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Robert Smithson wrote somewhere that nobody can mistake the non-site for the site, it looks nothing like it, yet there is a syntactic metaphoric relationship between the two, a space of significance without resemblance. To Smithson this is perfect abstraction, more so than 50's expressionistic or 60s' minimal ditto, which avoids logical problems, hence cannot be truly abstract. Logical intuition on the other hand, according to him, has a new sense of metaphor, freed of material and realistic content. For this year's Basel ArtFair, Wade Guyton did the statement for Galerie Francesca Pia. On the walls were a number of striped so-called paintings; ink-jet printed canvases with simulated self-expressive effects, derived from manipulating the mechanical printing process. The stripes repeated in muted green and red, are scans from a torn book page, the torn edge left visible. The effects - the bleeds or runs on the edges of the stripes - resemble both 50s expressive and 60s conceptual abstraction. Evidence #1: As I entered the both, I overheard someone asking if this was Daniel Buren who had work in an adjacent both, though the color treatment was terribly out of tune... Apparently Guyton's reproduced stripe can be mistaken for the thing itself, as opposed to the box of stones to the geographical spot. Reproduced stripes looking like stripes - this camouflage act schizoidly plays with what is. In a context such as Basel, appearing next to other works of art, the act of mimicry is perfected and complete, merging with its surrounding habitat. In his essay "Mimicry and Legendary Psychanastetia", Roger Caillois describes mimicry as a disturbance in the perception of space - a confusion experienced when entering represented space, as opposed to perceived space. The person does not know where to firmly place himself in relation to others, the singular vantage point is removed - all is equal. The difference between outside and inside becomes less clear and a rip occurs between body and language. Mimicry is put into play, not as a defense mechanism, but as a desire to overcome the distinction to outer space - a death drive to Caillois. The stripes display a tendency towards the similar, to approximation, a morphological mimicry of its reproduced sources There is something of a cataleptic response in Guyton's stripes, a frozen imitated gesture, a scan clumsily giving away its status. The stripes are not regular images, hovering between a 2-dimensional object and a 3-dimensional photograph, a representation on an object level, of a reproduction of a pure idea...clearly not only a stripe. Evidence #2: If Smithson's power was the understanding and display of the non-visual bond, the visual separation between the gallery artifact or the sign, and the item it re-presented, Magritte's discussion of mimesis in his paintings of the pipe was still involved with 'looking' like the thing, not meant to be mistaken for it. In different 'realistic' ways both broke with the paradigm of resemblance as affirming the representational bond to reality between sign and referent, which has determined and ensured the functioning of visual language since antiquity. Classically the more excellent the representation resembled reality the more truthful and hence real it was viewed, giving hierarchic ontological superiority to the real. A stripe functions as an abstract concept, similar to a Platonic idea, like the number 8 or a triangle. Seemingly accepting the bond to reality, we are soon to discover that there is nothing in the place of the bond, there is no referent. The sign-to-real relationship hardly exists, without the site of the real, the question of representation gets fuzzy, what functions as sign, signifying what? There are no 'more real' stripes out there to judge against, unless we decide to call upon the 60's art stripes as the Real. A stripe, once realized, there is no u-turn to pure idea, no stripe looks like another - the universal generalizations upon which language is built starts limping, everything is specific. Empty representation affirming nothing, simulated stripes, there is no difference between the reproduction of a stripe and the stripe itself, liberated from the 'as if' scenario, at the other end from Trompe l'Oeil. They are not only more similar to other stripes than the thing itself, there is no thing itself, or rather this is the thing itself. These are freak instances of signification, similar to the paradox: 'I am lying', which is true if it is false and false if it is true. The bond between the stripe and Guyton's look-alike stripe is not a metaphorical idealized one, probably neither an allegorical one. Here stripes function as signs parallel to other signs, like Buren's stripes, or maybe a striped t-shirt. As opposed to resemblance, which is ruled by representation, hierarchy, an original element with less and less faithful copies, similitude as delineated by Foucault , cuts free in an endless line