Oliver Herring at Max Protetch - Brief Article

Oliver Herring first gained notice in the early '90 by means of knitting Mylar coats and blankets as memorials to the performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger. He later shifted from making garments as surrogates for the figure to knitting actual figures. In his of recent origin work the figure is in motion: a Mylar man animatedly occupies a rocking chair in single sculpture and falls onto a mattress in another. Smaller statuarys depict furniture in isolation (an amusingly saggy chair and wail shelf are knitted of strips of wood-land veneer rather than Mylar--a witty choice). Videos present to view the artist making pictorial and sculptural arrangements of furniture. Thus, the whole exhibition is cleverly knitted together, if you will.

Herring's early knitting made a statement as a traditionally female activity used by dint of one gay man in a tribute to another. The technique itself has brought him abundant attention, but he's had to face questions of whether knitting has outlived its usefulness and whether it now limits his expression. Here, the videos and the drawings escape these questions; the sum of two units large sculptures find a surprising justification. The rocking man and the falling man (both are Herring himself video-taped in action, translated into drawings and then into a wire armature above which he knits) are returned as repeated partial figures, as if seen in a stuttering film or in Duchamp's bare Descending a Staircase. The knitting gives an incremental continuity to the action, since it encompasses all the particularities of the forms in single uninterrupted directional flow from a beginning point to the conclusion of the piece, like the run of film or videotape. The repetitive action of knitting is a small room of movement, and Herring's use of transparent Mylar above an armature that remains visible refer tos an analytical interest in manner of making position and pose.

In these plastic arts the technique is continuous while the image is not. Interestingly, the same is veritable of the videos. Rather than depicting the level flow of his activity as he arranges simple forms similar as benches, chairs or cubes in a expanse Herring trims the videos for a like reason that he seems to jump over from one pose to another. The halted motion brings to mind Bruce McLean's 1970 "Pose sculpture" photos of himself perched fetchingly upon pedestals. Herring's quick, rhythmic editing avoids the boring pacing that afflicts too many artists' videos. Shifting style of dress and furniture colors, he makes Mondrianesque compositions in videos with equal reason dense with incident that they bear repeated watching, and in like manner brief (Sketch #4, for example, is single minute 14 seconds) that repeating is not a chore. Herring has lit a fuse. Several, in fact.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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