Type A: Barrier and Trigger

June 26 to December 31, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Type A

Over the course of the past decade, the work of the artists who call themselves Type A has frequently touched on the perception of danger and the presupposition of risk felt by both individuals and groups in American society. This exhibition brings together two radically different, but related, projects by the artists that approach this subject manner from separate directions: Barrier, a large-scale modular sculpture whose primary subject is the fear of terrorist threat felt by both government and corporate entities; and Trigger, a project that deals in a dizzyingly complex way with the reasons Americans feel the need to arm themselves.

Type A (Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin) first became known in the late 1990s for work that focused on male competitiveness and how play and sports influenced adult male behavior. The unusual form that they assumed, a “team” of two artists working together, was the perfect vehicle for exploring the psychological, social, and cultural attributes of male identity. Their collaboration became a self-aware (and frequently humorous) exercise in the ways men both bond and compete with one another, echoing not so much earlier collaborative teams in the art world, but rather examples from the broader culture of literature and film, such as Gilgamesh and Enkidu from The Epic of Gilgamesh, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Felix and Oscar of The Odd Couple, and most recently, the phenomenon of “buddy films,” “bromances,” and the combative male camaraderie portrayed in television beer commercials.

Not that high art did not inform their work: the potency of their collaboration was based in the mixing of the high and the low, with major influences like 1960s minimalism, conceptual and performance art filtered though the aesthetics of punk rock and heavy metal, horror and action films, and sketch comedy. This serious interest in bringing together worlds that were separate (and seeing what new forms might evolve) reached a critical point in 2006 with Cheer, a collaborative project involving two teams of cheerleaders at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. This was the first time Type A had moved beyond the confines of their two-person collaborative to work with other groups, and the experience sowed the seeds for the direction their practice would take over the next five years.

In 2001, Type A began the photographic series Insertions, pointedly interjecting their figurative presence into the anonymous environment of urban infrastructure in lower Manhattan. A few short months later this landscape was traumatized by the terrorist attack of 9/11, which created a siege mentality felt both by the government responsible for our protection and the corporate world that perceived itself as a primary target. This level of fear and uncertainty transformed the urban environment of New York almost overnight. Public manifestations of this new reality included thorough airport screening of passengers and baggage, heavily armed National Guard troops in locations considered to be high-value targets, such as train and subway stations, and the ad hoc deployment of “Jersey barriers” as protection against vehicular bombs at sites such as Wall Street, City Hall, and Kennedy Airport. Type A witnessed this transformation firsthand: “The real eureka moment for the two of us came sometime in the spring of 2006,” Bordwin commented. “We went over to the West Side Highway to shoot

Type A: Barrier and Trigger

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more Insertions and related video inspired by orange traffic control devices, and there we rediscovered the concrete barriers… It’s important to remember that all of this was happening after the 2004 reelection of W [George W. Bush] and the outrage and resignation that followed.”

The resulting work, Barrier (2009), takes the form of twenty-one identical concrete sculptures that are based on the form of the Jersey barrier, the common concrete object that was originally designed for temporarily dividing highway lanes during construction. Each of the twenty-one sculptures, unlike a real Jersey barrier (which is straight), is curved in a sixty-degree arc that allows six of them to form a perfect circle. As a modular sculpture, the work can be infinitely reconfigured each time it is installed, and like actual Jersey barriers, the installation scheme is dependent on the conditions at the site: the existing topography and architecture and the needs of traffic control versus access (both vehicular and pedestrian).

Consideration of the qualities of real Jersey barriers and Barrier causes one to pause and reflect. Clearly, there is a difference between the two: Barrier was made as a work of art for aesthetic and philosophical exploration, while actual Jersey barriers are a design solution for a host of practical problems. But it is in thinking about this difference that things get really interesting. Jersey barriers were repurposed from the world of traffic control for use as security devices and, thus, transformed into both actual and symbolic boundaries of governmental and corporate authority. Type A has taken these actual and symbolic roles and tweaked them, turning them into objects that can still function in their intended original roles, with the added weight of art history and social and political awareness. They are a curious hybrid, part minimal sculpture, part remade readymade, part protest song, and part potential utilitarian object.

