LAYERS OF RE-ITERATION (McCormick & Brown)
Exhibition essay by Chris Lanier
The romantic (or insufferable) image of the solitary artist – wrestling with the world and aesthetics, alone in their studio – maintains such potency that it obscures how communal and social artists tend to be, out of the daydream and in the real world. A tremendous amount of artistic activity is fed and vitalized through all sort of associations – arranged at residencies, technical cooperatives organized around ungainly and expensive equipment, shared studio space in converted industrial buildings – not to mention the social circuit of unofficially ordained restaurants, bars and cafes. And then there are the educational institutions, miniature polities where reciprocal relationships are built into the day-to-day infrastructure. Of course, there is the official back-and-forth between teacher and student, but iterating out from that, there is a continual reconfiguration of artistic interchange, where artists become collaborators, sounding-boards, fellow-travelers, inspirations, co-conspirators, cautionary examples, comrades-in-arms – and on and on. Both Jim McCormick and Galen Brown were deeply plugged into these types of communitarian associations, and they even founded some along the way. This show is a testament to how effective they both were as sociable artists – not just making art, but making community.
You’ll see, in the work the participating artists made in response to McCormick and Brown, some stylistic and technical throughlines – but those aesthetic maneuvers are only a narrow part of the story. Legacies of style are relatively easy to trace and quantify, but the immaterial legacies are more profound. You’ll hear, in the remarks of the participating artists, that both McCormick and Brown were unstintingly generous, perceptive, and encouraging. I’m not going to downplay the significance of the kinds of techniques – both mechanical and visionary – that artists have been passing down to their succeeding generations for millennia. But generosity, perceptivity, and encouragement – those things go to the root of artistic sustenance. It’s the stuff that doesn’t show up on the canvas – but which helps make sure that something shows up on the canvas.
From here, this essay attempts give a sense of the concerns of McCormick and Brown’s practices, and to sketch in some zones where their approaches overlapped.
Jim McCormick
Among other things, Jim McCormick was a poet of the grid. That may sound narrow and specialized, but in fact the reach of the grid is nearly boundless (or more precisely, it’s able to absorb nearly everything into its bounds). It is a ubiquitous superstructure in contemporary art and in contemporary visual culture in general. The grid can be seen from airplane windows in city blocks and cropland, we move within its confines when we navigate the buildings we occupy, and it undergirds our digital experiences – flickering onscreen when we toggle between layer views on Google Maps, guiding the organization of text and image in website CSS divs, and disguising itself as the fundamental unit of brightness and color – the squared-off edges of the LCD pixels mollified by the color-mixing that occurs in the traverse between projected light and the retina. In modernist and post-modernist art, the grid might not be quite as fundamental a pictorial element as color and line, but it is nearly so – and nearly as adaptable as a vehicle, in its modulations, toward expressive ends. Josef Albers uses the grid to give his chromatic nested palette boxes an aura of scientific experimentation; Agnes Martin uses the grid as a spare vehicle for reverie, aligning it at first (as she put it) with “the innocence of trees”; Mark Bradford sometimes uses the grid like a pliable net, pushed and pulled by the local gravities of tone and hue.
How does McCormick use the grid? For him, it remains very much tied to its utilitarian functions in surveying and mapping. He’s very explicit about this, often incorporating surveyor’s tools into his work, returning again and again to tripod-mounted surveying instruments as an audience surrogate – levels, theodolites, transits. The “transit” features a small telescope, used to measure elevation changes across a line. There’s poetry in the name – while rooted on its base, “transit” suggests movement – once you put your eye to the eyepiece, you’re decorporealized, your vision collapsing space, as if you could arrive somewhere just by looking there. And perhaps that’s a way to typify McCormick’s technique: arrival-by-looking.
In his prints that combine delineated grids and surveying instruments (his Range Finder Suite series), a square grid seen from above provides the main anchor, with the surveying instruments appearing variously in front of and behind the grids, seen from the side or seen from above. Pieces of topographical maps cut through the squares, flowing like rivers or wounds. The scale of the tripods in relation to the maps makes them seem massive – they remind me of the Martian tripods in The War of the Worlds, come to invade and colonize the earth, eventually left to stand as cyclopean statues after their Martian pilots are killed by earthly germs (“They glittered now, harmless tripod towers of shining metal, in the brightness of the rising sun”). In further work using the top-down view of a square grid, McCormick turned the grid-boxes into windows that either reveal or redact what is beyond them – through them we may see a portion of landscape observed from the ground or seen from an aerial perspective, viewpoints in perpendicular opposition to each other, but harmonized by the regulating frames. These prints and collages are an instance of technique becoming subject – in the way that there are films about film, and paintings about painting, here we find organizing about organizing. And the grid becomes a non-linear mechanism for editing space.
