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How minimalism's topsy-turvy works, especially in the art of Adam Thompson.

GERMAN VERSION: ARTOU Berichte

Minimalism is known from the Sixties, when Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin constructed the essentials of handicraft into objects – paintings and sculptures – of art. It was like a freely moving, autonomous paint brush designed by a Bauhaus professor, not any longer dependent of being hold by anybody, but just being as symbol for the singularity of form and function in the arts.

Thus, the straight line or the form of a cube were content enough to make visitors stop to 'really look' at objects.

As if culture gives through the generations its competence of visual understanding (like Warburg guessed and Panofsky presupposed (and/or reconstructed)), the minimalistic knowledge and the impressions especially of regular forms and handcraft's basics can said to be enriched and improved now. Neither LeWitt's cubeforms nor Martin's graphit lines create a surprise in the art spectator of the 21^st century. But minimalism still exists without to annoy, perhaps because of an internal selfcriticism and -improvement. Already in the seventies of the 20^th , in a silent art line next to the funny fun culture of happenings, not only conceptual artworks refusing the visible came up, but also a kind of poetics of minimalism or even narrative reduction – no oxymoron, how the artworks of Eva Hesse soon after have shown.

3sat on Eva Hesse

In 2002 the Museum Wiesbaden organized a huge retrospective about Hesse's artwork. The curators emphazised her importance for the younger generation of artists today and her clairaudience for most recent physical theories about non-linear structures and theories of chaos and repetition.

In the fourties and fifties the artist studied painting at the Cooper Union School and the Yale School of Art and Architecture and was especially interested in Marcel Duchamp 1960. When she visited Germany in 1964/65, she started to create three-dimensional objects. Back to New York, she completely concentrated on sculptures and developed the use of materials like latex and fiberglass. Between 1966 und 1970 she began with room catching sculptures which made her famous in the New York art scene. MoMa on Hesse

Sol LeWitt had an obvious favor for her together similar and variant art, but friendly advices like the one to make „bad art“, resp. „the work you do is very good. try and do some BAD work. the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell.“ is perhaps almost ambigious in its friendlyness.

Robert Hughes writes about Hesse in „American Visions“:

„Backing away from its 'male' rigidity, which included the high-style rhetoric of Minimalism, she allowed her fascination with the 'female' and the inward, including what was grotesque and pathetic, to enlarge. The phallic mockery in Hesse's work can be comically obscene: black salamis wound with string, slumping cylinders of fiberglass. Even when it looks entirely abstract, her work refers to bodily functions. Hang Up, 1965-66, looks at first like a query about illusion and reality - the big rectangular frame hanging on the wall with no picture in it, but with a loop of steel tube spilling onto the gallery floor and connecting the frame's top left to its bottom right corner. But again, there's a fleshy metaphor. Both tube and frame are wrapped in cloth, like bandaged parts of a patient, and the tube might be circulating some kind of fluid. Blood? Lymph? Fantasies? Even in absence, the body is somehow there, as an ironically suffering presence; the title phrase, 'Hang-Up,' means both what you do to pictures and (in 'sixties slang) a mental block, a neurosis.“

The idea of poetrizing minimal art continues untill today and is surprisingly distinguishable from the concrete and reductive tradition of minimalism and real figurative sculpture or assemblages.

Especially latex and similar materials have become an emphazised subject in the art work of the russian artist Kirill Chelushkin, who presented in the Moscow Gallery Pop / off / art „Martion Mission Erotics“ out of rubber-latex with biomorphic structures reminiscent of the mythical milk exploding out of Hera's breast.

Another one is Esther Stocker, who spreads magnetic metall slides all over the room, the rooms sometimes nearly closed, a formal approach, but interpretable because of the chancelike spreadings and intended distributions of objects in strange materials and thus, in a way, „poetical“.

The examples teach the art looker something not really unexpected: It may sometimes be more difficult not to think about anything if you are looking at a purist's work than to think something about it. The best of course is to think the right thing. Thus, an artist who likes the poetical implications of materials and their forms of being formed non-figuratively, is perhaps oftenly demanded to point out and fix into unambiguosity his material's connotations. Thus, now, we've arrived at the interesting artwork of Adam Thompson, who untill the end of January presents his art works in a huge exhibition at Bernhard Knaus Fine Art in Frankfurt a. M.

Dean Kenning wrote these instructive words about this sculpture of Thompson:

„ Another found object resembles a mossy rock, but is actually an amorphous lump of dried concrete with a chemically-induced patina of green and brown. Originally constituted from excavated minerals this material has become an urban rock?superfluous, unproductive, kicking around. Re-functioned in the gallery it seems to float impossibly against a wall to which it is attached with an unseen rod. On its surface are dozens of plastic model chairs, arranged higgledy-piggledy?on their sides, upside down, scattered on their ground as if washed up in a deluge. Chairs have appeared often on the stage of modern art, from Van Gogh to Bruce Nauman to Sarah Lucas. In their isolated un-sat-upon state they conjure the human body in its very absence, particularly as they mimic the sedentary posture they allow, with their reduplication of limbs and torso?arms, legs, and back. Signs of life then on this craggy island, past life perhaps?“

Where chairs are, however small and unused, there is no anti-figurative minimalism, the reader might judge. Thus, no relation to Eva Hesse, Esther Stocker and less than ever to Sol LeWitt. But: Kenning uses in his description a special concept of functionalism. This is to say, whatever something (or somebody) can do or however something can be used it has to do or such it has to be used – otherwise the social environment of the unused thing should feel uneasy. Thinking in this way, Kenning can conclude, that the unused and dysfunctionalized chairs are signs for the absence of humanity, which „mimic the sedentary posture they allow“. They are thus „Signs of life“ but „past life perhaps“.

