Our Most Useful Occupation

By Clay Matlin

It is unclear what sort of career Al Taylor might have had had he not died of lung cancer in 1999. As it stands now he has drifted into one of those odd nether regions of respected but not particularly well-known artists. While many of his contemporaries have gone on to substantial fame and wealth, Taylor’s oeuvre, represented by a dense and complicated body of work that is often referred to as “whimsical” or “charming” has been left out of the canon. While these are apt adjectives, they are also derisive. Taylor’s is an abstruse art, at once dense and difficult, but also humorous and remarkably full of life—and it is for this reason that the art is so moving.

Therefore, we should look at Pass the Peas and Can Studys, Taylor’s recent exhibition at David Zwirner—the gallery that represents Taylor’s estate—as a prime example of the complexity of his art. Made up of two distinct bodies of work, Pass the Peas and Can Studys succeeds because it reveals to us the very important connection between drawing and sculpture in Taylor’s art. We cannot, in fact, separate the two. Pass the Peas, from 1991–92, is a series of tubular sculptures made of hula-hoops, garden hoses, and plastic-coated cables, formed into coils and loops. They sit on the floor, are attached to the wall, or hang from the ceiling. Small, recycled plastic bottle rings are glued at specific intervals to the sculptures to give a sense of “balancing.” Can Studys, 1993, continues what the gallery calls Taylor’s “fascination with circles.” Here, Taylor created wall-mounted constructions out of bare tin cans, wood, hot-rolled steel bands, and strips of wire. These sculptures have a ramshackle quality about them, less a physicality than an ephemerality. They cast shadows against the wall, like drawings created by sculptures, reminiscent of Richard Tuttle’s wire drawings from the early 1970s.

As with much of Taylor’s work, a series of drawings not only mimic, but expand upon the sculptures, giving each medium more substance. Some of the drawings are quite beautiful; in particular, there is an elegant simplicity to his Pass the Peas drawings absent from much of those in Can Studys. There are, however, moments of real humor in the Can Studys series, especially the drawings in which he labels what kind of cans he used. For example, Taylor made sure to mark down that one was “expensive cat food.”

And yet Pass the Peas and Can Studys, his third solo exhibition with Zwirner, isn’t his best show. Indeed, it pales in comparison to 2010’s Rim Jobs and Sideffects. Pass the Peas and Can Studys was overhung and (there are thirty-seven pieces taking up the entire space of Zwirner’s second-market gallery) and felt crowded and in need of a more restrained eye—perhaps a consequence of the artist’s absence from the installation. This is not to say, however, that the exhibition was a failure.  Taylor does not disappoint. Even the weakest of work here contains a power most art does not. There is a gentleness to Taylor’s touch reminiscent of his beginnings as a painter, a history that cannot be ignored. He switched to sculpture and drawing upon returning from a trip to Africa in 1980. Finding himself too broke to buy canvas, he was inspired by the memory of children he had seen in Africa making toys from the debris that littered the street. Taylor never went back to painting. Yet he never really became a sculptor either. The rigidity of categories does disservice to him. He was no dilettante making sculptures one moment, drawings the next, but never finding something to satisfy him. Rather, sculpture and drawing as Taylor approached them were one. Each complimented and informed the other. It is impossible to know which came first in his process. Yes, we could look at dates, but that proves nothing about the origin of their creation.  They so clearly speak to each other in a language personal to what Taylor made. For this very reason, the order of his process is difficult to penetrate.

Yet this matters little, for it is this intensely personal quality, this Taylorness, that imbues the art with so much life. There are no other Al Taylors. His was a daring originality, one invested not in those metaphysical or moral issues that can so easily trap artists. Nor was Taylor overly pleased with himself as might very well be the danger with work like this. One never gets the sense he is laughing at the viewer or condescending. Taylor might be smiling to himself, it might be a wry smile, but the smile is gentle and open. No cheap or trite meaning awaits us.  There may even be no meaning beyond the investigation of the material itself: joy in the act of making. Indeed, as the pragmatist John Dewey wrote in Art as Experience, “any authentic artist will avoid material that has previously been esthetically exploited to the full and will seek out material in which his capacity for individual vision and rendering can have free play.” Dewey was not writing about playfulness or whimsy here, not childlike playing. Instead, Dewey was referring to imagination having the freedom and capacity to see and feel things as “they compose an integral whole.” What he called the “large and generous blending of interests at the point where the mind comes into contact with the world.” Taylor’s interests were, if nothing else, large and generous. His mind did come into contact with the world; his sculptures and drawings are proof of this. That they are rough, that they look simple, perhaps even naïve, belies their technical mastery. We are hoodwinked by their very simplicity, tricked into thinking we could do this.

