Phillip Stearns. Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

As its title so aptly demonstrates, the show uses the concept of the line—or more specifically, the hard-edged line—as a starting point in exploring how contemporary artists approach abstraction. Obviously, lines are omnipresent in art—in fact, it would be hard to preclude artists from being in the show if the engagement of lines were the only criteria. Visitors to this exhibition may also remember the Museum of Modern Art’s On Line, presented in late 2010 in New York. This exhibition attempted to explore the use of the line throughout modern art; in the end, predictably, artworks filled every wall of every gallery, showing the ubiquity of this most fundamental of formal devices.

Avoiding a survey-like mentality, Linear Abstraction uses the line as a lens in which to view specific works, and in turn the curators have created a show that comments not so much on the deliberate use of line, but instead on trends within contemporary abstraction. By using the word linear in the title, viewers are forced to reconcile each work with the idea of the line. Thus the curators have created an environment in which the works are meant to be read in a specific way.

Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

Viewing works in these conditions often reveals multiple layers, and this is the case with Phillip Stearns’ Coplanar Nations: Israel & Palestine (2014). A digital video that could be categorized as glitch art, the work features ambiguous lines and shapes constantly and randomly shifting, with jagged, pixelated lines that pervade the entire space of the composition. As described by the artist, the work is the result of creating two polygons in the same virtual space—one shape is masked with the flag of Israel, the other with that of Palestine. Stearns then allows the polygons to rotate arbitrarily on top of each other. The visual rendering of such a procedure results in a process called z-fighting, where the computer tries to simultaneously display multiple surfaces that occupy the same space. The political overtones are immediately recognizable in such a work, mimicking the conflict between two nations over the same piece of land. Here lines are extricated from their formal use; instead, they point to geopolitical boundaries, especially those that are arbitrary and constantly evolving.

A work from Walead Beshty’s Black Curl series features lines as a vehicle for aesthetic conceptualization. Photographs created without a camera, these works are photograms that result from prearranged chance operations performed in a dark room. By using such a systematic procedure with little control over the finished image, Beshty’s works undermine the deterministic approach typical of photography as well as the innate aesthetic concerns inherent in many post-painterly abstract works from the postwar period. Like Stearns’ video, Beshty’s series of works uses a minimalist formalism to examine dominant structures within political and aesthetic spheres.

Linear Abstraction, 2015; installation view, Gutstein Gallery, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

The other pieces in the show are not as overtly political, but they do reference specific commonalities shared by many contemporary abstract works. Once such trend is the conflation of the physical and the digital. John Houck’s works—including his Untitled #257, 614, 655 (2014)—subvert this dichotomy. For each of his works on display, he begins with a monochromatic, computer-generated field of lines printed on large-format paper. Once the work is printed, he makes a single crease at a seemingly random line through the middle of the paper. He then photographs the work from above, prints the image out, and repeats the entire process. With each cycle of its creation, the work becomes flatter, as each physical crease is transformed into a digitally printed line.

Several works in the show also demonstrate how abstraction no longer relies on media specificity, itself an interesting concept since abstraction is closely linked with the essentialism of painting. Rebecca Ward’s A (Goading) (2015) and X (Navy and Baby Blue) (both 2015) exist simultaneously as painting, sculpture, and fiber art. Michelle Grabner’s Untitled series, consisting of large-scale photographs of plaid fabric, easily connects to the lineage of post-painterly abstraction, and her silverpoint tondo Oyster 8 (2014) hangs from the ceiling on a single thread, drawing a line from the ceiling to the work. Like an Alexander Calder mobile, this hanging painting is at once sculptural and interactive, forcing viewers to navigate around it and responding to shifts in air pressure as they do.

Rana Begum. No. 529, 2015; installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. Photo: Marc Newton.

Finally, many of the pieces in the exhibition directly reference key works of modern abstraction. Rafael Vega’s paintings, including Untitled #9 (2014), contain violent cuts in their surfaces à la Lucio Fontana. Rana Begum’s marvelous wall installation No. 529 (2015) casts neon light—via reflection, not actual lights—onto the wall in a way reminiscent of the works of Dan Flavin. And Russell Tyler’s CPAA and TAFS (both 2014) directly conjure Josef Albers and Frank Stella, respectively, albeit painted in loose gestural brushstrokes that are antithetical to the minimalist works they reference. These citations are recognizable throughout the exhibition, and they posit a core hypothesis about contemporary abstraction: Artists are attempting to marry the lineage of formalist abstraction with the concerns of contemporary society. While the works in this exhibition vary in their approach and use of lines as a formalist element, the show’s curators have also uncovered several commonalities shared by contemporary abstraction.

