By Joel Faflak PhD English department from the University of Western Ontario
Gerald Vaandering’s last show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, “My soul’s form bends”(2006), happened by sheer chance. Frustrated, Vaandering threw an unfinished print into the yard outside his studio where. quite by accident. he later noticed its aesthetic possibility. As Harper, the valium addicted wife of a closeted homosexual Mormon, says in Angels in America, “Nothing ever disappears. In life there’s a kind of painful progress.” This progress fit with the non-descript human figures, economic codes and quotes, and murky, black encaustic of much of Vaandering’s work up to the point of his last show – elements that simulated a fiscally calculated existence so quotidian it becomes almost sublime in its banality. The point was to reveal in the inhuman aesthetic vocabulary of Bay Street drones and Wall Street market quotes a vitally human dimension, the primitive nature of which characterized Vaandering’s earliest work. But in this ‘middle’ work it was sometimes hard to see the soul Vaandering was trying to release within the figural regimens with which he was clearly fascinated, though I also found this failure of spirit the precisely moving point of his art, contrary to Vaandering’s own intentions. It’s likely true that my own soul is a tad darker than his. I want to tarry with the abyss, which I imagined peering out at me in Vaandering’s seamed and pock-marked surfaces.
Things started to change when in the last show what was previously a be-labored, often arduous crafting of surfaces in order to compel their figurative landscape to take flight instead resigned itself to their earthbound flatness. Now Vaandering sutured plywood and aluminum, his materials of manufactured choice. gouging and burning into their surfaces to reveal possible depths he seemed no longer certain might be there. These chance encounters – how else does inspiration strike except randomly? – seemed to release Vaandering from his previous work’s diagnostic calculations, which sometimes imprisoned rather than unchained chaos. The most obvious shift came with the artist’s decision to distort the silk-screened human and inhuman forms in woozy, vertiginous fashion. No longer bound by the human’s more naturalistic form. effect was at once violent, evoking a desperation to break with self-imposed formal restraints, and exhilarating, as if he’d worked through to an energy he was now free to let free.
This energy and its motifs survive powerfully in this new show, but with a kind of furious, spectral, joyous unabashedness. Indeed, although one can see in the current work’s furious flights of fancy a clearly delineated evolution from the artist’s past, the breakthrough is nonetheless startling. And ironically, the show takes its cue from the further deconstruction and reconstitution of the human form. which makes things more vitally alive than anything before. Before I longed to be traumatized by Vaandering’s work. His new work makes me thrilled to be exhilarated, a vertigo beyond the specters of fragmentation, dissipation. exhaustion, depletion, or enervation that evokes a kind of Nietzschean ecstatis beyond good and evil.
The link between this and the previous exhibition is “Where I think, there I am,” one of the shows two large anchor pieces. Applying paint on plywood with a kind of day-glo brilliance, Vaandering creates an effect at once lurid and intoxicating. This time the human form is digitalized and silkscreened to nearly abstract distortion. Behind these figures stock market quotes weave in and out of focus with woozy dread, blurring the line between human and inhuman with even greater precision than in Vaandering’s previous work. One can’t tell if the bodies are disintegrating into the ashes of the Real or transubstantiating matter into spirit, although their (dis)figurations, while spectral, threaten with a kind of violent stain. The black literally bleeds on the surface, neither seeping in nor evaporating, instead marking representation’s unavoidably insistent cancerous and traumatic after-effects. In the previous show the most telling margins were those between and beyond materials-the seamless sutures of plywood and metal; the way the aluminum sometimes fractured at the borders of the image: the edges of the gouges and pockmarks. This new piece no longer seems desperate to reveal the depths of soul in a soulless society. This time Vaandering lets the surface reveal its own depths. The effect is Warholesque. and in this show I got the genealogy of Vaandering’s silkscreen practice back to Warhol as a conspicuous consumption of an earlier influence in such a way that I was shocked to have missed the reference in his previous work. The most startling elements here are image and colour, as if the paintings have definitively moved beyond the tensions of depth or perspective. Call it a kind of abstract realism, or better yet, a realistic abstraction. Vaandering stages his black, bleeding figures on a sky-blue background, washed over with bright green paint swashes. which he silkscreens onto the surface as if to highlight the human’s mechanically reproductive nature. Green and blue are, of course, preeminently natural colours – though here they look unnaturally juxtaposed. This meeting is made more freakish by a confused flurry of glaring red rings buried behind the most ominously blurred of Vaandering’s black human forms. The citation to the Olympic symbol seems obvious. but here their overlapping, wandering, and disorganized shape suggests a community of shifting targets that can’t find their aim. At this point the piece rather strangely and uncannily evokes Munich and 1972. and one starts to see in that swoop of green paint the terrifying and violent undercurrents of hope.
