Contemporary Modernism by Pilar Tompkins / back to main site /
Clement Greenberg once defined modernism as “…the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself...” Although this concept has been revisited often, few artists chose to interpret the very physical components that are implemented within a work of art and constitute it’s substantive make-up, while simultaneously examining the institutional models that surround artwork and serve to support the elusive property of value. Ed Gomez asks the question – how can the fundamental structures of art, from studio practice, to museum presentation and art handling, all be reinterpreted as an extended visual and conceptual vocabulary? Gomez’s practice derives from painting, but often morphs into sculpture, and meshes into extensive projects that function as arbitration between his many roles of making art, handling art, teaching art, and exhibiting and curating the work of other artists.
Gomez deftly weaves his way from realism to abstract expressionism through his body of paintings. His approach is not to deconstruct the realized image, or to flirt with hyper-representation, but is instead a play on art historical practices, citing movements as benchmarks for moments in critical theory. Aptly, his work is self-conscious of its own place in contemporary art making, and is married to the idea of form as a function and product of its own setting.
The first of several examples is the piece, Telos, a sculptural anthology of traditional methods of painting preparation. It is comprised of a sandwiched grouping of rectangular canvases, each stretched and meticulously prepared with formulaic pairings of materials and fabrics. White gesso on a linen/canvas blend sanded to a perfect surface, burlap sealed with rabbit skin glue, and raw silk are some of the historic technical treatments explored as subject in this work. Each layer is painted, either in acrylic, oil, egg tempera, spray paint, etc., thus resulting in a series of bright bands referencing color theory and modernists such as Morris Louis and Frank Stella. Additionally, the piece is positioned on wheels and meant to be moved daily during display to correspond with the phases of the moon. Though the artist intended this lunar allusion to serve as a metaphor for a romantic notion of painting, its changing orientation is purposeful for other reasons - firstly to undermine the monolithic, static nature of the sculpture, and secondly to serve as an obstruction to the other works that may be displayed with it in a gallery. By blocking the viewer’s line of sight, the formal and often passive experience of looking at art is interrupted.
This subversive tone reoccurs in Project B: the Wonderful Misadventures in the Waiting Mortuary. Finalized as a book of documentary-style photographs, the project began in 2002 while Gomez worked as a preparator handling Eli Broad’s stored collection. Gomez created a painting of a home being built by Broad’s company at the time and then inserted it within the collection as a packed and labeled artwork. As he came into contact with major works by modern and contemporary greats during his years as an art handler, Gomez photographed himself interacting with various pieces, such as placing a single fingertip under the nose of Charles Ray’s self -portrait, and re-measuring a Mel Bochner measurement painting, finding and citing in his own photo, that Bochner’s assessment of the canvas size was in fact off by half an inch. Here Gomez questions the authoritatively precious nature of art, by simultaneously handling these works with care while robbing them of the sanctity imposed upon them once they enter the marketplace and are institutionally acquired.
Taking this to an even further extreme, Gomez did the unthinkable for someone paid to protect art when he took a razor blade to a 1986 Gerhard Richter painting. In Richter, the artist sliced a minute paint chip from the edge of the piece. He then mounted it on a small canvas with a museum picture light positioned above it and presented it with an accompanying magnifying glass. This physical appropriation in turn becomes a study of the process of painting as the viewer is forced to examine and contemplate the chip’s own history found in its layers, as well as assessing its intrinsic value in contrast to the value which we ascribe to it.
In a more literal fashion, Gomez represents his fascination with transcendentalism versus the doctrines of art in Vehicle for Transcendence, a painting that recreates a National Geographic-style image of the Space Shuttle’s cockpit. While flexing his painting skills in this representational work, he uses genre painting as the subject, although the painting’s content references man’s desire to circumvent his own limitations. Conscientious of its source, the work is a spaced diptych, with the gap accounting for the missing information in the margin of the magazine the image was taken from.
The history of space exploration is a common theme in Gomez's practice and he uses it as a means for discussing the history of art. In the series Saturn’s Rings, the artist interprets satellite images of this planetary phenomenon as soft-edged, blurred arcs. The rings are presented chromatically in some pieces and in terms of value in others, as there is no definitive means by which we can visually attest to the appearance of these bands of nebulous materials and gases. Gomez has likens the rings to Barnett Newman paintings, and he reads them as vertical abstractions.
The chimpanzee, man’s closest genetic relative, NASA’s first passenger and the first hominid in space, appears frequently in Gomez’ work as a counterpoint to the discussion of linear relationships in art. Missionary Position depicts the Bonobo chimpanzee, which is characterized by the uniqueness of its sexual social behavior in the animal kingdom, paralleled only by that of humans. A smallish work at 30 x 40 inches, it is meant to be viewed on the floor, propped against the wall instead of hung. This forces the viewer to enter into a crouched position in order to see the painting, thus mirroring the positions of the monkeys on display.
This kind of forced, yet playful, physical engagement of the viewer is replicated again in one of Gomez’s projects, GOCA (Gallery of Contemporary Art), which furthers the artist’s investigation of institutional structures. In 2004, Gomez launched GOCA, an ongoing, series of exhibitions from within a standard-sized suitcase. As a fully functioning venue for curated group and solo shows, complete with catalogs, its own permanent collection, gift store and website, the viewer must hunch over to view the miniature works on display, thus succumbing to the scale that Gomez has mandated. Again, we find the artist questioning the policies of production - who is art being made for and how is it influenced by its ultimate public destination?
Through his experiences working in the backroom of a museum, Gomez saw art from the inside out and chose to utilize his observations as subject matter. Combining this with his formal training, he has structured a complex practice that continues to comment on the elaborate relationships between the function, form, setting, and support systems of art.
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