June 27, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (70A)
ARTWALK
Joan Linder opens her Fulfillment show
at the Cristin Tierney Gallery on the Bowery in New York
Notwithstanding the image above, Buffalo-based Joan Linder does not work for Amazon, though in a sense she is herself an Amazon, a truly formidable artist-qua-cultural-warrior and a bit of a nut. My kind of artist and my kind of nut. She looks, looks harder still, notices, notices yet more, and in so doing helps, or at any rate invites, the rest of us as well to see. These boxes, for starters, are all hand-made, exquisitely observed and then painstakingly rendered --meticulously inked, painted and watercolored on archival cotton paper which then gets folded up in exact-size replicas: scuffed corners, digitized address labels, smeared waterstains and all.
As such, they comprise the latest of Linder’s forays into the confounding material culture comprising the actual lived reality across which we as frenziedly consumed consumers measure out our lives today (her practice’s version of what it must have been like, say, for Caillebotte and the other impressionists when they took to centering trains and railway bridges and newly widened boulevards and strutting boulevardiers and achingly stretching laundresses and other such overworked laborers as their subjects).
Ossining-born (1970), a veteran of Columbia, Skowhegan, Tufts, and Grinnell, Linder has been based for many years now in rust-belt Buffalo, hardly the most aesthetically promising of sites for free-range exploration, one might have thought—yet in that regard she keeps proving us wrong. It would seem that she must be drawing all the time. A few years back she trained her gaze and ink-pen on the aftermath of the post-industrial wasteland surrounding the onetime neighborhood of Love Canal, by way of a series of long narrow scrolls, accordioned in on themselves in elegant artist’s books, documenting the screened-off perimeter of the abandoned, overgrown site. This time out she does the same thing with a series of walks around the grungy rusting remains of onetime manufacturing powerhouses, such as the carcass of the American Axle factory, newly converted, it would seem, to the sites of rumbling throbbing barely-inhabited albeit massively energy-consuming bit-coin crypto-mining operations and cloud-computing server farms—and then as well, the impoverished neighborhoods just on the other side of the street into which they have all been slotted.
To get a better sense of this aspect of her project, see here.
She is calling her entire show, her first at the Cristin Tierney Gallery on the Bowery in New York City (through August 9), Fulfillment, slyly riffing off the name for those nodal “fulfillment centers” whose churning labor, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, anchor the entire far-flung digital mail-order economy which has come to envelop us. The title leans in several directions—ironical (what dismal places, the sheer waste involved in such casual throw-away tossing of lives and byproducts), scathing (the Orwellian gall of their owners, lighting on such a name for such a place), but in the end, merely descriptive. For these works as works (along with 24/7, a remarkable eight-minute video
—Linder’s first such effort, embedding such places in their surrounding landscape, presently including nearby Niagara Falls, which powers them all) prove compoundingly engrossing. They do fill us full.
Linder flips the Rilke of that first Duino Elegy who had famously observed how “beauty is simply the beginning of a terror which we can only just barely endure.” Time and again, Linder burrows clean through to the beauty that is there, even there, in the most terrible of places, for as she keeps teaching us with every fresh outing, anything, everything, truly looked at is beautiful.
See you next week!