Todd McDonald’s Visual Feedback at Redux Contemporary Art Center addresses new modes of processing and viewing digital images as part of a painting practice. McDonald collects photographs of architectural elements and urban landscapes in order to change them with digital filtering, mirroring, and layering. These manipulation techniques are not novel; rather, they have become the prevalent tools for modifying images. But McDonald’s populist choice of image manipulation is deliberate, and is fascinating when viewed in the context of abstract art—particularly of the avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Todd McDonald. Go In to Get Out, 2014; oil on panel; 48 x 72 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Take McDonald’s Go In to Get Out (2014), for instance. On its own, the painting appears as a scintillating abstract work that uses scale, strong lines, and vivid color contrasts to enthrall the viewer. Semblances of everyday life appear here and there, with parts of columns and doors becoming subtly recognizable. The painting also has a strong symmetry, both horizontally and vertically. McDonald carefully mirrored and layered a series of images, and then used the digitally manipulated image to create an abstracted composition on canvas with oil paint.

Todd McDonald. Bloom, 2014; oil on panel; 48 x 72 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

While the resulting paintings are concerned with contemporary issues, they also resonate with art movements that occurred a century ago. Stylistically and conceptually, many of McDonald’s works in this format refer to visual tenets of Cubism and Futurism. Seeking to depart from traditional perspective, Cubists embraced a fragmentation that arose in a rapidly modernizing society, one in which long-held laws of science were constantly proved false. A similar fragmentation can be witnessed today in the way images reconstruct the world as we see it, and McDonald’s paintings explore this discontinuity. Many of McDonald’s works, including Go In to Get Out and Prop Interval (2014), also show a close aesthetic affinity to dynamic Futurist canvases, especially those of Luigi Russolo and Joseph Stella.[1]

Todd McDonald. Prop Interval, 2014; oil on panel; 62 x 37 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

While the connections to these two schools of modernist painting exist, McDonald’s works achieve a similar visual output with a distinct process. The paintings here are not concerned with encapsulating breathtaking speed and impressive force; rather, they present themselves as complex abstractions derived from representations of the world around us. Prop Interval displays semblances of the bland corporate architecture of airports and hospitals, and McDonald’s treatment of it appears more cynical than effusive.

Todd McDonald. Too Many Days in the Blue Maze, 2014; oil on panel; 21 x 41 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Additionally, McDonald experiments with a technique in which fragmented photographs are connected in a collage-like format to reveal the entire subject. In the painting Too Many Days in the Blue Maze (2014), several images coalesce into a disjointed tableau of an urban parking lot or street scene. This technique, especially when portraying architecture, reminds me of a series of brilliant photo collages by Gordon Matta-Clark. However, where Matta-Clark used this technique to subvert spatial orientation, McDonald approaches it from the level of individual images. By placing each image in context by connecting it to other fragments, McDonald shows how images can both elucidate and disorient our conception of reality. The paintings complicate the world around us.

Todd McDonald. Plasticstacy, 2015; duct tape and mixed media; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

McDonald has also created a site-specific installation using duct tape of various colors and patterns titled Plasticstacy (2015). While duct tape can have a gimmicky connotation—and McDonald does little to challenge that—his use of the material traces an impressive conceptual lineage. Referencing Thierry de Duve’s ideas in “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” in which the writer links the process of selecting colors and forms to the process in which Marcel Duchamp selected everyday objects as art, McDonald uses duct tape as a medium in which to conflate physical and virtual space. Hovering between the second and third dimensions, Plasticstacy uses extreme perspective to examine the perception of space. In this way, the installation is conceptually linked to his paintings, in which he explores the representation of space through digital images and painting.

McDonald’s paintings ultimately remind viewers that images—especially digital images, which are often and easily manipulated—negotiate our conceptions of and relationship to the world. By using the medium of painting to further bend these images into complex forms, McDonald explores our reliance on the very images that often mediate our own reality.

Todd McDonald: Visual Feedback is on view at Redux Contemporary Art Center through May 9, 2014.

Mz 601, 1923; paint and paper on cardboard; 17 × 15 in. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Schwitters’ hallmark was hybridity.  He started his career as a painter and then moved to collage, assemblage, and sculpture, all while never truly leaving painting behind.  He was associated with and influenced by many movements, including Dada, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, appropriating what he thought useful or provocative from each and synthesizing it with fragments from the next without becoming dogmatic about any of them.  In 1919 Schwitters coined the term merz to describe his work.  The origin of this word was a scrap of an advertisement for a bank, and is taken from the German word kommerziell (commerce).  He saw that snippet of a word as the embodiment of what he was trying to accomplish—to take a part of something and make it his own—and he organized his practice around it.  As curator Lucinda Barnes explained, “The merz approach is to connect everything.”

The works in the exhibition are mostly small, some no bigger than the palm of your hand.   Schwitters clipped bits of words from various sources and mixed them with other materials such as paper, fabric, feathers, and paint. Like the word merz from kommerziel, the words are fragmented.  But rather than making them incomprehensible, this practice opens the text up, transforming each word from a linguistic fence to something looser and more associative.  They sometimes provide clues to his interests and lifestyle.  For example, a few collages attest to Schwitters’ more pleasurable habits: snippets of labels from wine bottles, chocolate wrappers, and tobacco often make appearances.  The intimacy of each composition invites an almost forensic inspection, and I often found myself nearly fogging the glass with my breath in order to identify and understand each assortment of fragments so meticulously combined.

pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.; Collection of David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt.

Mz. 310 Carneval. (1921) is one such composition, where fragments of small, readable text are mixed with parts of individual letters and torn pieces of striped paper in a confetti-like arrangement.  Another is Mz. 410 irgensowas. (1922) (“something or other”) where the text fragments take on an almost Constructivist look.  In both of these, Schwitters covered the edges of the collage with a mat to create a clean, perfect rectangle that reigns in the implied chaos of the interior composition.  By making the edges precise and regular, Schwitters creates a window from which to view this arrangement, mimicking the era’s growing interest in the camera-eye, selecting and framing the world.  In contrast, the two small examples of his Oil wiping on newspaper (1939) feature compositions mounted on top of a substrate instead of matted beneath it.  In these, the edges are irregular and raw.  Often the compositions can be “read” like a Rorschach blot.  pink collage (1940) only looked abstract from a distance, but as I drew nearer it resolved into a dark tree trunk with white mountains rising up behind it.  Up close, the compositions have a particularity and a specificity that makes them seem representational.

Mz x 19, 1947; collage, oil, paper, and cardboard on cardboard; 6 1/8 x 5 1/4 in.; Collection of Ellsworth Kelly.

At first, Schwitters claimed that the collages were “not intended to mean anything, [but] only to be strong compositions in color.”  He later amended this view: “Poetry arises from the interaction of these elements, meaning is important only if it is employed as one such factor.  I play off sense against nonsense.”  Although the work is considered historical, the approach that created it is thoroughly contemporary, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha have cited Schwitters as an influence.   He anticipated the rise of commercialism, created collage work to materialize the saturation of information in the modern world, and predicted the indiscriminate use of varied materials as a way to reflect on the society in which it was created. The intimacy of scale and the way the work seems simultaneously expansive and specific makes it well worth seeing in person.  Upon attending an exhibition of Schwitters’ work in 1959, Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “I felt like he made it all just for me.”