Treading

The twentieth century proved that good art does not need to be beautiful in the classical sense. It need not necessarily concern itself with verisimilitude, with a lifelike representation of the physical world around us. It needn’t be a bucolic landscape or a female nude. However, successful art of any period—in my opinion, at least—does need to address the world around us, providing a personal response to our shared culture and representing it in a way that makes us consider it anew.

Treading, an installation by Judith McWillie’s undergraduate studio art class currently on view in the main hall leading to our temporary offices in the old visual arts building, is a work that fulfills this requirement of relevance. It is a challenging piece, but one worth the effort required to take it all in and to understand what it’s all about. At first glance, it can be overwhelming, for some, even off-putting. It’s not “pretty” in a traditional sense. It’s not safe nor is it particularly easy to grasp all at once. A group collaboration with the goal of making a site-specific installation might have made creating a cohesive work difficult. The result could have been a hodgepodge of individual works that failed to come together as a whole, or it might have been a blandly unified piece that settled for the lowest common denominator. Instead, an agreed upon set of formal parameters provide cohesion while allowing each individual voice to speak freely. With the first aim of filling the available wall, each participant chose a fifty foot by six inch strip of material on which they each wrote a text of their choosing, hanging the strips in long, horizontal stripes that cover the wall. In the process of hanging these stripes, the group decided to extend the texts further, filling the glass walls, doors, and windows in the surrounding space with their writing. The result is a multiplicity of voices, each component maintaining its individuality while creating a pluralistic but unified whole.

Comparisons can be made to some of the most important trends in contemporary art. It can be related to Minimalism, not in its aesthetic, which is far from minimal, but in the way it acknowledges the relationship between the work and viewer in real space. Like the work of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, or Donald Judd, this is not simply a picture on a wall that one can stand and look at, nor is it a work of sculpture with a clearly defined point from which it may be viewed. You have to engage with it and move around, to follow its lead—figuratively and literally—to understand what it’s all about. The heavy emphasis on text puts Treading firmly in the camp of conceptual art. Although Marcel Duchamp’s emphasis on the idea over the craft of art marks him as a forerunner of this style, Joseph Kosuth is typically cited as the most immediate progenitor of conceptual art. Kosuth’s canonical One and Three Chairs (1965), for instance, juxtaposed a picture of a chair, a real chair, and a dictionary definition of “chair,” essentially questioning what constitutes artistic representation. Bruce Nauman’s sentences crafted from neon lights and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poems on various materials may also be seen as heirs of this trend.

More recently, provocative artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer have become well known for their text-based art. Holzer’s “Truisms” series consists of aphorism-like statements printed on a variety of objects—postcards, t-shirts, golf balls—in a simple, bold font. Statements like “EVERYONE’S WORK IS EQUALLY IMPORTANT” and “EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE DESERVE SPECIAL TREATMENT” become absurd in their contradictions, demanding a reconsideration of received wisdom. Kruger uses similarly authoritative, declarative statements, such as “I shop therefore I am” (1987), overlaid on stark, black and white photographs. Both Kruger and Holzer reference consumer culture, using strategies common to advertising and marketing, and both artists stress their background in mass media. This critical stance towards consumerism also points to another important facet of conceptual art, its non-commercial nature and the lack of an easily sellable object. Performance art “Happenings” and installations became favorite media of artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Although both are as old as art itself, they became distinct categories of visual art making only in the late 1960s. Graffiti/street art, a stylistic trope that has been employed to great effect by countless artists since the 1980s—think Keith Haring or, more recently, Shepard Fairey—also figures into Treading, especially where the text continues into the surrounding space (if it were not erasable ink, it would literally be graffiti).

Clearly, the artists who participated in Treading have learned their lessons from art history, but they’ve also made something of their own. The coolly removed aesthetic of Holzer, Kruger, and Kosuth, is at odds with the highly personal, handwritten scripts in Treading, many of which could even be described as expressionistic. The individual texts used in the installation come from a variety of different sources. Some have a clear agenda. Chessie McGarity presents quotations from different religious texts of the world, all of which describe what most of us know as the “golden rule.” In doing so, she makes the point that for all of the conflicts that arise due to different religious beliefs, there are far more important and compelling commonalities than differences. Other texts have a personal significance for the artist, such as a favorite poem—for instance, Octavio Paz’s “Prologue,” used by Sarah Bohannan. Margaret George uses a favorite song lyric from Radiohead’s “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.” Some texts are repetitive, such as Nicole Levy’s, which draws from the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems,” repeating the phrase over and over on top of photocopied enlargements of dollar bills, or Mary Ellen Andersen’s repeated “Achachachacha…,” also a song title and lyric, but one that references the artist’s biography, coming from a fireside song that became a mainstay at the summer camp for homeless children where she worked. Other texts are used as much like found materials as quotations. Melissa Lee presents a text message conversation between herself and her boyfriend. Lindsey Reynolds used snippets of conversations overheard in class. Abby Newland sums up the sentiment most students are probably feeling this time of year: “I have no time, I have no time, I have no time…” In the context of this installation, these varied texts all serve as indicators of personal taste, style, and beliefs. They give us an idea of who the artist is and what they care about.

In naming the installation, the group wanted something evocative yet ambiguous. “To tread” can be used in the context of treading water, a continuous effort exerted to stay afloat. It can refer to a tire tread, something that goes around and around, providing traction but slowing wearing out. It can suggest treading on foot, again bringing us back to the issue of our navigation through a physical space. All of these meanings seem relevant to me. Aside from the fact that the viewer is compelled to follow each text, laid out in a path not unlike the marks left by a tire’s tread, it brings to my mind a parallel with walking through a busy university campus. Like the student body at large, each participant in this collaboration was given free reign within a set of predetermined parameters. The choice of materials—ranging from various sorts of fabric, most of them art materials like canvas and silk screen, to tinfoil (Patrick Triggs), or even plastic bags ironed together (Frankie Porter)—is almost like the choice of clothing made each morning, a indicator of who we are, or at least what we want to present as our public persona. Like Lindsey Reynolds’s literal presentation of overheard conversations, the disparate texts taken as a whole become much like the audio background of our daily lives, a cacophony of voices mingling with bits of music from cars and nearby headphones that surround us on crowded sidewalks between classes. In this way, Treading provides real insight into the diverse but not entirely dissimilar elements of campus life.

We at GMOA extend our sincere thanks to Judy McWillie and her class: Mary Ellen Andersen, Sarah Bohannan, Erika Burke, Anna Beth Eason, Margaret George, Kathryn Amand Green, Erin Haas, Stephanie Hammermiller, Lauren Kesler, Melissa Lee, Nicole Levy, Chessie McGarity, Abby Newland, Frankie Porter, Lindsey Reynolds, Claudia Santillan, and Patrick Triggs.