October 15 to November 14, 2015
531 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11h avenues
New York City, 212 331 8888

In her final show at Mixed Greens (this much-valued gallery is, sadly, closing) Joan Linder trains her lucid, maniacal drawing practice on a notorious environmental disaster close to her Buffalo home. This 1970s toxic phenomenon known as “Love Canal,” a name that must have made Burroughs, Pynchon and DeLillo giggle, confirmed an emerging environmental zeitgeist, fed by revelations of governmental fecklessness verging on murder. Linder documents this original superfund wasteland –– from which working class families were finally removed after unheard-of birth defect and cancer rates, and which remains fenced off forty years later –– by recording with her indefatigable pen, across the folds of accordion notebooks, seemingly every chain-link and blade of grass of the full perimeter. Displayed on wrap-around shelves, these encyclopeadic landscapes include indications of the site’s surrounding ecosystem of weeds and highways, telephone lines and old tires, much as in Rackstraw Downes’s deceptively neutral vistas, or analogously, in the household clutter of Dawn Clements’s panoramic interiors. In addition, Linder’s circumambulating drawings pack a punch as a group, as a project, that has something to do with Gordon Matta-Clark’s or Peter Fend’s subversive mappings of ideas hiding in plain sight –– or rather, site.

You could argue that in the past Linder has commented obliquely on post-feminist discourse, by rendering a colossally unwashed pile of dishes; and that the antiseptic delusions of science were slyly addressed in her exhaustive drawings from the inner sancta of biology and pathology labs. But with the Love Canal project Linder raises the political ante. Inaugurating a pure research vector, the artist displays in glass-topped vitrines neat rows of official reports and memos, blown leaves from the disaster’s decades-long paper trail –– or rather, they are illusionistic pen and ink renderings of such documents. Text has been caught before in Linder’s observational web, but in situ, casually strewn along with the books, signs and scraps of paper of a larger still life. The new document drawings for the first time take an overt angle of attack, and without giving up an inch of empiricism.

There is intention in the laboriousness and redundancy of the artist’s pilgrimage across these typewritten cover pages, fuzzy photographs, and charts and graphs, which are clearly the tip of a file-cabinet-and-microfiche iceberg. Linder’s stubborn simulacrum of bureaucratic paralysis means to cast a dispiriting pall –– but also, a fascinating one. A weird sort of fun, even, develops out of Linder’s characteristic obsession with every trompe-l’oeil detail of her quarry, including the mimeograph burn, feedback distortion and document decay of the “originals” –– which seem, in fact, to be xeroxes of xeroxes of xeroxes.

Each typed letter of each hall-of-mirrors document is rendered as legibly as the source allows. For those inclined to dip in, the rewards get more Kafkaesque, with chains of inference that run beyond mere corporate greed into shameful state secrets: ultimately to the infamous Project Sunshine (Linder’s exhibition title), an Atomic Energy Commission program that snatched bodies for the purpose of studying long-term health effects in the event of nuclear war. At the very least, Linder shows that Hooker Chemical, Love Canal’s toxifier, was a deep player in the military-industrial complex, like any large rustbelt concern. The limitless electrical capacity of Niagara Falls, into which Love Canal drains, is what put the region at the epicenter of the environmentally oblivious Cold War economy, before it plunged. Perhaps there’s something in the water, as Linder’s artist colleagues at SUNY Buffalo, notably Steven Kurz, have put a research-oriented, activist stamp on art from the area, to which Linder is in the process of making a necessary contribution (the Love Canal project is ongoing). Mark Lombardi was also from the region, Syracuse being a few stops along the Erie Canal; and it is worth pointing out that Linder’s research, like Lombardi’s, is not conspiratorial, in that the art is built entirely from public records –– known facts –– released documents.

Some conspiracy theories, however, turn out to be true: for starters, there’s the still-partly-classified Project Sunshine (yet another name, like Love Canal –– or Hooker Chemical, for crying out loud –– that would put a dystopian black humorist to shame). And Linder alludes, with a few cover pages of meticulously redrawn bureaucratrese, to a far worse government conspiracy: a local adjunct of the Manhattan Project, it seems, that was run out of the University of Rochester. The title of this report includes the phrase “CHANGES IN BODY TEMPERATURE IN RESPONSE TO URANIUM INJECTIONS,” and presumably is related to known U.S. Government programs in which deliberately misinformed, unwitting prisoners, chiefly minority, were irradiated for “science” –– sometimes fatally. Which is not all that far from concurrent experiments by Nazi doctors on concentration camp inmates (although these, at least, ceased with the war’s end; the Rochester document is dated 1946.) What Linder seems to be asking is: How many pages of obfuscatory memoranda does it take to get from there to signing off on building housing and schools on a known toxic waste dump?

