From a spectator’s standpoint, what’s
so impressive about many of the giant visual art figures of the 20th century
is their latent ability to amuse the audience. All political and cultural
statements seem to be enhanced by a smile, a snicker or even an outright
guffaw. Duchamp and Warhol are the heroes of modern art, redefined and
reshaped as something whose value can be determined both by its humor
and by its audience’s ability to engage.
Enter 1995 and a man poised to continue this tradition of challenging
euphoria. Drew Dominick’s recent “Gearmotor Grinder” installation
at the Jose Freire gallery in Soho brilliantly disarms its audience’s
critical and highfalutin powers from the get-go. Even Freire’s advance
publicity warned (quite literally) “enter at your own risk.”
And so with the utmost trepidation, the black-clad, the Chanel-suited,
and the flannel-adorned peered into the 10' x 10' gallery. Three rubber-bladed
circular saws, what Dominick calls “grinders,” were attached
to serpentine rubber and canvas ropes (“airline cable”), which
in turn fused with a steel pulley system just below the gallery ceiling.
Despite the giant black marks streaking the floor like a monochrome Pollock,
most people entered the gallery with a detached smile, unaware of their
impending doom.
Upon crossing the threshold of the gallery door, an infrared photo relay
at the attendee’s feet “activates” the two rear saws. A
sudden screeching hum inhabits the entire 10th floor and the grinders
become fully operational. Our objets d’art do backward/forward 360s,
occasionally pirouetting high into the air. They bang fiercely into the
gallery’s back and front walls, the viewer’s first sign of real
danger. And from time to time they even swing outward, farther than expected,
beyond the oval of black markings, into our space, into that world of
ambiguous insurance claims.
But, at this point, the spectator observes the grinders from afar. One
smiles, cluing in to the double entendre of “dangerous art”
and stepping farther into the gallery, somehow more assured both physically
and intellectually. Suddenly, though, another laser just past the first
previously inactive grinder triggers, and you are surrounded on all sides.
Here smiles become nervous giggles and looks of complacency become wrinkled
brows. Drew Dominick has made his work’s viability entirely contingent
upon the spectator’s presence. His tree makes noise only with your
step. He has forced his audience into a netherworld of sinister laughs
and gallery disclaimers. Surely, this work is reminiscent of Barney and
Nauman and the master comic Duchamp (a grinder producer of a different
age), but he resists their cult of personality, their body-intensive performances,
their hyperbolic declarations. Better to reminisce about Robert Morris’
box with the sound of its own making. Like Morris, Dominick can’t
help exoticize his place as creator in spite of and because of his absence.
“Gearmotor Grinder,” his first solo show, utilizes only the
most unmarked of visual media: the saws themselves, sturdy cantilevers,
some wood, timers, invisible lasers, and spontaneously generated floor
abrasions. This is the stuff of stagehands and home security systems,
materials that shape spaces decidedly not meant for mere contemplation.
Given this gulf between expectation and application, the saws seem somehow
more heroic than Dominick: they are tools of an age of manufacturing and
architecture somehow refitted into an information age. They are reminiscent
of Terminator—the machines, fearful of irrelevance, have taken over.
Their intentions are not noble ones.
Dominick’s other work accentuates this cult of the grinder: He has
stuck an activated saw in an empty truck to attract the attention of passersby
and exhibited the black markings as conventional canvas pieces. He is
the ideal 21st-century artist: seeking public recognition without having
determined who or what is to be recognized.
In the truck installation, passersby peered into the vehicle, confused
by the chaos. Inside a nearby gallery, the art crowd watched the concerned
citizens on TV from a camera feed inside the truck. Who here is to be
held in greater contempt? Who constitutes the audience and/or the creator?
What kind of watching is most acceptable? What’s really worth seeing?
While I love these conceptual booby traps, I’m perhaps more attached
to the conception of “Gearmotor Grinders,” one that rewards
risks and depends at the very least on semi-cognizant participation. Still,
the spirit is the same. Dominick seems in search of materials for which
we’ve naively pre-determined uses, for audiences who have foolishly
pre-determined the value of their educational baggage. Dominick as artist
is invisible and invincible. And the blood and laughter are real, regardless
of your credentials.Jay Mandel
New York, New York
1995