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Clipping (PDF)
artillery
January/February, 2009
Keith Walsh
KEITH WALSH, an elusive shaman whose work jumps and howls around Postminimal traditions, has fabricated three floor sculptures, a painting and a wooden symbol as talismanic charms for the construction of a time/ space convergence that dog-collars arterial movements of Western Art. Broad-survey furniture trends, 1970s automotive design and high-Modernist polemic architecture intersect at Kristi Engle's clean, white, reductive space - itself a confluence of modern historical aesthetics, i.e., the refurbished white cube to form a kind of supreme Minimalistic gestalt body the progeny of Donald Judd would orgasm inside of.
Central to this formal hysteria are Cab 1 Cab 2 and Cab 3 which form the primary
argument/rebuttal for the artist's admitted
historical fascination with "Classical and
Visionary architecture, 20th-century bunkers
and post-18th century furniture design." In
other words, viewers engage a geometric
trinity (white boxes with complications) that
simultaneously resemble full-scale, functional
furniture and large-scale modeling of some
architect's LSD-induced lost weekend
hallucinations. Yes, these sculptures are
far-out. If Judd's boxes were premonitions
of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 monolith
with its terrifying logic and irrefutable
proportionality, Walsh's "Cab" series is a
hilarious accoutrement for Dave Bowman's
alien-dominion town home near the film's
end: a white Trojan horse from the future
masquerading as neoclassical midget
armoire - suddenly scissors open to reveal
the naked, innocent Natasha from Jean-
Luc Godard's Alphaville. Crafted lovingly
out of fine-grained baltic birch plywood
(common to dollhouse construction), these
anthropomorphic-scaled residences are
ultimately home to no one; they contextualize
so many different historical forms and
functions as to make a complete mockery
of any specific meaning. Walsh's sculptures
are, fundamentally, prototypical mirrors of
cultural/historic time and space.
These three bold Greek temples in miniature are reconsecrated as "modern art" by the addition of Painting, a rather small, almost pure-black canvas with an extremely subtle illustration of a columnated Roman arch; and Carving, a hard-shaved. savage wooden emblem with weapon-like undertones. Both smaller pieces anchor the otherwise enigmatic sculptures to the notion of "artworks," though it's uncertain whether the "Cab" series interprets this qualification as endearing compliment or hopeless pick-up line. The real charm of Painting is its placement; situated about 12 feet above the floor, a nod to Ad Reinhardt. Carving, not to be outdone, prefigures the echo of this sacred whispering with pre-Columbian sacrificial screams.
Walsh's deceptively simple exhibition sails a deep ocean rich in the multifaceted. protean language of art university lecture halls, commercial furniture woodworking studios and automotive paint and body shops. Add to these the sobering American war machine, seductive James Bond gadgetry, mad scientist persona non grata and Clint Eastwood gunslinger/hero to arrive at one hell of a show.
-Darrin Little
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