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12/5/12 Wade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art - NYTimes.com
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Wade Guyton, The Rachofsky Collection,Lamay Photo
Wade Guyton: OS features thisuntitled work from 2006 at the WhitneyMuseum. More Photos »
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ART REVIEW
Dots, Stripes, ScansWade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art
By ROBERTA SMITHPublished: October 4, 2012
The Whitney Museum has a hit on its hands: a beautiful show
organized by a young curator that makes a cogent case for the work
of a young artist. In a season when many New York museums are
devoting a lot of energy to the past, the Whitney’s survey of work by
Wade Guyton stands out as a cause for optimism. Yes, interesting art
is being made here and now. And yes, there are serious ways that
museums can present this art that are beyond the scope of even the
richest commercial galleries.
Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is
40, is both a radical and a
traditionalist who breaks the mold but
pieces it back together in a different
configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous
paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though
devised using a computer, scanner and printer. The show is
titled “Wade Guyton: OS,” referring to computer operating
systems.
Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a
paintbrush, he describes himself as someone who makes
paintings but does not consider himself a painter. His
vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as well as
much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images,
combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the
recycling strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures
Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.
One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and
parodies yet reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of
art, design and architecture that permeates our culture
from the artist’s loft to the corporate boardroom. Another is
modernity as an inescapable current condition, personified
in his case by his adaptation, as just another kind of
paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our
everyday lives.
While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably
imperfect. The paintings in particular clearly tax the
equipment that generates them; they emerge with glitches
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Wade Guyton, Private collection, LamayPhoto
An untitled work from 2006 is amongthe more than 80 images in “WadeGuyton: OS” at the Whitney. MorePhotos »
Enlarge This Image
Wade Guyton, Collection of the artist, LamayPhoto
An untitled Wade Guyton work from2007. More Photos »
and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or stutters — that
record the process of their own making, stress the almost
human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of
pictorial incident and life.
The line between what the artist has chosen and what
technology has willed is constantly blurred. For one thing,
to achieve paintings of substantial width, Mr. Guyton must
fold his canvas and run it through the printer twice; this
gives nearly every image halves that are rarely in sync. You
will notice this right off the elevator, where the exhibition’s
first wall features five paintings of oddly offregister images
of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s.
Even more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an
extended eightpanel work in which thick black horizontal
bands alternating with white ones skittishly slant every
which way but level; their jangling patterns form a
rhythmic, slowmotion Op Art.
The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a
36yearold Whitney curator who has also written a
convincing if overlong catalog essay illuminating this
artist’s development, and he plotted, in collaboration with
Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80 works are
on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and
a few sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade,
they are displayed on and among a series of parallel walls,
some quite narrow. As you move around, works seem to
slide in and out of view, like images in different windows on
a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s
motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to
another. The U’s from the fire images are extruded into
three dimensions in a group of 17 sculptures of mirrored
stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed in a tight row
they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection
and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are
in fact individual works, temporarily brought together.
Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical
theory of the 1970s and ’80s as an art major at the
University of Tennessee in Knoxville before seeing much art.
And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay Mr. Guyton still
enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the real
thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort
them. He came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate
school at Hunter College, and his first exhibited works here
were sculptures that evoked an ersatz Modernism, most
effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and
mirrored plexiglass.
In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his Pictures
Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he simply tore illustrations
from books or auction catalogs and ran them through his printer, superimposing lines,
X’s, thick bands or grids on their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed
on an image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that color
coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In another, a series of thick
horizontal bars partly obscure an old halftimbered building whose geometric patterns are
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A version of this review appeared in print on October 5, 2012, on page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Dots,Stripes, Scans.
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structurally necessary, not decorative.
By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on canvas, making
paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the
Black paintings of Frank Stella (especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts
imposing white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark Rothko’s
veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented X’s can summon more Stella
Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate logos.
A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work
of Color Field abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas
wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited side by side, where
they are printed in similar scales but with quite different results in tone and texture. In
both paintings two large black dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a
clownish air.
The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original scale, in several
computer drawings that are sandwiched between plexiglass in a big foursquare frame
that mimics both a window and a canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella
aluminum stripe painting and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the
stripes culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and much
enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the other nearly 30 — that
cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here they seem extravagant and bold, yet they
also resemble large bolts of fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer
creating trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The extreme
magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the green as a twill pattern, the
red as tweed fuzzy with little orange dots.
In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the bigstatement grandeur of these works is
played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by “Drawings for a Large Picture,”
which consists of 85 unframed computer drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with
eyepopping blue linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled
in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition of images in our
time.
“Wade Guyton: OS” runs through Jan. 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art;(212) 5703600, whitney.org.
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12/5/12 Wade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art - NYTimes.com
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