Robert Beck, Untitled ("Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminist and Film Theory: 2"/"Art as Healing" by Edward Adamson), Detail, 1998-2007, Acrylic paint, carbon, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, ink, latent fingerprint powder, and tape on paper, 9-1/4 X 7".

CRG Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
New York
212 229 2766
Robert Beck,
How am I to sign myself
November 10-December 22, 2007

How am I to sign myself, an excerpt from the close of a letter written to Nora Barnacle by James Joyce, August 15, 1904, is the title of Robert Beck’s exhibition of new drawings.

What are often referred to as “Diagnostic Drawings”; a variety of psychological tests used to understand the functioning of a subject’s personality, have also been the form in which Beck has made a vast body of work on paper over more than a decade. This exhibition marks the end and culmination of that body of work.

One text Beck focuses on is The House-Tree-Person Technique (HTP), developed by John N. Buck in 1966. It serves as a personality assessment test in which the subject is asked to draw a house, a tree, and a person. By doing so, the subject is thought to provide a measure of self-perception and general neurological functioning. As Beck recreated these drawings in his own hand, each deviates from the original. With the addition of unconventional materials, notably latent finger print powder, the substance used by forensic investigators to recover finger prints at a crime scene, a bridge is established between the passive physical index of the subject or artist’s hand and what is actively derived diagnostically from the drawings.

After completing the HTP drawings, the subject is asked a series of test questions, though due to the subjective nature of the technique, the examiner is able to ask unscripted questions, such as “Is that a happy tree?” or “Is that tree alive?” In the second phase, the subject is asked to redraw the drawings, and another set of questions follow. The test drawings are scored using both objective-quantitative and subjective-qualitative criteria. The qualitative evaluation is derived from the examiner’s subjective interpretation of the drawings.

For instance, a tree with a narrow trunk but out-reaching branches could be interpreted as the subject’s need for satisfaction, while the walls of a house might correspond to the subject’s strength of ego, the windows or absence of them to the subject’s relation to the outside world. Such interpretative procedures might lend insight into the relationship between the work and the alteration of the gallery’s architecture that Beck has imposed. By reconfiguring the space to be centrally isolated and starkly illuminated by flood lamps rather than the usual gallery fixtures, Beck engages the otherwise unnoticed interpretive theater of the exhibition space.

Psychoanalysis as an interpretive method abides throughout Beck’s work as a theme, often as a means of exploiting the dynamic between artist, art object and viewer. In the drawings, the mechanism of interpretation is rerouted within the form of the culturally derived art-object. The drawings become a transparent form of the act of interpretation itself as, for instance, the examiner’s assessment is captioned. While one often interprets the art object as a trace or consequence of its maker, here the less apparent, self-referential property of interpretation is itself reflected through the otherwise tacit exchange that occurs between the observer and the observed drawing. Accordingly, the viewer is not exempt from this ricochet of interpretation.

Robert Beck, Untitled ("Clinical Studies of Personality Volume 2: Reactions Due to Brain Damage, Mental Retardation, Personality Disorders in Children, Studies of Normal Persons" ed. Arthur Burton and Robert E. Harris/"Art Therapy: In Theory and Practice" ed. Elinor U), 2001-2007, Acrylic paint, charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, ink, and latent fingerprint powder on paper
13-1/2 X 11".

Robert Beck, Untitled ("Approaches to Art Therapy: Theory and Technique" ed. by Judith Aron Rubin), 1996-2007, Charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, ink, latent fingerprint powder, and tape on paper, 14 X 11".

Robert Beck, Untitled ("Child Psychology" by Buford Johnson/ "Telling without Talking: Art as a Window into the World of Multiple Personality" by Barry M. Cohen and Carol Thayer Cox), 1999-2007, Charcoal, conté crayon, graphite, ink, latent fingerprint powder, tape, and white-out on paper, 14-1/8 X 11".

Robert Beck, Untitled (stainless steel partition, clean), 2004, Mixed media on stainless steel, 58 X 69-1/4".

Robert Buck, Constellation ("To find the Western Path, Right thro the Gates of Wrath"), detail, 2008, Steel railing and artifacts (headstone, surveillance mirror, steer skull, 3D print, Tumi luggage bag, and barricade), 112 X 373 X 110".

Robert Buck, How Am I to Sign Myself (detail), edition of 2, 2008, Lithography, Digital and Stamp Printing on (CRG) Letterhead in 24 parts, 11 X 8 1/2".

CRG Gallery
535 West 22nd Street
212-229-2766
New York
Robert Buck
June 12-August 8, 2008

Having shown previously under the name Robert Beck, this exhibition of the work of Robert Buck, is a departure. evidenced in a body of work consisting of sculptural and print-based works. Founding concerns include language, psychoanalysis, sexuation, filmmaking, and the American West.

How Am I to Sign Myself is emblematic. Combining lithography, digital and stamp printing on CRG gallery letterhead, the edition of 24 prints replicates pages from the guest book for an exhibition of drawings by Robert Beck last year. The simulated signatures defy pat notions of agency, community, audience and authorship.
 
The show features several modular-based works, including Cell (Winter Mimicry 1.0). Relief-like clusters of interlocking hexagons are interposed throughout the gallery. Each “cell” is printed hydrographically with a trompe-l’oiel pattern of tree bark and twigs, moths and pupa. The conglomerations suggest honeycomb, decor, or paving stones.

Vane of Association (Istock), a series of UV-printed rhombus-shaped DiBond panels traverse the walls. Scanned chain-links, in tangled and knotted layouts, are superimposed over non-descript images taken from a commercial photography internet site. Associations insinuate from random, linked sequences of “iconographic” images.

Sprawling across the floor and back wall of the gallery, Constellation (”To find the Western Path, Right thro the Gates of Wrath) is a central work. A vine-like apparatus of polished aluminum rails, the sculpture plots an array of commodities as rebus or schema, a 3D “Magic Eye” print its focal point. Gallery areas are enveloped in interstices of the sculpture becoming part of its network.

The commercial printing and fabrication techniques exploited by the work jibes with the appropriation of mass-produced-disseminated objects-images and the derivation-deviation of our global economy vernacular. With these initiatives, Buck signals socially accessible points of common reference in an increasingly imaginary public sphere. Notions of non-localized identity, precipitated by a cultural web/hive of mass-produced, techno-logically distributed identities (surrogates for social-physical structures) materialize as changeling subjectivities. According to Buck, traversing the fantasy may be our best chance.