letter
from new york : : matt freedman
john
himmelfarb: long overdue
John
Himmelfarb has papered the Phyllis Stigliano Gallery in Park Slope, Brooklyn with
some 200 small images drawn on old library catalog cards. This casual deployment
of casual work allows us to look in (listen in?) on the artist talking to himself,
working fast and playing loose with ideas and impulses, producing objects that
are once utterly complete statements and also tantalizing ephemera of pure (re)search.
There is something self sufficient and essential to observe in these
pieces. What is displayed is a statement of the artist's core principles that
could perhaps only be made in these unguarded moments. The ideas presented in
works of greater visual formality may gain persuasive authority through their
association with a fully realized synthetic reality, but by the same token the
very craftsmanship of that artistic seduction places us at a calculated distance
from mind and heart of the creator. Which is why the transparency and contingency
of these quick small studies is so beguiling. We are invited to travel deeper
into the artist's head than he normally allows us to go and to see, if not another
world, then this one through alternate eyes.
But we are not merely-only-looking
at sketches. Himmelfarb intends for us to understand the card drawings as ends
in themselves. He wants us to see this playful meta-dialogue as the essence of
his practice. The play is the thing, not the production. The artist, however,
is slyly having it both ways: While Himmelfarb's cards announce their presence
as the effluvia of a winsome and active imagination, their collective appearance
on a gallery wall reifies the imaginative play that produced them in the first
place. The mass of cards is impressive and overwhelming; a respectable and "traditional"
work of art in its own right. Collectively, the cards provoke an emotional and
esthetic response that individually they shy away from.
This paradoxical
melding of the self-effacing and the grand, the deliberately modest and the deceptively
ambitious nicely personifies one of the many bracing tensions in Himmelfarb's
art. Bipartite themes run throughout the artist's extensive and diverse body of
work, as does the impulse to string stuff together, to utilize connections and
contingencies as animating agents. Himmelfarb constantly fragments and connects
as he doodles his way into massive murals, cartoons his way into pathos, layers
whimsy and flippancy into Bosch-like complexity, hilarity and terror. All the
while, the artist keeps his poker face and plugs relentlessly away with a studio
practice that emphasizes, unfashionably enough, substance over style.
The
initial and perhaps lasting impression is of a mind - a mind gently unhitched
to conventional flows of logic and propriety perhaps, but a comprehensibly analytic
mind nonetheless - whose work is play. Everywhere in the room we are reminded
of the inductive and sequential process of the artistic imagination at work, a
process Himmelfarb himself subtly pushes upon us as a theme in his practice as
important as the actual images that he generates. In the library catalog cards,
the linkage of idea to image is largely spatial and schematic. Sometimes, the
artist plays off of the content of the cards for inspiration; a word or a theme
or a name on the card inspires a drawing, but, just as likely, he responds to
the layout of the text itself on the card. The dispersal of black type against
white space creates limits for drawings and, sometimes a formation of type, like
a cloud, inspires an image on its own. Each card is a separate planet, close but
no cigar to the next one over. Within each card we are taken on a delicate little
safari, each one inspired by some tenuous ephemeral impression.
It is
interesting that Himmelfarb regards the drawings as something akin to diary entries;
they are highly responsive, not just to the graphic or narrative qualities of
the cards they occupy, but to work of other artists or writers he is encountering;
sometimes they are simply drawn from life. They are done away from the studio
mostly, and they serve the artist as true mementos, reminders of experiences instantly
distilled into line. Collectively, the effect of all these little report cards
is quite overwhelming. The wall shifts from small scale to large, a tour de force
of imaginative suppleness.
But if the collective presence of the cards
somehow legitimizes them as respectable artistic endeavor rather than a series
of inspired doodles, so, too, does their massed presence threaten to fool us into
assuming that any mind producing so much must operate according to an obsessive
structure. We must remind ourselves of the gentle playfulness that produced each
little picture. Think, perhaps, of those old pictures of annual food intake of
the typical American family, so popular in the self-congratulatory 1950's. Four
small people in a warehouse filled with hundreds of roasted chickens, gallons
of chocolate milk and tons of Rice Krispies. We ate all that? Yes, but not all
at once. The accumulation of any quotidian exercise is formidable over time; seeing
it all at once is overwhelming but perhaps misleading: things, inevitably, add
up.
At the core of Himmelfarb's playful practice is the idea of noble
work; art making labor as a sort of joyous, de-frocked priestly activity that
is both its own reward and the path to esthetic and spiritual enlightenment.
Go
to the Himmelfarb visual essay.
Matt
Freedman is an artist and writer living in Queens, New York. E-mail: Trix4@aol.com
The
exhibition is accompanied by a small catalog/book featuring the above text and
life-sized reproductions of Himmelfarb's drawings. Price: About $40.
For information:
Phyllis Stigliano Gallery
62 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11217 USA Telephone:
718 638.0659
E-mail: Artjump@aol.com
John Himmelfarb: www.johnhimmelfarb.com
