Seattle P-I April 23, 2004
by Regina Hackett
READ ARTICLE
Seattle Weekly April 14, 2004
by Elise Richman
READ ARTICLE
The Stranger April 4, 2004
Mandy Greer's Fairy Tale
by Emily Hall
READ ARTICLE
The Stranger Jan 29, 2004
by Emily Hall
READ ARTICLE AT RIGHT > >
The Stranger September 10, 2003
by Emily Hall
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The Stranger Jan 29, 2004
HACKED UP AND SHIT OUT
Sam Trout's Angry Little Show
by Emily Hall
Priceless Works Gallery
619 N 35th St, Suite 100, 349-9943
Through Feb 1.
In this month's Artforum there's a letter to the editor from
artist Wolfgang Tillmans, who's piqued on account of an
article that identified him as a "crossover" artist, with
his roots in commercial photography. He's very careful to
point out that he has always been an artist, although one
who happens to enjoy the aura imparted to his work by glossy
magazines.
This sly response reveals the particular pervasive anxiety
that dwells in the margin between the artist and the
commercial professional. Many of their skills are the same,
and the work may look, in some cases, quite similar, but
there's a philosophical margin of difference, even though in
most good bookstores photography books are still shelved
away from art books, and even though artists let their work
be used as illustration. Some of these paradoxes reflect a
reality about earning a living, and others push on the very
boundaries of art, but it is not, in most cases, hard to
tell the difference between art and what lies outside it.
Sam Trout has so far been best known for extra-art
activities: for his line of Lula products (coasters and T-
shirts featuring his little freaked-out hipster girl), for
graphic design and illustration, and for being half of the I
Heart Rummage team (another repository of debate about art
versus craft). His art has appeared in a few group shows,
but has not yet made as much of a mark.
Which is fine, since he's very much at the front-end of his
career. So whether the aggressiveness of his first show is
aimed at the public (for slotting him as an illustrator) or
at himself (for failing to make the leap) isn't quite clear;
nonetheless it's palpable. In a series of installations, he
takes a number of clichˇs about art and makes them concrete:
Polaroids, each with an image of shit in a toilet, stacked
untidily in two actual toilets; 20 more Polaroids, hidden
coyly behind a curtain, of the artist's own body, each with
a little glistening trail or gob of ejaculate; a section of
wall with a hammer embedded in it. These obviously represent
the sort of facile musings on what art is and what it means
to create it that an art student might make: the artist
digests his surroundings and shits them out, art is just
masturbation, to make a breakthrough you literally need to
break something. But it's also obvious that Trout knows full
well how silly these gestures are, so that their effect is
antagonistic rather than introspective.
These installations lead up to a series of canvases on which
Trout has cannibalized his own illustration work by cutting
apart line drawings on acetate and then reassembling them.
The floor is strewn with little bits and pieces of those
drawings--like blood that's been let--and Trout has provided
a display book of what the drawings were before he hacked
them up (Lula, a couple fondling each other and picking each
other's noses, a skiing moose). On the show's opening night,
Trout kept moving these works around on the wall, as if to
remind you that the meaning and aesthetics of the work were
variables under his control, precisely the opposite of work
for hire.
But all these gestures are unnecessary. The two-dimensional
works are quite good (lively, packed with plenty of implied
violence, full of images that you can tell were once
something else, now mutilated past recognition) and begin
pretty much where his previous art ended. They propose
something beyond the usual strategy of drawing the viewer in
with what looks familiar, something about visual
overstimulation and the grave-heap of images; the best works
are those where Trout has allowed some emptiness, so that
the pieces seem to have drifted into place, here unstable
like Dr. Seuss pileups, there dense and jungley.
You might see the installations as a brave lead-in, showing
all the angst that went into producing the work. You might
even see it as confessional. But as interesting as it is,
all told, to contemplate the fraught passage from
illustrator to artist, the proof is in the art, not in the
shit.
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