Jack Jeffrey
15 February 2001 - 24 March 2001
Opening Reception 15 February 2001 8pm
Front Gallery:
Jack Jeffrey: Recent Works
Spaced Out: Jack Jeffrey’s Sculptures
Over the past ten years, Jack Jeffrey has created a broad inventory of effective systems of demarcating personal, social and bureaucratic space. As part of the exhibition at Mercer Union, a number of Jeffrey’s sculptures based on this rich archive are ‘spaced out’ to draw attention to a rather awkward, albeit well articulated aesthetic ‘gap’ that exists in between these different spaces. What makes these sculptures both provocative and frustrating is their ability to employ an abstract vocabulary that leads us everywhere and nowhere at once.
One such work that leads me to consider this implosion of meaning is Untitled (Green Stripe), 1999. Viewed from a distance, this white paddle with its green line and wooden grip is reminiscent of some strange signaling device that might have been used to direct train traffic in some remote part of Eastern Europe. On closer inspection it looks ‘home-made.’ A leather strap extends from the handle to strengthen its implicit use value. I suppose this ‘paddle’ could very well be seen as some home-made repressive apparatus or an object of sadomasochistic proportions. However, as a good old-fashioned art historian, I turn away from these ‘use values’ and focus my attention on the artwork’s aesthetic and historical merits.
Loosely painted on top of a white rectangular medite panel, the vertical green stripe brings to mind the painterly architectonics of the Russian avant-garde, in particular the work of Liubov Popova (1889 Ü 1924). Popova was always more interesting to me than someone like Kazimir Malevich because of her more pictorial rather than spiritual concerns. But one thing that Jack Jeffrey’s sculptures share with both Constructivism and Suprematism is a concern with forms of communication. For the Russian avant-garde, it was in the political economy of the sign where one could find the key to transform society. Factura workers such as Popova aimed to redirect language towards a more ‘open’ and creative future where poetry could be made by all. One of the most rhetorical gestures used to call up the militant side of these aesthetic experiments was the way the work was placed in relation to space. Just as Jeffrey has placed his Green Stripe in the corner of one of the gallery rooms, these artists often utilized the corner to call attention to the physical and ideological construction of space. In 1915, a painted black square placed in the corner of a room could function to reject a repressive pictorial tradition while simultaneously opening up a pictorial language and the room itself. After all, if the corner had been the place reserved for religious and political icons, a green stripe in that same corner could suggest a move forward into a new, more universally understood pictorial ‘space.’
But in the year 2001, this noble avant-garde history does not carry the same political strength as it once did, and it seems rather embarrassing to talk about ‘universal’ spaces. By now corners of rooms and the use of building materials such as industrial paint and mass-manufactured wood have become institutionalized into accepted standard art practices. As we know, a brick is no longer just a brick, and a coat-rack is a Duchampian Trap. But art and life have not completely accepted each other’s point of view. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, Jeffrey’s sculptures force us to look and think about objects, shapes and colours from one type of public sphere through the context of another. Rather than directing an urban pedestrian way from ‘danger,’ a work such as Untitled (Globe), 2000, re-stages signs normally used outside the gallery context as objects of art to be scrutinized from inside. Modified, these green stripes, yellow circles, red squares and orange cones shed light on the precarious line that serves both as an intersection and divider between my space, your space and some larger so-called democratic space.
But in the year 2001, this noble avant-garde history does not carry the same political strength as it once did, and it seems rather embarrassing to talk about ‘universal’ spaces. By now corners of rooms and the use of building materials such as industrial paint and mass-manufactured wood have become institutionalized into accepted standard art practices. As we know, a brick is no longer just a brick, and a coat-rack is a Duchampian Trap. But art and life have not completely accepted each other’s point of view. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, Jeffrey’s sculptures force us to look and think about objects, shapes and colours from one type of public sphere through the context of another. Rather than directing an urban pedestrian way from ‘danger,’ a work such as Untitled (Globe), 2000, re-stages signs normally used outside the gallery context as objects of art to be scrutinized from inside. Modified, these green stripes, yellow circles, red squares and orange cones shed light on the precarious line that serves both as an intersection and divider between my space, your space and some larger so-called democratic space.
Negotiating positions within the walls of Mercer Union, Jack Jeffrey’s sculptures demand their own space while refusing to be easily read or resolved. In this process, the viewer is left to contemplate a disruption of meaning both inside and outside the gallery walls. By bringing together different aesthetic forms of communication into single art work, Jeffrey leaves the viewer lost in space. It is this disorientation that is so rewarding.
– Patrik Andersson
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