Linear Abstraction is on view at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art through April 3, 2015.

Walead Beshty. A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench; 2013-2014. The Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London, UK. Photo: Alexei Tylevich.

Made of over 12,000 cyanotype prints and photograms carefully placed and pinned to the undulating curve of the gallery wall, the work documents fourteen months in the material and relational life of Beshty’s Los Angeles studio.[1] Thus, every item used, broken, or exhausted in the process of the work’s creation found its way into the work, either as the material matter of the installation itself or as the object photographed. As a representation of an artist’s practice, the work finds a way to acknowledge and render visible the aesthetic compost that is often kept out of sight when objects are placed within the clean white walls of an exhibition space. For Beshty, it is this waste that signals the work of the “work of art”—the constellation of decisions, actions, labor, institutional interventions, and mistakes that inform how objects and projects manifest themselves in dialogue with the world around them.

Walead Beshty. A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench; 2013-2014; installation view of wall installation made of cyanotypes. Photo: Getty Images/Chris Jackson.

The discrete separateness of each object invites the viewer to meander between passive and active forms of engagement where classification and contemplation work together, one informing the other, turning the reading of the work into a game of seek and find. Traces of research and creation can be spotted in the photograms of studio equipment, industrial tools, newspapers, and art journals, while strains of Beshty’s personal life and management role can be seen in the empty food containers, employee contracts, exhibition invitations, thank-you notes, and cinema tickets that ripple across the surface of the wall. Adding to the admixture are the more mysterious objects obscured during the cyanotype process that resist the process of naming (and thus significance)—a reminder of art’s resistance to quantitative procedures of data collation and progressive outcomes. Careful to attend to the personal as well as banal aspects of accumulated trash, Beshty is able to pluck at the idiosyncrasies and curiosities exposed in the act of assemblage, where happy accidents and compelling choices are difficult to distinguish within the artist’s paper-blue ecology of purposeful waste.

Like much of Beshty’s work, the Barbican piece is deeply concerned with the dialectical nature of a work’s becoming—its groundedness within a particular historical context, and its openness to the contingencies of time and history—and the material and relational by-products produced within the duration of the creative process. By foregrounding the acts of gathering, assembling, and archiving within this work, Beshty is able to attend to problems of presenting the visible and invisible forces at play in the creation, distribution, and exhibition of his artworks: “I thought of the studio as one big machine…a machine for making a kind of picture…the sum total of all of this is one depiction, is one picture, and in that sense, it’s a transparent picture.”[2]

Walead Beshty. FedEx Large Box; 2008; installation view at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 Whitney Biennial: Signs of the Time (New York City, NY). Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art.

It is this desire to demystify process that provides a point of connection between Beshty’s practice and the recent demand for political, state, and corporate transparency. After making his mark in the 2008 Whitney Biennial with an assortment of shatterproof glass cubes made to the standards of FedEx shipping boxes—a gesture that pointed toward the illusion of autonomy in minimalist sculpture, and to the systems of corporate transport and capital that tend to cover over and regulate the processes that deliver objects to your doorstep—Beshty has continued to find ways to acknowledge and create representations of the repression of materiality in contemporary aesthetic production. Similar to the FedEx sculpture series that bears the accumulations of time and travel (marks, cracks, handprints) onto the surfaces of the work, A Partial Disassembling employs the indexical impression of the cyanotype process and the waste of the artist’s studio in order to acknowledge his work’s circulation and complicity within powerful networks of technological, institutional, and social relations.

[1] Only 7,000 of the 12,000 items made it to the Curve Gallery wall. Accompanying the exhibition is a 41-volume book archive that reproduces all 12,000 pieces of the work in its totality.

