Tom Friedman
Gagosian Gallery, London, UK
Care Package (Manipulated) (2008), (c) Tom Friedman. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
All artists claim an ability to consecrate ordinary materials. With the addition of their touch, their discerning eye and their genius, paint, plaster and found objects become meaningful – even transcendent. Few artists, however, match the extreme disorientation Tom Friedman evokes in this act of transfiguration. Friedman’s work renders everyday detritus – toothpaste, spaghetti, eraser shavings, plastic drinking-straws – extraordinary, even unrecognizable. His art evinces painstaking construction and fastidious precision: representative works include a sphere molded from more than 1000 pieces of chewed bubblegum, a self-portrait carved from an aspirin tablet, a starburst sculpture made from 30,000 toothpicks, and a four-foot human figure constructed entirely of sugar cubes. Friedman’s treatment, beyond transforming common objects into art objects, yields profound uncanniness.
Green Demon (2008), (c) Tom Friedman. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
In his current Gagosian show, what appears to be an oversized box of Life breakfast cereal is actually a mosaic of thousands of quarter-inch squares cut from 25 real Life boxes, staggered and glued together. Blurry and mesmerizing, Life (2008) vibrates with optical intensity. A giant Quaker Oats cylinder, comprising 13 actual cartons, is also on display. Both works were produced this year, updating a 1999 untitled piece – one of Friedman’s best-known works – constructed from nine Total cereal boxes, cut up and combined into one ‘total’.
With his elaborate, unexpected constructions, Friedman decontextualizes familiar objects to the point of unrecognizability – as in Look (2008). What looks like a Pollock-esque composition of overlaid drips and splashes is in fact a collage of looping, scribbled shapes cut out from pornographic magazines.
Another collage, the triptych Monsters and Stuff (2008), from which the exhibit takes its name, features found images trawled from popular magazines. Based on Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-04), the collage evokes the Netherlandish master’s proto-Surrealist vision, eschewing its biblical motifs while retaining its chaotic composition and fantastical creatures. In the tradition of Dada photomontage, celebrities and politicians are mercilessly vivisected, their parts ingeniously recombined with animals and objects to create human chimeras: with the addition of a blond coif, an elephant’s rear becomes a kind of face, its tail an elongated nose. Condoleezza Rice’s head is pasted on a bodybuilder’s torso; her arm is replaced by a penis, topped by a hand extending its middle finger. An image of seeds being poured into a pile is inverted so that the pile appears like a cloud above the rising stream of seeds. Suggesting a mushroom cloud and a column of rushing gas, this inverted image is pasted above Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s head.
Though the collage takes on contemporary culture and its many monstrosities, Friedman seems more engaged by the medium’s formal possibilities. Employing his trademark technical virtuosity, he creates unnerving images and intricate compositions. Indeed, Friedman is at his best when he takes a mundane object and pushes it to the limits of its formal potential.
‘Monsters and Stuff’, installation view, (c) Gagosian Gallery
Balancing rigorous technique with humour, Friedman infuses his oeuvre with a sense of playfulness. His ‘total’ of Total boxes is the equivalent of a one-liner; Which (2008), composed of black paper arrows glued together in the shape of a witch’s hat, is a visual pun. In a corridor between two of Gagosian’s gallery spaces, a white shelf displays a series of tiny circular pellets carefully lined up in order of size. According to the accompanying list of works, the medium is ‘artist’s boogers’. As ‘Monsters and Stuff’ attests, Friedman aestheticizes everyday detritus only to regard this consecration with irreverence.
Natasha Degen
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