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future greats
Eric Wesley by Paul Schimmel
Eric Wesley’s work is goofy, broad, gestural, humorous and anecdotal, and at the same time structured, rigorous, reductive,
concrete, intellectual, social and political. The fact that he never went to graduate school (surprising for a young artist in Los
Angeles, a town known for its art schools) might have been why his first solo museum exhibition, which was part of MOCA’s
Focus series, was conceptualised as an off-campus ‘thesis’ exhibition. This show demonstrated that his rigorously developed
sculptural installations are part of a broad matrix that draws from a range of Southern California artists.
In it, Wesley dragged a Vespa (possibly a reference to Chris Burden) into a gallery of the Pacific Design Center. In
great incongruity with the elegance of the space, it created an empty stage for a performance that would not happen. The
motorcycle, whose exhaust pipe was redirected out of the gallery, would be turned on at regular intervals, thereby igniting or
activating the space. Its fuel line ran through a glass painting that acted as an external gas tank, referencing Charles Ray’s Ink
Line (1987), and the electricity generated by its battery-powered lightbulb was jerry-rigged to the museum’s electrical light-
track system. A stagelike elevated floor was inlaid with rotating disks rendered immovable by museum restrictions. Within
this spare environment, one also saw the influence of Paul McCarthy (a teacher at UCLA, where Wesley was an
undergrad), Richard Jackson, Bruce Nauman and Michael Asher. In a further show, at Bortolami, New York, Wesley
achieved a spectacularly functional minimalist sculpture using the cliché of the California health spa as its centrepiece. On a
cold, rainy December evening, the opening was less an invitation as it was an elegant assault on New York’s expectations.
These two back-to-back exhibitions allowed me to appreciate what Connie Butler, curator of the MOCA exhibition,
had realised – that Wesley is developing a sculptural language rich in possibility and well-grounded both formally and
clockwise from left: Clean Machine,
conceptually. Drawing more from the generative period of the late 1960s and early 70s, and working in the as-yet-undefined 2006, washing machine, cement,
and certainly noncommercial space between sculpture, performance and political action, Wesley revisits the interest of
163 x 69 x 65 cm, courtesy the artist
and Bortolami, New York; Kicking Ass,
working between practices. His breakthrough work Kicking Ass (2000), a full-scale model of a donkey that has knocked a 2000, neon, dimensions variable, courtesy
hole in a museum wall, draws from Liz Larner’s Corner Basher (1988). However, Wesley transformed Larners’s more formal
the artist; Spafice, 2007 (installation
view), courtesy the artist
kinetic sculpture into an animatronic reference to Paul McCarthy’s goat while making a metaphor for his own development. and Bortolami, New York
87 Artreview
FUTURE~1.INDD 87 11/2/08 12:11:16
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