November 8 - December 20, 2013 Studios Inc 1708 Campbell Street Kansas City, MO 64108
Garry Noland Test Patterns and Floor Samples This solo exhibition is part of the 2013-2014 Exhibition Series at Studios Inc, which has been made possible through the generous financial support of Jane Hunt Meade and Benjamin Meade.
“I don’t think it’s all that much different” Exhibition essay by Jamilee Polson Lacy
And you thought you knew what a Noland looks like. You love those tape collages, those “tape tapestries” as people call them. In your mind, and in the minds of many, they are masterpieces. You could stare for hours at the bizarre color combinations, raucous geometric patterns, and nasty bits of dirt (and who knows what else) stuck to gluey surfaces. So naturally, you were so excited to see more tape. But that’s okay, you can admit it: you have been caught off guard that this Noland exhibition, with its many artworks, is not what you expected. Don’t feel too silly—we all thought we knew. Instead of presenting to us what we already know, Garry Noland surprises with work that
more comprehensively considers materiality, resourcefulness, and transformation in Test Patterns and Floor Samples, his solo exhibition marking the culmination of a three-year residency at Studios Inc in Kansas City, Missouri. If thought of retrospectively, Noland’s artistic dossier demonstrates that no medium becomes fixed in the artist’s hand, and that no material remains obsolete in its singularity as long as the artist does something interesting with it. Undoubtedly, this new, diverse body of floor and wall sculptures emphasizes what we correctly knew—that Noland has a knack for discovering
otherwise unperceived possibilities of non-art materials. He began playfully experimenting with materials of all kinds at a young age. He worked with watercolors on specialty papers purchased with money earned mowing lawns in Independence, Missouri, his life-long hometown, and “[built] stone wall sculptures in the back yard” 1 with flat rock. Thanks to a clay deposit and a DIY kiln in that same back yard, he even dabbled in ceramics, trying his hand at simple coil and pinch pots.
aesthetics of things, as in “Cord,” which resembles campfire logs piled up and just beginning to burn, though it is actually orange PVC pipe encrusted with multi-color glass marbles. In this and many other works, Noland seems as much a painter as a sculptor in his attunement to color and optical texture. Take care to notice how the marbles adorning “Cord” and every other sculpture have been carefully selected to reflect a specifically limited color palette and pattern.
So yes, Noland arrived at art making through an investigation of materials and never since—in 40 years or so— has his studio production strayed from the physicality of those materials. Though he got his post-university art career going as a painter working between the traditions of Op Art, Pop Art, and abstraction of both the geometric and expressionist types, Noland’s work over the years increasingly employed alternatives to paper and canvas. From the late 1970s through the mid 2000s, he often fabricated surfaces from plywood or cement to paint on, before he switched to regularly using collage and decoupage methods atop postcards and hundreds of collected National Geographics. And in what roughly adds up to the last decade, Noland made from tape and contact paper the geometrically patterned tapestries for which he is so well known. When discussing his preference for non-art materials over traditional materials, the artist explains that he feels he is working right in line with those who use charcoal, paint, plaster, or woven textiles. Of his work in context with that of his peers, he states very frankly: “I don’t think it’s all that much different.” 2
It is accurate to say that Noland’s artistic concerns embody ideas found among modern and contemporary artistic movements and factions from around the world. Each of the artworks featured in Test Patterns and Floor Samples is precipitated by art historical trajectories encompassing alternative materials use and provocations of instances of false perfection. Upon doing so, this body of work indiscriminately draws from a long list of programs that includes Conceptual art of 1960s-70s America and the aesthetics of its Italian counterpart, Arte Povera, which advocated for the intermingling of art and life by championing complete openness toward materials and processes. Visit Noland’s studio to see how the artist regards equally but not too seriously all of his materials and each of his whims. He remains constantly willing to try anything; he has no regard for whether his methods and production meet high or low brow criteria. Case-in-point, a number of the pieces in this exhibition, such as the multiple “Swabs” and “Pump Jacks” sculptures, build on grotesque capitalist subjects taken on by the likes of Claes Oldenburg in the iconic “soft” sculptures designed for “The Store” (1961); by Mike Kelley in the masses of stuffed animals that make up “Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites” (1991-99); and by Jessica Stockholder in large-scale installations like “Vortex in the Play of Theatre with Real Passion: In Memory of Kay Stockholder” (2000).
