"POINT" Rebecca FitzPatrick, collage on paper, 2009. |
While aesthetically there is little to compare between Rebecca FitzPatrick's "Thread" show and "Multiples" by Owen F. Smith, together on view at Whitney Art Works this month, both artists appropriate found materials, are impressively prolific, and identify with a post- or anti-war movement of the previous century. This exhibition of works by artists subscribing to Dada and Fluxus practices, respectively, is appropriately timed, as the current recession and our military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan weigh on our acceptance of cultural norms.
FitzPatrick pays quiet homage to Dada collage and Surrealism, using the juxtaposition of consumer images to illuminate a deeper truth (or a universal fantasy) through a conduit of absurdity and nonsense. But while Dadaists rejected traditional formalism and appealing imagery, in an effort to break down bourgeois norms associated with high art — directly protesting the cultural norms that facilitated a world war, FitzPatrick embraces pleasing forms and compositions, as well as repetition, resulting in works that read as logical, familiar, and inevitable.
Twenty-three grayscale collages on paper and three delicate sculptures are hush-hush in the front gallery at Whitney. Though the work is confident in its meticulous execution and seamless figures, an overwhelming element of the experience is white. FitzPatrick thrives in the minute details: in the penumbras of forms carefully raised off their white background, in a speck of mica, and in the deception of weight in suspended vintage paper. She forms cairns from hands cut from mid-century magazines, strung together and separated by glass beads. There is a meditative quality in both her process and her work, which uses overtly symbolic imagery (thanks, no doubt, to her interest in comparative mythology) to suggest fragments of an after, or other, life.
While FitzPatrick's musings find levity in their desire to exist without a context, Owen F. Smith employs humor as he re-contextualizes found material, aggrandizes simple pleasures, and capitalizes on the obvious. Although directly engaging in the practices and attitudes of the Fluxus movement, Smith's work sits in a contemporary context. The most immediate work in the second room of the gallery, which exhibits Smith's "Multiples," is a letter from the artist urging the viewer to become a "Memory Keeper" for those who have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an effort to collectively remember the reality of war and the individuals lost, he asks that the viewer be responsible for the memory of one name. Similarly rooted in current political and social issues is an installation of various scissors in plastic bags uniformly pinned to the wall in a grid, titled "A Morphology of Potential Terrorist Acts." Bite-sized versions of this installation are "Memento(s) of Freedom," scissors confiscated from airline passengers in 2002 and 2003.
The gallery housing Smith's work appears as crowded and sterile as a laboratory, with meticulously labeled white cardboard boxes piled on shelves, but signs encouraging the viewer to participate with the work turn the room into a touch tank, breaking down the boundary between artist and viewer.
