PREAMBLE
Wherein a consideration of art objects in general leads to a belated review of the recent exhibition Casual Labor.

Zachary Royer Scholz, Situation 91206 (dirt, cushion) 2008.
Giclee print, 31 1/2in. x 23 1/2in.

The art object--in the art world--has been a rather sheepish presence ever since the "dematerialized," conceptual practices of the mid to late sixties and early seventies were adopted by alternative spaces, canonized by academics, and finally, officially sanctioned by museums. The adaptation of literary theory, with its emphasis on language, for art criticism and art education has only further problematized the role of objects in the art world. This, even as the material products of artists have persisted--no, flourished--as commodities in the market place, and equally important, as indispensable, if pesky, vehicles for ideas (after all, what ideas get transmitted, or had, without the presence of objects?). I don't mean to say that a Jasper Johns painting is the same as an Alan Kaprow "happening," only that one is not less conceptual or more commodifiable than the other. Or to put it in more contemporary terms think of a Brian Jungen sculpture as compared with one of Janet Cardiff's audio tours.

Perhaps we would do better to think of conceptual art, not as a contemporary working method that emphasizes ideas over objects, but as a historical period much like other art and cultural movements--contingent upon, and shaped by specific events and forces. Writing in "The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market" Dave Hickey recalls, "My own experience of those years suggested ... that non-object, non-portable art arose in the mid sixties as a strategic reaction to a commercial reality: all the walls were full! ... Thus the fashion for conceptual, documentary, and installation art arose ... Over the next seven or eight years this new art had its commercial cynosure, and no one I knew even considered the possibility that it couldn't be sold."

Of course the legacy of conceptual art will continue to inform contemporary practices, but being a conceptual artist today is a bit like being a punk rocker or a hippy--it's a sort of informal nostalgic reenactment. Looking back (in so much as someone born in 1971 is able) it seems to me that conceptual art never foreclosed on objects so much as institutions foreclosed on Conceptual Art, making it the official form of non-commercial, serious work. The attitude persists to this day and finds renewed vigor (and less rigor) in what has come to be called Social Practice.

Despite the continued interest of artists in things like form, process, materials and objecthood there lurks great suspicion (or in certain circles, just plain indifference) around anything made in a studio that can be easily transported, shown in a gallery, and bought by a collector. I too am not immune to believing, somewhat reflexively I might add, in the negative condition of art--that it can be best defined by what it is not. It is not decorative, sentimental or popular for instance. Nor does it exist outside of its context. And above all it is not a commodity, not really, right?

Of course the ambivalence the art world has for objects is circumscribed by larger cultural phenomena. The rise and spread of consumerism in the U.S. apparently has no end in site though logically it must. In the meantime your average consumer product has a more or less fleeting value in the face of constant and plural newness. So the world we live in is glutted with objects. They are plentiful and many of them are beautiful despite their precarious meanings. Or "As Wrahol was fond of telling us, the strange thing about the sixties was not that Western art was becoming commercialized but that Western commerce was becoming so much more artistic."(1) Add to this the advent and spread of personal information technologies--particularly those that have greatly increased the production and distribution of images--and the unique art object can begin to seem rather flimsy and quaint.

Under these circumstances it's no wonder that a certain amount of anxiety might accompany the production of yet another objet d'art, but a recent three-person show entitled Casual Labor dealt directly with the ambivalences surrounding art objects and objecthood in general.

REVIEW
In which the work of the artists in Casual Labor is discussed along with other topics relevant to the exhibition.

Curated by Lauren Davies for the Kala Art Institute's gallery Casual Labor brought together the work of Alex Clausen, Zachary Scholz, and Kirk Stoller, whose working methods, astutely described by Davies as "material collaboration," so thoroughly overlap that the unwitting visitor may have taken the work in the show to be that of a single individual. This gave Casual Labor a unanimity uncommon to contemporary group exhibitions and made it easier to focus on the work, the subject of which was indistinguishable from the materials used in its making.

Kirk Stoller, untitled(dome), 2007.
Mixed media sculpture, 80in. x 62in. x 18in.

I don't mean to suggest a uniform aesthetic or isolated formal experiments. Rather the sculpture and photography that comprised Casual Labor harnessed aesthetic experience to focus our attention on the abject and mundane objects and materials of daily life--all those things that populate our homes and workplaces that we often overlook, or see only in terms of use or sign value, and eventually discard: home furnishings, domestic architecture, scraps of plywood, 2 x 4 and other miscellaneous construction cast-offs, fifty-gallon cardboard drums, shredded paper, etc.--these are the kinds of things that serve as both raw material and subject matter for Clausen, Scholz and Stoller. I say this because the trio is equally interested in preserving the qualities of the things they work with as they are in transforming them. So the work in Casual Labor teetered between certain poles: subject and object, found and fabricated, observation and intervention. What I found refreshing about their approaches--though they do diverge into distinct territories and bodies of work--is that they all begin with a sincere interest in the innate qualities of the objects and materials they work with rather than assuming an inert world onto which they (and we) can project meaning.

Alex Clausen, Built with Lisa, 2008.
Glicee print and acrylic, 19.75in. x 19.75in.

