This, it turns out, makes for optimum art-viewing conditions. It brought to mind Virginia Woolf's 1930 essay, "On Being Ill," and its lovely opening: "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing... the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed." And later: "Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow." In short, when we are ill, the things we might not ordinarily be able to process bypass our intellects and go straight to our understanding muscles.
Therefore, wheezing, sniffling, and hallucinating, I went to see lineformcolor: from hard-edged abstraction to architecture at Howard House, a show I had been avoiding because thinking about abstract art is something that I've recently gone to enormous lengths not to do. Why? Mainly because I've run out of things to say about it--because I have understood how abstraction forces a focus on the artist's materials and on the simple act of looking, and that since this understanding I haven't seen much work that makes me reconsider. (Perhaps this is too harsh. Virginia Woolf again: "There is, let us confess it [and illness is the great confessional], a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out.")
Where was I? Oh, right.
And so I had been avoiding lineformcolor because of the poverty of my own imagination, but my stubborn cold broke down my resistance, so there I went. And I was so pleasantly surprised! It is a supremely gorgeous and sexy show, and there is about it a feeling of inevitability, a feeling that all the shows Billy Howard has mounted over the last two years have been rushing toward this place, and now he has arrived. (The sad consequences of my stubbornness: As you read this, lineformcolor has already closed.)
This place is something that I'll call suggestive abstraction, and here it is specifically about the way that abstract work suggests architecture. I have noticed this before in Leo Saul Berk's deconstructed hollow-core doors, which look like an architect's maquettes, and in Victoria Haven's tape drawings, which bring to mind futuristic cubicle-buildings replicating out of control. Mark Danielson's paintings often show how little is necessary to turn a set of boxy shapes into a house (such as the appearance of a doorknob, or a loose green tree); the presence of what may or may not be a coffin shape in each work further complicates the visual lesson.
Here Howard has taken this idea to the next logical step, bringing together artists, many of them from his stable (including Berk, Haven, and Danielson), whose work suggests--sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely--architectural qualities. He's anchored the show with an actual maquette, by Jerry Garcia's architecture firm UND, and taken the idea as far as three of Phil Roach's diorama boxes, each of which offers a privileged view of an installation artist's work. He has also pulled in two works by Benjamin Edwards, a young New York artist who is extremely of-the-moment. Edwards' work is particularly apt in this context; he distills digital images of national franchises into fragmented portraits of the communities they come from. They struck me as sad and also complicated, a map of the minutiae by which we distinguish one anytown from another.
There is also exciting brand-new work from Robert Yoder and Leo Berk, new paintings from Ken Kelly that look like little goth cages, and collages by Monique van Genderen which, like Danielson's work, show that with a minimum of elements, a city can be perceived. And because I was so vulnerable to suggestion, the show grew more sharp, in my mind, and more beautiful. Barthes would have loved lineformcolor, with all the signs and meanings loose from each other and running around as if on vacation. Lovely, lovely little signs.
