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Achieving the perfect anomaly- the object that doesn't belong in any imaginable ordered assortment- is a major goal in late modern art. St. Clair Cemin comes close to it as anyone, creating sculptural misfits that can be a wicked delight to behold. Often, as in these new sculptures (all 2004), Cemin further complicates things by the imposition of more or less inexplicable titles.
For instance, Computer is the name of a polychrome, T-shaped wooden relief propped casually against the wall, its crosspiece occupied by a huge staring eye. The upright of the T, with its open, roughly fashioned interlace motif, could be a greatly enlarged detail of an illuminated manuscript. Omniscient surveillance and information overload are two associations the title suggests, though implacable resistance to signification is an equally reasonable reading of the work.
On the other hand, The Night comfortably fits the melancholy sculpture it names, a wooden head with a inchoate form (a baby?) at its neck and a slab of wood painted midnight blue pressed against its sorrowful face. This nocturnal calm is shattered with A Shard of Glass, a comic little tableau that combines an even-sided polygon of whitewashed wood and, facing it on the floor, a crudely carved, pint-size wooden figure a posture of ritual panic, arms raised, knees defensively bent, body scrawled in flaming reds and blues.
Cross-wiring response systems organized for incompatible experiences- worship, consumption, fear, affection- is a primary Cemin gesture. Monument to Credit Card Debt features a chunky little slope-shouldered guy, crudely chipped out of a block of wood and painted a tarry black. Perched atop a tall steel pedestal, he is a relic without an origin: he could be an effigy out of childhood or tribal culture or the exigent religion of ready cash. More refined but no easier to identify is Birdy, a waxy-surfaced classical bust of polychromed wood, hair trimmed like that of some august Roman senator, and above his prominent nose, wan blue eyes and brow raised in helpless perplexity.
Occasionally in the past, Cemin's work has lost its edge to opulent materials (marble, titanium-clad steel). Here, he errs in the other direction, as with a host of inconsequential little figures, mostly of clay and plaster (We), congregated on the floor of the gallery's smaller room. In the same room, Adam, a handful of small 24k-gold objects displayed in an elegant Chinese vitrine, posed a tepid challenge. But courting failure is central to Cemin's work. "Meaning only has meaning when it's not understood," he has said, and also, "I can't read criticism because I find it's too primitive." Fair enough, though in using words - titles - to disable interpretation by sending it into overdrive, he risks having viewers skim right over the work. It's a dicey maneuver. But then his sculpture's manifold pleasures, as deep as they are irregular, are probably best absorbed in a state of mild confusion.
-Nancy Princenthal |
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In his history of creativity as bisociation, Arthur Koestler wrote: "When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other the result . . . is either a collision ending in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an experience. "He adds that such "comic, tragic or intellectually challenging effects" can occur simultaneously-- and this is precisely what happens in Saint Clair Cemin's droll sculptures.
The collision of a multicolored female figure and a white polyhedron in A Shard of Glass (all works 2004) - the figure horrified by what it sees, the object pristine and unmoved- is at once a laughable conflation, an aesthetic confrontation of opposites, and their synthesis in an intellectually puzzling relationship between expressively alive spectator and dead or indifferent work of art; more broadly, between an all-too-human representation and an eccentric geometrical abstraction; and even more broadly, between an object that presents itself as "art" and a human being who wonders why it claims such exalted status. Cemin's work is funny, thought provoking, and a condensed summary of unresolved conflict between figuration and abstraction that haunts modernism and its descendents. His sculpture satirizes itself in the act of satirizing the unresolvable standoff between art and life.
The pairing of figure and pedestal in Monument to Credit Debt and of head and rectangle in Birdy involves a similar aesthetic confrontation- the bases of the sculptures reference Minimalism; the figure is quasi- Expressionist, and the head quasi- classical- but the result is more absurd than tragic or comic. It suggests the impossibility of the integration of opposites in a new artistic synthesis (from one perspective the problem of postmodernism, which seeks to reconcile that which modernism implied was irreconcilable). Cemin continually restates the problem, but finds no solution to it.
Again and again cemin takes on, with a kind of tongue-in cheek insouciance, the idols and ideas of modernism; Richard Serra in The Night, Earth art in Adam. He knows his art history and puts it all up for grabs, sometimes in delirious combinations. In Computer, for example. he fuses truncated cross and simplified figure in quasi- Art Nouveau style. There's a kind of playful morbidity to Cemin's art that's especially evident in We, a conglomeration of clay figures of all sizes and shapes, some colorful, most not. It's a mimihistory of sculpture and a mocking comment on humanity and its gods ( including art gods, as the variety of styles implies). They're all toys in an ongoing game, one that gets increasingly crowed with players. Cemin hints at the folly of joining in, particularly as the game loses feeling by becoming too clever for its own good. But he also reserves some praise for this folly because art, after all, remains creative, however aborted into juxtapositions its bisociations become.
- Donald Kuspit |
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