Torn and hulking, graphite gilded, wholly unapologetic and maybe unforgivable, Nancy Rubins's giant Drawing (2005) devours the rear wall of Howard House. It's the unavoidable focal point of Paper Trails, Gary Owen's exploration of "paperness" in the work of eight very different artists, and it looks like it could beat you to a pulp.
Love it or hate it, Drawing is here because it asks good questions. When does paper make the leap from material to medium? What are the possibilities that come with working in paper, as opposed to merely on it? And—this maybe inadvertently—what makes an investigation of paperness, to use Owen's term, an effective platform for a show?
Perhaps no other man-made substance has plummeted from luxury to degradation as dramatically as has paper, the stuff that surrounds us. In fine art, paper's power is usually oblique, reminding us how good we are at taking it for granted. When Kelly Mark covers a chair in pencil lead and calls her work a "drawing" of a chair, it's paper's absence that makes you reconsider drawing. Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing is "just" a piece of paper—and a perfectly succinct indictment of its own insanely artificial market value. On a more tactile note, the intricately carved relief work in Ellen Gallagher's Watery Ecstatic series can make a sheet of paper seem bottomless, plunging us into depths we didn't know it had.
The sheer variety of work that Owen has assembled intends to produce such aha moments. Yet this closely installed back gallery ranges a trail or two too wide. (At Howard House, the bright front room is given to Owen's other parting project, the cherry-picked, spaciously installed work of three young painters. Looks like canvas is still king.) We're presented with cerebral, finely tuned abstraction (Victoria Haven and Marco Maggi); conceptual high jinks with political bite (Michael Arcega); spooky, homespun nature observation (Cat Clifford); a nod to pop and über-fame (Andy Warhol); detritus-strewn abjection (Franz West); slyly existential humor (Dan Webb); and menacing highbrow formalism (Rubins). If the inventory seems reductive, so is the cumulative impact of the show.
There's something quasi-academic about Paper Trails. It brings together diverse artists whose minds are elsewhere, and asks them to talk about the same thing. The resulting conversation foregrounds disparate strategies and practices without sustaining resonance between them. We're presented with a smorgasbord of choices, priorities, and preoccupations, among which paper doesn't necessarily register as a convincing motivator, subject, or primary source of interest for the work at hand. (The most obvious exception here is Conquistadorkes II [2006], which depends on its material for its pun content. Philippines-born Arcega's life-size suit of armor is crafted from Manila folders.)
That's not to say there aren't pleasures for the taking. Haven's Mylar-on-propylene Bolt (2006) characteristically blurs lines between drawing and sculpture (not to mention stretches the criteria for a paper show), even as it suffocates for want of wall space. With For the morning you should stay here (2006), Clifford creates a landscape all the more evocative for being parceled into fragmentary statements and beautifully observed miniscenes. But will I look back on this work—have I really even seen this work—through the hazy lens of paperness?
The pulpy path continues to Crawl Space and Chad Wentzel's cut-paper extravaganza, Everything I've Ever Wanted All at the Same Time. This strange, sexy show is an unsteady mix of the effusive and the rote. In Z28 (VA-VA-VAROOM) (2006), the labor behind those hard-edged curlicues plays against its outcome: It took Wentzel time and tedium to arrive at something ecstatic, and that whiff of tension draws you in. But when this tangled filigree—less Versailles boudoir than badass belt buckle—is paired with a collaged photocopy of the Z28 itself (or, in other work, a cutout Randy Rhoads, a photocopied Tina Turner), the hipster iconography feels tacked on. Wentzel's vocabularies don't integrate, and they fail to fail at integrating in an interesting way.
The gallery (full disclosure: I had work in a group show here this spring) says that Wentzel's show, more celebratory than ironic, "reaches towards a utopia of heavy metal, hot cars, and epic love." His sprawling, untitled installation comes closer to this goal; its white-on-white-on-white assembly of cutout images, text, and abstract elements feels more convincingly euphoric. Close by, the artist's signature looms large, in glowing neon. Its flash and brass make the rest of Everything I've Ever Wanted All at the Same Time seem awfully subtle, if not flimsy. Maybe paper on its own will never be enough.