Perhaps we could. Which is to say, perhaps we could make an object approximating an Al Taylor in the same way an art forger makes a painting approximating a Jackson Pollock. People believed they could make Picassos once too, just as it was thought there was nothing to Abstract Expressionism but fields of color and maybe some lines. The lack of clear subject matter somehow served as both the sign and signifier of lack of artistic talent. History has borne out as fools those who felt this way. Were we to make an Al Taylor, the crucial difference is that our object would lack the very generosity that fills all of Taylor’s creations. This is, of course, the great irony of mimesis, as the mimetic object is always a lesser thing. It approximates the thing yet never gets at what makes it special in the first place—something is always amiss. Now, all of this might not matter. An object is an object, though when dealing with an artist as particular and idiosyncratic as Taylor, it is the magic, as Ernst Fischer called it, which emanates from the objects we encounter that makes them art. With Taylor the intimacy of the parts and how they relate to the whole is everything. His work, to return to Dewey, is, in and of itself, a completed act, because “the act itself is exactly what it is because of how it is done.”

We find Taylor, then, in that most interesting of situations, the artist who is not hemmed in by some theory or bland morality. The things he made are merely things, objects of creation, nothing more. But I use the word “merely” with the utmost respect because it is unfair of us to ask art to be something transcendent. So often we expect art to be bigger than the world we inhabit. Art must alert us to some profound truth. We think of Goya and Géricault. We want grand visions. So we run to artists who offer themselves in this way, who tell us they will open our eyes (I am thinking here of the repugnant Thomas Hirschhorn). We must be wary of false idols, they come laden with duct tape and cardboard, but neither can patch the holes in this world forever. Al Taylor understood that to merely make an object was not to engage in some sort of lesser act. Courageous and tragic thinkers, like Hölderlin and Novalis, knew that sometimes objects are enough to help us navigate our way through the wilds of this world, that they allow us to discover ourselves. We can root ourselves in relation to the things we encounter. There is truth in objects, just as there is truth in painting. The inherent physicality of the objects’ existence alerts us to our own. Never do we get the sense with Taylor that art was some moralizing labor, a clarion call to social angst. Instead we find him at play, his art fantastically alive.

I am reminded of George Santayana who, like Dewey, wanted to take art out of the temple and bring it into the everyday. Santayana sought not to remove aesthetics from the idealist longings of the Platonists. He believed the poetry of Plato’s language and ideas really does allow us to understand our experience of art, what he called “the incommunicable and illusive excellence.” Nevertheless, Santayana did want to increase our knowledge of the beautiful. His goal was to know how we become sensitive to, and come to, value beauty. The cultivation of our sensibility, if we were not already too cultivated, Santayana would leave to the poets. When I think about Al Taylor I think about the process of becoming sensitive to art and the beautiful, of knowing and placing value on beauty. It may not be the immediately available beauty we accord to a Cézanne or Rodin, but it is a beauty nonetheless.

Al Taylor’s very importance is that for all the art in the world that we see and think we could never draw that well or form steel with such facility, Taylor’s work presents us with a sense of ease and life. “We no longer mean by work all that is done usefully, but only what is done unwillingly and by the spur of necessity,” Santayana wrote. “By play we are designating, no longer what is done fruitlessly, but whatever is done spontaneously and for its own sake, whether it have or not an ulterior utility. Play, in this sense, may be our most useful occupation.” This is where we find Taylor: the art is spontaneous and alive. Those strange drawings and sculptures were not done fruitlessly or for cultivation. They were made merely for the act of making. Taylor played. He played neither out of whimsy, nor quirkiness. He played because, as Santayana rightly pointed out over a century ago, play is our most useful occupation. It is a shame Al Taylor could not have played longer.

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