Also this issue: Go Fish -Susan Hagen Summertime Singing -Debra Auspitz Keiko Miyamori -Debra Auspitz Dynamic Duo -Steve Cohen Rodin -Debra Auspitz

June 13-19, 2002

art

Casting Call

Leonardo Drew in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Number 80 (2002), dimensions variable, paper.

The ghostly work of Leonardo Drew is on display at the Fabric Workshop and Museum.

by Robin Rice

Leonardo Drew: New WorkThrough Aug. 16, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1315 Cherry St., fifth floor, 215-568-1111

Leonardo Drew must have been in the mood for change when he embarked on the three cast-paper works currently on view in the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Drew’s earlier module-based installations tend to be dark -- not gloomy, but textured, shadowy, bountiful, with warm, rusty patinas: burnished, caramel-buttery, earthy.

Some associate the color black with mourning; however, among many peoples, especially some African cultures and the Japanese, white is the color of death. Drew's new pieces, which press materials indicate were influenced by a 1997 residency in Japan, are white, though a speckling of rust has worked its way through some areas, and there is soft-gray writing on casts of books. Drew's use of paper is quintessentially Japanese.

The fragile whiteness of Number 80, the largest of the three installations and the only one made at the Fabric Workshop, feels cool and ghostly. The apparently random scattering of full-scale cast-paper objects re-creates a casual refuse heap, one you might find on a vacant urban lot or in some untillable rural hollow. Crisp surfaces suggest that their interiors have vaporized, perhaps in some cataclysmic volcanic eruption, leaving behind shells of white ash, fragile empty husks like the cast-off skin of the cicada.

During his FWM residency, begun in 2000, Drew collected hundreds of items. As he traveled between his studios in San Antonio, Texas, Brooklyn and other parts of the country, he found provocative mundanities in places like Salvation Army outlets (known to the cognoscenti as "Sally's Department Stores"), thrift stores, junkyards or simply abandoned in the streets.

Number 80 is to some extent a broad American cultural portrait. Cultural, economic and geographic distinctions do not inhabit a trophy, a television set, a hat, a lawn mower, a pair of giant ornamental salad servers, a collapsing bed frame or a tricycle.

Drew's method of casting, which was followed by some 40 FWM apprentices and staff members who made the work, is to encase the chosen item in paper, which is then cut away and rejoined with more paper. The form emerges intact or reassemble-able, and the cast, though ever so slightly robbed of grace, is exact as to size and most details. The spiraling metal blades of a push mower are made more mysterious when transferred to another medium. Sinuous electric cords meticulously reproduced become a bit sticklike, suggesting an almost naive obsessiveness. A pair of glasses is blinded by opaque paper, inverting their function.

A video outside the gallery shows Drew's process so clearly that one could imitate it, but it's so painstaking that it's doubtful that anyone less compulsive than a Martha Stewart would be tempted to try it.

The cultural portrait factor, though valid, is not the core of Number 80. Shared culture makes objects accessible to us, people of this time and place. Like Duchamp's ready-mades, these casts will become increasingly quaint and inaccessible as the years pass. Number 80 is more deeply about utility and meaning. When has an object lost its usefulness? What has it taken from previous owners? In the video, Drew speaks of scavenging as "trying to find a voice." He says, "Every day is a bit of shedding skin and realizing yourself in the moment. Yet it's a new you."

Drew cultivates a deeply paradoxical relationship to his work. He not only refuses to sign it (these pieces aren't "signable" in any formalized sense, anyway); he uses numbers rather than titles to avoid coloring whatever meaning that the piece might have for the viewer. He tells us, directly in words and through his reluctance to speak about his work beyond generalized cliches, that we should not seek him in his art. On the other hand, he cultivates the persona of an artist. He appears in videos and speaks of his African-American heritage as part of his work. Of course, he has to make a living and, for an artist, this means seeking fame. Anonymous artists don't get far.

It was impossible for me to discover through telephone calls and reading earlier catalogs what was cast to make the long horizontal wall-based piece Number 81. In form it is related to earlier grid-based, heavily textured pieces for which Drew is best known. Similarly, the artist conceals the origin of fragmentary text in Number 82, a wall-mounted installation of cast-paper books. Perhaps this cultivated mystery enhances its somber funerary regularity.

In fact, the wall works, though less virtuoso in execution than the floor piece, have a more compelling formal richness. On the other hand, they provide an ideal frame for Drew's sprawling preservation of myriad cultural artifacts in a material whose very name is a metaphor for the ephemeral.