[2]See Beshty’s interview with the internet television art project VernissageTV on October 31, 2014. The interview can be found on the station’s YouTube channel in the segment, “Walead Beshty at The Curve, Barbican Center, London.” Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LO_o7os4Hs

Verão (Summer), 2007. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

The calling card of artist Rodrigo Matheus is double-sided: a enchantment of the everyday on one side, the reverse, a wry disillusionment. My first encounter with the work of Matheus was not his own artwork, but a curatorial project for the gallery Mendes-Wood in São Paulo. He brought together pieces that engaged perception and representation; there were works that played with optics and material, works that looked at the gallery structure, and a minimalist aesthetic that seemed to be strategy for incorporating the maximum amount of pieces to build up to a grand moment without overwhelming the exhibition space. This interest in representation and perception carries through in his own art. Matheus has often utilized the apparatuses of corporations, the mechanism of identity development and also everyday equipment and furnishings, to examine representation and perception, most often that of nature and art.

Criptonita (Kryptonite), 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

In his solo show Handle with Care at Galeria Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo, which runs through December 18th, Matheus expands and complicates his assimilation of the corporate institution by utilizing the accoutrements of art circulation within the gallery system. Here, the notion of a box, an apparatus used for both containment and circulation, is used as both raw subject matter and as a vessel to house videos. In a work reminiscent of Walead Beshty’s FedEx kraft and copper boxes, Caixa Pirâmide (Pyramid Box) are wood boxes that will bare the marks of their passage, the accumulation of stamps and labels reminding the viewer of the often invisible circuit operating behind artworks. Also exhibited among boxes is the video piece Patenon (Parthenon). 24 hours of Google Earth images of the Greek ruin are distilled into a 30 second loop creating a video that sits somewhere between postcard picture and video surveillance.

Handle With Care, 2010. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Hollywood, a concurrent solo show in Rio de Janeiro at Silvia Cintra + Box 4 will be up until December 11. Again, time and passages are looked at, but here through the imaging of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Delicately idyllic painting of the tropical environment partially cover concrete, neo-classical, decorative forms. Hollywood, as the title suggests, takes on the construction of representation, specifically an imagined colonial iconography.

Travel Expenses, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Matheus’s work is most successful when it embodies a topography of accessible, every-day technology that upends the construction of landscape – when the viewer, despite a framework of familiar technology and artificiality, still discovers a sense of wonderment. Representations of nature are often pushed through the sieve of technology to produce simulacra, but Matheus’s artworks are also a distillation of grand sensations into the human scale, carrying with them the legacy of Brazilian sensorial exploration. The use of industrially designed objects like humidifiers, fans, and spotlights to contain, organize, and model natural phenomena is a micro-scale experiment in forces, both natural and corporate. Work Station, 2008, is an installation environment that relishes in and transforms the everyday office. Computer monitors exhibit silent, uninhabited nature imagery from video games while artificial stone speakers play actual nature sounds. The non-functionality of the work station which runs parallel to an invented natural system asks the question: how do we apprehend the world?

Work Station, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Walead Beshty

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting New Photography 2009, this year’s installment of a series that began in 1985 with the aim of exhibiting the most compelling recent work in the field of contemporary photography.  Organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, the exhibition brings together six young artists, Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, Carter Mull, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek, in a visually diverse body of work.  Most of these artists actively produce work in other media, such as drawing, video, and installation, and each one has an innovative and distinct method of constructing a photograph.  Collectively, these artists investigate the making of a photographic image in the twenty-first century, often utilizing processes of collecting, assembling, or manipulating other images or items.

With the advent of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, photography, long characterized by its ability to capture and represent reality, is again the subject of critical debate. The historical definition of the medium is challenged by the rise of digital capabilities and software programs, which allow photographers to combine their own images with others that are digitally uploaded or scanned.  The abundance of imagery now available at the click of a mouse has led artists towards a deeper analysis of the role of an image within society.  The six artists included in the exhibition create their pictures in a studio or darkroom, investigating the expanded vocabulary of digital processes and its technical and theoretical implications for photography.   The exhibition highlights an epochal moment of transformation for the medium, showcasing the work of artists who critically confront our media saturated world, and open a new era of possibility for photography.  Some works reference traditional techniques of the medium while others are constructed from online images; the works included range from abstract to representational.

