Formalisms: Joel Swanson at Redline
The overwhelming monochrome of this show is made intimately fascinating by pieces that occur only on the extremes of the scale spectrum. One installation of circuiting twigs replicates up an entire wall (slightly disturbed by a fire alarm, as many large works are). The wall-colored shapes hardly seem to stand out but for their shadows, but there they are, big as the gallery. Another piece is tiny: a bud of a lightbulb sprouting from a tall podium. It is small but utterly magnetizing. The piece, a placard explains, is Lady Gaga’s twitter feed translated into morse code. The bulb flashes and flashes intermittently, and one wonders if it is set to loop on a set of previous tweets or if it goes dead entirely when Gaga sleeps and stops feeding content into twitter.
The show is hushed, gray, and looks like it either takes place in the guts of a computer or inside the brain of an engineer staring at a screen. There’s human transparency in the work; the paintings of minimalized architechtural layouts are precisely masked, yet slight bleedings of paint drift into the surface of the work. This can only be seen within inches of the piece. It would have been easy to fix, requiring a brushwork effort similar to fixing a smudge of eyeliner, but they have been left alone. These layouts are almost ‘perfect,’ but not quite.
A very 'formalisms' layout of DIA
I’m glad for the transparency in these works. I’d feel cheated if there was no conceptual explanation for the Lady Gaga piece; or if I'd stared at it for a while and then two years later in an issue of Artforum discovered what it really was. There is no cheap or gimmicky withholding of concept (an artistic behavior that constantly sends Artforums everywhere sailing rejectedly across rooms). For the imprinting of the chair that hangs suspended in the rear gallery, there is a wall-posting of the code that renders the chair in Processing, a friendly and in-vogue platform for coding. If one wanted, they could go home, download Processing, and key in Swanson’s code to make the chair on their own. It wouldn’t be as fun as originally developing the code, but it would be possible. Lucky for us, this artist has much to share, and he isn’t afraid to do it.
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tbronJuly 9, 2011
Not only an excellent article but an amazing show as well. Joel Swanson's work is deceiving simple. It is blend of both the right and left brained. Its presentation is as pretty as it is pragmatic. I am sure that 200 people that attended his solo show were equally impressed.