CHARLES LINDER VESPERTINE
For some, the merger of art and life is an intellectual process, more thought than action. John Cage famously said, “Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.” For Charles Linder,the integration of his life and his artwork is unconscious.He is an instigator of experiences. In the mid 1990s when I first began working with Charles, he was operating Refusalon, an influential, amorphous exhibition/lifestyle/living space located in his residence on Natoma Street in San Francisco. It was both domicile and stage, there was no implied neutrality between making,presenting,and experiencing art. To visit Refusalon was a journey into Linder’s world, one in which artists, writers, patrons, chefs, and messengers intermingled around activities of his choosing. In his 1999 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art,Paul Karlstrom described Linder’s Refusalon as “created in part as his conceptual art piece investigating the often conflicting worlds of creative idealism and business realities...” Linder leaves no stone unturned in his quest to find meaning through personal experience. One of my favorite examples of this kind of work is his 2006 piece, Ghostang, which was the centerpiece of his last show at the gallery. San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote, “Ghostang is a bullet-riddled 1965 Ford Mustang body that Linder retrieved from the desert and powder-coated to preserve and revive it as an ambivalent object of nostalgia... As a monument, it offers us symbolically the vanity of a gunslinger nation, in tatters.” Charles said of the car, “It had all of the things that interested me--this crazy sense of recreational violence, the found object, the rust.” Talking about his evolving work in a 2011 interview Linder explained,“Lately, I’ve found myself more preoccupied with lifestyle than product. I feel fortunate and lucky enough to be able to live in a way where work doesn’t necessarily dominate my life. I’m good at balancing work and play on a functional level so that it becomes effortless. With the aspect of going on adventures--if I don’t do that, the work doesn’t happen.” This book, Vespertine, is a glimpse into Linder’s life, it is both a collection of his artwork and his inspirations. In this river of images we can see where he trains his eye and the fortuitous moment where his life becomes the artwork. Vespertine is defined as being of, relating to, or occurring in the evening. The night, its engagements and our illumination of them, captivates Charles. This photographic document presents us with chance moments, illuminations, and sculptural actions which are often, by design, one and the same. Griff Williams Gallery 16, San Francisco
CHARLES LINDER: VESPERTINE ISBN 978-0-9827671-2-2 Copyright Š2012 Charles Linder and Gallery 16 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from Gallery 16 and Charles Linder. Charles Thanks: Mom, Dave, Pradeep, Bogart, Essex, Heather, Woogie, Isner, Muskaan, Adele, di Rosa,Pipeman, Rocco, Luis, Griff, Troy, Fireball, and Launa Produced in an edition of 1,000
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