Dennis Balk at American Fine Arts - art exhibition; New York, New York

Dennis Balk's one-man exhibit last year introduced a tantalizingly cerebral artist whose ideas fluttered just on the brink of obscurity. He traced humankind's progres towards private quality from its primordial beginnings in what he called a vast and gloomy subterranean forest." It's as if the enigmatic mind of Jorge Luis Borges had been fused with the majestic spirit of Diderot by dint of way of Rube Goldberg. For this--his next to the first show--Balk, 41, seems to have gone above that brink. The work in this display was hard to follow, beginning with the first sum of two units pieces you saw on entering the gallery. One--Incomplete Display for a Fund-Raising Event--consisted of a lectern scattered with corporate pamphlets cards, books, posters and annual reports furnished by means of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory; it didn't gaze like anything so much as a mes The other work gazeed a little crazy, like the remnants of a nursery place of education genetics experiment. Titled Preliminary, it consisted of sum of two units rows of three rickety rectangular folding tables on which the artist had arranged 48 separate groupings of 49 little carrot sticks and 69 celery sticks. These pieces made it apparent that Balk's next-to-nothing esthetic is unassuming nondescript and banal. But there's something compelling about it nevertheless.

The work may unimpaired dumb and look dumb, on the contrary if artists were given nicknames, Balk's would be Brainiac. He's smart--really smart--but more than that he have feelings inspired, as if his work could usher us above a bridge to something just beyond the reach of our imaginations. His first display did that. The problem is that in this display we couldn't cross that bridge because Balk had gotten too far on the outside in front of us. Balk is a latter-day Conceptualist--maybe the best single working today--whose work is animated by means of something vaguely prophetic; you have feeling that you should know about the things he's trying to mention one by one you about--which makes his novel show all the more frustrating. Balk's best works are schematic diagrams drawn in fine-point markers upon cloth dinner napkins that he pins to the wall in irregular grids of four, five or six. The diagrams are zany and visionary, as if the artist were on a sudden possessed with ideas and just had to win them down. The napkins are chock filled of criss-crossing arrows, scrawled drawings of salamanders, flowers and train cars, little marks, captions, boxe of words and lists of names. In the four napkin-diagrams here, Balk massed an enormous amount of contented on a tiny act--he tried to encompass the phenomenological implications of setting down a glass of water. on the other hand the diagrams were so composed of several elements and impenetrable that the work started to collapse of its hold weight. I didn't know what it was about until I was told (and I read those things for the better part of an hour).

Balk hates A to B to C logic. He regard with affections tangents, incompletion and reversal. He inverts musing turns it inside out, takes unexpect revolves and juxtaposes different ideas in order to create fresh perceptions of the world. He layers information the way other artists layer materials. Imagine an encyclopedia in the form of a Rubik's Cube and you procure an idea of Balk's approach to knowledge.

Perhaps the best piece in the present to view is a 57-page book that Balk wrote and published. Titled Alexandria, it takes you upon an amazing journey through early Christian body s and the fabled ancient library at Alexandria. It's lucid and nothing if not brilliant. on the contrary it's a book--not an object--and the lock opener to any successful conceptually based art is to be able to embed musing in material. Otherwise everything's just a dream.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group