Christian Faur - Sum of Parts - Kim Foster Gallery

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Christian Faur seems to be seeking a type of language which reveals its limits as it imparts, through its limits, even greater meaning or intensity to what it expresses. Frank Lloyd Wright said that every material possesses its own message and Faur seems to seek materials that have, despite or because of severe restrictive limits, a potential for expressing more than an ordinary expressive tool like math, logic or a sound/text-based language. The unsayable is best unsaid through a flawed or highly restrictive language which points to the unsayable through its very material limitations. The language we often use is a very real thing, like something material, and other things can be used in unconventional ways to possess and convey what language cannot convey easily or at all. This is, to me, the core meaning of Faur’s amazing show at the Kim Foster Gallery in Chelsea.

Faur also seems to ask what it is about sound and/or text that allows it to hide itself so effectively and point you toward something else, some meaning which seems to be a part of, and not a construction based on, some phenomenon. Meaning exists independently of an object or process, yet the medium of spoken/written language camouflages itself so well that it becomes virtually invisible and creates a surrogate world of meanings within our minds often confused with the real world. Faur seems to imply in his show that the most expressive material possesses something that tricks you into accepting meaning but also advertises its trickster nature. He seems to imply that a language which camouflages itself so you do not notice it when you use it, does not really get to the pith of things. A ‘flawed’ or burdensome, noticeably restrictive language opens meanings to even deeper penetration than a language which remains relatively invisible.  

To me, Faur also explores the mystery of how meaning is constructed – how deeply can we perceive the intersection of the world and our minds that produces insights and conclusions? How did sounds and later scribbles (there are about 800 differing sounds in all the world’s languages) become the material that captures and expresses these insights and conclusions?

So, Faur is shooting to make the invisible visible and, in science, this is often done through mathematics. Math provides identity, elicits relationships, charts growth and decline, predicts motion relative to other objects, but what if you want to understand the real essence of a tree or an ecosystem or injustice or the weird beauty of the life of a Mud Dauber (a wasp which constructs mud structures in which to deposit spiders it has placed in suspended animation as food for baby Daubers once they hatch) or the full moon or the constellation Orion or why you respond to evil the way you do or a zillion other things? Math and the scientific method fall way short – simple description falls short. There is something more called meaning and it is bigger than description. To me Faur is saying, “If you want this bigger stuff, you have to jerry rig new communication tools. Poetry, surrealism, symbolism, zen koans, Gauguin’s use of color etc.”

So we might see one of Faur’s pieces from a distance and shrug saying, “Oh, these are sunflowers.” But then as we approach we realize, “Oh, wow, these are a load of differently colored crayons perfectly ordered as pixels.” Are they sunflowers or are they crayons? This whole process of recognizing crayons underlying sunflowers approximates the realization that everything we see is, in reality, wavelengths of light. Just as we really see the tips of crayons making up the sunflowers, we really see photons making up sunflowers in reality. My immediate response to and experience of sunflowers can be affected by this knowledge and heighted by the realization of how complex the process of perception is. It is not a knowledge of sunflowers that heightens this experience of sunflowers but an awareness of the complex processes of light and the human eye and mind and how this may have evolved that adds to the wonder of this experience of sunflowers. The crayons reveal the sunflowers but declare themselves to be tricksters in the process, the childlike joy possessed in the crayon itself becomes manifest in the process of visual revelation and so the material becomes the message.

Seeing crayons as sunflowers, therefore, approximates an insight we could possibly have, but never really seem to have, which would constantly reveal to us that whatever we see is never what we call it since it is light of differing types of wavelengths and not objects themselves. But this insight never really registers with us, we have to remind ourselves, because light, like language, camouflages itself as a messenger and makes us believe we are seeing ‘things’. Why do we never realize we are seeing light? How does light deceive us so easily? Even when we tell ourselves we are seeing light, this usually has no impact or meaning. So Faur is approximating an insight we feel we should be able to get but never really do. The way we experience the world is based on a huge deception that Faur quixotically and playfully attempts to fix with crayons.

In another piece, Faur takes zillions of little strips of text from the Quran, ‘Old’ Testament and ‘New’ Testament and uses them to construct an image of one of those buildings we have all seen in documentaries of the nuclear explosions in the desert near Las Vegas. We see a building as it stands just before it is to be obliterated by a nuclear blast. We can also see that some of the tips of the strips of text are gilded and under the image is a golden heart, apparently representing the idol of the Golden Calf. To me, we see religious text as a messenger that has not advertised its trickster nature enough so that, unfortunately, most folks wind up taking it 100% literally. A message meant to point to peaceful, individual, humane development thus becomes a battle cry to reduce other cultures, peoples and religions to smithereens.

We also see an American flag comprised of dollar bills sewn together. Yes, we have a democratic government because this is the best system to generate wealth for some. Faur also uses his crayons as pixels to represent an old photo by Dorothea Lange. When Lange was working, color photos were too expensive to make. Crayons now become the ‘arte povera’ way, perhaps, to add color to this documentary material.

