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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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