OCTOBER - NOVEMBER : word : DEWITT CHENG : art : ANDY VOGT

ANDY VOGT

The ruin has a distinguished history in Western art. Piranesi, Lorrain, Turner and Friedrich depicted the crumbling glories of imperial Rome or the then-recent Middle Ages. Images of architecture returning to nature had a moral purpose as well, serving as a kind of public-sector vanitas (the name for those sobering Christian still-life paintings featuring skulls nestled among the fruit and flowers, books and busts): this too shall pass; as I am, so shall you be. Some artists even carried the Ozymandian tottered-statue conceit into the future: the American Thomas Cole in the 19th century imagined the rise and fall of the as-yet nonexistent American empire.

Construing Andy Vogt’s architectural/geological constructions and drawings as contemporary (or future ruins) might be going too far, however, no matter what the condition of housing or repossession industries. It’s a natural inference, certainly, for the wall pieces like skin & bones or 2 sided creeping, which suggest partial models of stick-frame houses or condos with their laths exposed by shattered roofs, their wall paneling splintered like the jagged, sublime, abstract mountains and flames in Clyfford Still, and their beams and trusses fading off into space like Giacometti’s figures, or as if immersed in a Chinese or Central Valley fog. (With their exaggerated or collapsed, perspectives, they also recall the geometric paradoxes of Josef Albers and Al Held.)

I see them, rather, as transtemporal — depictions of things simultaneously coming into being and vanishing — as if a time-traveling version had been added to the spatial multiple viewpoints of Cubism. With people we know we can summon up their appearances at earlier ages; with a little effort we can do the same for strangers, or even imagine their future grayer, heavier selves. Vogt’s work, particularly in the more recent stencil drawings (next, laminated/reduced, drained) and planar constructions with black “shadows” (landcrawler, folded back, epitaph), seems to me to be concerned with time and memory infused into building materials — hence his predilection for scavenged lath, which he laboriously alters to fit his emerging conceptions rather than just load up at the Depot. Leo Steinberg described Jasper Johns’ numbers and flags as objects waiting for humans in a desolate solitude. Vogt seeks instead, I believe, to see his materials poetically and make solid compositions from them, and for them; he’s a builder guided by intuition and a perspective larger than the average mortgagee’s onescore and ten. His mixing of the geological and the architectural equalizes manmade and natural environments. Buildings, all pretensions aside, are hominid burrows or nests; landscapes with road cuts and lofty beetling crags can be replicated with plywood scraps, paint and nails.

DeWitt Cheng
October 2008

OCTOBER - NOVEMBER : word : PATRICIA MALONEY : art : JEFF MORRIS

Spring and All: new work by Jeff Morris.

Plexiglas is such that it aspires toward perfection: it is made to think it can be so, perfect in form and being, ever and always. And that is essentially its undoing, because that which has the potential to be perfect must be perfect in every way, and so it must endure. Endurance is a form of perfection, or at least a long-distance training exercise for the afterlife. It is as the writer Joe Wenderoth describes the serious Christians, looking toward eternity. “It is terrible to be real, I know, but it is more terrible to be long” he warns them, or us, or perhaps the clear plastic shields of bus shelters and drive-thru windows. For Plexiglas does nothing so well as endure, and we, taking advantage of that attribute, subject it to elements and chance, and without fail, defeat its aspirations.

In other words, by the time the material comes to the artist Jeff Morris, it has done its time in service to the community, and in return, it has been scratched, cracked, scrawled upon, and generally made to suffer the indignities of everyday use. Morris, in turn, takes it upon himself to disavow the degradation his material has borne. He does not stoop to assignations of mundaneness and preciousness, the recovery of the overlooked or the elevation of the undervalued. He is not interested in heightened awareness. Instead he wants to make an object that is wholly itself. Morris does not erase the meaning of one system — the everyday — to impose another — art — so much as allow the material to yield to it. As a result, the Plexi doesn’t yearn for its lost potential. It is ready to be itself, reborn in a new sum of parts.

The results of Morris’ resurrections are small-scale sculptures of clear, thick slabs accented by thin sheets of colored plastic used for garbage or newspaper bags. He pokes a thin wire covered in beads through a small plane of Plexiglas, and props it in the corner. It is held up by its own weight, but sags awkwardly, like a plant stem uprooted or tired of standing upright. For another, Morris upturns a U-shaped channel onto its end, and stretches three layers of green film across the top to hang down like banners. He alters a clear piece of Plexi — salvaged from a shattered bus shelter after a car accident — simply by bending it into an acute angle. He upturns another scrap to form a jagged bowl with a swarm of frenetic wire tentacles waving out from and around it. Finally, he takes a L-shaped piece, clean and clear, and adds a misshapen piece of yellow plastic film to its base, creating a grotesque shadow spilling from its edges, undermining its order, hinting at some prior incarnation, some violent past, in which the scars are visible but their origins unknown.

Installed in proximity to each other, Morris’ sculptures nevertheless remain discrete, self-contained, as if stubbornly refusing to partake of their environment or allow the viewer to consider anything but their physical attributes. They are not recognizable as objects with identity, but as objects adhering to an internal, self-constructed logic, so that the appropriate question the viewer might ask is not “What is it?” or even “What does it mean?” so much as “What does it owe to itself in order to be real?”

The same inquiry is applicable to the drawings, which are entirely composed of straight lines of varying thickness and pressure, laid down with a ruler. Taken individually, each line keeps going until it stops. Then the next begins. And slowly, the lines become form the way words collect and combine, until both line and shape — words and text — are simultaneously visible, unrepentantly relying upon each other to make sense. The question of why one word should be here on this page is not raised when it is followed by another and combined into the coherence of a sentence. Similarly, Morris’s line are so stringently lines that one apprehends shape and texture and illusions of depth by recognizing how the lines stand together, where they come apart, or where they stop.

The spaces in between the lines are therefore just as important, the interruptions akin to moments in which the drawing is allowed to clarify its shape, its purpose, itself. Both Morris’ drawings and sculptures bear an affinity with the poetry of William Carlos Williams, in which the gaps between words are where the images are realized, and the reader can recognize the distance that has been crossed from one thought to another. For example, in The Locust Tree in Flower (second version), bareness yields to form as both object and image.
Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

As with Morris’ sculptures, there is a prior life referred to in the poem’s title, but without reading the first version, one is unaware of what the latter is missing. The reader has been spared the season’s loss, the sweet-scented flowers overlooked, quickly shed, and little mourned, the way spring’s sharp freshness yields so readily to summer’s blast of heat and daze and lulling forgetfulness. Like Williams, Morris seems aware that we do not ache in spring the way we ache in fall, when every day we come closer to life shutting down and closing itself off. Perhaps that is why his greens — which can’t quite shrug off their origins as garbage bags and therefore their association with containment or confinement — are the greens of winter, when things are expected to die. But winter is also the moment to look forward and wait for things to return as they need to. Therefore, if anything, Morris turns us towards a moment of anticipation and perhaps even awareness of what endures.

Patricia Maloney
October 2008