Faur also experiments by laying crayons flat on a birch plywood backing and melting them together using a blowtorch. The shape of the crayons causes the appearance of brush strokes while the melting of the crayons together creates a semi-abstract piece which Faur pointed out to me he cannot control perfectly and which often yields unpredictably amazing results. Faur depicts the famous photo of Wittgenstein and a photo of a woman Faur thought to be a typical working-class woman of Wittgenstein’s time, but which now turns out to be Virginia Woolf’s mother. Wittgenstein’s famous phrase is also encoded in another piece, using colors for sounds: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Faur possibly asks what cultural elements must be inherited or learned, and by whom from whom, to ‘decode’ such encrypted insights. 

Finally, you cannot miss the umbrella made of real human hair, which seems partly inspired by Meret Oppenheim’s ‘Fur Breakfast’ at MoMA. These days human hair has become a valued and expensive commodity. A temple in India, for instance, where pilgrims have their hair shaved as a sign of humility, makes millions a year from that largesse. What better way to demonstrate your social standing through conspicuous consumption than to use the hair of poor women from developing countries to provide you with protection from a storm? 

This show ended in September 2017. Re-posted from wsimag.com

https://wsimag.com/art/30433-sum-of-parts

Queens Museum Show Part 2

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In part 2 of this review, we see that we’re asked to think about, among other things, how creating art from and not with pencils and crayons might be interpreted, how tape can be used to confer meaning, what it means to obscure parts of classic books and what self-vibrating metal might mean.

In Christian Faur’s artistic statement, he points out that he tries to mimic the elegant structures of nature by creating his own systems, ‘…so that the medium and the message appear as one’. 

I did a review of Faur's work earlier in the year: http://artgallerystuff.blogspot.com/2015/01/christian-faur-at-kim-foster-gallery.html

In the pieces at the Queens Museum, Faur uses the tips of crayons as pixels to present portraits of, in this case, one little boy. Faur also seems to bring an interest in linguistics to his work, and certainly did this recently in his last show at the Kim Foster Gallery, when he used strips of color on canvases to approximate phonic sounds or letters and challenged viewers to decode his brief and often enigmatic sentences buried in the color combinations based on a code he had developed. He feels various expressive material forms are a type of language in themselves, exhibiting various limitations, and dictate what we can and can’t say through them. So to Faur an essential element in the definition of ‘language’ would be the fact that it can never adequately convey or represent everything we would like it to and we have to struggle with it and find ways to use it creatively to point, as it were, toward what is usually not expressed but needs to be expressed.

I like what I wrote recently for one of his shows at Kim Foster: If we use the Boltzmann-Plank definition of entropy, and view entropy as a means to assess disorder, Faur’s work represents a type of ektropy (the opposite concept of entropy) – or amazing, flabbergasting, Prussian and angelic order. Each piece seems eternal in its anti-entropic order, yet we are also hit with the realization that these crayons could be converted at any time into miles of frivolously joyful childlike expression. Maybe the big message here is that all art is a type of conversion of matter into energy, with the artist as the intermediary.

Federico Uribe seems to be doing something similar to Faur, yet Uribe’s medium involves colored pencils that have had their tips cut off. So whereas Faur’s work pulses with apparent potential energy, Uribe seems to go in the opposite direction and works with a suppression of possible creative potential in order to regenerate a new creative capacity. 

It’s like Faur embraces order and Uribe embraces entropy and wasted energy. He negates the potential expressive capacity of each pencil in order to use it as a type of colored line which exhibits an expressive potential but also extreme expressive limitation. The length as well as color of each pencil becomes the alphabet for his language, as it were, as the visual components of the piece.

Tim Rollins founded K.O.S. (Kids of Survival) over 30 years ago and they still create meaningful work based on classic works of literature and music.  He and a group of middle school kids recently dunked pages from a first edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’ book Darkwater into a type of solution including gold acrylic and watercolors. So we get a partially obscured message. What does this mean? To me, it can mean a couple of things. We – as a people – the American people – never got this message about the necessity of overcoming our racial divisions in the first place. Du Bois wrote that race was going to be the question of the 20^th century and it has continued into the 21^st century with a vengeance. The message was obscured and we didn’t get it.

This should leave us with a choice – do we want to get it or should we throw up our hands and forget the horrific consequences of racism and an economic, educational and political system that does absolutely nothing to address it. Even with a ‘black’ president nothing significant has been done to help black folks, in general, meaningfully integrate into the American dream. Like the pages of DuBois’ book, the plight of poorer black folks is now being obscured. You simply don’t hear or read about them until they get good and angry by how abused they are and take it to the streets. That’s my second interpretation, the message and the people are both being obscured.

