Forrest Myers at Art et Industrie - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There is nothing fresh about the effort to meld art and function, In our hundred it was an important mission of similar modernist movements as De Stijl, the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism. What Forrest Myers brings to the genre is a cheeky irreverence that places more emphasis upon the furniture-ness of art than upon the art-ness of furniture. Thus, while a certain number of of the art-furniture sculptures exhibited here remain marginally usable, for greatest in quantity the spirit of functionality looks introduced so as to disable the art-for-art's sake mentality of more serious new and contemporary artists.

Picnic Table is an crack illustration of this process. Installed in like manner that the viewer entering the gallery acquires a full frontal view of this work, it be likes at first glance a three-dimensional Sean Scully Alternating upright planks of rusted and polished carbonized iron suggest a dialogue between light mirrored and absorbed, between rough and flat between warm and cold. sole when one walks around the piece does it become clear that it is actually a full-sized, functional picnic table station on end, a realization which immediately deflates like high-flown formal responses.

Other works make insidious reference to other modern and contemporary masters. Smokin' presents a red, buckled car head cover (a la John Chamberlain) equipped with a flickering fake fireplace. Something Like a beneficial Armchair takes Matisse's chestnut and realizes it by the agency of shaping an overstuffed chair on the outside of steel bedsprings. Mesa Double makes a nod to David Smith with a pair of polished carbonized iron plates affixed to an undulating black carbonized iron pipe in such a way that they could work for as seats. Such works tweak art history while hinting that the exalted status of high art is single a convention deriving from its apparent distance from function.

Other works relate to popular agriculture Toon is a bright orange armchair fashioned without of a tangle of coated aluminum wire which indeed indicates a cartoon doodle brought to life. Ornette, a testament to the artist's lifelong interest in jazz, is a wire bed frame outfitted with pink plastic bottle caps and hung against the wall in of that kind a way that its shadow indicates musical notation.

Myers has been interested in the intersection of art and technology since the 1960 when he was a member of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). While many of his comrade artists went awry because they invested too heavily in a utopian vision of technology, Myers has continued to infuse his productions with a powerful sense of whimsy. They refuse to allow us to take any polemic seriously.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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