Since 1992, when Tom Burckhardt began exhibiting his art, he has produced many strong and diverse works, each faithful to the materials he uses. Its facilities includeCOMPLETE STOP(2005–6), a meticulously created homage and elegy at the artist’s post-war studio, using only black paint, cardboard, wood, and hot glue. The walk-through environment included all the paraphernalia typically found in an artist’s studio, often with art historical references: Edward Hopper’s pot-bellied stove; Jackson Pollock’s shoes; Jasper Johns Savarin box. In 2008, Burckhardt used cardboard and paint to make MARASMICan exhibition composed entirely of curved paintings resting on trompe l’oeil paint cans, slumped against the wall.
While many other artists have made entire careers rejecting paint or filling a grid with color, Burckhardt had a more complicated and nuanced response to art history and its narrative. In “FULL STOP,” surrounded by everything one needs to make art, from cans and tubes of paint to saws and hammers to art books laid out on shelves, he placed a blank canvas on an easel in the center of the room, essentially asking: Where do I go from here?
Since this groundbreaking work, Burckhardt has produced abstract paintings on molded plastic supports with uneven surfaces and observational paintings based on various signs he saw in rural Maine. Throughout all the changes and turns it has taken, it has remained true to the humility of its materials. By refusing to keep his objects in bronze or another permanent material, he rigorously rejected the modernist ideal of oil paint on canvas, while simultaneously criticizing the postmodern celebration of glitzy materiality and the high-end reproduction of ordinary things. Rejecting both the romantic and entrepreneurial vision of the artist, bohemian and corporate, he defined a generative position that has never been fully recognized. And, perhaps to further confuse the viewer, he also made beautiful abstract paintings on canvas.
Thinking of Burckhardt’s bodies of work, I recall Ralph Waldo Emerson’s helpful insight into productivity:
Insane coherence is the hobgoblin of small minds, adored by petty statesmen, philosophers and theologians. With constancy, a great soul has little to do. He may as well be preoccupied with his shadow on the wall. Say what you think now with harsh words, and tomorrow say what tomorrow thinks with harsh words again, even if it contradicts everything you said today. — “Ah, so you will be sure to be misunderstood” — Is it so bad to be misunderstood?
For nearly 35 years, Burckhardt worked with old and discarded books, using the inside pages for drawings. An admittedly frugal artist, he decided to do something with book covers. The lingua franca of self-help and history books is one of the highlights of the exhibition Tom Burckhardt: How We Got Here at the High Noon Gallery, but not the only one. According to the press release, “353 glued found book pages” are installed along the gallery’s three walls, on which Burckhardt has “made a deconstructed grid” in red and blue chalk, a la Sol LeWitt. It is both an installation and an efficient way to exhibit so many works in the long and narrow space of the gallery.
Working with ink and collage, Burckhardt preserves the words he found and adds an abstract patterned cut-out form on a gradient background. Simultaneously dramatic and restrained, funny and absurd, disturbing and apocalyptic, the phrases are “poetic” in a sense that is both elusive and kitsch: “NUPTIALS FLIGHT OF NEW SPERMS”; “I PASS AS A TEENAGER”; “TO THOSE WHO WILL KEEP AMERICA’S HEART ALIVE”; “THOSE WHO WERE NOT BORN IN IT.”
I like the ambiguous, strange, disturbing, crazy and tender titles and phrases that Burckhardt introduced into his works. It was impossible to guess the context of certain phrases, and trying to do so is part of the viewer’s aesthetic engagement with the pieces. The constants that run through all of the artist’s work are that he is not a literalist, that he does not make great claims for his art, that he does not nudge the viewer in any direction, and that he rejects the use of expensive materials and manufacturing costs.
Burckhardt continually resisted making works of art as products, while exploring different materials. He is a conceptual artist who has never defined himself as such because he knows that the label is limiting. In fact, it occurred to me that Burckhardt is implicitly skeptical of the claims of an original concept artist, Mel Bochner. Over the past 30 years, Burckhardt has never shown himself to be superior to his viewers, nor developed a practice geared towards soft, consumer-oriented production. Every job in How we got here is an original.
Tom Burckhardt: How We Got Here continues at the High Noon Gallery (124 Forsyth Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through August 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