Mark Khaisman says that his work is about images of images. He’s the guy in the show who uses different layers of brown translucent tape over images from art history, the movies or whatever. He says he wants to focus on the process of recognition. In his work you’re recognizing a material you’ve used as well as recognizing something from a film, book, the papers, the internet etc.  Frankly, the layered tape makes the images look more sculptural and grandiose. He is using a cheap material to elevate an experience of something we’ve probably seen before. Maybe it’s a remnant of his experience studying in the Soviet Union, where the worst monsters were lionized into paragons of integrity, public service and deep humanity. If I can raise enough money I’m going to commission this guy to do this to an image of the crook who is my current Congressman. Basically I think Khaisman has a hell of a sense of humor, horses around a lot and parodies the whole public relations process of elevating greedy, corrupt and sickening human garbage into respectable human beings. He could make a better living in Washington D.C. than in Philly.

To me Dan Miller’s layers of text, geometric figures and grids etc. are dense with attempts to get something compelling down for further examination and as evidence of meaningful cognition and insight and maybe even as an expression of pain and a cry or demand for an end of suffering or a desire for a type of deliverance.  

The layering and repetition seems to indicate to me that humane development or progress is not linear – it’s more like Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. We get stuck on certain levels for periods of time and only until we gain the proper amount of experience through the proper expenditure of time can we jump to the next level. Miller’s art seems to reflect the anxiety, pain, chaos and desire one feels stuck on one level, desperately waiting and hoping for transition to the next.

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Jacques Jarrige has contributed a sculpture called Waves, made of aluminum strips dangling from the ceiling, part of which seemed at the opening to be vibrating with no discernible cause. There are some mystics from the past who divided the world into three basic features (mineral, vegetable and animal) and believed our spiritual development could be represented symbolically by a progression from the mineral to the vegetable to the animal. The vibrating strips seemed to me to herald transition from the mineral to vegetable, as well as exhibiting a freakish mocking by the inorganic of the organic.

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Finally, as one enters the museum doors facing the Unisphere, one sees a huge installation of tabs by Alice Hope. According to what was emailed me, “Hope has strung over 700 feet of used can tabs on a continuous line of ball chain and IV tubing. This work is part of an ongoing project, reckoning the tab's fluctuating value in a consistently changing context. Related to the tradition of Land Art, this installation is meant to be experienced in situ, reflecting the changing view of the iconic Unisphere, the consistent flow of airplanes, and the passersby.”  The functions of post-industrialized global capitalism work beautifully in some countries to potentially provide universal nutrition, healthcare and comfort. But there’s one big flaw in the system – materials are being created that are more permanent than the most permanent organic material (even more permanent than, say, bones) but these materials are not absorbed back into nature in a benign manner.  No one seems to have adequately determined what to do with these materials and the more we try to hide or bury them the more deeply they become embedded in our lives. In the meantime, as this work shows, even the smallest bits of this junk are ever accumulating.

Christian Faur at Kim Foster Gallery

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As the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner pointed out, before children can visually represent anything, they scribble. Scribbling with crayons is a form of process or action art in which the child does not even attempt to represent anything, yet the child seems to derive immense pleasure from this expressive act. With a pack of crayons the child chooses from among differing colors, discovering preferences, learning the emotional effects of the differing colors and also learning that his/her expressive actions can result in a type of beauty to be shared with others.

Christian Faur uses crayons as his medium of expression in his current work at Kim Foster Gallery (part of a group show called Heavy Lite). In fact, I’ve been waiting a couple years to see a good representation of Faur’s work again – he’s always been one of my favorite artists represented in Chelsea. Gallery hoppers at the Kim Foster Gallery are generally dazzled by the creativity and innovation in his work, even though what he does may sound pretty simple: basically, Faur takes photographic images and replaces the pixels with crayons.

So, what does this mean?

Unlike a pixel a crayon holds tons of potential expressive energy.  Each crayon is like a little chunk of U-238 (uranium) waiting to be converted from matter to energy. I am pretty sure that if you stuck a three year old kid in front of one of Faur’s works, the kid would start drooling (representing our inherent NEED to express when the opportunity to express is present). Standing in front of one of Faur’s works gives you this feeling of raw potential expressive energy that is pent up in each image. Each image could be deconstructed (and I’m not referencing Derrida here) into miles of wonderfully chaotic scribbles.  

Physically moving around these sculptural works also highlights the pent up expressive energy laden in each piece. As you move around your ability to see the images changes. Get close enough or view a piece from an angle and you no longer see the image, but, instead, the tips of the various crayons. If we use the Boltzmann-Plank definition of entropy, and view entropy as a means to assess disorder, Faur’s work represents a type of ektropy (the opposite concept of entropy) – or amazing, flabbergasting, almost Prussian, almost angelic order. Each piece seems eternal in its anti-entropic order, yet we are also hit with the realization that this could be converted at any time into frivolously joyful childlike expression. Maybe the big message here is that all art is a type of conversion of matter into energy, with the artist as the intermediary.
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A better perspective to see how Faur uses crayons...