Tom Friedman
Like most myths, this one has some truth to it–though it was sharply belied on one of my visits to the wonderful Tom Friedman exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A four-year-old girl, Cat, attending the show with her mother, stood at one side and then another of Small World (1995-’97) performing the most basic act of art criticism: naming the objects she saw. Enclosed in a rectangular glass case on the floor were a few hundred tiny, brightly colored Play-Doh sculptures of ordinary things: a telephone, an airplane, a sock, headphones, a palette, a match, a watermelon, a hairbrush, a rainbow, a hot dog with relish. Clever details gave some pieces a wry humor: green relish on the hot dog, colored bands on the sock. None of us could identify everything, but like me, Cat found some things amusing, giggling when her mom pointed out a Band-Aid: seeing such a mundane object reproduced that faithfully in an art museum is, well, funny.
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Friedman, born in 1965 in Saint Louis and now a resident of rural Massachusetts, lived in Chicago for five years in the late 80s and early 90s; he received an MFA in 1990 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. When he was part of a two-person show in 1996 at the Art Institute (which included some of the pieces here), he told me that he was interested in “showing the complex nature of one’s experience of an object,” a formulation that’s still apt. Everything here can be named but not reduced to its name; Friedman introduces some paradox, often humorous, into the act of perception, making one more conscious of the oversimplified nature of “recognition.” There’s something about all of Friedman’s work that should stop us in our tracks: his simple alterations make ordinary materials strange, giving the perceptual process new life.
When Friedman was in graduate school, he had an unusual reaction to the usual “art theory, aesthetics–ideas about the potentially political nature of art making.” Removing everything from his studio, he painted the space white. “I had to find a way to explore my own experience of things, and so every day for about a month I would bring in something different from my apartment and place it in this space and then sit and think about it,” he told me. Eventually he spent a week assembling a jigsaw puzzle on the floor, but “three-quarters of the way through, I realized once I was through that I would separate the pieces. It seemed to make it into a different kind of puzzle in that one had to visually piece the image together.” In an untitled 1990 piece on view, the pieces of another puzzle are laid out on a low pedestal and separated by empty spaces about equal to their width; look hard and you can see some kind of landscape. But the pieces are too many and too small for the mind to assemble the picture perfectly. The resulting visual paradox recalls the perceptual complexities of modernist representational work, right back to its origins in Cezanne, who created worlds of struggling shapes rather than compositions organized around a center.
Friedman explores the cultural implications of meaning in an untitled 1991-’94 map, showing much of North America, with the U.S. states in bright colors, Canada and Mexico in white, and printed state, city, and town names. The crucial difference in Friedman’s map is that, while all the names are rightside up, the map is upside down, reminding us of what any historian of cartography knows: that maps reflect the biases of the cultures that make them, that they tend to place those cultures at the center, and that “up” hasn’t always been north.
Here too the location is crucial. Blood splattering a museum floor seems a violation of its staid purity–but no, it’s just colored paper, an appropriate material for a museum. Then again, it’s construction paper–is this a respectable art institution or a second-grade class? The viewer thus questions how the locale confers meaning on the work. But a more important issue–the mysterious connection between pure, solid colors and what they represent–is quite properly never resolved, forcing the viewer into awareness of the subjectivity of art making and art viewing. Once again I thought of the sublime paradoxes of Cezanne.