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Although it takes freely from heterogeneous sources, Type A’s work has increasingly engaged with the inverse of typical appropriation, a practice they describe as interpropriation: the act of interjecting themselves and actively participating in cultures outside the art world. This idea was central to the meaning and the working process of their most recent project, Trigger. Where Barrier references the control of public space, Trigger takes us deep into society’s collective unconscious, provocatively exploring the two contrasting sides of America’s love affair with guns: fear and recreation. Numerous artists have taken up the issue of guns in America, but the majority of the resulting works have been either elegies about gun violence or political works pointedly focusing on gun control. Trigger sidesteps the obvious by approaching the subject from an experiential standpoint: What can we learn about our fears (and our fantasies) by actually pulling the trigger?

The physical manifestation of Trigger is a series of photographic images produced by the artists and actually printed and sold as commercial gun targets by Law Enforcement Targets, Inc., a Minnesota-based company. Besides Type A themselves, the individuals portrayed on the targets are a selection of the artists’ friends and colleagues, as well as volunteers from the Museum’s community (including staff and Trustees). According to their Web site, Law Enforcement

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Targets is “a designer and full-service provider of training targets and supplies for military, government agencies, law enforcement, gun clubs, and shooting enthusiasts.” Given our image-laden culture it seems as if interest in traditional targets, such as those featuring bull’s eyes or simple silhouettes, has flagged, to be replaced by the “realism” of staged photographic scenarios, a situation that L.E.T. has taken upon itself to rectify. The artists approached L.E.T. with the idea of creating new images for the company, a proposition that L.E.T.’s principals greeted with cautious enthusiasm. The images in the company’s inventory were, by and large, amateurish and suffered from low production values, a situation that Type A felt was filled with potential. However, the most important aspect of the project from the artists’ standpoint was the fact that only images accepted by the company for publication (read: with commercial potential) would become art. Yes, these images are hanging in an art museum, but they are also being purchased and actually shot at by individuals across the United States. Generally, an artist will work with a curator to decide which of their works will be included in a Museum exhibition, but in this case the final curatorial decisions were made by the company on the basis of need, and those needs say volumes about the uncertainty and fear that surrounds us. L.E.T. proved to be quite discriminating, choosing approximately thirty percent of the images submitted by the artists for publication, basing the decisions on the perceived mental states of both antagonist and protagonist. In other words, they were after drama.

L.E.T. requested a handful of scenarios from Type A, including home invasion, domestic violence, workplace violence, and urban violence (including armed robbery). These areas of interest came as no surprise as these types of crime are the daily focus of the media. There might be a critical vote in the city council on school funding, but the first item on the nightly news will be the armed robbery of the convenience store, or the tragic tale of the dismissed employee who returns to the workplace for revenge. In a town like Ridgefield, which has an incredibly low crime rate, there are a disproportionate number of people who own guns for self-protection, a situation that has been fueled by singular events such as Connecticut’s widely publicized Cheshire home invasion murders in 2007.

The photographs that have been chosen by L.E.T. show a resemblance to the images used for film and television promotion: they are pointedly theatrical moments in which events have come to a head. Similarly, the marketing of individual posters on the L.E.T. Web site weaves the image into a brief narrative written by the company that the potential purchaser can buy into. For instance, this paragraph accompanies one of Type A’s workplace violence images on L.E.T.’s site:

Woman who was forced into early retirement decides she wants to get revenge on the people who cast her aside. She patiently waits in the early hours of the day for her former co-workers to teach them a lesson.

Do these narratives make it easier to shoot—and kill—the antagonists on these targets? Obviously, the targets are paper, but there is an intrinsic hesitation

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hardwired into all of us (with the exception of psychopaths and sociopaths) that makes us pause before we kill or seriously injure another human being. Just ask any police officer about their training with the use of deadly force: their split-second response to a life-threatening situation is based more on their experiences in intensive situational training, not on rational thought or emotional reaction.

