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1989
Car door, Sheetrock, cloth, oil, acrylic and latex paint, orange
light, yellow electrical cord, wood, hardware
approx 51 in
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About
the Exhibition: Jessica Stockholder: Kissing the Wall
--Introduction by Terrie Sultan and Nancy Doll, This text is excerpted from Kissing
the Wall: Works 1988-2003, Terrie Sultan and Nancy Doll.
Stepping into
an exhibition of Jessica Stockholder’s work prompts memories of
shopping at K-Mart, greeting a child’s room full of colorful toys
and games, visiting a lighting store whose stock is in disarray,
and walking down Broadway after the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Situated somewhere between home and Home Depot—with innumerable
detours—Stockholder’s art is optimistic, energetic, visually stimulating,
and formally and intellectually rigorous.
Throughout her
career, Stockholder has balanced production of the monumentally
scaled, multidimensional, and highly theatrical site-specific installations
for which she is largely known with self-contained assemblages and
various two-dimensional works that reflect a more intimate, human
scale. It is through these assemblages (formal “essays” in which
the artist processes her ideas about materials and composition)
and her collages and monotypes (intimate, autonomous “sketches”
in which the artist explores the pictorial tradition of framed space)
that we can gain further insight into Stockholder’s creative process.
Verbs, particularly
action verbs, seem to be the most apt part of speech to describe
Stockholder’s art, which has been said to overlap, turn, hover,
bulge, and kick. Her art also misbehaves by defying any and all
attempts at categorization or even description. Her work further
suggests the function of language in the way that individual elements
have meaning unto themselves but carry other associations based
upon their context. Just as by talking we sometimes clarify what
we think, Stockholder’s work assumes form and meaning as it shifts
from one thing to another, compelling us, as we view it, to make
sense of the space we move in. Not only does her work connect the
dots, it also links colors, forms, and spaces into relationships
we could not have imagined.
In 1983, the year that Stockholder began graduate studies at Yale
University, she created Installation in My Father’s Backyard. This
became a prototype for all of her subsequent explorations as she
developed a vocabulary that fused two seemingly incompatible disciplines,
painting and sculpture. In 1988, Kissing the Wall #2 [Plate 1],
a projection screen wrapped with paint and incorporating a light
that was pointed at the wall, she initiated the series of smaller
assemblage objects that would become the cornerstone of her subsequent
work.
Profusion, multiplicity,
and contradiction characterize Stockholder’s approach to art making.
She structures fusions of found objects—commercially produced textiles,
construction materials, household items, and bits of everyday stuff—as
shapes and lines in space. The use of the commonplace is emblematic
of Stockholder’s creative process. Building upon the creative trajectory
of Robert Rauschenberg, her compositions challenge cognitive and
emotional distinctions by blurring categories such as object and
environment, or decorative beauty and practical use. Trained as
both a painter and a sculptor, she takes a surprising hybrid approach
to art making that is grounded in sophisticated theoretical content,
a spirit of adventure and exploration, and a sly sense of humor.
Stockholder’s work packs the color, shape, and surface of conventional
painting into the space, volume, weight, and mass associated with
sculpture. The found objects and raw materials she uses are commonplace,
but she assembles them in such a way as to reintroduce magic and
possibility into things we normally perceive as possessing little
or no aesthetic value.
In 1965, Donald
Judd wrote, “Half or more of the best new work has been neither
painting nor sculpture.”
[i] Stockholder is
quintessentially of this historical paradigm, and her innovative
work has been influential for a younger generation of artists. Her
sculptures and installations are fully informed by historical awareness,
and her influences vary widely, from Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne,
and the Cubists to Clyfford Still, Frank Stella, New York School
hard-edge painting, and Minimalism. Her bias toward physicality
and a materialist’s understanding of artistic modernity also finds
its roots in Allan Kaprow’s 1960s “Happenings” and the post-Minimalist
“scatter” art of Robert Morris and Robert Smithson. Through her
tutored conceptual lenses, Stockholder synthesizes these various
influences to produce original, innovative, and intensely visual
essays on the theme of forms in space.
The exhibition
Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works, 1988–2003, takes its
name from the seminal 1988 piece mentioned above. The period of
the exhibition is framed, on the one hand, by this momentous development
in her work, and on the other, by recent work that has moved away
from the wall to stand freely in space, another important step in
her artistic exploration. Seventy-four works have been selected
for the catalogue to exemplify the diverse range of Stockholder’s
aesthetic and her cerebral synthesis of artistic and stylistic precedents
that, combined with her own visual impulses, has resulted in a unique
and highly important body of work.
____________________________
[1] Donald Judd, “Specific
Objects,” in Arts Yearbook VIII (New York) (1965), cited
by Barry Schwabsky in Jessica Stockholder (London: Phaidon
Press Ltd., 1995), p. 52
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Lack, 1992
Westphalian basket, linen yarn, acrylic paint, metal cable,
section of tree
64 x 66 x 72 in
162.6 x 167.6 x 182.9 cm
Collection of the artist
1994
Pink couch, oil and acrylic paint, wood, hardware, electric
wiring, newspaper mâché, plastic, twine, clothing, string, nail
180 x 61 x 47 in
457.2 x 154.9 x 119.4 cm
Collection Eileen and Michael Cohen,
New York
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