Mark Arctander
John Hoft
Much recent art, including three current exhibits, addresses this reduction of experience to objects. Several of the 16 new works by Mark Arctander, a Chicagoan born in Elmhurst in 1956, at Roy Boyd deal explicitly with books–a subject that’s become so common critics have coined the term “book artist.” In his statement Arctander suggests that by presenting books in ways that make them incapable of fulfilling their “normal function” he allows the viewer to “inject his/her own mental text.” That may be, but certainly the way that Arctander reduces and imprisons books makes a statement in itself.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Limit, for example, places a hardcover book between two long marble slabs lying almost parallel on the floor, so that the book props them apart at one end. One senses the weight of the upper slab on the book, trapping it and preventing it from being opened and read. Measure consists of nine tall, thin wooden boxes, only an inch or so wide, open at one side to reveal the spines of books placed one atop the other within, often stacked as high as three or more. The title and the work’s appearance suggest a ruler–books being used only for their length. In Untitled (Trois) Violins, Arctander applies a similar sensibility to different objects: he’s bound three violins with dark fabric and cords, their strings hidden, their soundboards mute. Like his books, these objects are reduced to static corpses, deprived of their ability to convey complex experiences.
It doesn’t matter: the effects are what riveted me. Ethos looks almost random at first–it’s as if Hoft were avoiding any one system of mark making. A piece of twisted sheet metal sits in front of pale brown-and-green plaster whose design breaks down into three distinctly different sections–in one, brown lines appear to be incised in the plaster, while another includes raised brown areas. Hoft makes the viewer vacillate between recognition of the solidity of things–the metal plate–and meditation on ethereal patterns whose origins are a mystery.
