Grotjahn's Game

by Michael Rutherford

Untitled (Green Butterfly Yellow MG), 2003, oil on linen, 73 x 49 inches
Collection of David Teiger, Image courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, NY. 
Photo: Adam Reich

Sometimes a game is played so well that it’s taken to an artistic level and sometimes art is gamed so well that it’s taken to another place altogether. Mark Grotjahn is one of the art world’s best gamers. Known for his paintings that combine a heavy dose of materiality with visual resonance, his whole body of work actually stretches along a continuum from highly formal, to a very funky brand of informality. This continuum, this space he’s made for himself, is actually an extension of a conceptual game—a game of an artistic sort.

from the Sign Exchange project

Earlier in Grotjahn’s career, the steps that he took were more obvious examples of concept and performance. The early 1990’s found him rearranging products in grocery stores and photographing the results. In his Sign Exchange project, Grotjahn switched out signs from small business establishments and replaced them with copies he had made as stand-ins. Then, in agreement with the various business owners, Grotjahn exhibited the originals as art. Another one of those early artistic experiments even consisted of a foray into gambling at Las Vegas in 2001. As a strategic measure, Grotjahn logged notes on matchbook covers complete with little quips to remember, telling himself to watch out for “the small connectors,” for example.

Consisting of the grit of life along with its risks, his gambling experience was a foreshadowing of his current strategy, a conceptual practice that resembles a long, drawn-out game of poker.  A major clue that underscores this fact is his limited edition for Parkett magazine from 2007. Called Spinner Winner, it consists of a coin-sized metal disk with a painted image on one side and a point in the middle on the reverse. The stated purpose for the object is that it’s to be used as a card cover to prevent opponents from slyly peeking at them as they lay flat on a table during a game. The object’s other use, however, is that it can be spun like a top with the pointed end facedown while the image side blurs into an abstraction of itself.

Untitled (Red Face 773), 2007-08, oil on cardboard mounted on linen, 72 x 54 inches
Image courtesy of the artist and The Heller Group
Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studio

From his very minimal Butterfly paintings to the radical Face series, his Flower paintings and finally the Mask sculptures, Grotjahn’s oeuvre is unique in its range from institutional rigor to intrepid ruggedness.  In 2010 and again in 2011, he showed new groups of Face paintings—sprawling sgraffito-like forms in oil on cardboard mounted to linen. These works were shown following a large 2009 exhibit at Gagosian Gallery which consisted primarily of his Butterfly paintings. This display of one set of work after the other in different years caused many to err when they stated that Grotjahn’s Face paintings were a new direction for him. They were not; he had actually been producing four distinct series of work (and a few others) all along.

Untitled (Angry Flower, Big Nose, Baby Moose, #4), 2006, oil, cotton and staples on canvas,
58 x 48 inches, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY

What’s beautiful about Grotjahn’s conceptual modality is his aesthetic freedom. A reflection of the times, he’s free to create his typically monochrome Butterfly paintings and in the opposite direction, he’s obviously comfortable enough to make his Mask sculptures out of cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls. Mid-range provides for the Face paintings and the onerous Flower series complete with socks for noses. As for exhibiting any of the four lines of work, just like a game of poker, one never knows which card Grotjahn will choose to play next.

Masks, acrylic on cardboard, dimensions vary

This brings us to consider what is about to happen at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado from February 17th to April 29th. Grotjahn will have the first comprehensive survey of his work from the late 1990’s to the present. The show will feature five new Mask sculptures—one to be exhibited at the Museum along with the rest of his work, while the other four will be displayed at the peak of each of the Aspen Skiing Company's four mountains. So, to see all of the Masks, one must make a pilgrimage in order to get to them. In this curious twist in his conceptual approach, Grotjahn has effectively elevated his seemingly lowest aesthetic level of work, locating it to a plane physically higher than where his most rigorous will be found—a move of artistic dissonance and true gamesmanship on his part.

To see more of Mark Grotjahn's work, see additional articles on our companion sites:  Painter's Bread and Postmodern Toaster.

For more on the Mark Grotjahn exhibition:  aspenartmuseum.org

When Sport Becomes Art

The advent of Bicycle Motocross (BMX) in the 1970's is a unique thing in and of itself. Kids basically started the sport, venturing onto motorcycle dirt tracks when no one else was around. Some key figures became involved and eventually, BMX racing associations were formed, complete with state and national championships. By the mid-1980's, some of the riders discovered that racing BMX wasn't enough; they were in it for the pleasure of riding wherever and however they wanted, using their bikes to create a different thing altogether—Freestyle BMX. This is a development unique to the Postmodern period. At no other point in time has a sport become art in such an obvious, transformative, and definitive way as BMX has. 

Duchamp was entirely correct when he showed that anything can be art. Understanding the transformation that occurred with BMX is important here. The bicycle, a form of transportation, became an object for sport. Its usage as a competitive device then morphed into an activity seen as free from the competition of racing. Sure, there are some who compete in freestyle competitions such as the X Games, but in its non-competitive state, Freestyle BMX is a form of art.

