An Artist's 'Exercise' In Tilting at Minimalism
By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, August 4, 2007; Page C02
Young artists have long pilloried their elders. For some contemporary artists, the ideologues of 1960s-era minimalism continue to play the role of disappointing forebears.
Today's artists see them with crystalline hindsight: They know that minimalism simply replaced an art of expression (Jackson Pollock, say) with an art of repression (Donald Judd, say).
In a complex and clever sidewalk performance and installation called "Exercise Machine," young German artist Stephan Schulz demonstrates that he's got minimalism's number.
Yet his work isn't a dressing-down; it's the smartest and most gentle-hearted impudence a young artist could summon. At Meat Market Gallery, videos of Schulz's sidewalk performances run alongside the objects he uses to make them in a show rich with humor and whimsy.
The performances go like this: Schulz dons a white jogging suit to which he attaches colored cables, wrist to ankle. When the artist moves, he sends data to a computer hooked up to five identical machines. Looking something like authoritarian robotic windmills, the machines all feature a fluorescent tube that rotates on a nearly eight-foot pole.
As the artist moves -- he favors a style of stilted marching that calls to mind a Monty Python sketch -- he resembles a calisthenics instructor leading five eager, if awkward, pupils.
The video of these public performances points to various comical facts of contemporary life -- from the artificiality of our exercise regimens to the blinders we wear on the streets (hardly a glance was cast by pedestrians making their way past Schulz's spectacle). And then, of course, there are the ghosts of the 1960s, which are everywhere.
Can an artist really use a fluorescent lamp without conjuring Dan Flavin? Here, Flavin's bulb installations come to life by their virtual attachment to Schulz's body. Forget about trying to erase the artist's hand, Schulz is saying, let's use the whole body (just as the artists of the 1970s did in their own messy reaction to minimalism). As Schulz's body softens the windmills' presence, we're prodded toward a conclusion: That the 1960s creative revolution was just another kind of fascism.
In Meat Market Gallery's rear room, District artist Reuben Breslar takes his own swipe at the annals of art history, though his focus is painting and, specifically, the tradition of illusionistic painting.
At Meat Market, Breslar riffs on precedents without repeating them. He traces blue lines into abstract shapes with sharp angles; the distorted geometries move across floor and wall or wall to ceiling as if the room were a single unified canvas. They send us on a chase to find a familiar figure while making the room look by turns much smaller and much larger than it actually is.
Further complicating matters of perception is Breslar's material. His lines are made with the blue tape used to mark off edges when painting a room. When you buy it at Home Depot, the tape is meant to keep paint from making a mark; here it is the mark.
