Spectacool
November 13th, 2009
“Performance is for me related to the very literal use of the term. You have to perform an act to give form to an intent. That relates to what I do very strongly.” -Stuart Sherman
Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing: The Works of Stuart Sherman is a comprehensive archive and survey of the late artist’s videos, poems, collages, drawings, stage performances, and signature “spectacles.”
Curators John Hagan, Yolanda Hawkins, and John Matturri present the prolific Stuart Sherman as a disciplined, studious artist with philosophical leanings. He worked every day and followed a natural logic that guided him from writing, to drawing, to performance, and to video. He appears as an earnest collaborator and sensitive reader, and ascetic in the ways he subsumes himself to his conceptual goals. Paradoxically, by suppressing his performative persona, he reveals a more permanent personality.
Though he earned his merit badges in the avant-garde scene around Charles Ludlam, the influence on Stuart Sherman from the Conceptual Art undertakings preceding him is apparent. His performances and videos feature repeated tasks, verbal instructions, minimal inflection, and geometric trajectories. “I find that in art in general, whatever the discipline, there’s too often a fascination with the material aspects of the medium, the sensuous properties of the medium with too little attention to the ideas that form the material.” Right! And like many other conceptual artists working before him, Stuart Sherman relentlessly interrogates written language in his ink drawings and found photo collages, many of which diagram the alphabet and select words that are incidentally loaded with pathos: “DRAMA,” “SCREAM.”
Most of the drawings look schematic, like tic-tac-toe games, semaphore messages, or dance instructions. He described them as “ideographic” and it’s tempting to identify figures among the dots and dashes. For example, we start to see in many drawings a large X topped with an O, which seems to correspond to the man/men noted in their respective titles. We also spot recurrent rings that signify the sun, and menacing zigzag lines, often red, that signal agitation or chaos, as in Orgy.
Beyond linguistic knob-twiddling, Stuart Sherman dissects and disperses the body and senses into his environment. In the videos, staccato editing and rebus-like montages establish analogies between his body parts and inanimate objects. Eating, in his words, “demonstrated most patently…the conversion of a physical act into language.” It also projects his face and open mouth onto the facades of a series of restaurants and diners. His “punctuating mouth” claps shut like a clapboard slate. In Portrait of Benedicte Pesle, the artist stands in a telephone booth, only to be replaced by a stack of white pillows. Baseball/TV stars a television-headed effigy, and in Theater Piece, he alternates between himself and a 2D cutout of his body – both strategies would appear later in his work. Finally, Discovery of the Phonograph establishes the transitive mechanics between field of vision, a spinning record, and bodily movement.
Chairs recur in Stuart Sherman’s imagery. As a poet, he loved word play and puns. I wonder if the Dr. Frankenstein in him recrafted the chair to stand in for him. One drawing mingles “chair” and “man” into the sequence “Chair Manned,” “Man Chaired,” until they amalgamate as “Chair Man/Man Chair.” Is it a coincidence that “Chair Man” sounds a lot like “Sherman?” Like Marcel Duchamp and “Marchand du Sel?”
Maybe we’ll find more clues in Nothing Up My Sleeve, the group show that just opened at Participant, Inc, which I hope to cover next week…