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ART REVIEW
bv JENNIFER SCHULTZ
THE WAY WE WERE
With his latest series of black-and-white pho
tographs, Carl Martin articulately captures
ghostly scenes from a little-known landscape of
interiors. His eye for the unending tug-of-war
between organic and order records abstract
states of transient reality with precision, humor
and grace. The result is a body of work titled
“Systems of Organization," on view at the Flicker
Gallery inside the Flicker Theatre and Bar.
There are two aspects to this work. First are
the six images of common organizing systems
devoted to function, passed beyond utility into a
realm of complex commentary and framed. In
Martin's portfolio (available on request), another
14 images, including several decrepit interiors,
explore what he calls, "the transition point
before demolitionand after salvage." The indi
vidual images are untitled. Martin's work with
local construction and renovation firm D.O C.
Unlimited takes him into hardware stores, ware
houses and businesses that are relocating or
defunct. He ventures into abandoned spaces that
have functionally ceased to exist, where his
roving eye sees a gutted building as "visually
exciting, nostalgia-ridden" material to be inter
preted via the camera into contemporary par
lance. Happened-upon displays of once-useful
cultural artifacts turn up forgotten behind busy
cash registers and archaic storefronts alike. In
his behind-the-scenes world of secretive leftover
spaces, common things are imbued with narra
tive.
On the wall from left to right, find a stack of
conspicuously empty cubbies labeled with half-
familiar phrases. A clue to their prior purpose
appears in the next image: , overstuffed bins of LP
records in anonymous paper sleeves, gathering
dust in orderly compartments as they await res
urrection onto a vintage Wurlitzer, courtesy of
recently dismantled Ideal Amusement. Third,
plaster, paint-em'-yourself heads and faces
inhabit a pegboard at Clarke Paint, the funky
1970s gargoyles nesting bat-like. Then another
shelf of empty bins with labels by turns func
tional and funny, "female adapter, male adapter,
coupling;" a long series of drawers; and last, a
broad pegboard pierced randomly by wire display
hangers, sporting a few orphaned product tags.
The bins, drawers and pegboards are of the
knocked-together-by-hand variety. There's
nothing slick about their forms; just rough
materials modeled on a grid. These are basic
human attempts to consolidate a mass of mer
chandise into something manageable. That
desire to organize takes the form of a grid, but
take away the merchandise—or devalue it,
declare it irrelevant—and what you have left is
not just the skeletal organizing system itself,
but a sculptural installation one would never
take the time to build. It's art, disguised as junk,
exploring the relationship between the grid and
the organic.
"The overlay of time is really interesting to
me," says Martin, and indeed the perpetual use
fulness of these grids or systems is the main
source of their weathering. They are scoured by
decades of greasy hands, occasional relocation
and unrelenting attention, until one day, when
the displays are moved to a back room, or auc
tioned off liquidation-
style, and these func
tioning grids are frozen
beneath a patina of obso
lescence. What was used
is now inert. Time ceases
to affect the grid; it
becomes static like the
grid. We see the pegboard
or the bins for what they
were; the narrative is the
distance between us now
and the time/place
belonging to these
objects. Martin is not
commenting on entropy,
about how "things fall
apart;" rather, he has
found an insight within
the application of
forceful human ideas, and
the forms bom of these
ideas.
Another kind of sculp
tural installation is found
in the works depicting
abandoned offices and
storage rooms within larger buildings. These
images are cousins to the work of Gordon Matta-
Clark, a sculptor/installation artist who alters
condemned buildings to reveal their beauty and
history. Of course, Matta-Clark has often beer
arrested for his trouble, since city officials and
property owners are often more concerned with
insurance liability than with the aesthetic
insights the artist provides by sawing away huge
chunks of a structure. In Martin's photos, a two-
walled cubicle nestles against a corner, a bar
nacle of refuge, looking squat and half-dead in a
vastly gutted interior space. Architectural cues
in a doorframe or a window moulding indicate
an attention to detail grossly undervalued since
the early 1960s. One can imagine the sort of
grizzled old foreman who might have hidden
there with his morning coffee, or a beleaguered
secretary sheltered against a machine shop full
of grease monkeys. Now the only traces of their
humanity are a bit of wall here and a doorknob
there. Persons removed, context stripped away,
the box remains. The box is a symbol of control,
a symbol of the grid. Of course, it's also a pure
form, if not a lovely one, particularly in this
case.
But what is beautiful? What is valuable?
Quoting architect savant Rem Koolhaas, Martin
says, "Art needs to be shaken up at all costs. A
bluntness in work, in thinking about photog
raphy and architecture, is required." Carl Martin
examines these concepts with his own direct
style by revealing to us that which defines us. c
WHAT: "Systems of Organization/'
photos by Carl Martin
WHERE: Flicker Gallery, 546-0039
WHEN: Through mid-August
HOW MUCH: FREE!
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