Christian L. Frock, commissioned by KQED Arts, 26 November 2011
Rarely seen works by Bay Area conceptual artist par excellence David Ireland (1930 – 2009) are featured in a solo show this month at Gallery Paule Anglim, curated by the artist’s longtime friend Jock Reynolds, director at Yale University Art Gallery. A concurrent solo show of recent work by Ann Hamilton presents an equally significant parallel conceptual practice, while providing context for these artists’ historic collaborations.
Full appreciation of the works on display necessitates an informed understanding of these, at various times intertwined, artistic legacies. The work parries the type of aesthetics that might engage a passive viewer; as with most conceptual art, context provides essential in-roads to the ideas embedded therein. The objects selected from Ireland’s studio date from the mid-1970s and are largely experiments with materials such as dirt and cement on paper. Not exactly drawings—though perhaps categorically so, in the most traditional sense—Ireland seemed to be attempting to create the surface itself. They are quasi-sculptural and quasi-architectural, more experimental papermaking than mark making. Knowing that these works were developed around the genesis of 500 Capp Street, Ireland’s long running living sculpture cultivated through the renovation of a dilapidated Victorian house in San Francisco’s Mission District, adds intrigue to works that might otherwise be mistaken for displaced building materials. One example, untitled (monotype B reddish brown with edge) (1974), could be mistaken for a sheet of sandpaper between its color and gritty texture. Though some are signed and dated, Ireland’s designation of others as finished pieces is less certain. As is often the case, the objects in the studio take on greater significance in the artist’s absence. Since all of an artist’ ideas are interrelated, experiments that might have been abandoned or disregarded in life become stepping stones towards greater understanding later. Given the time period, it is possible that these works anticipated Ireland’s unrestricted consideration of the studio, as he moved his ideas from tabletop to architecture itself, and inverted common expectations of the domestically scaled with what he called “an environmental sculpture in progress.”
“Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem like part of a usual, everyday situation,” Ireland noted in 2004, “I like the feeling that nothings been designed, that you can’t tell where the art stops and starts.” Certainly this is true of Untitled (1994), a collaboration between Ireland and Hamilton that consists of a galvanized tin box punched with both artist’s initials and containing a ball of horsehair (emblematic of Hamilton) and a ball of concrete (emblematic of Ireland). It offers a microcosm of their larger dialogue around materials, physical gesture and built-space-as-object. A more broadly defined example can be found in their combined efforts in renovating various spaces at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Bay Area former military barracks reclaimed in the 1980s as an international artists’ residency.
Initially shown at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, a large two-channel video installation, clapclap (2011), is the centerpiece of Hamilton’s simultaneous exhibition. Projected high on two walls at intersecting corners, the built environment itself is engaged as an element within the work. The video depicts a singular figure whose arms repeatedly swing forward in a silent clapping motion. The hands, covered by papier mache gloves, never meet. It is a visually arresting painterly image contrasted by the graphic quality of the figure’s striped pajamas. Another video work, follow (2011), shows the papier mache hands again, drawing infinite circles at close range. “For me,” Hamilton has said, “the circle of the hand making is the first eye. It is the empty center in the tower, the clearing in the forest, where with the fundaments of cloth and paper and line we weave and re-weave unending relations.”
Shared characteristics between the work of David Ireland and Ann Hamilton include slow, almost unremarkable meditative gestures that accumulate impact over time. The works on view here very quietly convey these unending relations, almost imperceptibly so -- a subtlety Ireland surely would have appreciated.
David Ireland and Ann Hamilton are on view through November 26 at Gallery Paule Anglim. For more information visit www.gallerypauleanglim.com
500 Capp Street is maintained by the 500 Capp Street Foundation. The site is presently closed to the public. See www.500cappstreet.org for more information.
David Ireland’s and Ann Hamilton’s respective projects at Headlands Center for the Arts can be viewed during various public events throughout the year. See www.headlands.org for more information.
