Among the many tenets of late 20th century art is a regular practice of working in series. Whether this means the repetition of certain formal elements within the design of a work, such as a shape or a color, or the careful selection of a specific group of objects, concepts or elements brought together to work harmoniously as a single work, the series is a hallmark of contemporary art thought and making. Each work is produced as a continuous arrangement of images a singular loop that looks back at itself for continuity, explication, and a narrative thread.
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Working in a series format also suggests a sense of continuity within the piece,
an intentional reading from left to right of a narrative or a symbolic
structure. |
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| This exhibition brings together the works of five artists to the new Microsoft Art Collection Gallery (an additional group of artists and their work are represented here on-line) and all make work that functions in a serial format or exists as a series. Because this exhibition presents a conceptual viewpoint within the Microsoft art collection, the range of styles, themes and techniques is quite varied.
Tina Hoggatt's history of Eight Players of the Negro League;
Amir Zaki's sharp, hyper-realist color photographs of Los Angeles
neighborhoods at night; Hills Snyder's enigmatic linear drawings, Charles
Long's Surrealist inspired doodles; and Roger Shimomura's re-collections of life in an American detention camp during WWII are just some of the themes that are presented by means of series.
Historically in Western art one can see that Greek and Roman architects made use of series as a solution to the decoration of public buildings. Religious narratives that appeared in church architecture in the Middle Ages and afterwards as relief sculpture or frescoes made use of the series and this is true whether illustrating scenes from the Old or New Testament or episodes from the lives of Saints. Jacob Lawrence's Genesis Portfolio, 1990, is a contemporary example of this tradition. Lawrence depicts eight episodes from this chapter of the Bible. Set in church, we witness a sermon on the topic progressing in the foreground. Moving from print to print the visual elements of the story of creation continue to unfold in the background, the different scenes portrayed in the arched windows of the church.
Looking back for more recent precedents one
can see models for this phenomenon among painters, sculptors and also among photographers. Beginning with the founding ideas of modern art among the Impressionists and more particularly Claude Monet whose views of haystacks, or Rouen's Gothic cathedral depicted at different times of day and under different weather conditions is an important precursor to the idea of series. So too is the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge. His photographs report on people and animals in motion. The individual frames of his sequential images capture one moment from the continuous flow of movement as a man runs or a horse gallops before the camera's lens. This breaking up of images, like Monet's preoccupation with the same subject at different times of day represent some of the first general notions of works in series. Into the 20th century we can find a similar obsession in Paul Cezanne's exploration of the views of Mt. St. Victoire in his native Provence. For Henri Matisse the notion of series appears in bronze castings of the human figure. His series of backs begun in 1906 and ending in 1930 resulted in four monumental low relief sculptures in which Matisse explored the evolution of form in the representation of the human body to degrees of abstraction of the same. In the more immediate past we have only to look at the Andy Warhol's silk-screened portraits of soup cans and social and political celebrities, or Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon-styled pictorial landscapes and still lives. Both artists sought styles that imitated the look and reproduction character of machine-made products.
For the
Minimalists
and Conceptualists of the
Viet Nam era it was a device whereby the act of making art
could imitate the product of a machine. The series underscores the rejection
and replacement by several schools of artists. They exchanged
the emotional reaction to the individual creative " moment
"of an older abstract expressionist generation such as Willem deKooning
or Mark Rothko with a more calculated set of intentions and
prescribed choices, characterized by the work of such historic
figures as Sol
LeWitt, Michael
Craig - Martin and James
Turrell
to name just three, but all of whom are represented in the Microsoft collection.
Today the series continues to be used as a
compositional device; a practical and sometimes economic means to
organize one's thoughts, visions and imaginative ideas. It can also
represent working habit, picking up a theme and exploring it until
it has become exhausted, or edited down to a comprehensive
statement. A series can be two-dimensional or it can be three
dimensional as in the case of the wall sculptures by Paul Arensmeyer
and David French. Both artists use wood, but beyond the series their
approach to their material is extremely different. Arensmayer relies
on the use of found material, whereas French creates highly
stylized, carved forms. Yet the organizing principle of their work
is the same, a set of objects arranged in some order to underscore
the connective relationships between their individual parts. The
relationships between disparate elements holds true for the other
works in the show as well. The approach is the same whether you are
looking at the personal and idiosyncratic symbolic elements of Matt
Mullican's
1989 suite of 16 untitled etchings, or the more recent set of four tantric inspired color lithographs by painter Robert Kelly, or the trio of suburban house facades depicted in acrylic paintings by Jane Dickson.
Working in a series format also suggests a sense
of continuity within the piece, an intentional reading from left to
right of a narrative or a symbolic structure. The series supposes a
belief in an unending array of ideas that are subject to editing but
that can later be engaged in another work, and expanded upon. For
example, Sol LeWitt's progression of black and white linear
arrangements and Dennis
Ashbaugh's chromosome diagram portraits propose to the viewer a
sense of infinite visual permutations and combinations. At the same
time Amir Zaki's desolate street pictures, Gary
Komarin's imagined vessels, Mark Bennett's blueprints of TV
stars' homes, Julian
Opie's
screen prints and Sherrie Levine's copies after Degas' drawings are more about grouping, collecting and/or cataloging of places or things.
As
a final point compare Peter
Shelton's
18 etchings called The Eighth Day on view at the Silicon Valley Campus to Beverly Semmes' cloth sculpture Six Silvers installed on the Redmond campus. Either can be said to illustrate a series. Yet in spite of the extreme differences in materials and concept by these two contemporary sculptors, their work makes us aware of just how the series has now become a classic format, and a valuable tool with which artists can structure their ideas.
Michael Klein,
Curator
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