In his second exhibition of painted timeline drawings at Pierogi, Ward Shelley has expanded his concerns from the lives and careers of individual artists (as in Re-materializing Art, 2006), to mapping the role of art as a shaping force in the world in Who Invented the Avant Garde – and other half-truths.
Shelley’s timeline pieces are expansive graphic depictions of complex relationships between events and people over time, linked by a subject or idea. For example, in The Beats he tracks the lives, loves, and artistic output of the primary Beat Poets and their muses, using highway-like lines to trace their travels and travails.
Driven by their content, Shelley’s drawings are rich in factual detail, yet often present highly subjective points of view. The unorthodox presentation, in turns borrowing from graphical conventions and improvising with an eccentric and personal hand drawn style is, in a sense, the speaker’s voice, giving the stories their color and spin.
The eponymous and central painting in the show explores and interprets the history of the Avant Garde, from its nascent murmurings, to its radical heydays, and eventual domestication and aestheticization. Owing a large debt to Alfred Barr’s famous chart about the sources of Cubism and Abstract Art for this piece, Shelley re-visits the Barr Diagram itself in another drawing, Addendum to Alfred Barr, extending it forward and backward through time.
A piece commissioned by Bomb magazine, Downtown Body, lays open the 100-year corpse of art and bohemianism in downtown New York. In addition to the visual arts, lines trace theater, music, and literature, graphically depicting the rise of the scene and the explosion of interdisciplinary work as a network of intersecting veins and organs. Also noted are the beginnings of downtown institutions, including the Whitney Museum, which began as a studio club a stone’s throw off of Washington Square Park. A limited edition of prints of this piece will be on sale for the benefit of Bomb.
Matrilineage is a celebration of American woman painters – beginning with the impressionist Mary Cassat – who achieved enduring careers prior to the 60’s and second wave feminism, in a world frequently hostile and unsympathetic to independent women with strong voices. Hundreds of individual lifelines are included, giving visual weight to their largely overlooked contributions.
Other strong voices that receive treatments are Andy Warhol (as filmmaker) and Frank Zappa.
Beyond the topics they are illustrating, these pieces are about the attempt and process of forming understandings which, in Shelley’s estimation, are dynamic and utilitarian but always partial. Since our understandings of the world both re-form us and change the world, it is poignant that they are by necessity never more than approximate. Consequently, Shelley rejects the idea of authoritative finality and rather sees these works as presenting arguable points of view.
The exhibition continues in the back gallery with Shelley’s performance installation The Sleeper Experiment. From April 16 to April 30, during regular (daytime) gallery hours, the artist will sleep in the gallery as he has in the past, this time inside a cabinet made for the purpose. He will work during the night on drawings based on information provided by visitors. The visitors, virtual or actual, are invited to contribute random input (in the form of words, short phrases, or images) that will become the basis for concept maps. This input will be read to the artist by a speaking computer program during his sleeping hours. In the evening he will rise and begin drawing, leaving the results on view for the following day.
Submit your input to <sleeperexperiment@gmail.com>
More info and guidelines at : Sleeper Experiment (external link)
Ward Shelley is best known for his installation / performance work, notable among which are his previous exhibitions at Pierogi: We Have Mice and The Cube; as well as Flatland at the Sculpture Center, Mir2 at Smack Mellon, and W.A.S.P. at the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.
