Tom Burckhardt, An Unique Artist in a World of Copies

Since 1992, when Tom Burckhardt started exhibiting his artwork, he has made many sturdy and numerous our bodies of labor, every of which has been true to the supplies he makes use of. His installations embrace “FULL STOP” (2005–6), a meticulously created homage and elegy to the postwar artist’s studio, utilizing solely black paint, cardboard, wooden, and sizzling glue. The walk-through surroundings included all of the paraphernalia sometimes present in an artist’s studio, usually with artwork historic references: Edward Hopper’s potbellied range; Jackson Pollock’s footwear; Jasper Johns’s Savarin can. In 2008, Burckhardt used cardboard and paint to make SLUMP, an exhibition composed solely of curved work resting on trompe l’œil paint cans, slumped in opposition to the wall. 

Whereas many different artists have made total careers by rejecting portray or by filling a grid with coloration, Burckhardt has had a extra difficult and nuanced response to artwork historical past and its retelling. In “FULL STOP,” surrounded by all of the issues one must make artwork, from paint cans and tubes to saws and hammers to artwork books organized on cabinets, he positioned a clean canvas on an easel within the middle of the room, primarily asking: The place do I am going from right here? 

Since that breakthrough physique of labor, Burckhardt has made summary work on molded plastic helps with uneven surfaces and observational work based mostly on totally different indicators he’s seen in rural Maine. All through all of the shifts and turns he has taken, he has remained true to the humbleness of his supplies. By refusing to protect his objects in bronze or another everlasting materials, he has rigorously pushed again in opposition to the excessive modernist superb of oil paint on canvas, whereas concurrently criticizing the postmodern celebration of glitzy materiality and high-end replication of atypical issues. Rejecting each the romantic and entrepreneurial view of the artist, the bohemian and the company, he has outlined a generative place that has by no means been absolutely acknowledged. And, maybe to additional confound the viewer, he has additionally made stunning summary work on canvas. 

Pondering of Burckhardt’s our bodies of labor, I’m reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s helpful perception into productiveness:

A silly consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a terrific soul has little to do. He might as nicely concern himself together with his shadow on the wall. Converse what you suppose now in laborious phrases, and tomorrow communicate what tomorrow thinks in laborious phrases once more, although it contradicts every thing you stated at present. — “Ah, so that you shall make sure you be misunderstood” — Is it so dangerous to be misunderstood? 

For practically 35 years, Burckhardt has labored with outdated and discarded books, utilizing the within pages for drawings. An admittedly frugal artist, he determined to do one thing with the ebook covers. The lingua franca of self assist and historical past books is one focus of the exhibition Tom Burckhardt: How We Obtained Into It at Excessive Midday Gallery, however not the one one. In line with the press launch, “353 collaged discovered ebook pages” are put in alongside the gallery’s three partitions, on which Burckhardt has “made a deconstructed grid” in purple and blue chalk, a la Sol LeWitt. It’s each an set up and an environment friendly technique to show so many works within the gallery’s lengthy, slim house. 

Working with ink and collage, Burckhardt preserves the phrases he has discovered, and provides a patterned cutout summary form in opposition to a gradient floor. Directly dramatic and withholding, humorous and absurd, unsettling and apocalyptic, the phrases are “poetic” in each an elusive and kitschy sense: “NUPTIAL FLIGHT OF NEW SPERM CELLS”; “I PASSED AS A TEENAGER”; “TO THOSE WHO WILL KEEP THE STAUNCH HEART OF AMERICA ALIVE”; “THOSE WHO WERE NOT BORN THERE.”

I like the ambiguous, bizarre, disturbing, nutty, and tender titles and phrases that Burckhardt has introduced into his paintings. It was inconceivable to guess the context of some phrases, and attempting to take action turns into a part of the viewer’s aesthetic engagement with the items. The constants working via the entire artist’s work are that he’s not a literalist, he doesn’t make huge claims for his artwork, he doesn’t coax the viewer in any course, and he rejects using costly supplies and fabrication prices. 

Burckhardt has regularly resisted making artworks as merchandise, whereas exploring totally different supplies. He’s a conceptual artist who has by no means outlined himself as one as a result of he is aware of the label is limiting. In actual fact, it occurred to me that Burckhardt is implicitly skeptical of the claims of an authentic conceptual artist, Mel Bochner. Over the previous 30 years, Burckhardt has by no means come off as superior to his viewers, nor developed a follow geared towards flabby, consumer-oriented manufacturing. Every work in How We Obtained Into It is an authentic. 

Tom Burckhardt: How We Obtained Into It continues at Excessive Midday Gallery (124 Forsyth Avenue, Decrease East Facet, Manhattan) via August 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.