Vaandering reminded me that while blue and green are analogous within the colour spectrum, red exists at its far extreme. If the shock value of this juxtaposition risks seems obvious in this work, it reaches a kind of sublime fulfillment in the show’s other large piece. “Public Transit.” Here Vaandering removes the stock market quotes entirely. as if they’ve spent their figural capital in his work, and reduces the large surface to three elements: blurred and distorted human forms coming and going in a subway station, an background expanse of apocalyptic orange, and a series of broad, dynamic red brushstrokes (again silkscreened) that are at once the surface’s source of integration and a sign of its potentially sheer obliteration. These marks draw attention to the work’s aesthetic surface with both exhilarating abandon and an almost visceral disgust for this gesture’s painterly nature, though the overall effect is, even to these cynical eyes, a definitively and unequivocal statement of the power of art merely to make its mark, the sign of a human
survival against all odds that is this work’s signal authority. Questionably this is Vaandering’s finest work to date, the achievement of self-expression on an the kind of epic scale that only an artist who has truly come into his own can pull off when he has marshaled his talent and its facilitations toward the higher purpose of an expression at once within and beyond his conscious grasp.
Yet for all their conceptual audacity, these large works are in many ways the prelude to five smaller square works: “Leaning against the wind,” “Leaps, long term options,” “Positive Normative,” “Stall point,” and “Your slip is showing.” Each work is split, either horizontally or vertically, into two colour fields (lime green/blue. red/purple, purple/lime green, blue/yellow, blue/yellow) against which Vaandering juxtaposes a single male figure, dressed in business suit with briefcase, shown in various stages of upset: falling. slipping, somersaulting, leaping, jumping. And over or against each figure is the diacritical mark – a drawn circle, straight bars at odds with one another, vertical slashes or scratches, horizontal sweeps – that by turns reduce, summarize. crystallize, and alchemize the surface’s defining movement. Between the colour field and human figure, these marks at once synthesize, abstract, and rupture the relationship between ground and figure, away of resolving the painting’s tensions between abstraction and representation, anthropomorphism and the posthuman, while at the same time satirizing this resolution’s patent absurdity, leaving the debate in the dust as purely academic. Which is also to point to these works implicit allegory of the ‘business’ of making art. in all its various positive and cynical connotations. It’s as if Vaandering is saying to us, what could it possibly matter? It’s all just the chance and finally the utter banality of making art in the twenty-first century. Putting a price on figuration is now, as much as it’s ever been, a gesture of such arbitrary proportions that to reduce it to five simplistic iterations of its arbitrariness is to turn the exercise into mere exercise, less the repeated delineation of some archetypal experience of luck, hazard. Or gamesmanship, than the sheer materialization o1’this experience as figures without any ground. Which is what makes these five pieces. otherwise or especially studies toward this show’s larger. more ambitious delineations, instead its marginal centerpieces, the show’s whole point residing beside its point.
