| Buzz Spector (2009) |
| Exhibition Catalog Essay: “Macyn Bolt: Recent Paintings,” |
| Kim Foster Gallery, New York, 2001 |
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| http://www.macynbolt.com/ |
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| Macyn Bolt, Chapter and Verse, 2003, installation photo, Kim Foster Gallery, NYC |
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| Some people say that art should be an instance of order |
| so that it will save them momentarily from the chaos |
| that they know is just around the corner. |
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John Cage, Silence |
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| Macyn Bolt is a collector of evidence, a cataloguer of experience, an investigator of life’s minutia and the details of its trivia. On one level, his art works are systematic arrays of specimens that display the infinite possibilities of surfaces and pictorial space. Within their rigorous, serial format, these playful-to-anxious pieces are samples of the banal and the exotic, the synthetic and the natural. Some surfaces are carefully crafted in shallow relief and then painted. Others are constructed of industrial materials like rubber, staples, nails, fragments of photographs, and iridescent Mylar. Still others use organic materials like bark, twigs and the shells of seeds. At times they are representational and illusionistic—scales, fluids, diagrams. At other times they are flat, textural fields or even physically drilled with holes. In Chapter and Verse, he brings these elements together in a large collection of taut, precise diptychs, each a cluster of tensions that link with the others into a whole wall of expanding comparisons and contrasts. |
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| But there is an improvisational character to his work that suggests an absence of absolutes. These are not permanent links. The diptychs can be rearranged, new ones added, others taken out. Each change has consequences—a simple alteration reverberates through the whole collection like a sudden shift in musical rhythm. It was Mozart, and now it’s techno pop. The set of works is a set of changing sensory events, sometimes light-hearted, sometimes disturbingly visceral. Their episodic specificity becomes a metaphor describing the complexity of experience. The syncopation of difference and similarity correlate to the way in which we think and make meaning. We look for principles, but everything is provisional. |
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| No collecting is without a narrative and no cataloging exists apart from a longing for order. So in these complex arrays of samples and evidence, Bolt constructs elaborate narratives of longing. In his incomplete and improvised systems, we are unsettled by our knowledge of the imperfect, the chaotic. In his serial displays of materiality, such as Chapter and Verse, we notice the insubstantial qualities of our experiences and the inadequacies of our representations. We are attempting to make meaning, to find the system, and to establish order. Even the solid presence of a building, as in Rotary, is questioned, is analytically collapsed in a rigorous, obsessive examination. The systematic display of every window in the building makes the whole structure recede in a subtle spiral of diminishing perspective. |
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| Although both Rotary and Chapter and Verse are multi-paneled, open-ended series of works, they succeed in conveying this content both as individual pieces and as a series, a kind of multiple object. The diptychs, on a smaller scale, do what the entire grid of panels does. They surprise, shock, seduce and baffle us. Each version of Rotary I-IV is a self-contained work, but when seen in a sequence, the individual gridded panels depict a moving spiral or, hung in closer proximity, an oscillation, a wave. The multiple nature of both projects amplifies the content that is already at work in the individual pieces. |
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| But in an assembled series like Chapter and Verse, issues of categorization naturally become central to the work’s content. Here, recent category theory, primarily from cognitive psychology and linguistics, has something to offer in the understanding of Bolt’s work. Classical or Aristotelian category theory thinks of categories as having clear boundaries, something is either in the category or it isn’t. And categories are established through a combination of necessary and sufficient features—certain features are necessary for an object to be a member of the category, and if an object has those features, then it is, by definition, a member. In classical theory, these features are binary, an object either has them or it doesn’t. And finally, in this classical theory, a category consists of equal members. |
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| Now look at Bolt’s Chapter and Verse. The format of this work, the standardized diptych, at first seems like one of those defining features of classical category theory. But this format is merely a kind of convenient container. It is a way of naming them as a category. But where are the boundaries to decide what is in the category or what is not? There are no necessary features in this collection. Instead the collection is structured by overlapping and crisscrossing networks of similarities, the same kinds of complicated relationships that Wittgenstein noticed about the category we call “games.” Our search for order in this collection is a search for a prototype that can describe them all, some being better examples of it than others. Bolt creates an evolving, inclusive category where we get caught up in the network of similarities and differences, where some objects share a feature with some objects, other objects share other features, and no features are common to them all. |
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| And this suggests another important issue in Bolt’s recent work: the rejection of hierarchies. To Bolt, no material is more important than any other material; no image or type of representation is more important than any other. The consistent size and format of the pieces reinforce this resistance to hierarchy. There are contrasts of loud and soft, of aggression and reticence; some works become foils for others, but no works become more important than any others. In fact, in each of the various installations of Chapter and Verse, some sense of unity, completion, closure is just around the corner. |
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| © 2001 Timothy van Laar |
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