Coffee, Paper, and Other Obsessions

Gwyneth Leech, Noriko Ambe, and Simryn Gill

When does art become obsessive—or as addictive as caffeine? Gwyneth Leech enters her own landscapes, assembled over weeks from disposable coffee cups. And even that sounds restrained compared to a male determined to be a showman. Stephen G. Rhodes could never settle for paper cups when he can afford real coffee mugs—and afford to smash them. He hopes in the process to smash, too, a philosopher of obsessive thought and habits.

Noriko Ambe, comes closest of all to a landscape, but on the truly modest scale of books. They just happen, however, to be other artists' books, which she obsessively empties of words.

Nor is she alone in slicing books to pieces. Simryn Gill did so not so long before. Gill makes the weight of words that much more inescapable, to the point that one can hold them in one's hands. She offers a library as a point of departure, toward a distant isle and a kind of New York history. In different ways, each of these shows depends on an artist's obsession.

Color as obsession

Many shows begin with a studio visit, in that moment when a dealer says, I want that in my gallery. With Gwyneth Leech, however, that was not just her work. It includes her colors, her studio detritus, her habits, her obsessions, and for that matter the artist. And in the process, all of them have changed. They have become an ever-changing landscape and an installation.

"Hypergraphia" first occupied the Fashion Center Window, around the corner from her dealer, and Leech looks even more exposed later the same year, in the windowed tip of the Flatiron Building. She sits exposed, sketching on takeout coffee cups both upscale and down, and the results are everywhere. Paper cups fill the shallow space, surely hundreds by now, hanging from the ceiling or stacked on the floor, like a caffeine fiend's replacement for the plastic-cup landscape of Tara Donovan. Still other cups sit upright, holding the tools of the artist's trade, mostly roller pens. Their lids, the kind designed for sipping, may litter the floor. Passers-by may stop in out of curiosity or simply rush by to Madison Square Park or along streets crowded with the wholesale garment business.

For Leech, as for them, one might think of this as a job or an obsession. Caffeine is of course an addiction and a staple of most workplaces, and the initial installation ran workdays rather than gallery hours. (Its reappearance at the Flatiron Building made it a visible and active part of New York's fall and holiday seasons.) Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write, and Leech covers cups to the brim with a mix of abstraction, skyscrapers, and goodness knows what else. I think I spotted some cute squirrels, but I cannot always swear when a colorful pattern belongs simply to the found object. After all the criticism recently, trashy installations between architecture and a wrecking ball can get along quite well as a site for modest but visually compelling art.

For all that, the artist looks quite calm—patiently drawing, tuning out the male gaze or the passing scene, and in fact rarely drinking. The cups might almost have emerged out of nowhere, and the patterns of art and mathematics might have emerged of themselves. Coffee is also a diuretic, but she does not seem overly troubled by it. Besides, she could hardly get up too often without knocking something over (although friends report having missed her on, no doubt, a coffee break). Perhaps Whistler's Mother was in need of an update for twenty-first century Manhattan and twenty-first century neuroses. Naturally the reception served coffee instead of cheap white wine.

Stephen G. Rhodes has a fixation of his own on coffee—and on failures of the flesh. He just cannot decide whether to make fun of it, to identify with it, or to turn it into a spectacle. His last multimedia installation included a gallows, inspired by a short story of a condemned man's final moments, consumed by a fantasy of salvation and home. His latest centers on an early essay by Kant, a notorious late bloomer. Rhodes himself translates its conclusion in lieu of a press release, with a lack of clarity and syntax that Google Translate will not envy. In it, philosophy's great idealist traces mental illness to intestinal disturbance.

The LA artist, who called an early piece Circle of Shit, should know. His shelves hold a multitude of coffee cups (and an automatic drip machine, which I sure hope worked better at the opening), while on video a foot repeatedly crushes more. This all goes to mock Kant's habits, including a daily walk so regular that neighbors could set their clock by it, almost like real-time video by Christian Marclay. It all has something or other to do with history's neglect of Kant's servant, who would have had the discretion not to repeat that tired story. For all Rhodes's mockery, though, Kant's habits give human particulars to a thinking man's generalizations, not unlike his preposterous explanation of mental disorders. Besides, one can probably set one's clock by my workouts, too—or my blog posts.

Artists cut loose

Noriko Ambe creates a layered portrait of the artist, with a different kind of paper trail than coffee cups—in text and images that one never quite gets to see. She shapes twenty books on leading artists into quite a group show, at least (as the saying goes) on paper. For Alberto Giacometti the covers press in on a thin man out of his nightmares, fashioned from its pages. For Félix González-Torres, the pit in a volume pairs with its shreds, as a corner piece on the floor. Damien Hirst catalogs laid flat on sliding shelves become of a piece with his natural histories. A Roy Lichtenstein dot-scape and the topography of cut paper expand into a sparkling imagined city.

Obviously Ambe deconstructs the artists, just as her X-Acto blade eviscerates their work. She has appeared in shows called "Cutters" and "Mutilated/Cultivated Environments," along with such architects in words as Sarah Sze. Others such as Ishmael Randall Weeks in "Greater New York" have cut books into mountainous landscapes. At the 2011 art fairs, still another cut up Artforum. They lacked Ambe's quiet care and portraiture. They also had me wondering if any of those issues of Artforum covered Leech or Donovan.

