Review: Hard Cover

Jacob Kassay, Hard Cover. Car Hole Gallery

“I’ve always balked at writing anything because there’s this need that everyone seems to have for the conceptual or verbal validation of art which doesn’t interest me at all. Maybe I’m trying to get too specific about it. Specifically, my work just is what it is. To the extent that it’s successful, you can’t take it apart.” — Fred Sandback

On the back cover of the 100+ page catalogue for the exhibition Hard Cover at Car Hole Gallery (114 SE 12th) is a giant cross, two lines hastily drawn with a wide black marker that is running out of ink. These two lines serve as a kind of documentation for one of the two covers by artist Jacob Kassay (NY) of minimalist works by Fred Sandback that make up the show. And this work, executed in black yarn taped to the haggard concrete walls of this subterranean garage gallery, was the one that startled us and made us laugh because the only Sandback piece that I’ve seen in town, the only Sandback I know of in Portland is this very piece at the lumber room. Collector Sarah Miller-Meigs has a cobalt blue and orange (hope my memory serves) Sandback in her Pearl District space above the Elizabeth Leach Gallery…one piece of yarn is horizontal at about chest height, one of comparable length traces the line of the corner where the walls meet. In the cover that gallery director Sam Korman executed on behalf of Kassay, the vertical line nearly melts into the grey textured corner, aping the black cracks elsewhere in the walls. Though it’s really only about three miles away, this cover couldn’t be further from the original, aggressively announcing its means of existence via the torn scraps of duct tape that hold it to the wall. Though it’s lo-fi, it’s still fierce, like a Black Flag version of a Carpenters song. And I like it.

I should tell you that although I don’t recall the name of the Fred Sandback corner piece at the lumber room, the other cover at Hard Cover looks to be a cover of Sandback’s “Untitled (no. 48, Three Leaning Planes, from 133 Proposals for the Heiner Friedrich Gallery)”
(1969). The source piece, too, was executed in “black acrylic yarn” and, “Dimensions vary with each installation.”

Interestingly, some of Kassay’s previous works, including those for which he gessos the ground then sands it away, and even those he has silverplated, address the textures and below even the colors of the walls of Car Hole as much as anything.

Perhaps Kassay turned to a Sandback cover as a further reductive gesture.

What do we want to say about cover versions of art? It’s a short path from Duchamp eliminating representation by presenting the thing itself—a readymade (urinal, bike wheel)—to proto-pop artist Jasper Johns’ cast beer cans as an art thing representing the thing itself and Warhol’s flat image of the thing itself (soup can) to appropriators presenting images (or objects) of art images (or objects) as art. It’s a mobius strip. Or rather things fold in on themselves again and again until they can’t be worked, folded, any further and we viewers are bent into perceptually/intellectually odd positions (i.e. being able to see the back of one’s own neck where the cranium meets the spinal column).

This is the second time in a week or so that Elaine Sturtevant comes up in visual art discourse in Portland (the other was the tantalizing prospect of YU bringing Sturtevant to Portland for an exhibition), but I can’t resist going to the O.G. of appropriation of visual artworks (see also Mike Bidlo, Sherrie Levine, &c). The octogenarian Sturtevant has been doing reproductions or restagings or cover versions of art works by well-known artists for decades. I can’t help feeling that in part this kind of work is like that of the bard in a pre-literate society who recounts the epic poem again and again to maintain the collective memory of the heroic act(s). If my dear friend who knows a thing or two about contemporary art was not so familiar with Sandback’s work then yes, there is clear and present value in covering it as a way of pointing the viewer toward the original. But of course, the broadly accepted raison d’etre for this kind of work is that it critiques the notion of authorship and originality that apparently still requires critique. Sleeping dog. Lying. Kicked. Again. Remind me someday to tell you about how I think that the notion of taking Roland Barthes “Death of the Author” as a prescription, as an excuse to gaze unendingly into the barbershop mirror/mirror/mirror/mirror, is a misreading of the essay. And as Ron Silliman said of a cavalcade of poem works based on canonical literary texts (a related if not entirely analogous phenomenon), “Do we really need an EAVES OF ASS?” In other words, once covering has been covered, does more covering need covering?

The best thing, perhaps, about Hard Cover is the curatorial gesture of its 3/4-inch thick 8-1/2 x 11 catalogue held together by brass fasteners, the catalogue essay consisting of, it looks like, all of the Fred Sandback statements and interviews Sam Korman could find online. They are printed in the kind of jagged lines that occur when one copies and pastes web-based text into a word processor. As one who appreciates and critiques in equal measure the castles of words we build around works of art, this catalogue was made for me.