“I am not what I am.” Ominous words spoken by Iago in Othello, but in the case of Richard Artschwager a definition of aesthetic principle. We can change the meaning of Shakespeare’s words by simply changing the context in which they appear, an idea that comes to the point of practically every piece included in David Nolan Gallery’s comprehensive yet comprehensible celebration of Artschwager’s centennial. A protean shapeshifter, Artschwager (1923–2013) has been called a furniture designer, a Pop artist, an installation artist, a conceptualist—not to mention his work in glass or his landscape drawings. The common thread linking all these identities is that of the perceiver and interpreter of given reality. Artschwager’s work is a rejoinder to Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness,” that we humans are tossed into a world we haven’t made and obliged to live in ways we haven’t ourselves chosen. Artschwager turns Heidegger upside down, remaking the world by taking objects out of their given context and thoroughly reimagining them.
The thirty-four works in the show cover six decades of artistic production, from the late 1950s until the artist’s death in 2013 and include objects of all sorts as well as works on paper—drawings in ink or graphite, pastels, and one watercolor. That strange, untitled watercolor (c. 1958/59), a vaguely desert landscape with a flattened perspective and a drawn frame that excludes all but the essential, reminds us that Artschwager first learned to draw with his mother Eugenia when the family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1935. By the time he reached the end of the 1960s, Artschwager had become a different artist. Hair Box (1969) is a disquieting piece, perhaps a descendent of Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacups but certainly not in the same humorous way. Hair Box has sexual implications, especially because “box” is slang for the vagina. Artschwager’s sculpture is geometrically precise, angled like a male urinal, leaving us to wonder about its meaning. The other Hair Box in the show, from 1990 and also a wall piece, is only partially open. What was possibly sexual in 1969 becomes a sendup of Minimalism two decades later, a parody of Judd-style wall boxes made of rubberized hair.
Work from the 1970s represented here is quintessential Artschwager. Untitled (Box with drawers) (1971) is an everyday object, made from a box of white oak and fitted with five drawers and brass hardware, transformed into art. We might link it with Dalí’s Venus de Milo aux Tiroirs (Venus de Milo with Drawers) (1936). Dalí “opens” the Venus de Milo sexually and psychologically, while Artschwager first renders a utilitarian object absurd by turning the drawers into psychological conundrums: one is a mirror, another has no bottom. The drawers then become devices to open our minds to the possibilities entailed in peering into the hidden, perhaps illusory spaces of our subconscious. Four Approximate Objects (1970-91) plays with the same idea of the ordinary box as a portable Wunderkammer. To open the box is to peer into a mind and examine its mysteries, simultaneously familiar and strange. Artschwager’s affinities with Surrealism are strong, especially in the sense that these two boxes become mirrors held up to the mind of the beholder, doors that open onto our secret life.
The works from the 1980s continue Artschwager’s experiments with defamiliarization. Quotation Marks (1980) accomplishes several things: first, the idea of quotation, parodied here because there is nothing between the marks, and second, the gesture we make when we draw imaginary quotation marks with our hands to signal irony. Succinct and elegant, Artschwager’s quotation marks suggest we not take the entire universe, everything between the marks, too seriously. Fractal (1987), a Formica and wood wall piece, is a conceptual representation of its title. In fractals the part is a miniature version of the whole, so this piece constitutes a metaphor for infinity. Mirror(1988), Formica and enamel on wood, is yet another defiance of utility. You can’t see your reflection in this mirror, so perhaps you don’t really exist. Maybe, like Alice and her looking glass, we are only figments of someone else’s imagination. Artschwager suggests volumes in a modestly sized structure.
Artschwager’s work from the 1990s and first decade of the aughts move further into irony. Three anti-tables allude to his work as a furniture maker, which, during the 1950s was how he earned a living. But Small Red Table(2008), Table (Drop Leaf) (2008), and Table (Wannabe) (2009) are only tables because he calls them tables. Each is a block with faux trompe-l’oeilspaces between the non-existent legs. Wannabe is the most complex of the three because it is topped with an imaginary tablecloth. In one fell swoop, Artschwager manages to parody Minimalism and to hearken back to a still life tradition that runs from seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting to Cubism. The illusion is that there is no illusion: what you see is not what you get.
David Nolan painted the gallery space facing 81st Street yellow in homage to Artschwager, who had the façade of Nolan’s Chelsea gallery space painted the same color when he designed it. A fitting tribute to this great artist from his long-time dealer.