The hesitation of committing a violent act to a photograph raises a host of interesting questions about the perceived power of representative images. Throughout history, realistic representation has frequently been looked at as being idolatry, but in the modern, Western world we generally agree that the thing depicted is not synonymous with the thing itself. But even today (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Photoshop not withstanding) we believe that a photograph of a human being has an aura of reality that borders on the supernatural. The recent calls for the US government to release the photo of the dead Osama bin Laden to “prove” his demise are a case in point. Bin Laden might be gone, but a photo of his dead body will have a life of its own.

The images made by Type A for Trigger fit uneasily into the history of photography, particularly because of the multiple roles they fulfill. Photographs, in general, fall into two primary categories, documentary and aesthetic, with these two classifications combining in varying degrees to form a third class: the commercial and mercantile. Advertising photography combines the medium’s descriptive power with art’s ability to seduce in order to influence our behavior, and the responses engendered by the images in Trigger clearly relate to the techniques employed by advertising, particularly advertising photography’s goal of making the viewer act in a desired manner. But there is a huge difference with the images in Trigger: these images don’t suggest action, they demand it. Being prompted to pull a trigger on a deadly weapon in order to blow a hole in an image is about as definitive as it gets, and this reaction has a terrible, raw purity about it.

What, you might be asking, about the zombies? Yes, L.E.T. had a limited line of zombie targets, rendered as digital illustrations, not photographs. Given the opportunity to expand on L.E.T.’s zombie offerings, who wouldn’t jump at the chance? Type A worked with a professional makeup artist to create new zombie targets (several of which feature Adam Ames’s mother). Obviously, most of us don’t feel the need to defend ourselves from the undead, and these targets point to another aspect of target practice: recreation. Many Americans shoot for fun and sport (independent of hunting) and these targets fulfill the need to provide images that don’t have the stigma connected with shooting at those who are living and breathing. Zombies are remarkably persistent characters in popular culture, so it should come as no surprise that they would make a guest appearance on gun targets.

Trigger has inexorably blurred the terms “gallery” and “shooting gallery,” while Barrier’s dramatic deployment has tightly controlled access to the museum. We are clearly armed and protected, but do we feel safer?

Richard Klein, interim co-director

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1 Artists have collaborated with one another throughout recorded history, but consistent and ongoing collaboration between visual artists is a relatively new phenomenon. In the 1960s, collaboration as a form of production and self-definition started to become common, evidenced by a growing roster of artist “teams” in the ensuing years, including Bernd & Hilla Becher, Equipo Cronica, Gilbert & George, Komar & Melamid, the Starn Twins, Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler, Fischli & Weiss, General Idea, Tim Rollins + K.O.S., and Allora & Calzadilla.

2 Type A’s influences include a broad range of conceptual, minimalist, and performance artists from the 1960s and 70s, including Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Cindy Sherman.

3 Type A, email message to the author, October 7, 2009.

4 Conversations with the Ridgefield Police Department, CT, played a critical role in understanding handgun use in the surrounding community, particularly during the initial period when the artists were producing images in and around the Museum. As of May 2011, there are 642 active state pistol permits in Ridgefield, a town with 22,000 residents.

5 A hidden aspect of Trigger that speaks to the power of images (particularly photographic ones) is that numerous individuals who were approached about participating in the project refused because they were uncomfortable with the idea of their image being used for target practice. The belief that a violent act committed against one’s image could in turn “draw” actual violence to one’s self seems to be very common.

6 Besides prohibitions against certain forms of representation in Islamic Fundamentalism, the best- known example of the elimination of representative imagery on idolatrous grounds was the Protestant Reformation that began in the sixteenth century.

7 Pornography is another subset of photographic imagery that shares characteristics with both documentation and art.

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The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum advances creative thinking by connecting today’s artists with individuals and communities in unexpected and stimulating ways.

Board of Trustees

Mark L. Goldstein, Chairman; John Tremaine, Treasurer/Secretary; Annadurai Amirthalingam; Richard Anderson; William Burback; Eric G. Diefenbach; Chris Doyle; Linda M. Dugan; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Meagan Julian; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Donald Opatrny; Gregory Peterson; Peter Robbins; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus

Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder

Barrier is an institutional collaboration among The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

Tel 203.438.4519, Fax 203.438.0198, aldrichart.org

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