Exhibited along with the documents and the accordion landscapes are two large, grandly luxurious color ink drawings, meticulous delineations of the interweaving patterns of weeds in an unkempt backyard –– presumably in Niagara County, maybe even on the overgrown site of Love Canal itself. (For that matter, in that locus of poisons it can’t matter very much which side of the superfund fence the ground is on.) Where pebbly dirt peeks through, the ink is shades of brown, contrasting with the green weeds above, which are outlined strategically with black. This consistent division of color from top to bottom layer makes for a crisply vibrating visual texture that at a distance approaches the richness of a William Morris endpaper design or a chinoiserie folding screen. Up close one sees the slight waver of a tireless hand, drawing a plot of ground at actual size, as if that inch-by-inch attention might bring, to scorched earth, a measure of remediation.

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October 11 to November 10, 2013
56 Bogart Street, at Harrison Place
Bushwick, (718) 852-4396

A one-room gallery in Bushwick provides the unlikely setting for what is arguably one of the most elegant solo shows of the Fall season. Meg Hitchcock, formerly a painter of likable if unexciting lacy abstractions, came up with a fully-formed concept five years ago that sprang to mind, according to the artist, like Athena from the head of Zeus.  Simply put, she would disassemble sacred texts into their individual letters and then reassemble these same letters into passages from other sacred texts. She cuts up Psalm 23 from the Old Testament, for example, and pastes its letters into a passage from the Koran.  A self-confessed heavy reader of religious writings, and literature with a spiritual bent in general, Hitchcock makes literal the deconstruction necessary for the analysis of text.

The work’s visual impact is immediate.  Almost exclusively black and white works on paper, they present themselves as simple graphic designs.  A few of them appear as recognizable images – a tree branch, a flaming circle – but most allude to tantric symbols, mandalas, or Kabbalistic images. Their sensuality is undeniable, and one is enticed to closer inspection, and it is at this point that we seethat the images are comprised entirely of typeset letters. By the time one’s noseis mere inches away,,   the work’s austere terrain becomes monumental, the edge of each little square piece of paper – not much bigger than the letter printed on it – standing in relative high relief to the paper it’s glued on.  Hitchcock’s process, in spite of being immaculate in execution, registers as the opposite of mechanized.  Her touch is light and resonates with meditation not drudgery.

Once the viewer is aware that the image is comprised solely of text, they are lead, inexorably, to attempt reading the work.  Which, because they are based on often-familiar texts, proves surprisingly easy.  Not that the entire passage is immediately available to the eye, but the opening thread, “Amazing Grace” for instance, will stand out.  Grabbing that thread will, for the more ambitious, lead into reading more of the text, if only to confirm the derivation of the text. One looks to the wall label for help and is intrigued further: Amazing Grace, Letters cut from the Bhagavad Gita, 2013. On an intellectual pilgrimage, we move from label to label – The Prophets: Surah 21 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible (The Book of Psalms), 2013; Mundaka Upanishad, Letters cut from the Koran, 2012; or The Sun: Surah 91 from the Koran, Letters cut from the Bible. The palpable joy of following the artist down this rabbit hole can be transformative.  The single sculpture/installation in the show, Trimalchio’s Feast: The Declaration of Independence, Letters cut from “The Satyricon” by Petronius, 2013, expands on not only the artist’s materials, but on the possible definition of what might be considered a sacred text. There is a vision and a mind at work here.

As the late Arthur Danto often emphasized, the subject of most contemporary art is art itself, a circular dialogue within the art community.  Rarely does an artist find a way to step out of this circle and instead make their art an exploration about who they are as people – how they think, what is important to them on a daily basis – and wed it to a process that not only intimately mirrors this, but allows viewers to actively participate in their discoveries.  Mark Lombardi, whose obsession with conspiracies resulted in exquisitely drawn flow charts, comes to mind as another example of this.  With this kind of art, all the elements – subject, technique, process, materials, and image – are so intertwined, and in such harmony with each other, that they exude a sense of inevitability.  Conversely, and more to the point, aesthetic impact — the pure pleasure derived from engaging with each piece — is ensured by all of these elements being transparent and available to the viewer.  These spare, works manage to be at once, intellectually satisfying, emotionally powerful, and visually stunning.

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Lombardi, for anybody who doesn’t know, made drawings of conspiracies. Not hypothetical or imaginary ones, but real ones like Iran-Contra and Charles Keating/Lincoln Savings. To do this, he pulled together hundred of facts from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times, cross referenced them on index cards – he had around 14,000 of them – and then laid out the schemes using carefully composed flow charts. His medium of choice: graphite on paper.