This catches the very aspect of the chair in the arts, that does not really symbolize a lack if unused but more the principle of lack-if-unused, a special identity as merely functional object. But how? The chairs and easy chairs of Charles Eames, Macintosh, the cantilever chair – all know it better. They are not just functional in questions of pleasure and comfort but beauties... this is how: The basic principles of static and solidity of construction are not just visible even in the most simple example of this object kind but transfigured into virtuosity in the above mentioned, like huate-couture models' behaviour on a catwalk. With most emphasis on the political and system related aspect, Magdalena Jetelova became famous for a monumental chair sculpture, in one of her catalogue pictures shown on a stair, reminding on Marcel Duchamp's nude descending a staircase – both ' pictures ' visual aspect-maps of constructional systems and their inherent properties of self-deconstruction.

Even in the theoretically simple Van Gogh chair this principle works, as objectual simplicity and intimacy is brought out on the surface of the picture, as if Van Gogh has searched for the ideal female nude in this such objectual object. Who has ever read Kafka's „In der Straßenbahn“ and his perception of a human ear will be able to retrace the depth psychological dimension of ears to female primary sexual characteristics, thus the art and life gestures of van Gogh as extremly reductive approach to get the very essence of the principle being a desirable objects into his pictures.

But if even expressionism and unconsciousness cannot stop to give analogies between human bodilyness and object construction, if even design objects celebrate the functional constructiveness of chairs as nearly model-like gestures of oscillating lines and luxury, a chair seems in a fundamental way to be incapable of being just a functional object. And thus – why should we miss anything if we always see something? Within all this pleasure of cultural overconnotativeness, it seems to be completely crazy to miss anything if a chair is not used for some minutes. We should have learned to look at it. This might be exactly what Keening does - more than he tells the reader to do -, because his observation of mimicry is an interpretation of the chair in its formal lines and structures, quite independent of the lack of use. But – as Van Gogh and Duchamp show – as a male viewer, the interpretation as body-like or object-body (torsos) might too be silently evoked by the foregoing projection of sheer objectuality, developing in the critics mind to a connotation of death (likewise Van Gogh).

Well, but what about Thompson and minimalism? The as well striking as surprising similarity between Hesse's and Thompson's pieces of art is, as I in a way dislike to notice, the very apportioning of connotativeness and semantical depth. Thompson shows with his chairs distributed on concrete, how even figurativeness can reduce itself via art history and placement or displacement (however) to principles of construction. These are, as Thompson demonstrates, never free of semantical aspects leading beyond principles of basic engineering. Thompson is of course not the first to tell this – more Hesse or even Agnes Martin, who understood her own art works as transfiguration of natural beauty, especially light. Her emphasis in handicraft was as a kind of ritual to adjure natural beauty's worth, in a kind of synaesthetical transformation from haptical subjectivity to the seemingly objective beauty of an external world.

What Thompson adds, is a kind of proof for the principle of indistinguishability of formal, concrete and figurative motives in the arts – as such overconnotated symbols as chairs become, because of their semantical weight, symbols of constructiveness and principles of construction in a far better way than the nearly unwitty merely cubeforms of Sol LeWitt. Better in the sense of minimalism, because not only showing construction in its basic, formal aspects as lines, cubes, curves and edges, but analysing it even beyond the traditional predefined limits of, perhaps, early constructivism of the 20^th century, as most - but significantly not all - of the works you see at the quite aggressively reductive website www.minusspace.com.

Another aspect makes all this more obvious and less dependent on Kenning. This is the ambigous semantics of the english expression "concrete". "Concrete" stands for a material of building houses - construction and engineering in the sense of industrial forming. "Concrete" is otherwise an expression for non-figurative art, that emphasizes materials and forms in the tradition of minimalism. Thompson block of dried concrete has a kind of artificial turf on its surface, reminding on patina (Kenning). this is again a kind of proof how impossible it is for concrete art to be *as such*, almost outside of language. Thompson's block is deeply involved not only in the selfreflexive ambigousity of its material's name but furthermore in lifeconcepts like "Power for fantasy" and "Under the asphalt the beach". We see these concepts in Thompson's block again topsy-turved (!), his nearly inconspicuous art materials becoming thus innocent racing horses in a dramatic polysemy of language.

Adam Thompson. Installations and photographies.

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt a.M.

Opening December 4, 2008, 7 pm

December 4 untill January 24, 2008

Bernhard Knaus Fine Art GmbH

Niddastrasse 84

60329 Frankfurt am Main

Germany

Fon 0049 (0)69 244 507 68

Email: knaus@bernhardknaus-art.de

http://www.bernhardknaus-art.de/