Video has served as the medium for the art of riding and all of its nuances to be elicited, staged, and exhibited through. Those who ride will often go to great lengths to shoot video, carefully editing the clips, then selecting just the right music as a background soundtrack. Their careers, complete with sponsorship by rider-owned BMX companies, often thrive due to critically acclaimed video parts that are mentioned in the riding magazines and websites. The in-print forms of Ride and Dig equate to Artforum while Vinyl BMX and BMXFU are the BMX world's cyber equivalents of Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail.

In assessing BMX and Art, it's not only the similarity of their media that compel me to view them as parallel universes. Remember one key term: sponsorship. Young, up and coming artists are on the look-out for gallery representation and freestyle BMXers are out there hoping to be tied-in to their industry by becoming part of a stable of riders for small, rider-owned bike companies that offer high quality products. Additionally, in certain circles it would be seen as selling-out for a freestyler to ride for a large bicycle conglomerate with inferior product versus a smaller rider-owned company that only offers premium goods. So in the same sense, as an artist, who would want to be represented by someone who really doesn't know what they're doing?

An interesting development in this sport that's become art is the idea of "rider-owned". With a drop in activity in the 1990's, BMX took a severe hit. Those who rode wanted to keep on riding and make their contribution, so they took matters into their own hands, starting their own companies and keeping those companies within the realm of quality, both in concept and in day-to-day operation. It seems that the art world and its institutions could glean many insights here.

Thanks to Vinyl BMX for use of the video and to rider Kevin Porter for being the artist that he is.

Jim Shrosbree

Video via David Lynch Foundation Television.

Tales of a Museum Guard part 2

Antony Gormley, Field, 35,000 terracotta figures, each 6 inches high

As a guard, you're constantly dealing with people as well as the art that you're watching over. Sometimes though, things just go wrong. A case in point was during the Antony Gormley show at the Modern in Fort Worth during the autumn of 1991. A family of brick makers in Mexico was commissioned by Gormley to make 35,000 handmade terracotta figurines to be used as an installation in various venues around the world. They were installed at the Modern in a lower level gallery space just eight steps down from the main floor, engulfing the entire space they stood in. A few days after the opening, a woman had visited the museum and was paying more attention to what was on the walls rather than where she was walking. As she stepped down the eight stairs to enter the gallery where the figurines were installed, she quickly found herself as one of them; another figure in a multitude of figures. The guard on duty had been slow to respond as she had descended into the terracotta abyss, too late to stop her as she blithely ambled down the wrong path altogether. As she was helped to her feet, embarrassed yet unhurt, she explained that she had thought the sea of orange was simply carpeting. So, as a museum guard, not only does one have to deal with the actions and attitudes of museum-goers, one also has to deal with their perceptual problems as well.

Blindsight and the Collective Unconscious

Chartres Cathedral Labyrinth, France

Sometimes it seems that we can still see, despite ourselves. A fascinating phenomenon is the case of a man who suffered a stroke to the visual cortex of his brain which left him blind. The important thing to remember here is that while his brain was damaged, his eyes and the rest of his visual array were left in pristine condition.

Researchers conducted an experiment with this individual. He had to negotiate an obstacle course without any sort of cane or device whatsoever and was able to pass by each object in his way without touching any of them.

The phenomenon at work here is the concept of “blindsight” which has been identified in patients with similar cases of brain damage. It seems that there’s a primary visual pathway at the subconscious level that the brain is constantly using. This subconscious pathway is bridged somewhere in the brain, feeding visual data to the conscious part of the brain, making a person aware that they are actually seeing something.

In the case of the man mentioned here, the stroke damaged the ability of his brain to bridge visual stimuli to his consciousness. Although he can walk through an obstacle course and he’s aware from a non-visual perspective that he’s doing it, he’s not aware from a visual perspective that he’s doing it.

This shows that there’s so much more that we experience at different levels on a daily basis; so much that we’ve yet to understand. When I first read the accounts of this blind man who can still see, it immediately brought to mind the concept of the “collective unconscious” as postulated by Carl Jung:

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.^[1]

^{Could the core, basic part of the brain and its activity actually be a main part of the equation that Jung calls the “collective unconscious”? Was it this basic structure in the brain that gave Jung the impression that there are inherited archetypical forms simply because the brain is at work in mysterious ways, helping to organize experience? How then does this affect our perception of art? Are we seeing and responding to things at another level, despite our conscious selves, then adding to that basic response with what we have already learned and known while we were aware?} 

^{Further scientific research will eventually shed more light on this. On our part, we'll just have to keep on looking and thinking about art within all of our own various levels of consciousness.}

1. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43

Tales of a Museum Guard part 1

Having found myself in Fort Worth, Texas in 1990, I set out to find a part time gig to supplement my day job. Every Saturday and Sunday for the next two years, I found myself in another world, that of the museum guard. The people I met and the art that I saw, along with the inside story of what goes on in a museum is exactly what I will share in this series. 

After a short interview and on-the-spot job offer as a weekend guard to watch the galleries and keep people from touching the art, I was given a short tour of the museum -- the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. One key instruction that I was keen to remember was when I was shown where the break room was. That room, which resembled a kitchenette with a breakfast table, was very close to an office and restroom, just six feet away. The advice given to me was that the office was for the Director of the Museum, and so was the restroom. Employees were not to use that restroom; it was reserved just for the Director. "Interesting", I thought to myself, "that little thing called 'social stratification' that I learned about in school really does exist".  Stay tuned...