Tom LaDuke by Miles McEnery Gallery

TOM LADUKE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

GLINT By Daniel Spaulding

In a series of recent paintings by Tom LaDuke, hard-to-describe forms occupy a spatial netherworld that is neither entirely here nor there: neither entirely on the flat of the canvas, nor entirely in the spatial grid of post-Renaissance perspective. Those forms erupt in a neutral interior space that bears an uncanny resemblance to the “white cube” of the gallery. Or, indeed, to specific galleries. When installed in such a real gallery, then, the paintings enframe a second order of neither-nor placelessness: There is a white cube inside the canvas, and the canvas sits in a white cube. The space in which these pictures literally hang is thus doubled by the space in which strange tubes, tree-like structures, rock-like protuberances, proto-figures, or miasmatic nebulae of color precipitate from the atmosphere, somewhat as the paintings themselves (that is, LaDuke’s real paintings) occupy their (real) spatial setting. This atmosphere can be named “the art world”— the gallery space—which means that the forms themselves must be art, since it is hard to imagine them being anything else. LaDuke sometimes even more explicitly thematizes the self-reflexivity of the art space as it precipitates artwork. In Warp and Weft (2018), for example, a rickety Constructivist tower—which reminds me of El Lissitzky’s Lenin Tribune (1920–24) or some of Gustav Klutsis’s designs from the same period for folding propaganda kiosks—rises off the floor, or rather hovers inexplicably just above it. LaDuke thoughtfully adds a shadow to better place the unplaceable object. The tower is built of elements that look a great deal like color-shifted Haim Steinbach shelf sculptures. Art grows from the gallery like a tree from soil.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze differentiates the relationship of the virtual/real from that of the possible/actual. The “virtual” is already part of the real, in a way that the “possible” is not part of the actual. Something possible may or may not happen, but something virtual is already there, just not in a way that’s perceptible (yet); the virtual is the process out of which real objects or events emerge. When something happens, the virtual is actualized. I like to think of LaDuke’s forms as Deleuzian events precipitated out of the space of the gallery—which, since the art world is not self-enclosed, also happens to be haunted by a multitude of other scenes. In older works of his, LaDuke makes this clear in a different way. His backgrounds are copied from existing images—for example, stills from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Or the foreground shapes arrange themselves into art historical references, such as the recreation of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) in You’re Like Me (2010). 4

In LaDuke’s more recent paintings, there has been a figure-ground inversion of sorts. The “ground” now—which is no ground at all, since it is rather the open space of the virtual—is the architecture of the gallery. And the “figures” are those loopy, tubular, tree-like things that I’ve been talking about. Or they are other artwork. Ontological disjunction always seems at stake in LaDuke’s work—a sense that orders of reality have crossed into not-totally explainable interference. That’s what happens, after all, when a Deleuzian event occurs. The logic of phase shift from virtual to real can only be traced after the fact, and maybe not even then. This is perhaps clearest not in LaDuke’s paintings but in his three-dimensional work. Recently, for example, he has been working on a mind-boggling sculpture of an octopus that he has clothed in a minutely exact, though scalable and deformable, replica of the artist’s own skin, with the physical surface generated with a scanning technique that, frankly, begs the present author’s comprehension. The effect is uncanny, as is often the case in LaDuke’s work. I mean “uncanny” in technical (or, in other words, psychoanalytic) terms. Works like these have a logic that coheres only in a flash of recognition to which a straightforward understanding of causality has little access. Which is to say that the works are grounded in something not accessible to the conscious mind.

*** In an essay some years back, Kristina Newhouse wrote, “It is obvious from the onset of Tom LaDuke’s recent exhibition that one is in the presence of the repressed.”1 This seems correct, except that I am not sure our habitual spatializations of the idea of repression—an image of the psyche as an archaeological site, with older layers buried under the newer—is wholly adequate to describe these paintings. Of course, layering is LaDuke’s key operation in a literal sense. Things tend to be screened, stacked, occluded. Yet, what’s striking about the newer paintings is how—repression notwithstanding—the forms loop back to what in German one might call Evidenz. This is a noun that in part means “self-evidence,” but with shades of “obviousness,” “clarity,” or perhaps “truth of appearance”; appearance is of the essence. Evidenz is the quality that emerges when something stares you in the face, when the look of a thing and the truth of what it tells you coincide. The English cognate “evidence” is to a degree misleading. Perhaps the most unpretentious way to show as much is to compare the Wikipedia pages for the two words. The English article starts as follows: “Evidence, broadly construed, is anything presented in support of an assertion, because evident things are undoubted.”2 The German page (as best as I can translate it, at least) starts like this: “In philosophy, Evidenz refers to what is unquestionably perceptible [or recognizable: erkennbar] on the basis of inspection [Augenschein] or compelling deduction, or to the immediate insight thus achieved.”3 Aside from the more laborious vocabulary, two things stand out. First, in German the frame of reference is philosophy or, more particularly, epistemology: the study of