These operations are very much tied to the Nevada landscape, the way its expanses and visual ambiguities demand organization, lest we get lost in undifferentiated openness. Vista, a true turning-point work for him, was originally staged at the Shepard Gallery at UNR in 1989. McCormick filled the gallery with white squares (on which were printed one-inch grids), arranged across the gallery floor with a one-inch gap between them. In some areas the squares were stacked on top of each other, up to five squares deep, suggesting an undulating terrain. A bench was placed at one end, and transits were set standing along this edge of audience access. The walls of the gallery were painted black, and the lights were dimmed, so that this horizontally-and-vertically layered landscape could project the luminance of early dawn or late dusk. In its radical spareness, it was less a depiction of landscape than a recapitulation – and a frontal encounter with desert emptiness.
William Fox’s chapter on McCormick in his survey of eight Nevada artists – which remains the most piercing consideration of McCormicks’ work – is titled “The Topographical Mind.” But the overarching title of the book is directly tuned to McCormick’s method: “Mapping the Empty.” Emptiness, on the face of the earth, is a fiction – a psychological effect of space, and not a physical reality. In the sparsest landscape, there is always the play of air, light, dust, moisture, energy – of weather, however transparent to the eye.
That emptiness of the desert is less a call for delineation or documentation, than a call to fill that space up in some way. Vista was a direct answer to that call.
Vista also had an afterlife, sprung from the gallery into the outdoors, in McCormick’s land-art iteration of this white tile arrangement. Titled Vista Revisited, it was executed as a guest artist commission for Burning Man in 1992 (back then, about 600 people attended the event – a far cry from its nomadic population of 70,000 or so nowadays). Staged on the flat of the Black Rock Desert, 1,000 tiles were laid out in a thin cross or X – two arrow-straight roads with one intersection. Described as a “compass,” the north-south road pointed to the sculpture of that year’s Man, which stood 40 feet tall. But in that airy playa, the wayfinding element of the piece strikes me as fundamentally contingent. Direction, at its outer limits, can become unglued from destination. The only way to understand emptiness is to move through it. Five years after the installation of Vista Revisted, the land speed record would be set on that playa – the Thrust SuperSonic Car, outfitted with two jet engines, broke the sound barrier and achieved the speed of 763 miles per hour – a feat that has yet to be surpassed, and which will likely never be attempted again at that spot, because lack of rainfall and increased human activity on the playa has rendered the land surface less platonically smooth. The car of course traveled in a straight line. I recognize it as fanciful, but to me Vista Revisited and the Thrust SuperSonic Car are connected. They are both vehicles – one running on perception, the other on wheels – where velocity itself functions as destination.
The Pivot
In pivoting from McCormick to Galen Brown, I want to make brief notes on some points of contact between their work. How much of it is cross-fertilization, and how much parallel evolution, I can’t be sure – regardless, there’s a fruitful dynamic when their work is brought together. Both of them are compelled to flatten the picture plane – treating it as a surface, rather than a window. Brown, too, seems preoccupied by the grid – though it’s looser, less precise an instrument, in his hands. Both sometimes utilize additive processes that start at a center, and then work their way outward. And for both, the landscape seems to provoke flights of geometry.
I’m being too facile here, but in broad strokes it seems to me that McCormick uses these elements to investigate and understand space, and Brown uses them to investigate and understand time.
Galen Brown
Brown’s most striking work, due partly to the scale, are his giant concentric ring drawings, done in pencil on hundreds of rectilinear matboards, stuck together in a kind of cellular mass. The matboard grid provides a material structure, but it has been disregulated here – overlapping, not lined up in fastidious equalized rows, and then further pacified by the round ripples of overlaid graphite. The ripples have the uniformity of ripples made in water, but the size and stasis suggest the truncated stump of a sequoia or redwood. They bring to mind the crucial Muir Woods scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” where the two main characters, Scottie and Madeleine, look at the displayed cross-section of a felled tree. The cross-section is slightly taller than they are, and certain rings have been traced in white and labeled, to coordinate them with historical events (“1066, The Battle of Hastings,” “1215 the Magna Carta Signed,” “1776 The Declaration of Independence”). Madeleine, seemingly possessed by the spirit of her long-dead ancestor, Carlotta, uses two black-gloved fingers to mark out an approximation of Carlotta’s birth and death dates on the dead record of the tree. Madeleine talks, as if with Carlotta’s voice, to the tree itself: “Here I was born… there I died. It was only a moment for you. You took no notice."
Brown’s piece Sine Cere is somewhat larger than that redwood prop, and while the time scales between origin and outer compass aren’t quite as extended, the weight of time and mortality are still an integral part of its substance. He worked on it for over 25 years, adding matboard around its perimeter as the concentric circles expanded, so that it grew as it aged (mimicking the annual centrifugal expansion of a tree). In its physical scale, its timescale, its process of accretion, and in the thrust of its energy – working its way out from the center – it recalls Jay Defeo’s iconic feat of abstract painting-cum-sculpture, The Rose. That piece – executed over the course of a relatively modest eight years, eventually accruing nearly a ton of paint on its surface – was, in Defeo’s accounting, a genuine attempt to apprehend the growth and entwinement of rose petals – their vegetal exhalation of form. But the finished piece seems more sudden – not an unfurling but an explosion, a burst, shooting off linear rays of force across the picture-plane (or, given the pigment’s depth of eleven inches, the picture-terrain). By contrast, Sine Cere is measured, calm, stately – something that happens by degrees. It describes, perhaps, a point of impact absorbed and distributed by a medium that can accommodate and balance its force. That medium could be time itself – conciliator of all eruptions and events.