Yet in both center and margin” theme and variations, final accomplishment and essays, I return to all of the works’ sheer colour and energy, in which resides a kind of .cheer exhilaration. This is corporate art-art that dispels myths about corporate, multinational, global idols of capitalism from whose grip we can’t seem to wrest ourselves because the fascination remains too seductive. It’s thus also art about the corporations and incorporations of art itself, the way in which art materializes precisely how reality cannot be materialized in art, yet which materializations we want to turn into embodied facts, so much more so to comfort ourselves about reality and its attendant myths and ideologies. In his Defense of Poetry Shelley, writing on the verge of modernity, argues that we have produced more facts and figures than we can possibly any longer process or work with. He describes this burdening welter of fact and circumstances as a copse which, increasingly, we lack the spirit to reanimate into new forms. new ideas. new realities. New life. Yet that sense of impending impotence is, Shelley seems to say, precisely the starting point of all human endeavor. What’s the point of falling, leaping, turning ourselves over to another reiteration of the what ultimately proves to be the same thing? Vaandering’s pieces tarry with this enervation, with such emboldened energy and sheer joy that one more than glimpses a kind of Nietzschean fury, an Apollo that gazes into the Dionysian sun, with black spots left on the eyes
to heal one’s gaze and thus to save one’s identity. If this is ‘corporate’ art, its shifting simulation of bodies – human forms, bodies and forms of colour, bodies of facts * is a reincorporation that demonstrates the sheer resilience of this body’s will and fantasy.
I’ll belabor my own words once more to say that there’s something intoxicating about an artist coming into his own as if for the first time. This isn’t to read this artist’s previous work as folly or detour, for Vaandering’s past work is too assured in its pursuit o/’detours to dismiss this way. However, there is an undeniably visionary and revolutionary element about the current show, precisely because it reveals as if for the first time what was already there within its soul. This comes with the artist struggling and brooding over his confrontation with the world and with the surface, despairing that he can ever get his perception of it just right, further despairing that anyone will be there to see or appreciate what he’s accomplished. That’s the vitally and darkly contemplative side of the artistic process, and it produces some pretty wonderful results, as Vaandering’s previous work demonstrates.
But the revelation comes when the artist, whether consciously or unconsciously, decides to get out of the artwork’s way and let its process happen. The archetype of this is materialized in Pollock’s drip paintings, of course, and its difficult not to belabor that example as a Romantic ideal long past its prime. Yet one can’t deny the power that comes with an artist seeing things as if for the first time, even if – and especially when – what he’s seeing is what’s there all along, and might never change. Warhol knew this when he transgressed once and for all the line between transcendence and banality that had kept high and low art so elitely and disastrously at odds with one another. Some called the collapsed boundary the final death knell of art. Others saw it as an abyss, from which chaos of everyday life other modes of seeing could emerge. This is why Warhol’s Brillo boxes or Campbell soup cans were preceded by the mechanical reproduction of disasters, car wrecks, scenes of capital punishment. The line between life and art is traumatically banal; both are traumatically repetitive of one another. That’s the way trauma works: by suspending us from the everyday, quotidian dimension of our lives precisely to show us that dimension’s compulsive insistence.
But the prison from which we never escape or the dream from which we never awaken are two ways of also saying that dreams and prisons can be sites of a possible transformation. By reducing his work to the bare. primal elements of its constitution. rendering all too obvious what was simply there all along, Vaandering actually distills a whole new beginning from within the surface of things. All life might be the horizontal ceaselessness of a spectacle, like Shelley’s Triumph of Life, the waking dream of which descends into chaos and death, but even past those possibly redemptive negative moments to a further banality that is the endless exploitation of our lives as mechanical reproduction. Is it possible that Vaandering sees past that moment to a further possibility. barely glirnpsed on the horizon? I can hardly wait to see his next move.
Shelley reminds us that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Vaandering would likely shudder at such apocalyptic ideas, imagining that his art has humbler, more human designs. But Shelley, despite his own grandiosity, meant what he said, not as prophecy, but as a statement of everyday fact. In what has become such a hallmark of poststructural cultural theory as to be impotent, although both the statement’s potency and its possible impotence matter here, these canvasses both literally and figuratively deploy a mobile army of metaphors and metonymies to speak for a brave new world on the verge of financial, moral and cultural collapse. Yet from such apparent crises these works release a new energy, as if to mark how the old paradigms were always already old because we held onto them for so long. These figures are falling, but they might just as easily be playing, both with themselves and with us, as if to say, lighten up a little.