1. K ristina Newhouse, “Tom LaDuke: Auto Destruct,” X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, 12, no. 4 (Summer 2010), https://www.x-traonline.org/article/tom-laduke-auto-destruct. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence, accessed 11/28/20. 3. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidenz, accessed 11/28/20.

how we know what we know. In English, on the other hand, “evidence” is most strongly associated with legal procedure, a meaning completely absent from the cognate. (German speakers instead use the word Beweis—which is related to a verb meaning “to prove”—in the legal context.) Second, the German definition stresses perception or, more specifically, visual perception in a distinctive way. Augenschein, the word I’ve translated as “inspection,” literally means “appearance to the eyes.” The word Einsicht (insight) likewise figures knowledge as a product of vision. The English page, by contrast, merely refers to “anything presented” without saying how the presentation happens. For whatever reason, Germans apparently want it to be a matter of seeing.

These etymological excursions may feel distant from our object of attention here, but they are not. LaDuke’s work stages an epistemological process that turns on pulling the repressed (if that is indeed what it is) back to the visual surface plane of Evidenz. Sometimes the device by which this happens is an actual loop, tube, or stripe that traverses fictive space, bringing it all back, as I have put it, to the flat of the canvas. And at other times, or often simultaneously, it is the interference of a bright, blinding blur of white, akin to a lens flare or the shimmer of a metallic reflection. These are ostentatiously illusionistic motifs that recall another translingual conceit. In his classic paper on “Fetishism,” Sigmund Freud analyzes a patient’s odd fixation on what he terms the Glanz auf der Nase, or “shine on the nose.” It turns out that the young man in question was brought up in an English nursery, although by the time Freud got to him, he had completely forgotten his childhood language. The “shine” (Glanz) was in fact a “glance” at the nose. Hence it was the latter organ (its phallic protuberance making it so obvious a fetishistic substitute that Freud does not even bother to explain its meaning) rather than the shine itself that was the origin of the fetish; the idea of the Glanz or shine was an accident of transmission from the English word to its unrelated homonym. Yet, the unconscious linguistic slip was nonetheless strong enough that the patient, when face-to-face with any nose, “endowed [it] at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others.”4 We must imagine Freud’s poor fetishist

going about his daily business in a haze of luminous noses—a world perhaps not unlike that of LaDuke’s hallucinatory white cubes. So, the theater of repression need not look like dark secrets peeking out from dark shadows. It might be saturated with Evidenz instead. I think this is the case with LaDuke’s recent works. If there is a return of the repressed here, it makes itself felt not so much in the backgrounds that (barely) seep through, as in a proliferation of gaudily visible screening devices that loop, layer, and fizzle atop the picture plane. This is a space that seems distinguished above all by differentiations of 4. Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 152.

focus: the fuzziness of the ground (which is usually airbrushed and incipiently photorealistic, in the mold of forebears such as Gerhard Richter); the material quiddity of the thicker dripped, scraped, and smeared paint on the uppermost level of the picture plane; finally, the more illusionistic yet straightforwardly material marks that snake in and out between fictive space and factual surface. It would be wrong to nail down repressed content to the rearmost layer of the ground alone, not least because, in the newer paintings I have been talking about, the “ground” itself is already insistently spatialized, meaning there is never really a backstop where the space comes to an obvious end. In fact, if I may be permitted to reveal some of the painter’s process, these spaces do not come to an end at the edge of the strictly visible: LaDuke builds 3D models that include out-of-view areas around corners. (This is different from the pictures that Newhouse was writing about, which is why her essay remains the most useful guide to LaDuke’s work of that period: In every one of the works she uses to illustrate her points, there is clearly a fuzzed-out but photo-based layer at the back, against which the gloopy textural bits stand out distinctly. In the newer works, figure/ground relations are, by contrast, complicated almost to the point of incomprehensibility.) Topology, shine, occlusion: This is the territory of Jacques Lacan, the great French psychoanalyst who died in 1981. To Lacan, the mind is not an archaeological site but rather a loop, a topology, a kind of Möbius strip. The unconscious is not something separate from the conscious mind but is rather the point where the loop of cognition touches itself, producing a dizzying (Deleuzian) eruption of the real exactly at the point where you might have thought you had everything most under control. Perhaps the most uncanny of all Lacanian tropes is the notion that you do not look at the world: The world looks at you. And that is because the “world” as we know it is a construction built, shoddily, upon the constant churn of unconscious fixation. All noses shining.

