Michael x. Ryan: Above Ground

Searching for Authenticity in a Postmodern World

To begin to interpret Michael x. Ryan’s new body of work the viewer must first juxtapose two images of very different artists at work. The first image would be that of the iconic modern artist Jackson Pollock leaning over a canvas unrolled on the floor of his East Hampton, New York studio in the late 1940s. Pollock’s elegant aerial gestures are improvised and spontaneous. He choreographs arcs of fluid enamel paint through the subtle contortions his body and lets gravity complete their journey. For Pollock and his generation, these romantic gestures are invested with the authenticity and poetry of the human experience as transmitted through the veils of the subconscious. The individual’s responsibility in shaping his destiny, as the existentialists defined it, is prominent in Pollock’s achievement. Process, not preconceived image, would now be the cornerstone to the artist’s methods. Fast forward to the year 2006, the iconic postmodern artist Michael x. Ryan is on his knees on the dirty sidewalk outside of the Earwax restaurant in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood. It is 7:00 a.m. and he is laboriously tracing the contours of a stain from an undetermined liquid. As in Pollock’s paintings, gravity has created a beautiful organic pattern, stretched and formed by the irregularities of urban topography. But the random, anonymity of Ryan’s appropriated stain as well as his distinctly unemotional method of replicating it has a decidedly different character than the distinct marks created by Pollock and those of his fellow Abstract Expressionists. The dilemma for Ryan and other postmodern artists is how to reclaim the authenticity of the spontaneous gesture which has now become diluted of meaning. If Pollock and his generation sought the truth by literally getting closer to the ground and inside their paintings and themselves, Ryan and his generation seek to get above ground, to step back from the deceptions of their subconscious and the facility of the hand in order to create works that are decidedly unromantic and that question the nature of truth in a world of recycled fictions.

The conceptual distance that Ryan requires to get above ground from the potential romantic implications of his source materials is manifested in the deliberate stages he implements to remove the evidence of his hand from the work. A stain is traced with a marker on transparent plastic with the clinical detachment of a crime scene technician. Great care is taken to record every undulation, which is difficult depending on the porosity of the asphalt or concrete surface, encrusted debris, pedestrian/auto traffic, and the irregularities of the streetscape that may include curbs, manhole covers and sewer grates. This is dirty, unpleasant work that requires Ryan to spend considerable time drawing on his knees that which he cannot fully see until sections of the tracing are returned to the studio and assembled in an upright position. Resembling an anthropologist making a casting from fossil, Ryan proceeds to use his tracings as templates for making wood reliefs whose intricate patterns are laboriously cut out of Finnish birch plywood and then painted by the hands of several assistants. His background as an exhibits designer and preparator for museums informs both the technical and conceptual requirements of this stage of his work. Architectural in their weight, the resulting multi-panel and freestanding works use the authoritarian vocabulary of museum displays to emphasize that these stains have been rescued for preservation from their “natural” environment. Presented in upright positions, these works convey the distortions in the truth that occur when information is codified into a history. Ryan’s stains are no longer part of the past, nor are they of the present, they are something distinctly other. This disconnectedness is underscored by the literalness of the titles to each piece, such as Road stains #1, block party beer stain on Potomac Ave., Chicago, July, 2004. Echoing the meticulousness of museum labels that attempt to convey the authenticity of the artifact on display, Ryan’s titles emphasize the artificiality of what is presented. One distinctly knows that this crisp, flatly painted cut-out is not a beer stain from a city street. It lacks the detritus, odor and fugitive transparent layers intrinsic to such a stain. Which leads to the interesting question, a hundred years from now could people collect Ryan’s road stain reliefs as ethnographic artifacts as they presently do with the objects from other cultures? Could one possibly see in some stylish analyst’s office in the future instead of the ubiquitous tribal masks a framed Coke spill from 2006 that the proud owner when asked would say, “Yes, it’s authentic.” That Ryan expects the viewer’s complicity in this perceptual transaction is evident in his desire to have each purchased work painted the color of the wall that it is installed on, embedding the mythical stain into the architecture it inhabits. At the core of this dialogue is the desire to define the nature of leaving one’s mark on a world already encrusted with centuries of fugitive imprints.

While Ryan’s road stains are noteworthy for the removal of the artist’s hand, his map drawings that record his peripatetic movements through the city grid emphasize the dexterity of his linear mark making. Lines in these works do not present clear departure points and destinations, but instead accumulate into tangled matrixes that become their own stains recording the fleeting presence of a living being moving through and filling up the space around it. Previous drawings investigating this phenomenon have been accompanied by meticulous books and charts documenting a year’s worth of daily trips by Ryan throughout Chicago. If Jackson Pollock’s webs of paint suggest the infinite and the tragic, Ryan’s equally dense networks of graphite and pencil lines provide a parallel universe of the finite and the mundane that is no less compelling for the tangible reality they create. The current body of work in this series, on display in this exhibition, is a work in progress that documents Ryan’s participation in an artist’s residency in Krems, Austria, in 2006. Identical tourist’s maps of this medieval town provide the ground for Ryan’s layers of heavily worked black ink lines that cause one to ask, “Did he really cover all that ground?” Displayed horizontally under Plexiglas boxes, the individual maps echo an historical museum display missing a key for specific interpretation. Placed next to each other the maps almost appear identical, until individual discrepancies in the conduits of Ryan’s lines reveal incremental changes in direction. Resembling frames in a film, each map focus microscopic attention on the forgotten movements of a day traveler’s passage through an unfamiliar city and an artist for the duration of a blink of an eye reclaims the authenticity of the gesture in a postmodern world.

John Brunetti, Director

Alfedena Gallery

March, 2007