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Garry Noland, Painting on a Pedestal, No. 1, 2019. Vinyl paint, plastic hook, cardboard box, and decollage; 76 × 30 × 6 in.
Painting on a Pedestal is on a found, corrugated box. The familiarity I have with the functionality of a common container like this puts me at odds with how to make it different. Not necessarily to “elevate” it but to foist upon it another identity. Whether or not the box is elevated is not up to me but elevating material in art is an apt metaphor for what I think we want to do in general. That is to elevate our basic package, as people, into other, or further identities. Photo credit on Painting on a Pedestal: EG Schempf.
This work, by Chicago artist Ted Aergeropolis was part of an exhibition that was exhibited at University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1977 called “Chicago Abstractionists”. I was a gallery student intern, at the time, in the Fine Art Department.
Aergeropolis had passed by this time but this work, and the larger paintings in the show seemed so sure of themselves that it sent a message to me: “that yes, you can do something like this”. White on White, No. 1 work is complex, but not complicated; something I’d like to see in art more often. Conversely it is simple, but not simplistic exhibiting an elegant, economical matrix of line, form and shape. I look at it everyday.
Photo Credit: Garry Noland