It should be stated first, for reasons that will become apparent later, that I saw Robert Fields’ “Every Now N’Then…” at approximately 6:45 p.m. on its last day on view. I believe I was the exhibit's last official visitor. Now, some days later, at exactly 11:51 p.m., I am still debating where to begin.
When writing, it’s a good practice to make an outline. To define what you are trying to answer, or where approximately becomes exact. I could write a summary of the work Fields presents, from left to right, leading the reader the way the eye reads text. That feels wrong. The objects Fields presents do not assume that type of overt linguistic structure. They play with the idea of being read first and foremost, but then they dart between the singular and the whole. They start, end and finish each other while starting something again in the corner of your eye. Things are not always what they seem, often blurring the line between the hand of the artist and materials in a way that leaves you questioning which came first. The most common shape often becomes something else entirely as you move within the space. Careful examination often leaves more questions than answers. Careful examination often, paradoxically, feels like zooming out. This exhibition is often in the form of an outline itself, as often as it acts as a punctuated ending.
Small quotations are found in the didactics, disembodied and recontextualized. Small anchor points give just enough direction, just enough to cause a ricocheting effect as you turn around to reexamine the work with new context. In this state, the outline starts to form something like an index. A structure. The narrative is located in parts, with the possibility of wholes. Specifically, I am drawn to the Kiefer quotation (and this is from memory) about the impossibility of a landscape to be innocent, as the most concrete of these anchors. An argument can be made that all conceptual work eventually is, in some way, landscape artwork as all new concepts are born of what already exists. The same can be said of the type of minimalism Fields’ work is in conversation with. If minimalism can be claimed to be a form of art that, at its core, uses reduction or redaction as its medium, then what can be left if all is redacted? A single line, perhaps. Either an image's last stand or the defining start of a new horizon. This is a space where Fields finds ample room to move around, eschewing the hard authoritative aspects of classical minimalist reduction used to make surgical, hard-edged gestures. Rather, he questions and finds new questions within that type of atomization. A type of research based in pushing detail to the point of a generative fracture.
If this notion of a landscape being impossible to disentangle from its history or context can be a thread to be pulled, suddenly threads exist throughout. Linkages between the work appear, allowing the viewer a plethora of possible ways to untangle the knot. Minimal, general shapes start to form images and scenes. The cold manufactured grouping of triangles and beams becomes a fracture or impact. The slightly folded metal on the wall becomes a book or text. The perfect geometry of metal lines in the frame becomes a sketch of that same landscape shattered, its vanishing point separated and dissected to be both punctuation and world. A single flesh-colored rock traces the impossibility of the divorce of the body from where it currently stands alongside a clean-cut pegboard structure. An impossibly natural shape for a round hole. Two brooms make a cleanup team for the wreckage as a sign assembles itself into a billboard that either will be, or was, larger than life. Lines become barriers just askew for new openings. Each work builds on the rest, creating a faint image of somewhere. Somewhere both familiar and unlocatable, like tracing your steps to someplace once dear by only memory.
Another thread I have been pulling is the level of care Fields employs when engaging with the history of the subject of the landscape in art, and this relationship to minimalism. Often, the work engages with painting in a unique roundabout fashion. Full, single-colored matte paint often alters these objects, both obscuring and adding alchemically. Much of the questioning is with just how much care the paint has been both applied and implied, often reaching a point where it’s difficult to tell if this was the material’s original state, blurring the line between construct and reality. It is a type of mark-making not unlike how Fields uses shape.
These forms often have the same sort of generality or found quality, reduced to a certain perfection within their recognizability, asking the viewer to play a type of association game, to find an image through the mind's eye. It’s in this type of reduction where this work shines, and a language starts to appear around it to begin to describe this landscape. If a landscape can be reduced to a horizon line, then the first additions to documenting the world around oneself often can be reduced to both color and structural shapes that start to frame out the bones of a picture or place, sketching with each turn of the head.
And there is something here with every turn of the head. When my eye begins to commit to this type of minimal meditation on the mechanics of the object, the idea of history and context starts to overlap with aesthetics with a capital A. Kiefer's ideas of a contextual history have an apparent overlap with ideas of autonomy, usually rendered theoretically, that exist in a very grounded, almost practical fashion here. Much can be said of the way Fields takes on the landscape, the tendency to collapse the line between the subject and object into each other, often allowing the works to communicate between themselves, to form an ecosystem.
Where “Every Now N’Then…” shines is in the fact that I am not completely sure if my reading of this work has much bearing on it at all. That, like any landscape, it exists without me. These are threads I’m pulling because the work has invited me to find threads to pull, but they are certainly my threads. If the show can function as an index, then I am adding chapters and footnotes of my own, attempting to reconcile my own history with this new context. As much as I may want to pull my own readings into the work or even “review” it, I feel as if I am playing into what Fields is doing and the way the work and exhibition create threads for each viewer, all equal, all separate. Field’s work is most successful in the moments when his sculpture retreats to the unseen, entirely molding itself out of the collision between the viewer's contextual history and that of the artist, meeting in the landscape of the gallery.
The best way to illustrate this is the fact that I have not addressed the elephant in the literal room. I have currently just pulled threads all across the main gallery, but in the X gallery, x marks the spot. Inside is a grouping of cardboard boxes, each with a wispy black spray-paint interior and some holding a reflective circle about the size of a coin. Above, in the didactic, is a Gandhi quote. There is so much to say about the different strata of what is happening here and the dizzying jumps of detail. The relationship between such a weighted historical quote and a pile of collapsible utilitarian objects. The logistics of spray painting cardboard. The way the work must be physically navigated. In the end, what I want to highlight is the small reflective pieces. The way the audience has to break the fourth wall to look into them, just to see their own eye reflected back, and what it feels like to be material to be reduced. To have an emptiness staring back. In the end, though, the way these small circles loop back to the fleshy cut outs of the board at the entrance. The way they could fit right in those holes if given the chance. In the end, the line of that horizon, this narrative, this landscape, repeats as history often does, bending that line into a circle.
Fields’ greatest trick here might be that in the end it’s just time to start again and try to pull some more threads, a small gesture toward a trudging optimism. The idea that history repeats itself, but that each time around something new can be discovered in the remains, dug up in the smallest details in the wreckage. I cannot think of a better review than to say that as of 4:08 a.m., five hours after sitting down to write, what I would most like to do is take another walk through, to retrace my steps.
Everything can fit in that space, in that space between the exact and the approximate.
“Every Now N’Then…”
again.