reviews Matthew hiGGs
Matthew
higgs:
art is
to enjoy
JaCk haNleY GallerY,
los aNGeles
7 JulY – 18 auGust
While Ed Ruscha’s first book of photographs,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), has found its
appropriate place in the history of contemporary art,
little is spoken of its original incarnation. Before being
a handheld object filled with an apparently arbitrary
collection of images, Ruscha’s book was to be found in
a drawing. Barely a sketch, Twentysix Gasoline Stations
Slant (1963) pictures the cover of a book lying at a slant.
The red letters spelling out Twentysix Gasoline Stations are drawn in the same generic, sans-serif Photograph of a book (JOHN CURRIN),
1999/2007, colour photograph,
font that would later adorn the book. This subtle design was an admission of nonstyle, a mere
48 x 54 cm, edition of 10. Courtesy
idea for the book that Jeff Wall would later contend only an ‘idiot’ could make. Stupefyingly
the artist and Murray Guy, New York
simple, Ruscha’s drawing concretely founded conceptual practice, where idea becomes object
and word meets image.
In his first solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery, critic, curator and artist Matthew Higgs
channels the youthful Ruscha’s tendency for conceptual idiocy, melding it with an ironic sense of
appropriation. Presenting only found material, Higgs exhibits discrete pages and covers torn from
books both common and obscure. Their original context all but lost (the titles occasionally clue
us in to their provenance), these sheets are nevertheless subtle balances of design. Language,
font, format and kerning are the media Higgs employs to dissolve the boundaries between them
and infuse them with paradox. For instance, WORD AS IMAGE (all works 2007) summates the
entirety of conceptual art. Taken (I suspect) not from an art book but a book on typography, the
bold font stretches the breadth of a blank white page. The equal spacing between letters allows
them to oscillate between abstract form and language, confirming what they do in fact say.
The text recalls the format of Ruscha’s book covers, a format that, this piece indicates, evolved
from a keen artist’s attempt at a styleless aesthetic approach to a distinct typographical genre.
In the context of the art gallery, WORD AS IMAGE is inundated with a history it was
never meant to hold. Of course, Higgs’s exhibition draws us in to the mysterious unknown
original context of each of these pages. The words hang as slack slogans of distant gestures.
The wit of Higgs’s project is his ability to formulate new narratives, indeed to compose a history
of contemporary art through these decontextualised leaves. He takes the murmur of a book, like
the blank pink cover of Lila Katzen, 1969, or the red stripes adorning Emergent Americans, 1981,
and allows their anonymity to articulate the mediation of modern art. As with his one framed
page, Late 20th-Century Art, Higgs’s Art Is to Enjoy speaks to the manner in which the enjoyment
and knowledge of modern art is by way of a secondhand relationship. Chris Balaschak
161 artreview
NEW_October_REVIEWS.indd 15 4/9/07 12:41:00
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