ART-PRESENTATION: Wade Guyton-Zwei Dekaden MCMXCIX–MMXIX,Part II

Wade Guyton plays a key role in the artistic engagement with images in the digital age. He combines traditional visual media, such as primed canvas, with digital printing processes so that deliberate degradations lead to aesthetically astonishing results. By appropriating existing images and confronting them with new technologies of reproduction, Guyton has developed an updated form of appropriation art over the past 20 years. While his first inkjet paintings on canvas were initially interpreted in formal-aesthetic terms in regard to a modernist approach, the development of his work shows that even the seemingly abstract patterns of stripes, squares, and circles are rooted in specific digital images.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum Ludwig Archive

After acquiring several of the artist’s works for the collection, the Museum Ludwig is hosting a major survey exhibition entitled “Zwei Dekaden MCMXCIX–MMXIX”, that presents his oeuvre from the beginning of his career to his most recent works.  The brings together numerous large-scale paintings created with an inkjet printer as well as early photographs, sculptures, drawings, posters, and books. The laconic title, which almost seems to be from another time due to its use of Roman numerals, marks the period between 1999 and 2019 when the works were created. The artworks in the exhibition are arranged thematically, which reveals the artist’s numerous forward- and back-ward-looking references within his work. Photography and Sculpture: The exhibition begins with a large installation that offers a broad overview of the artist’s multimedia production processes. The tables and printers, over which he has draped rolls of blue carpet, are essential tools for creating his inkjet paintings. This sculpture from 2017 becomes an improvised “pedestal” on which Guyton positions his “U” sculptures made of reflective stain-less steel. Similar to his “X” paintings and sculptures, here too a letter serves as a placeholder for various associations. While the X could be read as a mark or symbol of crossing out, the U in the shape of an open ellipse seems more inviting. “The Devil’s Hole” (1999) is Guyton’s earliest work in the exhibition. The artist took the photos in a cave in Tennessee in the United States, where he grew up and attended university. They not only mark the beginning of the development of Guyton’s work, but also present digressions on the history of photography: whether in a deadpan reference to Plato’s Cave, where the shadows of things become reality for the viewer, or to fundamental ideas about how illusions are created through light. “Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair)” (2001) is a broken Marcel Breuer chair, the first work in an extended series of sculptures that Guyton has made over the course of his career. He thinks of them as repeated actions. These sculptures made from Breuer chairs also appear later in various forms: in paintings of scenes from the studio as well as, for instance, in another sculpture from 2007, “Untitled Action Sculpture (Five Enron Chairs)”, for which the artist purchased chairs from the bankrupt Enron Corporation. However, in this case, instead of breaking them he left them as they were. Drawings: This exhibition is the first time that such a large number of individually framed works on paper, which the artist calls drawings, are being shown. Additional groups are also arranged in sets of vitrines and in a large four-part wooden frame in the back of the exhibition. Similar to his paintings, Guyton also uses inkjet printers for his drawings, but in this case he transfers his images to pages torn from historical art catalogues and design books. Some of these works were created using the Draw function in Microsoft Word, while for others the artist used images from the Internet and printed screenshots of websites. Comparing the drawings with his paintings suggests parallels, anticipations, and references to earlier works in central subjects such as the letters X and U as well as flames and the New York Times website. Paintings: At the beginning of his career, Guyton printed his images directly on linen and loosely attached the resulting works to the wall. Subsequently he began running large primed canvases through the printer, usually folded once lengthwise, and then stretching them over stretcher frames. His first paintings were initially interpreted more in terms of formal aesthetics. However, as his work developed, it became apparent that even the seemingly abstract patterns of stripes, squares, and circles were rooted in digital image files. This approach becomes increasingly clear in paintings of the New York Times website and pictures of his immediate surroundings, such as his studio and the urban landscape of New York. The formats of Guyton’s works respond to the technological constraints and material limits of the printers. Over the course of his career, he has continually addressed the existing architecture of the exhibition space, for example, by adjusting the size of his paintings and sculptures to their environments. In 2010, he created his largest work to date for the Museum Ludwig, consisting of eight imposing panels nearly fifteen meters wide and eight meters tall. This work was reinstalled in the same place for this retrospective. In contrast, in the case of the long red-and-green striped painting presented in Cologne (originally made for another museum exhibition in 2015), Guyton takes an opposite path by dictating the width of a temporary wall precisely to the size of the work presented on it. Posters and Books: With so many of his printed paintings and drawings on view, it is not surprising that print media such as posters and books play an important role for Wade Guyton. His interest in the physical and theoretical conditions of the reproduced image and its dissemination takes on various forms. For instance, Guyton’s six Zeichnungen books document stacks of drawings photographed  on his studio’s kitchen floor, and some of these sets of drawings also appear in Cologne distributed on the same kind of tiles across several vitrines. Other examples of the artist using his work as the raw material for a book are the publications “Black Paintings” and “WG3031”. For the latter he photographed a large-scale painting, known by the studio inventory number WG3031, at one-to-one scale. He then turned the 360 individual photographs into an artist’s book for the annual report of the Swiss media company Ringier. For “Black Paintings”, Guyton printed images of three similar successive exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Frankfurt am Main between 2007 and 2008 on newsprint with a laser printer. Due to the incompatibility of the printer’s toner and the fragile paper, the materials did not fix together and the resulting images were smeared in the process of handling. These pages were scanned and published as a book. Guyton designs the posters for his exhibitions, many of which are included in the Cologne presentation, and a few of which are remarkable for their use of found sexual imagery. In 2013, one of Guyton’s fire paintings was discovered as a post on a hardcore gay blog called sfcrewcut.tumblr.com. The resulting publication, “1 Month Ago”, documents the month of posts preceding that of the painting, and provides an unconventional reflection on how an image circulates in today’s digital world.

Info: Curator: Yilmaz Dziewior, Curatorial Project Management: Leonie Radine, Museum Ludwig, Hein­rich-Böll-Platz, Cologne, Duration 16/11/19-1/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-ludwig.de