Clausen's work is the least subtle of the three, and thus the least dependent on gallery contexts. His altered photographs document temporary sculptural interventions in the homes and offices of friends and strangers. One of the two series he presented in Casual Labor essentially extended his approach of binding the moveable items (mostly furniture) in a room into improbable structural conglomerates, photographing the ad hoc arrangements, making a print, and finally painting out the bound objects (being careful to delineate the ropes used to bind the objects). The results are brightly colored, somewhat Frankensteinian, silhouettes--recognizable bits emerging here and there from abstract masses floating in the middle of what would otherwise be bland images of unremarkable rooms. The rope, like the rooms, keeps the strange forms from slipping into total abstraction and underscores the fact that we live, generally unremarked, amongst similar such forms.

Alex Clausen, Shawn's Shoes, 2006.
C-print mounted on plexiglas, 18in. x 18in.

In the recent series he has introduced human figures--presumably the owners/occupants of the things/spaces depicted. In these window-lit, shadowy images people are bound up with the objects that surround them--their identities obscured by Clausen's impromptu constructions. They are less composed (both the construction and the image) than their predecessors, but more astute. There is something particularly evocative about literalizing the metaphor of the human body entangled with things--weighted down by possessions. The other series in the show was somewhat less successful, in part because the added step of altering the surface of the prints by hand was missing. They are mechanically reproducible and everything in the image is plainly visible--plainly what we recognize it to be. Still they are not without interest or humor, as in Shawn's Shoes, which in Clausen's hands become a Goldsworthy-like mini-monument to the often-fetishized objects. Like Clausen's other work these images have a reach outside the gallery space, and have the potential to create connection to viewers' lived lives. In the case of Casual Labor they also served to create connection to the other work in the show.

Kirk Stoller, untitled(slant), 2007.
Mixed media sculpture, 70in. x 66in. x 48in.

Both Scholz and Stoller walk a finer line between art and everyday encounters and their work is far more reliant on the rarifying embrace of gallery spaces to focus our attention on even the subtlest details. Stoller's stacks of bits and pieces of scavenged lumber literally need the floor and walls of the gallery for their support--most any floor and wall would do, but he is specifically interested in the specialized space that exists between the floor and the wall in galleries--that transitional zone between 2D and 3D art works. Stoller's work is made to live in these zones--simultaneously resting on the floor and leaning against the wall. The tension is heightened upon discovering that the constructions are precarious--apparently held together only by gravity and friction. Slant is particularly effective in this regard and reminded me of Serra's smaller balanced pieces, but Stoller's materials aren't nearly as stoic. They speak, if nothing else, the language of orphaned parts and selvage edges--fragments of oblivious wholes, every one an incoherent sign of some human act of making. Yet in Stoller's hands the dissonant shards become harmonious, if tenuous, compositions--each part tentatively dependent on the next.

Zachary Royer Scholz, Object 24273107 (metal tubing, plastic strapping, paint) 2008.
31in. x 27in. x 24in.

Zachary Scholz' work is perhaps the least accessible of the three if only because it tends to look more like the objects it's made out of than it looks like art. This is a special irony that stretches back to Duchamp's readymades: the more closely art resembles everyday experience the more likely it is to alienate or confuse viewers, or just disappear into the stream of quotidian existence. But Scholz' work can be more accurately described as "readymades aided" and he is interested in neither alienating nor disappearing, but like Clausen and Stoller, in opening up a space in which to consider how we shape objects and in turn how objects shape us.

At their best Scholz' subtle interventions and alterations thoroughly blur the distinction between found and manipulated, or useful and useless, leaving in his words "a stick in a stream" (I imagine he means a stationary stick). Or in my words, an object that is no longer smoothly carried by language, but stubbornly resistant to ready categories. Scholz' descriptive but cryptic titling conventions [i.e. Object 21304608 (water, tape, trash bags, 2 drums)] intentionally provide no further clues as to meaning. They refuse to answer the question, why is it? and instead refer us back to the object itself, placing the onus of meaning squarely with the viewer. It's a risky strategy to be sure as many may just shrug their shoulders and move on. But Scholz' sculptures do reward a little patience and receptivity. Loosened from the context of use and refuse his impoverished materials take on new life--inviting us to consider their surprising formal qualities and potentially errant functions.

Zachary Royer Scholz, Object 21304608 (water, tape, trash bags, 2 drums) 2008.
46in. x 30in. x 21in.

The term casual labor usually refers to part-time, intermittent, temporary, or undocumented employment. Besides the fact that many artists' practices might be characterized as such, Casual Labor seemed at first an incongruous title for this show. On second thought the term itself is incongruous, almost oxymoronic, even absurd in a certain light--an expanded meaning that is more apt given the way the works in the show exploit the tension between first reads and second thoughts--the difference between recognition and perception, or nouns, and the things they name. In this case "casual labor" could even refer to the work of particularly active viewers.

Casual Labor was on view at Kala Art Institute from February 21st through March 29th, 2008.

1. "The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market," by Dave Hickey, from Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, Art Issues Press, Los Angeles, USA, 1997.