Wade
Guyton's mid- career survey fits well within the precincts of the post 1945
American modernist art territory staked out by the Whitney. The work displayed
on the museum's third floor includes painting, sculpture and collage and if one
ran through and peripherally scanned the ensemble it might well serve as a
survey of "triumphant"
American art ranging chronologically from Barnett Newman to Post- Painterly
Abstraction to Minimalism. Newman's Stations of the Cross cycle immediately comes to mind in one of Guyton's
large series of black, inkjet- printed, stretched-linen panels. The machinic
rhetoric of the screen grab, scanner and ink jet printer displaces the humane
existential stance of Newman's work. A man's extensivity gets exchanged for his
extensions. Rather than Newman's
incrementally painted swaths of stubborn sublimity, Guyton skims his surfaces
with incidents of juddering printer glitches and unevenly dried- up ink
matrices. This attention to machine-made accident is reminiscent of Warhol's
squeegee scrapes and his serial, visual stutter. When a repetitive trope jumps
in fits and starts like this, it usually signifies a certain antipathy to a
faithful reproduction of the original. In Warhol it can also signify a brut
disinterest to proprietary beauty. The different signification and purpose of
mechanical chance in Guyton's work is interesting when compared to his
predecessors. His use of accident seems more restrained and tasteful. His is a
more epicurean style based upon a
la carte ordering from a variety of influences.
The few
early works displayed here stress a materialist phenomenology and seem intended
to serve as counterpoint to the literal and figurative fracture of mechanical
reproduction dominating the show. A pile of found plywood, inverted by the
artist, occupies a wall in a shallow planar display of "the real"
recuperated within a formalist aesthetic. A similar later work has an ink-jet
printed two- by- four incidentally leaning in a corner. These disparate works
offer a meager scrim through which to discern a development of the artist's
sensibilities. The inclusion of these primary forms invokes a pre -mediated
world from which the artist sprung, a rustic alchemist, ready to turn real
plywood into virtual picture planes. Guyton's advance press notices of
traveling from the rural South to the big city to make his indelible mark may
resonate with art historical genealogies in artists like Rauschenberg and
Noland (both of whose work he liberally channels) but here that narrative seems
much less cogent both historically and formally. A mid- career survey of an
artist's work, even more than a retrospective (which might be forgiven the sin of tendentious
historicizing), shouldn't be so transparent in attempting to delineate a
historical provenance for a younger artist. Unfortunately this is a lurking
problem in the rest of the show. Even more disappointing is the fact that the
problem extends into the core of Guyton's own aesthetic. He self- historicizes
in a way that undercuts an innovative approach to process.
I was
primed to like this show. Guyton's work contains many of the formal elements
that I enjoy in a peculiarly American visual rhetoric from Stuart Davis to
Christopher Wool. These include slab- like lateral color, generic quotidian
fragments, ridiculous scale, open- ended rhythmic composition, parallax optics,
sloppy paint application, etc. The problem I had with achieving a fresh view of
Guyton's work was that the clear influences of Davis, Noland, Kelly, Martin,
Stella, Warhol, were never fully synthesized into a newer aesthetic that might
define the artist as a "strong poet " in the present. In the
"Anxiety of Influence" Harold Bloom writes " The later poet, in
his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost
a solipsism, holds his own poem so open to the precursors work that at first we
might believe that the wheel has come full circle." A strong reader of one's artistic
influences can summon the power to erase the traces of their own borrowing by
making their lenders go begging for attention themselves. Schwitters may have
influenced Rauschenberg but one doesn't readily think of him when experiencing Factum
1 and 2. Kandinsky might have had some early influence on Noland but
it doesn't come immediately to mind when looking at one of Noland's chevron
paintings. A sense of inevitability in a contemporary work may be dependent
upon its predecessors' historical influence but this should not be foregrounded
in such a way to eclipse the joy of rediscovery in the fresher view. There is
something too seamless (ironic, given all the literal disjuncture) about
Guyton's aesthetic provenance, both tactically and aesthetically. One can't
help but make the references to Agnes Martin in one work or Ellsworth Kelly in
another. The work never fully breaks free from a dogmatic adherence to a
received American art history, one ostensibly processed by an individual, yet
seemingly administered by a committee. Guyton himself seems to intuit a need
for a different cultural perspective by the inclusion of Joseph Beuys and
Martin Kippenberger into his mix of influences. Beuys seems to percolate in
Guyton's absurdly oversized vitrines with scattered, printed and manipulated
reproductions and Kippenberger's ghost arises in idiosyncratically manipulated
modernist furniture sculptures and installations. Unfortunately these late
interventions fail to counteract the dominance of influences in this show and
rather than offering a foil, they act as a depressing reminder of the power of
contemporary culture for superficial assimilation. If the meta-narrative of
superficial assimilation was one that was embraced in Guyton's work this tactic
might play out in an interesting critical way, but the sincerity with which the
artist pays homage to his predecessors' forms tends to deny this critical
distance.
Wade Guyton Untitled, 2007 Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 84 x 69 in.
Printing a painting doesn't take that work into the realm of the
contemporary mythic by virtue of its technical innovation alone. This naïve
supposition is reinforced in the wall labels for the show in statements like
this fragment, referring to Guyton's engineered printing glitches, " this
failure lends the work its formal and rhetorical power, offering an abstract
picture of how machines, humans and images interact today." One of these printed paintings,
which approached a critical complexity lacking in most of the rest of the show,
Untitled 2012, consists of a large,
green - striped reproduction based on an enlargement of a book's endpapers. The
decorative functionality of a book's endpapers, to contain and protect the
actual, deeper contents of the book, its original text, seems a more creatively
apt analogue for Guyton's overall approach to doing covers.
copyright Tom McGlynn, Nov.8 , 2012
