ANDY VOGTThe 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
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