Leslie Hewitt

The monumental polychromatic photographs of Walead Beshty (b. 1976) dispense with specific content and outlying subject matter entirely, instead reflecting the technical and historical means of image production.  At a time when chemical photography is slipping into obsolescence, Beshty works completely without the use of a camera in the secluded space of a darkroom, removed from the outside world.  His psychedelic photograms, such as Three Color Curl (2008), result from exposing the sensitive material surface of the photograph to a range of various light sources and chemical applications.  Portions of photographic paper are exposed multiple times to cyan, magenta, and yellow lights.  Since the exposure process must take place in total darkness, a set of closed operations are administered, but largely left to chance, in the creation of these spectral compositions.  The surfaces of the photograms are treated as objects in themselves, released from the role of description.  Beshty pares down the photographic machinery in the creation of self-reflexive works that record the event, or the surrounding conditions, of their own production.  Beshty began employing this evidentiary photographic process after a trip to Berlin in 2006, where he took several conventional documentary shots of the unoccupied Iraqi embassy.  Upon crossing the border on his return to the United States, Beshty’s undeveloped film was accidentally exposed during the security scanning process, producing warm vermillion washes over the otherwise static architectural compositions.  The element of chance and its creation of non-referential, but highly indexical, information characterizes all of the artist’s subsequent work. Each Three Color Curl is the outcome of the direct manipulation of photographic elements.

Daniel Gordon

For other artists in the exhibition, the photographic image is the end result of a creative endeavor that begins with sculpture or collage.  The photographs exhibited by Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) represent the final stage of a process that starts with the construction of life-size figurative sculptures made from cut paper and other images, often culled from the internet.  In an interview conducted by DailyServing earlier this year, Gordon describes his pictures as “a collaboration between me and everybody on the internet.”  Using online search terms such as ‘skin’, the artist compiles image results to use in the fabrication of his three-dimensional temporary collages that are then photographed.  Produced entirely within his Dumbo, Brooklyn studio, the crude figurative sculptures (often female) depict bizarre and sometimes unsettling situations; detached objects and anatomical parts mingle and merge with one other to form grotesquely appealing images, such as Red Headed Woman (2008).  Gordon’s photosculptures exist somewhere between two and three dimensions, visually interrupted by his disjunctive cuts which recall the photomontages of the Dadaists.

Sara VanDerBeek

Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976), daughter of experimental filmmaker and animator Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984), takes a similar approach to image making, appropriating current and historical photographs from various sources, including newspapers and exhibition catalogues.  She then creates temporary structures that exist only to be photographed.  A Composition for Detroit (2009), a multipart photographic work consisting of four panels, reflects the country’s current economic situation by exploring the state of postindustrial cities.  Media photographs from the 1967 Detroit riots as well as a Depression-era photograph by Walker Evans are symbolic markers in this cultural commentary.  Leslie Hewitt (b. 1977) combines personal and historic narratives within her photographs, examining how nostalgia and cultural meaning can be held within an image.  Hewitt meticulously composes and then photographs still life arrangements of personal artifacts, such as family snapshots or the 30^th anniversary issue of Ebony, placing them with historic relics from the civil rights era.  In two of the works exhibited, Hewitt turns the orientation of the photograph upside down, causing visual tension for the viewer.

Carter Mull

Works exhibited by Carter Mull (b. 1977) include Los Angeles Times Tuesday, August 5, 2008 and Los Angeles Times Monday, February 23, 2009, for which the artist photographed the front cover of the L.A. Times, his local newspaper, and at least two pictures responding to that page, and manipulated them using both digital and analog techniques.  Mull draws attention to the parallel between the transformation of photography and print media in the digital age with his vibrant and often patterned prints.

Sterling Ruby’s (b. 1972) digitally constructed photographic collages on display at MoMA, Artaud (2007) and Animal (2009) are based on graffiti found in the Cinque Terre region of Italy and in Venice, respectively.  Ruby took pictures of existing graffiti and digitally manipulated these photographs by adding his own painterly touches with Photoshop, resulting in rich and complex layers of imagery.

The six artists included in New Photography 2009 are expanding the medium by introducing new ways of working with an image, whether referencing traditional techniques or exploiting the proliferation of images in our media saturated world.  Beshty, Gordon, Hewitt, Mull, Ruby, and VanDerBeek are blurring the lines of photography with other disciplines as they participate in the lively debate on the nature of photography in the twenty-first century.

New Photography 2009 will remain on view in The Robert and Joyce Menschel Gallery on the third floor of MoMA until January 11, 2010.