Daniel Spaulding is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His writings have appeared in publications such as Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal, and October, as well as in Charlotte Posenenske: Work in Progress (Dia Art Foundation, 2019). He is a founding editor of Selva: A Journal of the History of Art.

Cold Exit, 2020

Acrylic on canvas over panel 81 3/4 x 82 3/4 inches 207.6 x 210.2 cm

With, With Threshing Oar, 2021

Acrylic on canvas over panel 31 x 27 inches 78.7 x 68.6 cm

Tongues of Grace, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 54 1/2 x 54 1/2 inches 138.4 x 138.4 cm

POV, 2021

Acrylic on canvas over panel 78 1/2 x 48 inches 199.4 x 121.9 cm

The Blow That Hurts The Ones That Don’t, 2021

Acrylic on canvas over panel 51 1/2 x 75 inches 130.8 x 190.5 cm

The Proper Channels, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 69 1/2 x 75 1/2 inches 176.5 x 191.8 cm

Rain Rereleases, 2021

Acrylic on canvas over panel 65 x 89 inches 165.1 x 226.1 cm

I Watched The Fire That Grew So Low, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 70 1/2 x 92 inches 179.1 x 233.7 cm

Cistern, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 74 1/2 x 98 inches 189.2 x 248.9 cm (MMG#33044)

Cistern, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 74 1/2 x 98 inches 189.2 x 248.9 cm

Houses Of The Holy, 2021 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 124 inches 203.2 x 315 cm

TOM LADUKE Born in Holyoke, MA, in 1963 Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

EDUCATION 1994 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

2007 “when no one is watching,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2004 “Pattern Seeking Primate,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2002 “terrane,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2001 “Private Property,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1991 BFA, California State University, Fullerton, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2016 “New Work,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2015 “Candles and Lasers,” Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 2014 “Tom LaDuke,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2011 “eyes for voice,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY 2010 “run generator,” Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC  “Auto-Destruct,” Angles Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2020 “It’s All About Water” (curated by Elizabeth Fiore & Melissa Feldman), The Storefront, Bellport, NY 2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2011 “Loose Canon,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA  2010 “Inaugural Exhibition,” CRG Gallery, New York, NY  “New Art for a New Century: Contemporary Acquisitions 2000–2010,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “FYI–The Reflected Gaze: Self Portraiture Today,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2009 “Tools,” Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA 2008 “Like Lifelike: Painting in the Third Dimension,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA  “New Works: A Group Show of Gallery Artists,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

“SceneSeen: Recent Acquisitions from the Luckman Fine Arts Complex Permanent Collection, 1979–2006,” California State University, Los Angeles, CA 2007 “LA Bodies: Figuration in Sculpture,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Suburban Sublime,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, San Diego, CA “Rogue Wave,” L.A. Louver, Venice, CA

AWARDS 2011 Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant  1992 Trustee Merit Scholarship, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

SELECT COLLECTIONS 2005 “The Blake Byrne Collection,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA “New Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Terra Non Firma,” Howard House, Seattle, WA

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, FL

2003 “Sprawl: New Suburban Landscapes,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA

Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico

2002 “2002 California Biennial,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “New in Town,” Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR

Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN

Luckman Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA

2001 “furor scribendi: Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2000 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Inventional,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH

TEACHING Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR 2010 ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA 2005 Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

TOM LADUKE 24 June – 31 July 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved  Essay © 2021 Daniel Spaulding Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Fredrik Nilsen, Los Angeles, CA Jeff McLane, Los Angeles, CA Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-48-9 Cover: Rain Rereleases, (detail), 2021