Tim Clifford: Threat Assessment

Tim Clifford:

Threat Assessment

Dec. 11, 2015–Jan. 10, 2016 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Howl! Happening takes its name from the unpredictable, free-form happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, where active participation of the audience blurred the boundary between the art and the viewer. More to be experienced than described, Happening will curate exhibitions and stage live events that combine elements of art, poetry, music, dance, vaudeville, and theater—a cultural stew that defies easy definition.

For more than a decade, Howl! Festival has been an annual community event—a free summer happening in and around Tompkins Square Park, dedicated to celebrating the past and future of contemporary culture in the East Village and on the Lower East Side.

The history and contemporary culture of the East Village are still being written. The mix of rock and roll, social justice, art and performance, community activism, gay rights and culture, immigrants, fashion, and nightlife are even more relevant now. While gentrification continues apace and money is king, Howl! Happening declares itself a spontaneous autonomous zone: a place where people simultaneously experience and become the work of art. As Alan Kaprow, the “father” of the happening, said: “The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and indistinct as possible.”

Tim Clifford:

Threat Assessment

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Dec. 11, 2015–Jan. 10, 2016 at Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project Howl! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 7

Threat Assessment

PLATE 1

The Ideal Classroom, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 120 inches

PLATE 2

Threat Assessment, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 72 inches

PLATE 3

Seduction of the Innocent, 2013 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 84 inches

PLATE 4

Maternal Anxiety, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 96 x 96 inches PLATE 5

There Is No Danger, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 96 x 120 inches

Target Panic

TARGET PANIC

PLATE 6 – 10

Target Panic, 2008–12 Gouache on paper 100 9 x 12 inches

PLATE 11

Target Panic (detail)

PLATE 11

No Trust (flag study), 2008 Gouache on paper 14 x 20 3/8 inches

Randall Edwards Tim Clifford: The Archeology of Fear

NO TRUST sets emblazoned on a flag divided into two rectangles: one blood red, the other cool azure, each word painted in the color of the opposite background. The stark contrast quickly induces retinal fatigue, forcing the capital letters to seem removed from their backgrounds and unable to coexist – an indicting metaphor of the divide between red and blue America. However, No Trust (Flag Design) [2010] is more than a sociopolitical commentary or visual experiment.

It has deeper roots, eruditely alluding to Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, a late-antebellum-era satire of deceit on the Mississippi River.

Such methodology is emblematic of Tim Clifford’s exacting practice: he mines the American psyche, studiously constructing an anthropological vernacular of distrust and violence. The Threat Assessment series [since 2013], for example, reimagines carnival shooting galleries as matte black murals with austere white targets. The individual titles, such as The Ideal Classroom [2014] (taken from news coverage of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut), transform visual abstractions of frontier gun culture into harrowing juxtapositions of freedom and death.

Further investigating the aesthetic mechanisms of gun culture, Target Panic [2008–2012] identifies an astonishing intersection between firearms and abstract painting, between violence and design. For this series, Clifford gathered one hundred targets used for shooting practice and copied them as delicate gouache drawings. The meticulously hand-drawn works recall

colorful Suprematist compositions, Agnes Martin’s faint gridded lines, or Gabriel Orozco’s geometric permutations of circles.

Excavating found images, however, Clifford’s works are not abstractions, but simulacra, vulnerable representations of images created only to be violently ruptured.

Clifford quite literally reversed the artistic process of excavation in The Neighborhood I Grew Up in Buried Underground [1999].

Here, the artist dug a one-foot trench and buried a miniature schema of his childhood cul-de-sac in an attempt to escape the traumas of youthful anxiety and symbolically return the landscape to its uninhabited state. Clifford, who grew up in Newtown, later responded to the massacre of schoolchildren there with Our All American Town [2015] – a startling print of targets imposed on a photograph of two boys bearing the eponymous banner at a parade. Unfathomable mass carnage, like that perpetrated on children very much like these boys, suggests that any American can too easily be added to the rollcall of needless death.

Clifford’s most recent work borrows solemn historical imagery to evoke the grief accompanied by loss. A Good Death [2015], the title drawn from Drew Gilpin Faust’s A Republic of Suffering, depicts a willow tree commonly found etched onto 19th century New England gravestones, suggesting that society confers value on the manner of one’s death, not the merits of one’s life. The cumulative result of Clifford’s oeuvre is a trenchant conceptual embodiment of the visceral fear inherent to the American condition. Positioning the past as contemporary subject matter, he traces a genealogy of societal distrust. Ultimately, the work places us not only as the shooter – panicked targets cleanly in our sights – but on the opposing side of a yawning cultural chasm, where fear is so potent that tragedy is not enough.

PLATE 12

A Good Death, 2015 Charcoal on paper mounted on panel, 78 x 48 inches

What Home Was What War Was What Fear Was

PLATE 13

What Home Was, 2012–13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches

PLATE 14

What War Was, 2012–13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches

PLATE 15

What Fear Was, 2012-13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches

PLATE 1

The Ideal Classroom, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 120 inches Threat Assessment, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 72 9 inches

PLATE 2

PLATE 3 Seduction of the Innocent, 2013 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 108 x 84 inches

Maternal Anxiety, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 96 x 96 inches

PLATE 4

PLATE 5 There Is No Danger, 2014 Ink on paper and paper inlay on panel 96 x 120 inches PLATE 6–10

Target Panic, 2008–12 Gouache on paper 100 9 x 12 inches

PLATE 11 No Trust (flag study), 2008 Gouache on paper, 14 x 20 3/8 inches PLATE 12 A Good Death, 2015 Charcoal on paper mounted on panel 78 x 48 inches PLATE 13 What Home Was, 2012–13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches PLATE 14 What War Was, 2012–13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches PLATE 15 What Fear Was, 2012-13 Gouache and ink on paper 25 x 56 inches

HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker Board of Advisors Curt Hoppe Marc H. Miller Dan Cameron Carlo McCormick James Rubio Anthony Cardillo Debora Tripodi Lisa Brownlee Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Brian (Hattie Hathaway) Butterick Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus Gallery Director: Ted Riederer Program Director: Carter Edwards Creative Consultant: Susan Martin Howl Artist/Videographer: Darian Brenner

© 2015 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 7 Tim Clifford: Threat Assessment Dec. 11, 2015–Jan. 10, 2016 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project ISBN: 978-0-9961917-6-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, with prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. Essay © 2015 Randall Edwards Editor: Ted Riederer Copy Editor: Jorge Clar Design: Jeff Streeper for Modern IDENTITY Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project 6 East 1st St. NYC, 10003 www.HowlArts.org 917 475 1294

The Arturo Vega Project: Jane Friedman

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