Like them, no doubt, her project is something of an inside joke. She favors such ironists and insiders as Richard Prince and Andy Warhol. (I promise not to give away all the punch lines.) She even shared the Flag Art Foundation with Jennifer Dalton and Robert Lazzarini. Dalton again catalogs the limits of the art world, as she did the previous spring with William Powhida. Still, Ambe plainly believes in the visual arts.

She may be joking, but she respects her artists—or even improves on them. John Currin becomes an evanescent tribute to Renaissance beauty. Hirst's shark (or perhaps a wave of formaldehyde) escapes its tanks in a burst of color. She also gives the artist's book a double meaning: it is not just text as art, but the artist's printed text as text for art. The Japanese-born sculptor, based in New York, may not give away her magic or sit exposed, but I appreciate the reticence. Her artist's life is still an open book.

When it comes to comforts, collections, and obsessions, one will always have words—at least until books, too, become distant memories. Or at least, Ambe might add, until an artist eviscerates them. Even then, I suppose, one will have memories. My parents divorced when I was seven, and I moved, but I can still remember the name of my first public library. I guess that means I must have used it, and it was half a mile from home. Barbara Page insists on the same kind of memories.

She, too, indulges in an artist's obsessions, with perhaps a heavy dose of whimsy. Page shares her "Book Marks," on the cards that used to track loans on the inside cover of library books. She inscribes each one with the author and title from her own reading, stamps it with a year, and fills it out with a drawing. Naturally art books lead to handmade images after Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, and Vincent van Gogh. Hemingway gets a gun, Animal Farm a pig, Tom Sawyer a paint brush, and many others a window onto natural histories. The nostalgia can get heavy, especially for the cards still resting in old wooden card catalogs, but preposterous stamped dates acknowledge the foolishness of looking back, and the images keep one looking for more.

Three little words

My first term in college, a professor introduced King Lear with just three words—nothing, nature, and sight. He asked us to follow their resonance through the play, almost like actors, as they articulated the tragedy. Perhaps we could have examined them more closely had we paused to slice out the words, sorted each into its own plastic bag, held them to the light, weighed them in our hands, and turned the pages once again to feel their absence. Perhaps we could at least have come closer to nothing, nature, and sight, but what else would remain? "Nothing will come of nothing."

Those three words could also make a pretty good definition of conceptual art, and the process describes a project by Simryn Gill. Visitors can thumb through two tables of books, but she has already removed every instance of some eighty words, adding up to some gaping holes. No other writer has Shakespeare's expansive vocabulary, and the excision devastates more than a hundred well-worn hardcovers and paperbacks, suggested by friends of the artist as personal favorites. Voices as expansive as James Agee and Bob Dylan become close to mute. Books for hobbyists or self-help lose their meager utility. The prefaces, which Gill leaves intact, appear to chide the authors for not living up to their advance billing.

One can pull up a chair at a third table to check out the key terms in this lexicon. I expected imposing trash bags, but instead they fill to differing degrees Ziploc bags, stacked in turn in small cardboard boxes. Words like always and still sound weighty, and here they hardly seem worth the paper on which they were printed. Gill does her best to hide her own conceptual traces along with the original sentences, like the plot for Matthew Brannon. The choice of words developed from her own associations, but one would never know how. Each morning, the gallery restores the books to her precise intended order, but I doubt that even she could have explained it.

Ask artists, and they will tell you how they value the artist's book as collaboration and as object that one can touch, much like these. Elsewhere in publishing today, engravings will have given way to digital prints, the production editor with an X-acto knife to desktop publishing. In real life, too, the blocking out of words raises frightening stories of censorship and destroyed lives. Recently a man held illegally in the war on terror told of mail from his family with even the greeting blackened, probably the word Allah. If one could have shared a bag weighted down by instance after instance of that word, he would have had fitting testimony.

For all its postmodern love of text and emptying of language, then, Gill's work has its old-fashioned charm, much like the gallery's home at the time in an West Village brownstone. It goes down easily, but she has created something unusual as well as inviting. She offers the artist's book without much of its text and without the hand of the artist. She offers conceptual art that one can hold, at least briefly, in one's hands—conceptual art that reduces its own text to nonmeaning. Curiously, too, the same description could apply to Gill's photographs, in which a small, mountainous island in Indonesia has a huge back story. I found this version of the artist as traveler less successful than the verbal one, but they reflect the same puzzle of judgment in light of visual, verbal, and personal evidence.

As the gallery graciously explained to blundering visitors like me, the Dutch traded another island to the English for it, preferring nutmeg to the commercial future of New Amsterdam. Actually, the deal had far more to it, in property and at least two Anglo-Dutch Wars. In fact, the artist, born in Singapore and living in Australia, would probably enjoy spelling it all out. Either way, she is framing bland compositions with a great deal of socioeconomic narrative. Other photographers have staked high concept on banal execution, as with Shelburne Thurber's therapist offices, Lockhart's blank-faced teens, or even Catherine Opie's American cities. For Gill, however, the whole point is whether visual and verbal significance will end up in plastic bags for recycling—or escape from the trap of words.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Gwyneth Leech had pop-up shows at 215 West 38th Street through April 1, 2011, and in the Flatiron Building extended through February 18, 2012, organized by Cheryl McGinnis. Stephen G. Rhodes ran at Metro Pictures through March 5, 2011, Barbara Page at the Center for Book Arts through June 25. Noriko Ambe ran at the Flag Art Foundation through September 10, 2010, Simryn Gill at Tracy Williams, Ltd. through January 6, 2007.