5.5.25 — Speeding Right Along
When John Chamberlain made sculpture from used car parts, he inherited all the dynamism of a speeding car and all the gravity and perfection of a showroom. He could count, too, on a different kind of dynamism and stasis, that of postwar American art.
If he was throwing the scraps of sculpture every which way, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and others were hurling and slathering paint. If he was welding them into something larger, so were Dorothy Dehner and David Smith, starting at an auto plant. If he was also adopting an icon of what had become in no time the classic American lifestyle, so were James Rosenquist and Pop Art. America, boosters felt, was in motion like no other country, but it was not going anywhere if that meant going away.
Kennedy Yanko makes art just as familiar, but not a bit larger than life. It has all the quick moves in converting a gallery into a showroom and a showroom into a highway. One work has rods sticking out in every direction, badly in need of repair. Others have gentle folds from surfaces of welded steel. Black is the dominant color, in what I took for industrial-strength spray paint. Rent a limo in Tribeca now, while you can, at James Cohan through May 10.
Yanko, though, is a designer, not a destroyer. His show fits easily on gallery walls and on pedestals, like scale models for something larger. He cultivates the look of fine design as well. These materials hold out hope that one could double them over by hand, without need of a hammer or blowtorch. Folded white has the texture of fabric rather than metal. Silvery surfaces make a point of shining.
The gallery lists only generic metal and, new to me, paint skin. Paint, it explains, accumulates on whatever it covers to the point that he can dispense with backing. Jack Whitten, the black artist, does much the same with acrylic on plastic before transferring it to painting. If Whitten is decidedly abstract, so is the generation that Yanko recalls. You call this painting? Well, yess.
Not that Chamberlain is devoid of trickery or artistry. If you have not seen his work in a while, you can easily have forgotten just how monumental and how pliable sculpture can be. You can forget how good he is as a pure painter. Series have stuck to mere arches and to black or twisted and cut into space itself. It is not out to barrel down the highway and ram into you from behind. Oh, and Whitten made sculpture, too.
Yanko is up to much the same thing, at a time when so much in the galleries seems like old news. He just happens to do it well, with an eye on art’s image of America. If it is a little too nice and a little too old, so be it. At the same gallery two doors down, Claudia Alarcón paints with actual tapestries, in conjunction with a South American collective, from the town of Silät, of her own devising. Yanko, though, pushes it harder even without the plea for cultural diversity. He also calls his show, “Epithets,” and there are a lot of names and terms here to throw around.