Wayne Smith masks seriousness as accident, apathy
Updated 3:29 pm, Friday, August 16, 2013
We live in an era of slight achievement in the visual arts that neither scorching ambition nor big scale can disguise. We may wish for big statements in an exhibition or brace for a big ego, but neither manifests in Wayne Smith's show at Gallery 16. Seriousness masquerades as accident, rote performance and emotional indifference in his art.
A couple of decades ago, looking ahead, Smith began to collect early models of inkjet printers that a booming industry was rendering obsolete as fast as they could be marketed.
He used them and rejiggered software to generate things such as "Orientation" (2013), whose color striations give the lie to both pictorial and abstract readings. The proper term for such work might be "corrupted output."
Like Wade Guyton, who gets strikingly allusive results by printing on canvas using corrupted software, Smith produces patterns that signify almost nothing but aberrations.
These works derive such power as they have from their insertion into an art context, rather than from creative intent.
The spirit of Smith's work is hard to read, but his show reaches a comic high point in a floor piece, "Trends in Small Pamphlet Design II" (2011-13).
Its 135 components consist of phrases printed in black Helvetica on small, folded rectangles of newsprint. The piece recalls with mock nostalgia the early days of desktop publishing and the somewhat earlier cusp between floorbound minimal art and word-centered conceptual art.
The imaginary pamphlet titles contain the real mischief.
"Morton Feldman at 78" reads one. Viewers who know that Feldman died at 61 may still feel prompted to imagine hearing his characteristic slow-flow music on 78-rpm vinyl.
"Democracy Now and Then" refers to the famous progressive radio show and the nation's political narcolepsy.
"God Will Dry the Dishes" sounds like both religious twaddle and the joke of a procrastinating domestic partner.
"You're No Medium" might be spoken in a clothing store or at a seance.
Phrases such as these recall the work of Ed Ruscha, who plucks words overheard in conversation or in the media to germinate his language pieces.
Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) may come to mind more frequently during scrutiny of Smith's collages. Delicate but not precious, many of them suspend tiny images cut from found magazines or newspapers in front of patterned inkjet prints. Smith adheres the cutout images to the inside of the glass that covers his printed sheets. The little floating pictures dance like spots before one's eyes.
The other 'Cats': Despite the title "Schrödinger's Cats," Bruce Nauman's may be the spirit presiding over the group show at the Popular Workshop that was inspired by Erwin Schrödinger's (1887-1961) famous thought experiment expressing the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and commonsense views of reality.
In that conundrum, observation plays a determinant role in the fate of a cat whose life depends on a random subatomic event. The reference underlines the dependence of the art here on activation by a viewer's engagement or recognition. That dependence might be generalized to a wide array of modern and contemporary art, but never mind. The show contains a few striking things.
A fragment of architecture, it consists of walls and doorways, each passage lit by a wall-mounted globular ceiling fixture.
In its simplicity and absurdity, the piece produces a surprising dreamlike disorientation, a feeling of revisiting a place too well remembered or inadequately forgotten.
Suarez-Wolfe, an architect by training, reinforces this sensation with two elegant drawings that describe clusters of stair stringers with only a few steps or risers as reminiscences of function.
He also contributes an apartment floor plan, apparently rational at first glance, that breaks down into zany contradictions on close examination, like conflicting recollections of non-communicating eyewitnesses.
Dana Hemenway has a satisfying installation piece consisting of hand-dyed moving blankets and two shrink-wrapped white boxes, either of which might serve as a pedestal for whatever the other contains.
Andrew Chapman's paintings, so diverse they might be the work of three people, hint at exhaustion of hope for painting outflanking the other modes of image making, and a kind of Beckettian resignation to persistence regardless.
Wayne Smith: 5 Short Holidays: Collages and other works on paper. Through Aug. 31. Gallery 16, 501 Third St., S.F. (415) 626-7495. www.gallery16.com.
Schrödinger's Cats: Recent work by six contemporary artists. Through Aug. 23. The Popular Workshop, 1173 Sutter St., S.F. (415) 655-3765. www.thepopularworkshop.com.