Gerald Vaandering’s last show at the Michael Gibson Gallery, “My soul’s form bends”(2006), happened by sheer chance. Frustrated, Vaandering threw an unfinished print into the yard outside his studio where. quite by accident. he later noticed its aesthetic possibility. As Harper, the valium addicted wife of a closeted homosexual Mormon, says in Angels in America, “Nothing ever disappears. In life there’s a kind of painful progress.” This progress fit with the non-descript human figures, economic codes and quotes, and murky, black encaustic of much of Vaandering’s work up to the point of his last show – elements that simulated a fiscally calculated existence so quotidian it becomes almost sublime in its banality. The point was to reveal in the inhuman aesthetic vocabulary of Bay Street drones and Wall Street market quotes a vitally human dimension, the primitive nature of which characterized Vaandering’s earliest work. But in this ‘middle’ work it was sometimes hard to see the soul Vaandering was trying to release within the figural regimens with which he was clearly fascinated, though I also found this failure of spirit the precisely moving point of his art, contrary to Vaandering’s own intentions. It’s likely true that my own soul is a tad darker than his. I want to tarry with the abyss, which I imagined peering out at me in Vaandering’s seamed and pock-marked surfaces.
Things started to change when in the last show what was previously a be-labored, often arduous crafting of surfaces in order to compel their figurative landscape to take flight instead resigned itself to their earthbound flatness. Now Vaandering sutured plywood and aluminum, his materials of manufactured choice. gouging and burning into their surfaces to reveal possible depths he seemed no longer certain might be there. These chance encounters – how else does inspiration strike except randomly? – seemed to release Vaandering from his previous work’s diagnostic calculations, which sometimes imprisoned rather than unchained chaos. The most obvious shift came with the artist’s decision to distort the silk-screened human and inhuman forms in woozy, vertiginous fashion. No longer bound by the human’s more naturalistic form. effect was at once violent, evoking a desperation to break with self-imposed formal restraints, and exhilarating, as if he’d worked through to an energy he was now free to let free.
This energy and its motifs survive powerfully in this new show, but with a kind of furious, spectral, joyous unabashedness. Indeed, although one can see in the current work’s furious flights of fancy a clearly delineated evolution from the artist’s past, the breakthrough is nonetheless startling. And ironically, the show takes its cue from the further deconstruction and reconstitution of the human form. which makes things more vitally alive than anything before. Before I longed to be traumatized by Vaandering’s work. His new work makes me thrilled to be exhilarated, a vertigo beyond the specters of fragmentation, dissipation. exhaustion, depletion, or enervation that evokes a kind of Nietzschean ecstatis beyond good and evil.
The link between this and the previous exhibition is “Where I think, there I am,” one of the shows two large anchor pieces. Applying paint on plywood with a kind of day-glo brilliance, Vaandering creates an effect at once lurid and intoxicating. This time the human form is digitalized and silkscreened to nearly abstract distortion. Behind these figures stock market quotes weave in and out of focus with woozy dread, blurring the line between human and inhuman with even greater precision than in Vaandering’s previous work. One can’t tell if the bodies are disintegrating into the ashes of the Real or transubstantiating matter into spirit, although their (dis)figurations, while spectral, threaten with a kind of violent stain. The black literally bleeds on the surface, neither seeping in nor evaporating, instead marking representation’s unavoidably insistent cancerous and traumatic after-effects. In the previous show the most telling margins were those between and beyond materials-the seamless sutures of plywood and metal; the way the aluminum sometimes fractured at the borders of the image: the edges of the gouges and pockmarks. This new piece no longer seems desperate to reveal the depths of soul in a soulless society. This time Vaandering lets the surface reveal its own depths. The effect is Warholesque. and in this show I got the genealogy of Vaandering’s silkscreen practice back to Warhol as a conspicuous consumption of an earlier influence in such a way that I was shocked to have missed the reference in his previous work. The most startling elements here are image and colour, as if the paintings have definitively moved beyond the tensions of depth or perspective. Call it a kind of abstract realism, or better yet, a realistic abstraction. Vaandering stages his black, bleeding figures on a sky-blue background, washed over with bright green paint swashes. which he silkscreens onto the surface as if to highlight the human’s mechanically reproductive nature. Green and blue are, of course, preeminently natural colours – though here they look unnaturally juxtaposed. This meeting is made more freakish by a confused flurry of glaring red rings buried behind the most ominously blurred of Vaandering’s black human forms. The citation to the Olympic symbol seems obvious. but here their overlapping, wandering, and disorganized shape suggests a community of shifting targets that can’t find their aim. At this point the piece rather strangely and uncannily evokes Munich and 1972. and one starts to see in that swoop of green paint the terrifying and violent undercurrents of hope.
