| Pirating
from his past work and work in progress, John Bisbee creates a restless
installation whose fragmented pieces signal memory, the shifting moments
of time, industry, and labor. Field is a haptic field of sometimes
ambiguous and sometimes dangerously desirable metal objects. Field
threatens and beckons. The fragmented metal pieces are often sharp and
potentially harmful, but grouped together suggest a remarkable, indefinable
biology or geography. We are confronted with an anxious desire for proximity
to this field of objects, but may be fearful of the thousands of sharp
nails and welded forms that comprise the work.
While Bisbee's work is curiously beautiful and fractionally a formal exploration
of space and form, it also suggests the myriad ideologies associated with
industry. Labor, work, and industry crackle through Bisbee's project.
His materials - nails and arc welding, both industrial glues - emerge
from industry, connote the struggle with often-dangerous material, and
are the implements of pre- and postindustrial work. Marrying objects and
structural elements with nails is a simple solution to complex fabrication
goals, and Bisbee capitalizes on that idea. Yet the end result of Bisbee's
manipulation of the nails, brads, spikes, and weld clearly places the
work outside the realm of industrial labor. They're not really nails,
brads, spikes, and weld anymore, but they're not not nails, brads, spikes,
and weld. They're transformative objects of wonder.
Bisbee trades on the effect of patterning. By allowing a pattern to emerge
in the nails, brads, spikes, and weld as he manipulates them, and then
following the pattern "autodidactically," Bisbee sustains the
organic impact of the patterning.(1) Like natural objects-shells, leaves-whose
shapes are determined or surfaces are marked by pattern, Bisbee's works,
while inorganic, often mimic biological forms. In his words, the works
are "bioindustrial," also acknowledging their post- or preindustrial
origins. Despite its preindustrial history-nails in some form have probably
been in use since the bronze age-the work evinces postindustrial aftereffect.
Bisbee's technique yields objects that emerge into a world dominated by
electronic capitalism-the new industry. Yet Bisbee's work is rooted in
the dependence of ritual (the repetition and patterns, the artist's solitude)
lodged in preindustrial labor before master craftsmen were transformed
into wage laborers. Agrarian labor practice and the attendant craftsmanship
needed to maintain the tools of labor depended (and still do) on the patterned
cycles of nature. Bisbee operates within the conceptual space history
has provided between the Industrial Revolution's occlusion of the hand-
made crafted object (and the artisan's singularity) and a modern social
order- workers united around a capitalist goal. Ultimately, Bisbee's installation
is allied to a utopian artisan's ideal-conscientiously crafting objects
by allowing a pattern to emerge in the medium, and following that pattern
to its aesthetically pleasing and logical culmination.
Bisbee's accumulative installation-some of whose components span the past
ten years-reveals his desire to preserve and study time and memory attached
to the work, to him, and to the private space of the studio. With this
piece he has effected a shift in his working process-moving from the creation
of singular and autonomous objects to shape-shifting installations whose
individual components are also in flux. Some of the pieces in the work
are discards from past work which Bisbee has reconfigured and revitalized;
similarly some pieces may, in the future, be remade for another piece.
By bringing the work-these fragments of meaning, of time, of moments passed
and passing-from the private into the public, Bisbee unpacks memories
implicit in objects, even fragments. Like relics, souvenirs, and inherited
mementos, these metal fragments are a check against eventual loss. Art
historian Carol Mavor notes,
Like a photograph, the drawer of saved objects functions as a space between
life and death. For not only do our photographs, our objects, signify
death, they also (in the spirit of the fetish) keep death away. Collecting
those objects in the nooks and crannies of our homes keeps them and our
memories and ourselves alive. Objects keep death away by helping us to
remember. (2)
Populist in nature—nails and weld are easily available and relatively
inexpensive—Bisbee's installation is conceptually tied to the works
of his predecessors Carl André, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra,
who democratized sculpture by using common materials such as firebricks
and rusted nails, often scattering them on the gallery floor. Bisbee's
populist approach to installation building emerges from his love of his
material and its seemingly endless potential for metamorphosis. But perhaps
his work is more closely related to a seemingly disparate history: 17th-century
Dutch painting. Like those landscape, still-life, and genre paintings,
where the viewer is visually and intellectually rewarded by patient scrutiny-think
of the microscopic world made visible through paint or a map of the Netherlands
creating topographical context-the intricate relationships between the
myriad objects in Field offer a similarly handsome payoff. Looking closely
at Field we find that the objects include tiny squiggles of weld,
nails welded together in a seemingly chaotic pile, delicate nail "baskets,"
and spiny nail vertebrae, to name only a few. The individual pieces are
tumbled together in ostensible chaos, but patient examination reveals
their engaging eccentricity.
Bisbee's title Field is both wholly obvious and completely ambiguous.
Field's geography is inherently unstable, shifting, and in flux-at
any time the artist may decide to remove or add components. And the metal
components' future as Field, a site-specific installation, is
ephemeral. Field both occupies and becomes territory examined
(in the already existing pieces), and unexamined, as evidenced in the
new pieces. Bisbee denotes territory, geography, and place, marking out
his site with the field of metal objects. Bisbee literally creates a field
and more poetically fields a group of objects, as one would field a team
for a pick-up game of touch football. (3) While each piece is scaled in
a comfort zone relative to our bodies-nothing is taller than 16 inches-the
feeling of the installation is that of monumentality. Spread out nearly
forty feet in diameter, Field is strewn with objects that signify
discursive histories of industry, work, memory and time, and the artistic
practices that join them together.
The individual objects that comprise the whole (yet evolving) Field
are Bisbee's utterances made physical, fragments of nonverbal speech,
fragments of time. According to Albert Einstein, "Time cannot be
defined in substance; it is, metaphysically speaking, as mysterious as
matter and space." 4 Bisbee's beautiful fragments seem to suggest
the opposite: that time can be embodied in something as prosaic as a 1/2-inch
brad, a 10-inch spike, and weld. Moreover, as art historian Carol Mavor
suggests in her discussion of an object's shaping of time and memory,
Bisbee's accumulative (and perhaps subtractive, as he reshapes it) installation
propels itself into the future, but without leaving behind the past. For
Bisbee time is unambiguous, as evidenced by the works themselves which
stand in for and mark the real time spent making objects of wonder, time,
and memory from simple instruments of industry.
Dana Self
Curator
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