Nathan Piskator
12/30/15
I once had a drawing teacher, named Bob, who told me, “Art, all art really, is a construction.” Bob was right. Untitled, A mixed media painting by Myron Hoffman, reminded me of this as I stared at it, gazing at a work only partially constructed. I say this, of course, with no disrespect to the artist, as I believe that to be the message of the piece. If not, at least that’s what I took away from it. According to the plaque to the right of the painting, it was created in 1999 with paint and photographs on paper. The total picture almost comes toward you due to its many layers, almost like looking at the top of a building with its frameworks still exposed. The first layer in the foreground, are three vertical photographs of three notepads, each with scribblings of words and drawings, presumably ideas for other works of art. Those photos cover a second layer of Photos; obscuring words written on concrete steps, framed by six more photos that create a disconnected rectangle drawn with chalk. The two layers of background are comprised of a wood-red painted staircase surrounded by gray that almost looks like it’s floating because of the yellow brick wall it’s juxtaposed in front of. It’s a difficult work of art to describe, but the task is necessary to emphasize the steps, the building, the construction.
Untitled hangs on a wall in first floor of the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, as part of an exhibit by Hoffman entitled, An Inventory of My Thoughts. Between classes, I walked to the gallery by myself, and decided to observe his art and let it affect me as it may, without too much additional research into the context of his work. The reason for this was so I might keep a more subjective eye for the art, potentially allowing it to tell me about myself as well as the artist. The first works I observed on the on the wall were similar to Untitled, but ultimately simpler and cleaner. All of them pictured drawings of gridded notebook paper covered in scrawls with different slightly crumpled perspectives placed in front of various photographs. They decorated the wall in a row, and as I followed them from right to left, they finally led me to the work that caught, and still has my attention for whatever curious reason. Even as I continued up the stairs and through the rest of the exhibit, I still found myself focusing on Untitled. Amongst a variety of sculptures and functioning electronic spectacles, complete with prerecorded segments of speech that made rooms sound full of people despite my solitude, I drifted back.
The picture serves as a window into parts unknown, or perhaps more accurately, parts impossible to be. The exhibit is titled An Inventory of My Thoughts, in all likelihood, due to Hoffman’s ideas becoming a reality through his works. As a half constructed amalgamation of concepts and various media, Untitled allows us to see into that process in which his mind creates painting and sculpture alike, a kind of “behind the scenes” imagery. This image stops me and makes me wonder, “Which is more pure, the raw ideas of creation or the refined and extracted form which we know as art?” and as I debate this to myself, I watch this work existing in a strange purgatory between the two. Truly, this work is complete due to its incompletion. The photographs of notebook pages are very telling for that very reason. One pictured a rough sketch of the shape of a body sitting, with the question, “homeless?” scrawled across the top with other assorted messages. The other pages had similar painting or sculpture concepts. With these photos, Hoffman is introducing a meta concept that shows the viewer how this work is about his other works, or even works that might have never come into existence. The other telling aspect of this piece lies behind the photos, the layers of paint that create the stairs and the brick wall it’s floating in front of suggests another, almost separate incompletion, trying to be covered up by the other. A painting is assembled in layers to give the viewer the idea of dimension and to build the pictures that show you what the artist sees either from their visual perspective or their mental perspective. Leaving the staircase floating in the painting may be considered subversive if it’s left alone, but being covered up with rough concepts suggest the actual partiality of the art.
When it comes down to it, all of these thoughts and ideas are just my opinion. I could be wrong about the whole work. However, as it is, Untitled left me contemplating ideas and memories. It brought something out of me in a very unique way. I was still thinking about it as I walked to my next class. It makes a good case for the power in the construction of art, or the lack thereof.