Handled With Care
Jim Isermann
When I think about Jim Isermann’s work, I am reminded of Tom Snyder, the late night talk show host of the ‘simultini’ (simultaneous broadcast on radio and TV) who babbles on and on like a big yenta. If an old woman cracked herself up about her personal affairs and ‘mother Snyder’ the way he does, she would surely be dismissed as a self-obsessed, irrelevant old biddie, but because Snyder presents the image of the mature, helmet-headed authority figure, he somehow gets away with it. He does more to deconstruct the authority of the white male talking head than an army of p.c. alrightniks.
What Tom Snyder does for the talking head, Jim Isermann does for the formalist Modernist objet. Using the craft techniques of ladies’ handiwork and the meditative processes of occupational therapy, he decorates the forms ‘purified’ by the ultra-macho modern masters with their famous mission to strip aesthetic form of all references to decorative tsatchkes. One recalls the cube-form of yesteryear as it was served up straight: the Robert Morris mirrored cube, the Richard Serra precariously-balanced-but-threateningly-heavy steel slab cube, the Tony Smith cube of solid, content-free presence; in Isermann’s contemporary West Coast hands, these icons of 60s Minimalism get a provocative plaid makeover into something beautifully stuck between a formal thing and a decor thing.
Rhonda Lieberman
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