Walter Andersons
One work made me wonder whether Andersons is ambivalent toward the whole idea of the artist as creator of “original” forms. Die Fahne Hoch (Stella) is a pencil drawing Andersons made of a small reproduction of a Frank Stella painting of the same name, a characteristically geometric composition. Then Andersons covered his pencil drawing with a sheet of paper, pressed against the drawing so that it seems there are tiny relief effects from the pencil areas. The Stella image comes through only faintly, its hard-edged self-declaration lost, diffused and distanced by the paper. I thought of Robert Rauschenberg’s famous Erased de Kooning Drawing, in which he obtained a de Kooning drawing from the artist and actually erased most of it. Was Andersons also expressing ambivalence toward an earlier artist and an older idea of the artist’s role?
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Andersons redirects the viewer’s attention to things we all see but seldom focus on. He’s interested, he told me, in “the momentary disruption or perceptual rift that occurs in the viewer when realizing [the work is] painted…there’s a delay that’s central for me.” Often the effect is also humorous. (Newman) Trim is more than a foot high but less than two inches wide, a shape dictated by its subject: the edge of a piece of notebook paper ripped from its binding. It has been painted with almost obsessive precision, right down to the tiny fragments of paper lodged in some tears. The viewer may do a double take, realizing that this is not an actual piece of paper after all. These carefully rendered details make the subject seem oddly important: I found myself thinking about what an utterly violent act ripping a page from a notebook really is.
The message is printed on white paper set against a black rectangle, with a gray “shadow” behind it, but in what space does it hover? And an odd horizontal line across the bottom of the picture, just below the note, is an actual, not a painted, pencil line. Like a film scratch, it calls attention to the image’s surface, contradicting the depth implied by the gray shadow. Andersons calls it an “obvious imperfection,” meant to “ground the image,” to act as an “equalizer.”
Andersons, 29, has lived in Chicago since he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute in 1983. He now works as an Art Institute museum technician, installing and packing works of art–a job he says has made him more aware of the way an artwork is displayed. He’s given much thought to “how in different contexts a painting can have a confused meaning, or lose its meaning, or have a completely different meaning,” he remarks. He recalls the pleasure of painting realistically as a boy–“I liked the object quality.” But in his mid-teens he had an experience that caused a shift in his focus from the object to the act of depicting it. “I set out a paper with coins on it, doing a watercolor based on overhead observation of them,” but he found himself paying more attention to the qualities of the painting itself than to his subject. At around the same time he came across a book on cubism that made him feel that he had far more options than he’d realized.
