Marc Leuthold’s ceramic wheels rotate through a kaleidoscopic range of associations. To begin with, they conjure up the potter’s wheel itself, though only their centers (sometimes) are thrown. They might also suggest turbine blades, torsioned fabric, ruffs, ruffled water, fingerprints, marine exoskeletons, and the solar disk, a range enhanced by the oddities of memory and emotional resonance peculiar to each individual viewer. In the end, however, though they might suggest all these things and others besides, they represent none of them. Rather than yield a singular meaning, they draw attention to the instability of association and the circular restlessness of obsession. They are abstract cogs designed to engage the senses and propel the machinery of the mind.
The recent history of abstraction in the visual arts is unfortunately the history of a misbegotten and destructive enterprise. Insofar as a legitimate distinction can be made between art and decoration, it can only be based on art’s long and fruitful association with narrative. Abstraction, on the other hand, has always lent itself to decoration if for no better reason than that decoration tends to demand repetition and repetition breeds simplification. The impetus toward abstraction in art came not from any desire to make art more decorative but rather from a need to expand the range of narratives that could be incorporated into painting and sculpture. Specifically, abstraction entered art in response to a demand for more expressive content. Nonetheless, as abstraction assumed ever “purer” and more radical forms, the loosening of the connection between art and narrative became a complete rupture. Indeed, the absence of even the slightest hint of narrative content in abstract art became a point of honor in the postwar period, a position that achieved its extreme in American minimalism, which sought to deny its objects any associational content whatsoever.
What was odd and finally untenable about this evacuation of narrative content from abstract art was the simultaneous attempt to deny the inherent decorativeness of the results. At the very moment when painting and sculpture became exclusively preoccupied with shape, color, and texture, the term “decorative” became the most feared of pejoratives. Such strident denial of the obvious burdened abstract form with a weight of meaning and spiritual pretension it was too frail to carry. The sublimity and drama that formerly derived from the combination of exalted subject and the theatrical genius of the artist now had to be carried solely by gesture and color. It was an impossible task that was to be a source of despair for any artist (Mark Rothko immediately comes to mind) who set out to rise to it.
Leuthold’s work illustrates how much more felicitous the results are when the inherently decorative nature of abstraction is openly recognized and made use of. In particular it reveals how repetition, which Minimalism employed as an instrument of boredom, can be reclaimed as an instrument of decorative nuance. In theory repetition should yield uniformity, and, if the tolerances are kept within a narrow enough range (as is the case in industrial fabrication), it does. But when room is left for “noise,” unforeseen variations become possible that give the finished product a unique signature. A pertinent example here would be the “abrash” effect found in some of the most prized oriental carpets-a slight dappling in an otherwise uniform color field caused by minor variations in the hue of the batches of dyed thread from which it is woven. This is the principle that Leuthold makes such adept use of in the carving of the flutes that give his wheels their organismic quality. Because it introduces into his work effects that suggest evanescence, it also endows his objects with a visual delicacy that surpasses their actual fragility.
While retaining the unitary form of Minimalist objects Leuthold’s wheels subtly “effeminize” it by turning it to purely decorative ends. Consonant with that inversion is the mimicry of that primordially functional object, the wheel, which here serves only to draw attention to these objects’ utter lack of function (and conversely to their archly aesthetic raison d’être). Equally consonant is the fussiness of their facture, which on occasion brings to mind the fussiness of a dressmaker making sure that the chiffon bunches just so. The shards take the preciousness of the wheels a step farther by introducing the melancholy sentimentality of the keepsake and the dandyish conceit of bestowing perfection on imperfect things. Taken together, these qualities completely subvert the macho brutality to which Minimalist objects typically aspire. But “subvert” may be too strong a word here, insofar as it implies malice and radical intent. The word creeps in only because modernism has so accustomed us to disdain decoration that the legitimate exploitation of the decorative possibilities latent in modernist form tends to seem like a transgression. Leuthold’s objects, however, are too graceful to be argumentative. It is their allure that speaks for them.
The one quality that distinguishes Leuthold’s work for me is its uncommon refinement, a quality ill at ease with the coarse expectations of a democratic age but all the more valuable as the residue of an aristocratic one. In the end, therefore, I do not associate his objects with any particular thing but with something more diffuse, a delicacy of taste that conjures up an entire fabulous kingdom founded on good form.
Mario Cutajar
Marc Leuthold, Ceramics was at Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, from October 2 to November 14, 1999.