Many artistic eras are characterized by dominant subjects. Medieval European artists presented Christian themes; Romantics, nature imagery. In recent decades artists have turned increasingly to the artifacts of mass culture. But perhaps more significant than this shift of attention has been a shift in materials: artists don’t try to draw or paint such objects but instead arrange them collagelike. I’ve seen installations of Tupperware; Nathan Mason creates wall pieces of belts, ties, and shoes.
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The checklist for Mason’s show at RX Gallery numbers 18 works, but actually there are 69: one of the 18 is a large grid of ties, another a grid of belts, and their components are available separately. Tie Grid has 28 components: four colorful ties arranged in a simple cross, each arm a different tie. Mason seems to have grouped them according to their appearance: four floral designs or four with simple geometric patterns. Belt Grid consists of 25 similar crosses, each made up of two or more belts, mostly women’s, cut in half and attached at the center. Both grids are floor-to-ceiling arrangements about the size–perhaps intentionally–of a massive abstract expressionist canvas.
That allure comes in part from the tension Mason creates between his repeating forms and the ties’ and belts’ anti-formalist sensuality. But I was undecided whether to call the result less than satisfying or to declare the work’s apparent incompleteness part of Mason’s statement. He doesn’t really bring the dialogue between kitsch surfaces and ideal forms to a conclusion; perhaps, like many artists working with mass-culture artifacts, he treats his materials with an odd mix of irony and reverence because he feels that in some ultimate sense he can never conquer them. At any rate the designs of the ties and belts evoke the ocean of kitsch that sometimes seems to engulf us.
Indeed, part of the charm of Lins’s works lies in what they aren’t. If Mason’s crosses have a certain phallic quality, Lins’s objects–foam sculpted by picking out pieces of it with her fingers–are modest, provisional, almost self-abnegating. The rough indentations on her “boots” feel recessive rather than aggressive, almost rhyming with the enigmatic slits of the vents below. Her gentle humor tends to mock ambition, as in the three prints of Football Photos. In each, a football is seen aloft against blue sky, soaring heroically. But the football is pretty small, and in one shot its visible red edge makes it seem a mere toy. None of these different footballs against the sky occasions any of the feelings one is supposed to have about a long pass.
