As Antoni helpfully pointed out in an email, Canadian artist Brian Jungen has created a work wherein he carves a design into the gallery wall with a router, which leaves a bevel-edged channel which, as one viewer in Vancouver described it, “revealed all the coloured layers of paint like layers of sediment.”
Sounds awesome, and awfully similar to Huyghe’s and ___?__’s pieces. And Jungen’s one-man show did travel to the New Museum’s temporary Chelsea location in 2005. [Which is kind of problematic: did the New Museum’s 22nd Street space walls even have hundreds of coats of exhibition-related repainting to expose and contemplate? And so what happens to this work without the supposed burden of Art History lurking right behind that fresh coat of paint? Please tell me there’s more to a piece like this than expedient aesthetic pleasure.]
And anyway, I didn’t see Jungen’s show. Which is really too bad, because this piece sounds kind of sweet. Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time, 2001:
consists of a handcrafted cedar pallet that is surmounted by neatly stacked cafeteria trays in several colors. While the form can be understood in terms of the classic minimalist cube, it is also a facsimile of an escape pod that was fashioned by an inmate at one of Canada’s largest prisons. Knowing that the cafeteria trays were delivered by truck to another facility for cleaning, the prisoner had built up and glued together many cafeteria trays, leaving a void at the center in which he could hide while the trays were being transported. In this sculpture the void is taken up with a television playing daytime programming and soap operas.
Hmm, not getting the TV aspect, but still. It’s got some nice Tony Feher-meets-Swiss Baroque-period Judd-meets-early Michael Phelan vibe going on. Also, and obviously, the title just backed into me in the lunch line.