of copies, loosing their identity, referring to nothing but them selves, repeated in series without beginning nor end, like a Warholian abyss. No reference point can be located, translations with neither point of departure nor support circulate the simulacrum, in an indefinite reversible relation of the similar to the similar. Art of the same; stripes simultaneously referencing other stripe signs, while not looking like but reproducing reproduced stripes of unknown origin, twice removing a concept without source, a non-stripe occupied with 'being' the thing re-produced. We may have a case of new kind of realism in Guyton's work. In opposition to Smithson's logical intuition, freed from realistic and material claims and his concept of perfect abstraction, which may be a fine aspiration, but may just as well be an allegory for something else... Guyton's work seems rather preoccupied with the real, inverted, ontologically and semantically inter-exchangeably. Well on the other side of the 80s' from Smithson, the simulacrum is embedded into our every-day cultural understanding. What here looks like true abstract art, may be no abstraction at all, deeply dependent on its materiality to confuse the sign for the thing, for the sign itself. If Magritte undoes realistic representation by pointing at the text infinitely, Guyton undoes appropriated or reproduced reality by making a real out of a simulacrum. Wes and Yous: In Basel, hung repetitively in gorgeous wooden oversized frames, the small so called drawings, of ripped out pages from books on alpine architecture, lattice wooden work visible allover, are eX-ed (axed) out with the use of the printer. Smells like badly executed formalism, where effect and content are engaged in a playful somewhat painful dance of substitute moves, serving neither. Purposeless graphic design, randomly decreasing readability of the image, imitating some avant-garde aesthetic, maybe a Swiss one... Guyton overlays an X shape - a letter or a sign, which one is it? - overwriting the reproduction in the action, now only partially invisible under the gesture. Inefficient censorship! These X-pressive puns are repeated several times for every frame. The choice of imagery talks about the local, failing to be specific. Political correctness out the window - in seeps global branding strategies. An ex-position of the reproduced into the realm of reality. The material used is most commonly lifted from books on early 20th century art, architecture and design. When it comes to design, the relationship between the real and the reproduced gets ever more complicated, as it will most often only exist reproduced, which is increasingly the case for contemporary art. Depicted could be anything, or something that would let the Xs slip smoothly on the surface and give off resonance. It doesn't matter. The imagery has no value as such. It is a vehicle for other activity, just as with the stripes. An Xoticism of a sorts, reference Basel used as context, culturally re-gorgitated inside the fair. In a modernist paradigm the local flavor is not much cared about anyhow, here rather a late capitalist re-customization, "For U." Guyton has expanded his look-a-like letter shapes to a U shape. Is it what it gives itself out to be, the real thing. The need to pronounce, we have no other text to indicate if we are to read it as a U, no surround letters, apart from the Xes of course, if that's what they are. Maybe it refers to a U on a white board at the optometrist, as in his printed canvas with a big lone U. Pretty bad sight for that one, going for retinal surgery. It is reminiscent of a circle painting (or zeros or Os) by Olivier Mosset, a once collaborator with Buren. Vision becomes an X-rated display with a fuck-U in mind. In Basel, the elegant Us in polished stainless steel comes in different sizes, sesame street for grown-ups who forgot how to play with language or Alphabet Art starting on the wrong end of the line. Surface-wise appearing intimate, the omni-directional address of the U creates its own non-site, pluralistically pointing somewhere else, coming closer to a personally addressed letter from the Chase Manhattan Bank - be ware we are all identically treated. The U as an image as a sculpture as a letter shape resembling a U, which isn't necessarily a U? The U-sculpture disturb the bond between language and image by being both looked at and read at the same time, a calligram - think of Magritte's "This is Not a Pipe". In a calligram the distinction between to show and to name, to shape and to say, to reproduce and to articulate, to imitate and to signify, has been perverted, if not erased. To Foucault, Magritte's work inaugurates a play of transferences, that proliferate; this is a pipe in mimetic representation has become the this is not a pipe of circulating similitudes. This is not a U, it is a sculpture/picture of a U, while being just a U. The illusion of pictorial realism is disturbed in another way than in the stripes, throwing us back and