ArtSeen
Chuck Webster
ZIEHERSMITH GALLERY | NOVEMBER 13 – DECEMBER 20, 2008

Since the 1960s, certain portions of the conceptual art world have been on a mission to emancipate art’s intellectual essence from its corporeal burden—to make art into pure idea. Lucy Lippard gave her account of this purging in her book, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. No one really doubts that materiality in art will endure because human beings, no matter the level of intellectual development or technological reinforcement, are at heart smarter monkeys who like to use their senses to navigate the world. This tends to be forgotten though when the art market shakes up and sends the pendulum swinging toward the immaterial. I was reminded of this recently at Chuck Webster’s exhibition, O My Soul at ZieherSmith, where, with my somnolent material desires in tow, I think I saw that pendulum switching directions.
Webster has made a reputation for painting and drawing eccentric, often biomorphic abstractions on paper or panel with an endearing informality. Remembering his last show of works on paper at ZieherSmith, this new suite of paintings struck me as being particularly substantial and solid. The subject matter looked familiar: motifs that could have been gleaned from Navajo rugs, Anatolian Bronze necklaces, the back of a leaf or a bisected gourd. However, this time, the quirky forms took a back seat to process and material and, more essentially, to the time and matter implicit in Webster’s painting.
“The Toughest Riddle,” a spiny, burnt-orange form quivering in the middle of a scarlet field, looks like the product of a prolonged engagement with the painting’s surface. Despite its far-reaching graphic clarity, a close examination of it reveals significant layering and reworking with traces of previous compositions peeking through its poker-faced countenance. What first seems a resolved composition becomes a palimpsest of erasures, abrasions, paint, and sizing which only barely lost the battle for survival to the fitter final image. Similarly, “Figaro Figaro,” a small painting of either clustered gastropods or abstracted tongue-shapes, quickly whisks the viewer from exterior to interior. Hints of green bleed from its pale red and salmon-hued seams. The closer one gets to its surface the more jewel-like and sophisticated it becomes. The stylized tongues come to read less like the preordained inheritors of the present than as the result of a contingent and fortunate evolution. Like tiny, unpolished versions of the sedimentary shelves of marble created from eons of accumulating seashells over which their lucky descendents thrive, Webster’s paintings seem simultaneously light-reflecting and light-absorbing, giving off a dim satiny glow.
Despite their discrete objecthood, the relative lack of compositional variation in Webster’s work leads one to accept each painting as part of an uninterrupted sequence. For example, “Gannet,” an O’Keeffian-looking ribcage-shape set against a pale, worked-in background, functions on the same premise as the other paintings in the exhibition—a centered graphic floating in a monochromatic field. This one-off repetition makes the paintings seem more personal and ephemeral, but runs somewhat counter to the notion of them as time-worn jewels. But who’s keeping score? As Barnett Newman said, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” I don’t think Webster considers himself a maker of objects any more than time is a maker of fossils, so let the viewers and the paleontologists (respectively) sort out the details after the fact.
I can’t help but see my somatic response to Webster’s work as an indicator of a more general need to revisit some artistic fundamentals. I think as the American art world, and America in general, sobers up from a period of financial decadence, it will become more sensitive to basic needs and desires: food and shelter in life; form and tactility in art. I also think, and hope, that we will see more work that supports these qualities in the way Webster’s does, either indirectly or directly. And, from an informal survey of the landscape, it seems this may already be happening. My prediction: Six Years: The Re-materialization of the Art Object from 2008 to 2014—pub. date, October 2014.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Center for Book Arts
By Megan N. LibertyMARCH 2023 | ArTonic
Wandering around the flower district of Manhattan, you may be surprised to see a green flag hanging high above the flowers, signaling the location of the Center for Book Arts (CBA) on the third floor, where it has been located since 1999. As artist and designer Ben Denzer recently wrote to me, Despite coming and going to CBA all the time, I can never really get over how much of an unexpected gem it is. The fact that this book utopia is hiding on the third floor of a random building on 27th street has always made me look at all NYC buildings as if each might contain delightful secrets inside.
36. The 1960s, Brooklyn
By Raphael RubinsteinFEB 2023 | The Miraculous
Its the mid-1960s in Bedford-Stuyvesant where some 15 or 20 young men get into the habit of harmonizing together after pick-up basketball games. One of them, an aspiring musician who is supporting himself as an elevator operator, notices some talented voices in the crowd, so one night he invites everyone back to his apartment to rehearse, hoping for something interesting to emerge.
from The Nature Book
By Tom ComittaMARCH 2023 | Fiction
Darwin discovered that evolution proceeds with neither direction nor purpose. The natural world is largely indifferent to plan or plot. Yet we, story-seeking creatures that we are, see the world around us as more completed, more accomplished, than what came before. Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book explores these tensions by stitching together hundreds of fragments in the history of literary writing about the natural worldthis excerpt alone is a collage of ninety-seven novels ranging from Hawthorne to Arundhati Roy. Though the text of The Nature Book is a polyphonic effort of writers, humans are absent from the actual story. In this seamless anthology, we forget that the experience of reading about nature is mediated by human voices and, when suspended in the text, succumb to the magical illusion that we are perceiving the world in itself.
Xaviera Simmons: Crisis Makes a Book Club
By William CorwinNOV 2022 | ArtSeen
In the comprehensive survey exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club, Xaviera Simmons explains with brutal clarity the need for real gestures; land acknowledgments without Land Back will not do, and there can be no equality without reparations. As the title calls out, starting book clubs to read the literature of the oppressed without yielding the social and economic capital demanded in those very texts means nothing.