Glass Tambourine

Mark Flores, Gregor Gleiwitz, Pearl Hsiung, Pamela Jordan, Michael John Kelly, Rachel LaBine, Emily Marchand

January 29th – March 11th, 2018

Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, Orange, CA

Is space a form of enlightenment?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

A glass tambourine is certainly difficult to use. It would be interesting to know what kind of frequencies you actually produce when you play it, provided it does not break. On the one hand, it offers the advantage of being absolutely clear, so to speak, transparent. On the other, it has been understood, seen through, and is now an object without any secret. The inclined reader already suspects that the exhibition title is not meant in a literal or poetic way, but rather figuratively alludes to a certain condition, namely the availability of forms of expression that are decontextualized from their origin into an empty form.

An example of this inner emptiness is the tambourine-sound imitated in the computer with the help of emulated synthesizers, or the plethora of visual effects that we have at our disposal in digital photo- and video-editing. They aim to deliver a specific sound or look that has been decided in advance, disassembled into its parts and analyzed, put back together and readily available for purchase and use. But the idea that the computer is a toolbox with which the artist now accesses a world of boundless expression is erroneous because the box itself is the only tool we work with. The use of once vital forms of artistic expression that are now applied out of context to produce a certain effect we could call kitsch - the opposite of avant-garde. A Taoist would probably add that when the outcome of an action is known with certainty, this action is already in the past. Whatever we call it, in it we recognize the same worldview that determines our global economy, our political landscape and 'social’ media. And we see it transposed into the realm of art, which, in the sense of a continued modernist utopia, whether it be ‘post’ or otherwise altered, represents the exact opposite of the precisely quantified and standardized product. And so we find flocks of artists far from their actual mission, the discovery of visionary and surprising expressions, now merely working in so-called industries to re-arrange prefabricated components.

Are now the artists in the exhibition examples and illustrations of the opposite state? And what is this state? Should I throw away my computer? Maybe after I’m finished typing this text. We can’t turn back the digital clocks nor do we want to and lines are hard to draw; Standardization begins long before I switch on my computer with the use of industrially produced paints, brushes, canvases. Then cameras, monitors, etc.

The works the artists in the exhibition create however are arrived at in dialogue with the used materials, which is informed by a kind of behavior that is directed towards this material, acknowledging its existence as much as ones own. We, our bodies, do this in space. This processual ‘acting-in-accordance-with’ lets us be active participants, wholly present in the unfolding of the becoming of the artwork. This goes beyond the production of a predicted effect and hints at the possibilities of something unfolding, a development over time, and the notion of surprise as positive values, whereas in the currently dominating view these qualities are seen as obstacles to be overcome or eradicated. Think: (Profit) maximization, streamlining and efficiency, terms that are increasingly also describing forms of contemporary art practice. We can infinitely access and manipulate the recordings of past forms of expression to our liking in a kind of master/slave relation - but we are also fundamentally separated from the world in that we exclude our corporeality and its entanglement with the environment and all the reverberations this can have in our art.

For the artists in the exhibition, what is 'said' is inevitably associated with its own physicality. This goes beyond the notion of the integration of form and content, but rather requires that expression and form create and suppose one another. Creative process takes place in an open interactive loop as a negotiation of material, and its formability, and the artist and their formability. The works in the show all have a heightened awareness for a body that does not only see with its eyes; be it the stacked and boxed painting-sculptures by Mark Flores, abstract clay handwritings by Emily Marchand, Pearl C. Hsiung’s neon-landscape installation, Gregor Gleiwitz’s ectoplasmatic beings, the virtual line drawings in space by Michael John Kelley, paintings by Pam Jorden that juxtapose geometry with painterly geography, or the precise gestural formulations of thingness in Rachel LaBine’s works.

And so the exhibition asks: What is different when we play a tambourine that is made of wood and skin and metal? The sound?