In a traditional artistic sense, Lombardi drawings eschew most of the draughtsman’s vocabulary. There is no shading or cross-hatching, no pentimenti or rendering, no foreshortening or perspective. It would be hard to attribute any romantic or expressionistic quality to the artist’s marks – quite the opposite, for their closest visual cousins would be scientific diagrams, power point presentations, or surveyor’s maps. Simplicity and clarity are the ruling aesthetic.

And yet, Lombardi’s drawings are overwhelming. When viewing the drawings and becoming caught up in their densely compressed narratives there is a tendency to attribute their power solely to their content. But the reality is actually far more complicated, as Lombardi was well aware. In fact, it was at the root of one of his ongoing struggles that, to an admirer looking back today, might seem strange: how to make his art work as something other than a drawing?

One doesn’t have to know a great deal about the art world to understand the real world factors that could make this question important to an artist. Unlike painting, sculpture, or video, works on paper are not considered by most to be a primary art form. As beloved as they may be by many collectors and curators, works on paper always have to fight the perception that they are merely preparatory studies and not complete artworks unto themselves. True, they often have departments at museums and magazines devoted to them, but in this way they are also, in a way, ghettoized. One need only walk through almost any museum to realize how rarely one sees a work on paper being exhibited in the main galleries. Make all the conservation arguments you want, it is obvious that in the view of curators, drawing can’t be an artist’s main work. At the end of the day, an artist whose work is restricted to paper faces an uphill battle for recognition.

An ambitious artist, this was something that Lombardi often thought about. As his dealer (I represented Lombardi from 1997 until early 2000, when I closed my gallery), we would often have conversations on the subject of how he might successfully move his content to another medium. At one point, Lombardi produced a large proto-type light box that presented one of his drawings in negative – white lines on black background. It was an interesting failure.

So Lombardi worked on the drawings. He experimented with the paper, switching from a cool, fairly standard butcher block white to warm, cream colored Arches for his 1999 show at my gallery. He changed the shape of the chart, moving away from the primarily linear and time based left to right earlier drawings to drawings comprised solely of arcs. And he found ingenious and beautiful ways to form these arcs into fragmented circles, spheres, and even insect like images, always with the effect of clarifying the underlying narrative.

In Lombardi’s cosmology, the little crooks, cons, and double-dealers revolve in perpetual orbit around the heavier CEOs, oil companies, and corrupt government officials. Ask yourself: What the giant, graceful lines forming a globe in a drawing like “World Finance Corporation and associates c. 1970 – 84, Miami – Ajman – Bogotá – Caracas (7th Version),” 1999, are curving around? The answer: international law.

But again, we have to ask ourselves why? If Lombardi’s work was so focused (some might even say obsessed) with simply creating flow charts of global conspiracies, why couldn’t it be translated into a range of alternate media? Silkscreen, web site, etched aluminum panel, lithograph – Lombardi contemplated them all and rejected them all as unsatisfactory. Everything other than the most basic tools of creation – pencil and paper – seemed to fall short.

If there is no obvious reason why an artist’s straight forward, if complex, narrative cannot be expounded upon in any other medium, then perhaps we are missing something essential about the narrative. Are we missing something about Lombardi’s content, something that the drawing is trying to tell us? Something that Lombardi as the artist might have been too close to see, though keen enough to sense hovering nearby and, consciously or not, stay true to.

As I pointed out at the beginning, Lombardi’s drawings, so devoid of Sturm und Drang is not typical of most artworks. But they are beautiful, and just as their narratives are somehow larger than first appearances, so too their beauty is not confined to their overall design, but inherent in the physical quality of their lines – the way Lombardi applied the graphite, the way he touched them. Looking at them, we can sense how deeply Lombardi cared about the subjects of the work (who was who) and about their purpose (the shape has to relate to the meaning). However, more than that, more than anything else, he cared about clarity – he wanted to understand, and he wanted us to understand, too. Can we doubt that this overarching desire for clarity is the reason that he shunned expressionistic or romantic markmaking? It must have been enticing to telegraph his outrage, shock, anxiety, depression, even, no doubt, his occasional bemusement at the high level hi-jinks he so carefully, lovingly illuminated- but he resisted the temptation to do so.

Iran-Contra, Lippo Group, Palmer National Bank, World Finance Corporation, Charles Keating: we can be overwhelmed and confused by the information in the drawings just as we were when we first attempted to wade through these stories in the daily press. But because they are drawings we can see the care and precision that went into them. Because they are drawings, a diary-like product of an individual who struggled to get things right, we feel not just that we are in intimate, caring company, but empowered as well; if Lombardi can understand this, then so can we.

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