Vaandering reminded me that while blue and green are analogous within the colour spectrum, red exists at its far extreme. If the shock value of this juxtaposition risks seems obvious in this work, it reaches a kind of sublime fulfillment in the show’s other large piece. “Public Transit.” Here Vaandering removes the stock market quotes entirely. as if they’ve spent their figural capital in his work, and reduces the large surface to three elements: blurred and distorted human forms coming and going in a subway station, an background expanse of apocalyptic orange, and a series of broad, dynamic red brushstrokes (again silkscreened) that are at once the surface’s source of integration and a sign of its potentially sheer obliteration. These marks draw attention to the work’s aesthetic surface with both exhilarating abandon and an almost visceral disgust for this gesture’s painterly nature, though the overall effect is, even to these cynical eyes, a definitively and unequivocal statement of the power of art merely to make its mark, the sign of a human
survival against all odds that is this work’s signal authority. Questionably this is Vaandering’s finest work to date, the achievement of self-expression on an the kind of epic scale that only an artist who has truly come into his own can pull off when he has marshaled his talent and its facilitations toward the higher purpose of an expression at once within and beyond his conscious grasp.
Yet for all their conceptual audacity, these large works are in many ways the prelude to five smaller square works: “Leaning against the wind,” “Leaps, long term options,” “Positive Normative,” “Stall point,” and “Your slip is showing.” Each work is split, either horizontally or vertically, into two colour fields (lime green/blue. red/purple, purple/lime green, blue/yellow, blue/yellow) against which Vaandering juxtaposes a single male figure, dressed in business suit with briefcase, shown in various stages of upset: falling. slipping, somersaulting, leaping, jumping. And over or against each figure is the diacritical mark – a drawn circle, straight bars at odds with one another, vertical slashes or scratches, horizontal sweeps – that by turns reduce, summarize. crystallize, and alchemize the surface’s defining movement. Between the colour field and human figure, these marks at once synthesize, abstract, and rupture the relationship between ground and figure, away of resolving the painting’s tensions between abstraction and representation, anthropomorphism and the posthuman, while at the same time satirizing this resolution’s patent absurdity, leaving the debate in the dust as purely academic. Which is also to point to these works implicit allegory of the ‘business’ of making art. in all its various positive and cynical connotations. It’s as if Vaandering is saying to us, what could it possibly matter? It’s all just the chance and finally the utter banality of making art in the twenty-first century. Putting a price on figuration is now, as much as it’s ever been, a gesture of such arbitrary proportions that to reduce it to five simplistic iterations of its arbitrariness is to turn the exercise into mere exercise, less the repeated delineation of some archetypal experience of luck, hazard. Or gamesmanship, than the sheer materialization o1’this experience as figures without any ground. Which is what makes these five pieces. otherwise or especially studies toward this show’s larger. more ambitious delineations, instead its marginal centerpieces, the show’s whole point residing beside its point.
