Charles Wiesen
through August 10
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Poking fun at the way the typical gallery or museum setting confers preciousness on objects is hardly a new theme in modern art, but Wiesen handles it with an unsettling, quirky creativity. There’s always one more detail than is needed for a simple statement of his idea in these seemingly minimal works–a detail that somehow comes at the theme from an unexpected direction. Imaginary is a rectangular board on the wall. Painted white, it makes a joke about single-color paintings by artists from Yves Klein to Robert Rauschenberg: somehow it seems flatter and emptier than the earlier work, hardly worth looking at on its own. But Wiesen also encases it in a zippered piece of cheap, flimsy-looking clear vinyl, recalling furniture covers. The zipper at the bottom made me think of clothing zippers, adding an odd eroticism–yet think of how fetishized the precious, expensive artwork has become, protected under glass or behind barriers. (In the Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Negotiating Rapture” exhibit, the viewer can’t even get close enough to really see the magnificent almost all black Ad Reinhardts.) Yet unzipping Wiesen’s vinyl wouldn’t help–there isn’t much to see inside. I recall the first time I saw a home with furniture under plastic and, looking at the chintzy decor, wondered why anyone thought it worth protecting. In Imaginary Wiesen creates a resonant parallel between our interest in protecting faux art and the way art museums, trying to protect a work, tend to destroy our ability to see it. Using his vinyl to protect something so slight, he mocks all pretenses of preciousness.
Erasure asks the viewer to handle it, to flip it over and become a participant in its creation. And by inviting the viewer to choose between an apparently straightforward traditional picture of clouds and the cloud of erased chalk, Wiesen not only allows a choice between different centuries and styles, he creates an unsettling parallel between intended artistic effects and random effects. He apparently wishes to redefine art as merely another facet of daily life. On a wide, white wall he’s placed a tall, dark magnetic stripe, a conscious reference to Barnett Newman’s “zips”–stripes Newman painted on wide color fields to capture, as he put it, the “chaos of ecstasy.” Wiesen rejects the transcendence of Newman’s stripes, presenting a different invitation to chaos: viewers are encouraged to place objects on his strip–when I saw it, a tiny drill bit, a safety pin, and a pair of scissors, among other things–and to move them about as if they were objects on a coffee table. Even Wiesen’s title, Here 2, has a casual immediacy opposed to such Newman titles as Abraham and Onement.
Steve Dilworth’s ten elegant nature-based sculptures at Belloc Lowndes seem at least half a world apart from Wiesen’s work–and Dilworth does live half a world away, on the treeless, windswept Isle of Harris off the Scottish coast. Like Wiesen, Dilworth often makes paradoxical objects that invite the viewer to participate in creating meaning; but in contrast to Wiesen’s egalitarianism, Dilworth shows a worshipful reverence toward his bird shapes and carved rocks. Dilworth’s carved whale’s tooth, containing a vial of the “north wind,” restores to nature a respect usually lacking in our culture. Sperm Whale Tooth is carved into an arrowlike form with gill-like flaps projecting from the sides; it suggests a fish swimming. A wall label informs the viewer that a tiny glass vial of air is sealed inside, but it can’t be seen and can’t be removed without destroying the work. In this respect Dilworth partakes of an idea common to builders of medieval cathedrals, who constructed elaborate architectural details too high for any human to see, “for the greater glory of God.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Reproductions of: “Conversation Seat” by Charles Wiesen;”Cormorant with Dolphin Vertebrae” by Steve Dilworth.
