Jack Pierson: Traveling Show
“Everybody is a narcissist,” Jack Pierson told an interviewer. “That’s why people can respond to my work.” His photograph Palm Springs, one of 37 photos, drawings, and installations now on view at the Museum of Contemporary art, addresses this matter more directly than artists typically do: it’s a frontal nude shot of Pierson, with a flowering bougainvillea in the background. But he hasn’t taken any special efforts to make himself look good–or bad. While his body is illuminated by the sunlight, much of his face is in shadow. His hair, bleached light blond, natural for the beach, seems out-of-place against the dark background leaves, and his nudity seems odd in this apparently residential area. His pose, with his shoulders tilted somewhat indifferently. is hardly that of the proud figures of Classical sculpture, but it does suggest sexual availability. Pierson’s narcissism is more complex than simple self-love: he gives us neither total glamour nor sordidness; his view that lies somewhere in between.
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These snapshots are enlarged to twenty by thirty inches and displayed in plain wooden frames which, compared to the photos, look positively elegant. Some Peaches is a “modern” still life: peaches, but also a milk carton. It’s badly out-of-focus, rendering the colors more sensuous, but on its own is hardly worthy of a great still-life painting. Its size and frame encourage careful viewing, but the unaccountable emotional charge it produces seems to come not from details of the image’s internal organization, its composition and colors. Rather, its size and framing make the act of looking at it into its true subject, as if the artist seeks to reclaim all those random scenes in ordinary kitchens that normally go unnoticed. Pierson, hardly a self-aggrandizing sort of narcissist, finds pleasure in simple eyesight. While acknowledging that the incomplete narratives suggested by these photos encourage viewer participation, because they have the ability to “become a part of someone else’s story,” he also declares that “One thing I feel I’m doing is giving equal value to everything.”
The most obvious of the several meanings that exhibition curator Dominic Molon teases out of Stay in his helpful catalog essay is “a simple plea for companionship,” and a number of other works in the show suggest that it’s addressed to an about-to-depart lover. In Paris Blues, a moody series of ten gouache and colored pencil drawings, the thick abstract ground of blues and blacks is both lushly sensuous and impossibly sad. There’s a bit of camp distancing here, in the use of blue coloring to depict a “blue” mood, yet the work carries a real emotional charge: by printing and then crossing out words, Pierson effectively conveys the way abandonment by a lover can lead to a mood of utter negation. In the first, “L’Amour” is written and crossed out; the fourth, which says “I was your man,” is followed by one in which the crossed out word “you” is repeated three times. In the eighth there’s a bit of word-play: we read “Good Bye” with the “good” crossed out. The four textless images, neither romantic or erotic, are line drawings of wasted time: a hand holding a cigarette, a table with ordinary objects, a palm full of capsules and pills. The resulting hint that wasn’t much “amour” to begin with gives the references to loss an added edge.
Golan, a Prague native who fled the 1968 USSR invasion, has lived in the Chicago area since 1970. A painter who has gradually shifted to sculpture, she only began making ladder works recently. The first, an untitled work installed in the gallery’s garden, is constructed mostly of wood from a discarded pile she found. The rough, discolored, and irregularly shaped logs are lashed together with rope to make a ladder about 14 feet high; two tiny white androgynous figures climb its sides. First placed on a lakefront beach–the three photos document this installation–it was swept away by a storm the next day, and when it washed ashore the top rung was broken. Golan left it that way because the intent was to welcome “whatever happened as part of nature’s action,” but the effect is quite striking: as one’s eye follows this tenuously tied ladder upward it completely stop functioning at its top rung, even before it ends. Seeing its physical structure as limited in space, the viewer turns toward its symbolic import.