Yet in both center and margin” theme and variations, final accomplishment and essays, I return to all of the works’ sheer colour and energy, in which resides a kind of .cheer exhilaration. This is corporate art-art that dispels myths about corporate, multinational, global idols of capitalism from whose grip we can’t seem to wrest ourselves because the fascination remains too seductive. It’s thus also art about the corporations and incorporations of art itself, the way in which art materializes precisely how reality cannot be materialized in art, yet which materializations we want to turn into embodied facts, so much more so to comfort ourselves about reality and its attendant myths and ideologies. In his Defense of Poetry Shelley, writing on the verge of modernity, argues that we have produced more facts and figures than we can possibly any longer process or work with. He describes this burdening welter of fact and circumstances as a copse which, increasingly, we lack the spirit to reanimate into new forms. new ideas. new realities. New life. Yet that sense of impending impotence is, Shelley seems to say, precisely the starting point of all human endeavor. What’s the point of falling, leaping, turning ourselves over to another reiteration of the what ultimately proves to be the same thing? Vaandering’s pieces tarry with this enervation, with such emboldened energy and sheer joy that one more than glimpses a kind of Nietzschean fury, an Apollo that gazes into the Dionysian sun, with black spots left on the eyes
to heal one’s gaze and thus to save one’s identity. If this is ‘corporate’ art, its shifting simulation of bodies – human forms, bodies and forms of colour, bodies of facts * is a reincorporation that demonstrates the sheer resilience of this body’s will and fantasy.
I’ll belabor my own words once more to say that there’s something intoxicating about an artist coming into his own as if for the first time. This isn’t to read this artist’s previous work as folly or detour, for Vaandering’s past work is too assured in its pursuit o/’detours to dismiss this way. However, there is an undeniably visionary and revolutionary element about the current show, precisely because it reveals as if for the first time what was already there within its soul. This comes with the artist struggling and brooding over his confrontation with the world and with the surface, despairing that he can ever get his perception of it just right, further despairing that anyone will be there to see or appreciate what he’s accomplished. That’s the vitally and darkly contemplative side of the artistic process, and it produces some pretty wonderful results, as Vaandering’s previous work demonstrates.
But the revelation comes when the artist, whether consciously or unconsciously, decides to get out of the artwork’s way and let its process happen. The archetype of this is materialized in Pollock’s drip paintings, of course, and its difficult not to belabor that example as a Romantic ideal long past its prime. Yet one can’t deny the power that comes with an artist seeing things as if for the first time, even if – and especially when – what he’s seeing is what’s there all along, and might never change. Warhol knew this when he transgressed once and for all the line between transcendence and banality that had kept high and low art so elitely and disastrously at odds with one another. Some called the collapsed boundary the final death knell of art. Others saw it as an abyss, from which chaos of everyday life other modes of seeing could emerge. This is why Warhol’s Brillo boxes or Campbell soup cans were preceded by the mechanical reproduction of disasters, car wrecks, scenes of capital punishment. The line between life and art is traumatically banal; both are traumatically repetitive of one another. That’s the way trauma works: by suspending us from the everyday, quotidian dimension of our lives precisely to show us that dimension’s compulsive insistence.
But the prison from which we never escape or the dream from which we never awaken are two ways of also saying that dreams and prisons can be sites of a possible transformation. By reducing his work to the bare. primal elements of its constitution. rendering all too obvious what was simply there all along, Vaandering actually distills a whole new beginning from within the surface of things. All life might be the horizontal ceaselessness of a spectacle, like Shelley’s Triumph of Life, the waking dream of which descends into chaos and death, but even past those possibly redemptive negative moments to a further banality that is the endless exploitation of our lives as mechanical reproduction. Is it possible that Vaandering sees past that moment to a further possibility. barely glirnpsed on the horizon? I can hardly wait to see his next move.
Shelley reminds us that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Vaandering would likely shudder at such apocalyptic ideas, imagining that his art has humbler, more human designs. But Shelley, despite his own grandiosity, meant what he said, not as prophecy, but as a statement of everyday fact. In what has become such a hallmark of poststructural cultural theory as to be impotent, although both the statement’s potency and its possible impotence matter here, these canvasses both literally and figuratively deploy a mobile army of metaphors and metonymies to speak for a brave new world on the verge of financial, moral and cultural collapse. Yet from such apparent crises these works release a new energy, as if to mark how the old paradigms were always already old because we held onto them for so long. These figures are falling, but they might just as easily be playing, both with themselves and with us, as if to say, lighten up a little.