Round Two: Fight!

by Jeriah Hildwine

Five weeks after the opening of the Fall gallery season, some of the heavy hitters have geared up and reloaded for round two.  In addition to shows at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 65 Grand, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Linda Warren is showing Emmett Kerrigan, and Packer Schopf was showing David Buckingham, Jerry Beem, and Curtis Readel.  When Warren and Packer are having openings on the same night, I’m virtually guaranteed to see something I like, and they’re just around the corner from each other.

Emmett Kerrigan "Yellow Farmhouse" (2008)

Emmett Kerrigan’s show, Cline Ave. at Linda Warren Gallery, is a straightforward presentation of aggressively flat paintings (some in oil, some in gouache) depicting the urban, suburban, and agricultural landscapes of the Midwest.  The flatness of Kerrigan’s work goes far beyond the mere absence of depth common to most Modernist work; Kerrigan’s work seems almost to be about flatness.  Lines are dragged through the paint like a plough through black earth, carving furrows that show a Bauhaus-level honesty about the material.  The paint curls, wrinkles, and piles up along the margins of each field of color, accumulating like excavated earth, but also very much like paint.  Kerrigan’s material asserts itself plainly, giving the viewer (or at least a fellow painter) a visceral connection to the studio experience involved in the creation of this work.

David Buckingham "Show Me On The Doll Where The Bad Man Touched You" (2007)

Packer Schopf Gallery is presenting a nicely-matched trio, who share a sort of oblique dystopianism just this side of apocalyptic.  As The World Burns presents David Buckingham’s cut-and-welded metal text pieces, which combine a Modernist flatness and color sensibility with a snarky sense of humor.  Jesus Saves reads one, while a nearby piece reads like a transcription of scripted porno-movie passion; others quote song lyrics.

Perhaps a useful reference point in approaching Buckingham’s work is Ed Ruscha.  Buckingham shares with Ruscha an aesthetic affinity for material at least as important as a linguistic affinity for text.  The differences between the two artists are more telling than the similarities:  while Ruscha’s media range widely, including both oil painting as well as ketchup on paper or egg white on satin, Buckingham’s medium remains consistent:  found, cut, and welded steel, often cut from junked automobiles, retaining its original paint as well well as its scratches.  It would follow then that while Ruscha is a conceptual artist interested in both the aesthetic and conceptual implications of both his subject and his material, Buckingham is more primarily an aesthetic artist, in some ways a formalist, interested in the color and form of his material as well as the subject it describes.

piece from Jerry Bleem's Allegiance show

Alongside Buckingham in the main gallery space is Jerry Bleem’s Allegiance.  Thin strips of American flags, crocheted into abstract patterns, combine a symbol as loaded as Buckingham’s text with a medium obviously associated with craft and kitsch.  As an inverted flag can be flown as a sign of distress, Bleem disassmbles the flag as an act of contemplation of patriotism and war.  Appropriating the flag is a risky proposition, about as risky as using text.  I won’t say that Bleem has totally changed the way I see our nation’s flag, but he does manage to approach it with a delicacy and dedication that avoid heavy-handedness.  The time spent crocheting can be seen as a form of meditation, and in this sense I read Bleem’s work as a material documentation of a performance.  While this can be said of nearly any labor-intensive endeavor, the repetition of crotchet in particular lends itself to this interpretation.

peice from Curtis Readel's Damn Nation

As Buckingham disassembles our cars and Bleem disassembles our flags, disassembles our currency.  Presidential busts are re-presented with their features defleshed down to the skull, and the monuments from the backs of our bills are shown in ruins.