Dots, Stripes, Scans
Wade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 4, 2012
Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a
traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a
different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous
paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a
computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,”
referring to computer operating systems.
Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he
describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider
himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as
well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images,
combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling
strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.
One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet
reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and
architecture that permeates our culture from the artist’s loft to the
corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current
condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another
kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday
lives.
While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The
paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them;
they emerge with glitches and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or
stutters — that record the process of their own making, stress the
almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of
pictorial incident and life.
The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has
willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of
substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through
the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely
in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the
exhibition’s first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register
images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s. Even
more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work
in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones
skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form
a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art.
The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old
Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog
essay illuminating this artist’s development, and he plotted, in
collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80
works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few
sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed
on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move
around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different
windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s
motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U’s
from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of
17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed
in a tight row they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection
and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact
individual works, temporarily brought together.
Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the
1970s and ’80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in
Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay
Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the
real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He
came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College,
and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz
Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and
mirrored plexiglass.
In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his
Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he
simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them
through his printer, superimposing lines, X’s, thick bands or grids on
their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed on an
image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that
color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In
another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old
half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally
necessary, not decorative.
By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on
canvas, making paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black
monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the Black paintings of Frank Stella
(especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts imposing
white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark
Rothko’s veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented
X’s can summon more Stella Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate
logos.
A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work of Color Field
abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas
wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited
side by side, where they are printed in similar scales but with quite
different results in tone and texture. In both paintings two large black
dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a clownish air.
The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original
scale, in several computer drawings that are sandwiched between
plexiglass in a big four-square frame that mimics both a window and a
canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella aluminum stripe painting
and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the stripes
culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and
much enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the
other nearly 30 — that cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here
they seem extravagant and bold, yet they also resemble large bolts of
fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer creating
trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The
extreme magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the
green as a twill pattern, the red as tweed fuzzy with little orange
dots.
In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the big-statement grandeur of
these works is played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by
“Drawings for a Large Picture,” which consists of 85 unframed computer
drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with eye-popping blue
linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled
in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition
of images in our time.
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