/ARCHIVE — 2010

/Tyler Hodgins — Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?
Project Room. September 3 - October 1, 2010
Reception at Stride Gallery
Opening reception Friday, September 3, 2010 at 8pm

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Exhibition Information
Artist Bio
Exhibition text
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/exhibition information

/WHO'S AFRAID OF THE RED, YELLOW, AND BLUE? is an installation that examines the ambivalent relationship I have with colour by creating an environment for the blending of primary colours through chance. A “cleaning” cycle is staged for the digestion and recreation of colour using sand and robot vacuum cleaners.

Barnett Newman’s paintings bearing the same title as my exhibition challenged the purist ideology that Piet Mondrian had assigned to the primary colours, returning them to their expressive role as colours. Newman’s challenge and my response create the framework around which this installation is built.

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/artist bio

/TYLER HODGINS lives with his family in Victoria, BC. He has exhibited widely, and his work appears in public and private collections in Canada and the United States. Hodgins works primarily in sculpture, focusing on themes of home, language, repetition, reproduction, and chance.

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/Exhibition Text

/AFRAID TO LOOK
JOHN LUNA                                                                                                            

The title for this essay refers both to Barnett Newman's 1966 painting Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? and to painter Philip Taaffe's 1985 riff on the same, entitled We Are Not Afraid. Taaffe's painting can be interpreted as a semantic maneuvering of Newman's colour field from its existential origin (itself a reaction to Mondrian's equivocal, geometric composing) to another outcome: frankly plastic, positively ornamental, but not less serious for surrendering abstract autonomy to decorative sociability. It is context that matters here, and the courage to shift the scale with which an iconic image is read from public to personal, even confessional, that I would like to address to Tyler Hodgins’ choice of motifs and materials.

What exactly is being confessed? The ambivalence (not to say fear) inherent in Hodgins' decision to offer his own colour blindness as an impetus to reading this work introduces several important questions. For one, the work potentially unites artist and viewer in perceptual uncertainty. As Hodgins' piece progresses, its colours are potentially compromised, though just how thoroughly and at what rate remain variables. This slippage echoes the character of colour blindness itself, in many of its varieties scarcely detectible without testing. The confession is also an act of faith: the degradation of colour in Hodgins' work sets in motion outcomes to which he himself would be challenged to bear reliable witness.

Hodgins’ personal history compounds this sense of confession. Raised in a Christian Science household, he may have regarded his imperfect vision as something to greet with silent circumspection; the mystery represented by a crayon whose label had worn away was a singularity of personal doubt. Later, in art school, it was secret by default 1. Colour in this anecdote stands for faith, but is defined by its absence within a continuum of undermining uncertainty—an endless, worldly dust.

Sculptor Gabriel Orozco’s defines just such a “confrontation of colour and dust,” referring to dust as both “a negative pigment” and a “totalitarian surface”:

Everything that gets dusty just becomes surface [...]. Painting tries to create an illusion, the illusion of volume, perspective or light. It promises a kind of enlightenment through colour [...] but dust is the contrary force 2.   

Orozco cites the special case of public sculptures, whose default state he sees as “abandoned to dust.” Hodgins’ practice engages an ongoing involvement with public sculpture projects, underscoring the monumentality of the column-like ‘zips’ of Who’s Afraid.... But they also resemble Pop quotations of Newman’s forms, or their revision as Minimalist sculpture. In extending the metaphor of dust as a ‘totalitarian’ leveler, we might conceive of the entropy of dust as relatable to other kinds of entropy, such as the inevitable debasement of monuments as enlightening commons to commercial or industrial spaces, kitsch or cliché 3.

The complexities of these quotations have already been mapped somewhat by artists like Taaffe and Peter Halley, who used similar strategies to relate Newman's zips to decorative/architectonic/technological schematics; not a purist platonic geometry, but, as Halley describes it, “the soft geometries of interstate highways, computers, and electronic entertainment” 4.

Likewise, Hodgins' vacuum cleaners have a precedent in Jeff Koons' readymade New Hoover Convertibles (1981-86). Thinking of Koons’ ‘vacuums’ or even Warhol’s ‘Brillo’ boxes, the metaphor seems obvious, that readymade culture is a killer hygiene, destroying all other seminal gestures of meaning. Halley writes that Koons' perfect vacuums propose a world of model realities, “a state of asepsis and weightlessness” 5. That Hodgins’ robot vacuums not only clean the sand but (through bumping the columns) trigger more spillage is important. They imagine the underside of the readymade's spiritualized sheen as a polluting of perception, a totalitarian leveling of the value of visible labour.

It is significant that invisible labour via institutional care completes the cycle of Hodgins’ work: behind-the-scenes, gallery workers are emptying the vacuum cleaners back into the column-tubes at each day's end. It should be said, though, that the work is not so much completed as protracted. The time it takes for hollow columns to retreat from their initial interactive vibrancy to become greyer, more obdurate things is impossible to measure, a collapsible eternity.

Ultimately what makes us ‘who’s afraid’ is a more subtle moral entropy, our own inability to track and discern with care over time. As Paul Valéry remarked, “It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity coincided with the increased aversion to sustained effort” 6. As every compulsive gambler knows, observing the operations of chance too closely for too long engenders a fatigue with the concept of destiny. Like the retinal fatigue that dismays Newman's painted zips with juddering afterimages, attempts to track the serial overlap of Hodgins' colours do not reveal their subject so much as dismay it, carrying our attraction further and further back toward an increasingly unstable instance of material cause. Like Newman at his most integral, Hodgins is interested in marking a human scale, albeit one in time rather than space.