forth between the modes. A pretense realist 'representation' in effectful steel, excellent resemblance, thus more truthful or real - but what is an unrealistic u or stripe, how does a u look like? A more perfect U in a neo-Platonist world - pointing to an un-depictable reality... In the case of Magritte we see text and image confused trading places. There is no swap with the U-shape, the marriage is done, referent and reference united, the incommensurability between plastic imagery and discourse resolved. This visual pun or language game breaks discourse's action of naming and fixing the referent to the sign. In the paradox performed by accepting and rejecting the piece as text or image, representation unsettled slides around like in a co-opted advertising space. Representation re-presented as non-representable -a fluctuating target, appearing and disappearing at indiscernible locations, in a meaningless monosyllabic babble. If many artists of the nineties worked in-between the real and cinematic space, Guyton puts a doubt on reality - structurally side shifting the real as created by the discursive practices describing it. This complicated relation to the (agreed) Real also re-occurs in Guyton's at time collaborator Kelley Walker's recent work, splattering melted chocolate over documentary race-riot images from the 60's. Although once was the real deal, the chocolate won't be mistaken for edible, the confusion rather leads to squirted paint. The chocolate cannot be used, it cannot be devoured, it will stay eye candy. S as in Slick for Kicks: Guyton's materially elegant work turns around the retinal masturbation, which Duchamp spoke of in regards to Cubism in contradiction to a more cerebral activity. The seduced gaze is here used to make the viewer perform perception, setting reproductions free. The viewer becomes an accomplice by engaging in the work's visual seduction, materially and content wise at the same time, taking the stripe as a stripe, for U and U by 'looking'. Nominators for quality are frequently shuffled and re-positioned. If we read the torn reproductions not as his source material in constant search for the origin, but as an act of mimicry, moving towards a de-personalized place, fusing with the surrounding space. What looks like laying bare his private inspirations for a transparent 'comparison' to primary references, in sharper light turns into text to be read, reference material creating an echo chamber of modernist art. These are not the influences, these are the work, just as much as the images of JFK or the space rockets on a Rauchenberg flatbed. These are the signs of material used to speak the work. One cannot see what it resembles, but read it, playing up similar reproductions. To claim it as source material simply verifies the functionality of the masquerade, setting in motion the retinal efficiency, blinded for textual read. Two fold Guyton turns his back on reality. Firstly, he turns away from reality by tearing and inserting the pages themselves, or scanning, leaving the torn edges visible, making it clear that we are to understand that it is the reproduction he is after. Secondly, in his use of reproductions of items from the early 20th century avant-gardes, artifacts which were originally used as propaganda for a new society and way of life, now these societal forms have long since been discarded as non-viable. Just as the expressive effect of the stripes from the pushing and pulling of the digital printer moves the idea of authenticity via the physical mark into another terrain, in an early piece by Guyton; 'Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair)' (2001), a shiny Breuer chair has been disfigured - violence to a form becomes violence to an already severed ideology. The inoperative component does double duty as 'form' and 'content', a hybrid. In Conceptual art content is to determine the form, a formalist one would be about 'material' and 'process', where subject matter, politics, and figuration are to be left out. This cover of a Pollock attack does both in reverse by fusing the effect of the action with the bend on the content. Use-value is removed, and in an unexpected twist, the split between content and form can be left behind. Via this twofold negation, Guyton loops back to the real full force, having the viewer extract sense in similar ways to the operations of contemporary propaganda, while making clear that this stripe is not a stripe. The divide between visual resemblance and linguistic textuality has been made useless. Our reading attempts at separating what is said from how it is being said are futile. The work derives its specificity from the generically tasteful, as imitated or adapted. The pathology occurs in the performative act of simultaneously looking and reading, at a glance seductive sophisticated stainless steel turns out an x-rated mockery of a seedy striptease in any crisscross of semantic fabrication. S as in ass or ace for stealing or sliding the site of signification... |