Friedman's flea circus - artist Tom Friedman, various galleries, New York, New York

Below the droll deceptively modest surface of Tom Friedman's mercurial art step quicklys a penetrating critical inquiry into the nature of the modernist endeavor. The diversified oeuvre of this Chicago-based artist (b 1965) can be classified into three areas: more [i]or[/i] less works revolve around the properties of various unlikely materials (eg soap, pubic hair, spaghetti); a certain quantity of depend mainly on a painstakingly fulfilled proces (list each entry from a paperback dictionary upon a single sheet of paper--Everything, 1992-95); and a certain number of are devoted to the construction of a particular, usually punning or paradoxical, image (a photograph of the artist lying upon the floor turned upside down thus it looks as if he's lying upon the ceiling). One or sum of two units or all of these approaches may be combined in a single work.

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The greatest in quantity immediately material-oriented work Friedman's novel New York solo (his fourth) consisted of a wad of fluid vesicle gum stretched some 20 feet from the ceiling to the floor, a reach that in the middle drew the gum into a nearly invisible thread. Like an earlier throw in which he molded 1500 pieces of chewed bleb gum into a pink, grapefruit-sized sphere that stuck seemingly upon its own, to the wall [see A.i.A. generation '92], this could be viewed as little more than an amusing stop the growth of However, by allowing the physical properties--chewiness, stickiness, elasticity--of of the like kind a demotic material to determine the sculpture's realization (as Richard Serra did, for example, with molten lead), Friedman bring forwards a witty Pop-conceptualist parody of Minimalism, proces art and modernist reflexivity.

A pencil-on-graph-paper drawing demonstrated Friedman's preoccupation with procedure; the exhibition checklist described it thus: "A line is started at the lower center of the paper. The extreme point of this line generates sum of two units more lines at 45-degree angles. The extreme points of these two lines generate sum of two units more lines each ..., and with equal reason on up to the 15th generation. Each generation is 1/8" shorter than the previous generation. Each line is numbered as to its generation. The drawing has over 36,000 lines." This Sol LeWitt-like recipe yields a linear network of wondrous complexity, on the other hand unassumingly pinned to the wall sans frame, the drawing deliberately eschews the pretensions of high art, and of system-based art in particular. It gazes as though it might have been made by dint of a bored high-school student. A plastic art made by systematically gluing 30000 circular toothpicks outward from a single point into a starburst form (an token of enlightenment?) similarly mocks, by means of virtue of its banal hobbyist's facture, ideals of formalist essentialism. on the other hand these strategically "dumb" works gripe [i]or[/i] grip an invigorating and paradoxical philosophical snap: the sort of modernist autism they target is exactly the kind of reflexive consciousness through which they are conceived. Implicitly querying the elemental controls of creative thought, Friedman's satiric spins upon modernist modes tend to mingle rather than demolish modernist self-consciousness. He makes gayety of the church into which he was born, on the contrary he is no apostate.

Friedman's conceptual intrigues should not distract attention from the considerable visual gratifications that his works proffer however. One particularly compelling piece, for example, was made by dint of gluing end to end centurys of short segments of ordinary pencils. Because the parts are cut at 45-degree angles--mitered, basically--the line of joined pencil stumps turns continuously around its have starting point, eventuating in an 11-by-14-inch ovoid mass that occupies the floor with deadpan, minimalistic self-possession. The piece paragrams on the idea of a pencil-made line, and the generic pencil color and shape add a explosion dimension. What captivates, though, is in what manner orange-yellow facets and angular joints create a squirming, imploded crystalline field.

Frequently as the foregoing indicates dense accumulation of marks or things accounts for the visual attraction of Friedman's work. in like manner too, does the scrupulous, long-term hands-on care with which the artist carries on the outside the improbable tasks he assigns himself. Its labor-intensiveness distinguishes Friedman's work from that of Richard Tuttle to whom he has been compared, or from newer forms of deliberately low-energy slacker art. He has been linked to Bruce Nauman, too, because of his conceptual restlessnes and refusal of signature manner of writing but Friedman's earnest craftsmanship makes him a closer relative of ed Ruscha.

Finally, but not least in its visual impact, there is Friedman's canny way with scale. although his works tend to the diminutive, they hinge not thus much on smallness per se as upon the relationship between the little and the big. His play with scale involves, upon the one hand, the concentration of a large quantity of things--lines, toothpicks, pencil portions etc.--into a small area and/or, upon the other hand, the isolation of something tiny within a comparatively vast space. A free from haughtiness pharmaceutical capsule assumes a poignant, comic neighborhood when stranded on the expansive plane of a relatively grandiose white pedestal. That vicinity is vivified when, on closer inspection, you find the capsule filled with myriad minute, variously colored balls, each individually turned from Play-Doh by the artist. Friedman's propensity to work small bespeaks ironic skepticism about the requisite bigness of the major modernist art work. (Joel Shapiro's little-houses-on-the-prairies-of-gallery-floors, ca. 1975 advance to mind.) It also obeys to heighten and focus perception; you direct the eye closely and attentively to make fully convinced you're not missing anything, and you are rewarded by dint of otherwise unnoticeable discoveries. The elevated awareness thus precipitated induces a arch intoxication.