Looking through homage

As I recently blogged I have started to shift some of the focus of my practice to material reuse, with the addition to content being, I think, landfill waste diversion and more specifically, avoidance of methane emissions. Since the work pictured in the link above, I’ve created the work below, which has three layers of glass inside a frame of dumpster-rescued framing lumber. While at first I felt compelled to try to pound the square that is cube into the circle that is oh never mind… anyway, contradiction of materiality is still present I believe, as well as choice and chance (any time one cuts through a piece of wood you reveal something that isn’t known in advance).

I’ll freely admit the composition makes it hard to not think of Josef Albers famous Homage to the Square series. Alber’s teaching has a lot of influence on me- I use many of the exercises out of Interaction of Color when I teach. There’s already a lot of links in this blog so if the reader isn’t familiar with any of this maybe just stop and Google for the next six hours. Seriously. Have fun!

There is of course an Albers entry on the Guggenheim’s site- their/his page has this quote “The optical effects Albers created—shimmering color contrasts and the illusion of receding and advancing planes—were meant not so much to deceive the eye as to challenge the viewer’s faculties of visual reception. This shift in emphasis from perception willed by the artist to reception engineered by the viewer is the philosophical root of the Homage to the Square series.” Albers was also apparently very spiritual, having at one point said “Good to know that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.”

I’ve written about the value of contemplation, centering the viewer and awe on this blog, so all this feels right in the strike zone. And since I came through art school during the postmodernist wars of the ’90s I’m all good on quotation/appropriation blah blah blah moving on. However, this last week I really felt myself getting hung up on the word “homage,” given the definition- while Albers no doubt meant “expression of high regard : respect” the word drives from an older practice, “a feudal ceremony by which a man expresses allegiance as the vassal of a lord.” Respect I can do, no prob- I think there’s even a nice tie-in between homage and reverence, in the context of Albers spirituality and (this artist’s perceived need to) hold humanity and our continued struggle through and towards valuable enough to have… faith and maybe practice something like devotion? However, as a child that grew up in the doctrinaire environment of an Evangelical household, allegiance is a bridge too far (my afore-mentioned post-structuralist indoctrination education notwithstanding).

The issues I am (was?) having with positioning really came to the fore for me this week with a recent post by Laurie at Two Coats about an exhibit of Noland, Stella and Olitski that was cancelled at the last minute. tldr; I demurred and my (hot) take is/was that the museum in question missed an opportunity by passing on a planned exhibit to hold both truths- that the mores of many late Modernists were exclusionary and they themselves were not diverse or valuing of the same and that their work can and does hold relevance to history and contemporary audiences. To close the loop here, I’m thinking and writing about this topic because I know Albers was not an ally, forgiving him for the time in which he was raised aside. He apparently sexually assaulted Audrey Flack at Yale (I first learned about his misdeed through this Hyperallergic podcast which, like Ms Flack, is amazing for a lot of reasons, her revelations about his abuse and my own struggles to continue to use his text for teaching afterward notwithstanding).

So where am I- swimming in contradiction, where else? But seriously, I did have the opportunity to submit the work to a group show this week and so all of the above is the backstory to the following first draft of a statement for the work, which I simply titled “through” and is, I’m hoping, the first of several (many?) works in a new series…

The materials used for this work are recycled, specifically, they are scavenged from construction dumpsters which means they represent waste diverted from landfills. Landfill gas (LFG) is a natural byproduct of the decomposition of organic material such as wood waste in landfills. LFG is composed of roughly 50 percent methane (the primary component of natural gas), 50 percent carbon dioxide (CO2) and a small amount of non-methane organic compounds. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas at least 28 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere over a 100-year period, per the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report (AR5). 

The work also directly references the Homage to the Square series of prints and drawings made in the last century by Bauhaus artist and teacher Josef Albers (1888–1976). Considered an ascetic by some academics, his spiritual disposition is evidenced in the following quote: “Good to know that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.”

Modernism, and artists we categorize as Modernists, while not monolithic, generally shared a belief in the possibility and the importance of progress as a goal, which may seem naive today and can also be seen as aspirational. Many espoused “universal” principles- a belief in the value of all life (even as in practice they often fell short of their own ideals)- and believed science should and could be used to understand human reality.

The word “through” has many different meanings for Westerners, including “moving from one side to another,” as is the case for viewers looking “through” the layers of translucent paint and glass in the work. For this artist, the definition of “through” that is perhaps most relevant to my intent of pointing at the state of passing “through” this time of (climate) crisis is “continuing in time toward completion of a process or period.”