For the last year, however, Noland’s studio has been a laboratory for experimenting with meaning conjured through form and texture. Take for instance the tablet-shaped slab of commercial-grade blue foam decorated with golden hued tape that comprises “Failed Monument”. Re-conceptualized by Noland as Art with a capital A, the foam, with its rough, dirty surface, reads as heavy stone that conveys literal and metaphorical weight. As such, the foam now holds the spiritual value often bequeathed to historical monuments, gravestones, and public sculpture in general. The failure referenced in the artwork’s title comes at the first sign of actual material recognition, when the viewer realizes that the poor foam, regardless of its shiny golden makeover, will never hold up to the standards of true monumentality. Nonetheless, “Failed Monument” ultimately succeeds in its capacity to culturally revalue the blue foam, which will never again be thoughtlessly discarded. Because Noland’s practice has for so many years relied on non-art materials, he has honed a keen ability to breathe new life into the stuff, the remnants, and the sometimes untidy refuse of everyday life. Test Patterns and Floor Samples, which includes pieces consisting not only of foam, but also marbles, aluminum foil, bubble wrap, and other found commercial construction materials, simultaneously cites as its conceptual underpinnings the chaotic playfulness in consuming and collecting, the melancholy in waste, and the surprising aesthetic pleasantry in combining usually unrelated entities. In “Le Vin des chiffonniers” 3 (The RagPickers’ Wine), poet and critic Charles Baudelaire immortalizes the figure of the rag-picker, a downtrodden soul who sifts through the refuse bins of nineteenth-century Paris in search of bits and bobs that could be salvaged and resold. For Baudelaire, the rag-picker’s activity mirrors that of the modern poet: both exist on the margins of middle-class urban life, feeding off its consumptive delirium, and both have an uncanny adeptness for observing in everyday phenomena something remarkable that escapes the notice of others. Not unlike Baudelaire’s rag-picker, Noland sees something marvelous in the ordinary of Kansas City, and he has the modern poet’s talent for inventively amalgamating and thus transforming mere fragments of that local ordinary into imaginative experiences that allow others see the marvelous too. Though Noland’s brand of assemblage art traces back to 19th century French poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé (a poet frequently championed by Baudelaire) and 20th century collage by Picasso and his fellow Cubists, its footing still holds today thanks to the ever-resonant Duchampian-style employment of objet trouvés and trompe-l’œil. But unlike Duchamp, who claimed to be indifferent to the aesthetics of the things he presented as art—like a bicycle wheel fixed to a stool, Noland is obviously acutely attuned to the visual appeal of his materials. Much of the excitement around his work is in the synthesis of the primary
The wall full of “Test Patterns” offers up a little bit of what we already knew of Noland’s work. Covered with rectangular pieces of aluminum foil tape, these wall-mounted sculptures gleam under gallery lights as if they were old-fashioned tanning reflectors in the afternoon sun. They also draw strong connections between Noland and the work of Tony Feher, the esteemed New York-based sculptor who uses everything but art supplies to make straightforward structures that subtly upend the more pretentious notions of serious art. Like Noland, Feher’s work lets commercial color and arranged objects take center stage to emphasize the aesthetic potential of industrial and consumer products. This artist, again similar to Noland, rarely if ever alters the chemical properties of his material; nothing has been melted down or bent out of its original shape. Yet in contrast to Feher, Noland is averse to the sterile qualities of consumer goods and design. His materials always show evidence of being handled and infused with the charming imperfections of real humanity. If Feher, who is heralded by critics for nailing to the wall a beautifully crumpled piece of metallic foil or for positioning on the floor a huge pink polystyrene sheet that has been elegantly folded into the shape opera-fan dinner napkin, can be called “a wily poet of the everyday,” 4 then we know for sure that Noland is crafting epic odysseys from the scraps of the real world, a place that we all know. With each verse, Test Patterns and Floor Samples sends us back to our own journey through life with the knowledge that art is a process that unfolds in tandem with the complexities and joys of everyday existence. Footnotes: 1 Quote from my conversation with Garry Noland at Studios Inc, Friday, October 4, 2013 2 Quote from “A Punch-the-Clock Kind of Art Making: An Inter view with Garry Noland,” Temporary Art Review, September 12, 2012: http://temporaryartreview.com/a-punch-the-clock kind-of-art-making-an-interview-with-garry-noland/ 3 See “Le Vin des chiffonniers” in Les Fleurs du mal, an expansive volume of poetry Baudelaire first self-published in 1857. 4 Ken Johnson, “Throwaways, Put Together Just So: Tony Feher’s Retrospective at the Bronx Museum,” New York Times, October 17, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/arts/ design/tony-fehers-retrospective-at-the-bronx-museum.html Front-side images: “Pump Jack (Clot),” 2013 (top); “Pump Jack (Sash),” 2013 (middle); and “Floor Sample, 2013” (bottom) All photographs by E.G. Schempf