Garth Weiser's "Wall Painting" (Daniel McGrath)
A simultaneous deluge of both paint and rain arrived right on cue as the gallery season began in St Louis this weekend. White Flag Project’s initial public offering is a refreshingly ambitious presentation of Garth Weiser’s mural works. The installation itself embodies something of the spirit of this rainy season—washing away memories of a hot summer and ushering in the fall. His blue, black and white Wall Painting (57x10) covers the vast interior west wall of the project space, while the large Untitled (painted with water soluble tempera on a vinyl banner), hangs outside the building. Toward the rear of the exhibition, a grid of pages torn from a special edition book link together to form a disposable Xerox-like reproduction of his 2008 painting, I Wouldn’t Have Worn Mascara If I Knew I was Going To Take a Trip Down Memory Lane. Weiser’s three works raise pertinent questions about how we see abstraction as a variety of fixed, conflicting and dated historical painting styles and, without sentimentality, suggests possible ways for those efforts to live on, at least for a while, in the form of a site-specific installation.
The grand impermanence of Wall Painting (fated to be sanded and overpainted for the next exhibition) and the banner (whose tempera pigments will wash away over the course of the exhibition) speak of the transience of the wider historical style cultures of Modernist painting. Where did all the debates and rivalries of the high Modernists go to in our disposable, celebrity-obsessed culture? What happened to Abstract Expressionism, post-painterly abstraction, and Op-art? Greenberg and Rosenberg, what was their beef with each other? Mainly, the paintings were safely deposited into museums or the disputes folded away in critical theory books (think here of Weiser’s book art: I Wouldn’t Have Worn Mascara…) and were subsequently ignored by most practicing contemporary artists. As such, Wall Painting, which cannot be sold like a canvas, acts a "meta" comment on virtually obsolete strands of Modernist abstraction. The expressive styling of the Pollock-like dribbles and the stark geometry of Bridget Riley-esque stripes optically negate one another, as skeins of thrown paint are transfixed in a field of thick creases of taped-off paint. Here, Weiser’s synthesis does something unexpected: the "gestural" marks become oddly mechanical as the "geometric" stripes take on a curious natural rippling motion. Wall Painting’s optical game, played out between Pollock and Riley, constitutes an intelligent revision of categories of stereotypical incompatibility. The coming fall rain will begin to mark time over the surface of the exterior banner. As an integral part of the most impressive element of the exhibition, the weathering of Untitled will form a visual residue of meteorological forces. These bleeding and running rivulets of paint will look more expressive than the hard-edge geometry of the human painted stripes—but they will be as objectively impersonal as an accountant’s Excel spreadsheet. The painstaking effort spent on the precise, crisp blue design of the banner come, in the end, to nothing. The Untitled banner develops the questions raised by Wall Painting about the false dichotomy between analytical and expressive styles commonly attributed to abstract paintings and without fuss slips into the territory of ontological enquiry.
See Garth Weiser through October 23. White Flag Projects is located at 4568 Manchester; for more information, call 314-531-3442 or go to whiteflagprojects.org.