In Brown’s Small Waves series, the grid appears again, more in sync with McCormick’s deployment of it – using its precision, its imposition of order. Each of the drawings is made at the same size, and then displayed in grid format. As in the circle drawings, accumulation is the engine of the aesthetic, though in this case it’s a more modular accumulation – not the expansion of a single work, but the expansion of a collection, which the grid offers as a typology. In the drawings the picture-field is crossed by horizontal lines – sometimes in the visual stereotype children use to depict waves (a set of stuttering arcs, joined at points, like a long serration), but more often in more naturalistic traverses, where the tightening and relaxing of space between the lines evokes the compression and extension of the surface of water. Brown modulates the lines in an inventory of mark-making – wavering them, breaking them up with little gaps, spangling them with flecks of white like bursts of reflected sunlight, scalloping along their edges, massing them so they read more as texture than line. He also plays with color, hinting at reflections of things that lie outside the picture plane (in his tightness of focus, we never see what exists beyond these rectangular patches of implied water).
Brown grew up near Lake Tahoe, and for me, these variations on a theme recall time I’ve spent in or near the lake, absorbing its multiple moods – from its glassy repose to its roving, angry grey hills, spilling their composure in white spray (the Small Waves never get that riled up, keeping in calmer zones). The wind is always at play there, in maneuvers painters can recognize – smoothing, dimpling, sweeping, scumbling, fussing, skipping. And of course there are the vast internal forces, the restless momentum of its own unsettled mass, the heavings and subsidings, the incessant negotiations between shoreline and semi-submerged boulders, the reciprocal encounters between water, sand and granite.
The Lake Tahoe environment insinuated itself into his vision at a deep, and at times even unconscious, level. Frances Melhop tells a story about his piece Prime, part of his Shadowcasters series, which Melhop displayed in a solo show at her gallery. It’s a piece in red hues scored with vertical lines, six and a half feet long and four and a half inches tall, protruded outward from the wall by metal supports. That extension from the wall allows it to project its shadow against it, as a laddered prolongation of its visual presence. Melhop mentioned to Brown that it seemed like a materialization of the Kings Beach pier he played on when he was a kid, and the insight stopped him short – it was both surprising to him, and undeniable.
Many viewers have remarked on the meditative quality of Brown’s pieces, the way that they nudge gallery walls toward sacral spaces. Both the circle drawings and the Small Waves series manage to import into the gallery the contemplative aura that can emanate from bodies of water. On the shore, in a pensive mood, water sympathizes with thought. The patterns at play on the surface aren’t decorative. Upon water, we can discern patterns that we understand as universal patterns of nature, made palpable, and which govern the progress of our own lives. And I think this is the sort of pattern-thinking that Brown was drawn to. His work is the work of sustained, thoughtful effort – and it’s as if the time and patience he put into his drawings gets stored there, and is able to be released by the attention of the viewer.
Landscape Triangulations
Neither McCormick or Brown can be pigeonholed as “landscape artists” – it limits how the work can be interpreted, and it also ignores large swaths of work they produced over their lifetimes. But it is fair to say a sense of the Western landscape can be felt through much of their work – and I think that comment can be extended to the work of the artists in conversation with them for this show. Collectively, they’re all engaged in the activity of place-making. If I can get a bit idiosyncratic in my definitions, it seems to me that a “location” can be encountered solitarily, and can even exist without any human presence at all – but for a location to become a “place,” it requires a multiplicity of experience and vision. It requires parallax and triangulation, comparing one vantage point against another to judge distance, and to relate things to one another in space and time. Place-making is a collective act – it’s only together (and in collaboration with the land and elements) that we can begin to sort out our environment – to understand its dimensions, its punctuations, its debris. Place and community make each other. This show isn’t just a catalog of influences and echoes – it’s both action and evidence of a community of vision.
A final note: this is, on a certain axis, a memorial exhibition. I’ve chosen to keep the descriptions of McCormick’s and Brown’s aesthetic work and process in the present tense, rather than the past, because that’s how extant artworks function – continually addressing the present moment.
CHRIS LANIER BIO
Chris Lanier is an artist with a background in both traditional and digital media, and a demonstrated interest in hybrid forms, having worked in multimedia performance, digital animation, web production, and comics. His animation has screened at Sundance and won awards at several international festivals, including the Grand Prize for Internet Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. His work has been displayed, performed and projected in New York, San Francisco, Japan, Canada, Britain, Mexico and Serbia. He is also an essayist and critic whose art criticism has appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including The Believer, HiLobrow, Furtherfield, Double Scoop, Rhizome, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Comics Journal. He is currently a Teaching Professor of Digital Art at the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2024 he was awarded the position of Reno City Artist, and a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council.
