Press

Linda Norden/ PotBox Boxing: The Author & the Other

In the spy-versus-spy era of World War II, collaboration meant collusion, assisting in an often-illicit operation or campaign. In the current, millennial, mad market art world, collaboration has become a working relationship of choice, a feel-good antidote to commercial competition and an evolutionary advance on the artist as Author. The creative coupling the word suggests has the aura of a win-win proposition, at least ideologically, though anyone who’s actually undertaken a collaborative project knows better. Most artists are hard-put to relinquish the signature bits and pieces that add up to what others call style. So sorting out what might actually inspire an artist to agree to subject her work to the hands and mind of an other can be complicated. In the case of artists Nicole Cherubini and Taylor Davis, the motives were less ideological or strategic than personal, and the unanticipated fear and anger the interchange excited and scared them both.

Before they took on the collaboration that led to the works on display here, Cherubini/Davis had only a few, seemingly random points of intersection -- a gallery; Boston; a practice rooted in hand-made, materially defined, labor-intensive objects; their sex; and an affection for the eccentric potter George Ohr and two unsung, 19th century brothers named Kirkpatrick. Even these overlaps were qualified. Davis, now Boston-based, grew up on a farm in Eastern Washington state; Boston is where she came to terms with herself as an adult. Cherubini, who now lives and works in Brooklyn, knew the city as a child. Davis’ mostly floor-based, mostly hard-edged sculpture is made mostly from wood, though she often includes mirrors, and more recently, language, and plays with transparency and reflection. Cherubini makes intensively decorated bottomless vessels that she generates through a series of self-imposed rules, and works almost entirely in clay, though she augments her vessels with materials that include wood. Though both artists are highly attuned to gender and to the erotics of their art, in life, Cherubini is a mother, married to a male, while Davis has long been involved with a female partner.

Still, each artist had intellectual reasons for believing they might gain from the dialogue, and both artists cite an intense, but unformed desire to catalyze some change in their art.

“There was something in Taylor’s sculpture,” says Cherubini, “maybe control, maybe order, a containment of sorts that attracted me.” (Davis' spare wood constructions are almost ascetic in their formal restraint, but often full to overflowing with penned-up emotion. Both artists tend to open, extend, fuss with, and tease their closed volumes, but Davis' aesthetic is implosive, where Cherubini treads more comfortably with expressionism.) “I wanted to know,” Cherubini adds, “what would happen when two equally skilled artists, equally immersed in material properties, but working in very different materials, attempted some new ‘whole.’ I wondered what kind of information the inherent properties of each material might provide aesthetically and conceptually. I wanted to get a better grip on craft, and to think about the terms in which our practices get discussed. And I'd never met another contemporary artist who knew the brothers Kirkpatrick.” Davis, more taciturn, was drawn to the lushness in Cherubini's work, the traditionally sensuous color and surface of her forms. She liked the ways in which Cherubini knew how to lift her forms to eye level. Recovering from several personal losses, she was also ready to bypass recent work she described as “homeopathic.” The collaboration, in other words, began as a kind of mid-life, creative affair and a leap of faith. Which may also be why the resulting works seem at once so tentative, so testy and so charged.

Piece #1 gives some insight into the self-conscious cleverness with which the experiment began. Davis delivers an elegant, attenuated plywood “peace-pipe,” replete with signature adjustments, like the splayed ends with finger holes and heavy galvanized steel handle smack in its middle. As if to will the wood into clay, Cherubini seals its surface with varnish, then "embellishes" Davis’ gauntlet, adding a graceful, but mocking, twig-like appendage, one of her signature elements, and daubing the heavy handle, which she's moved, with globs of finger-marked turquoise glazed clay. Having rendered Davis' peace pipe a cartoon -- it’s a bit as if she's invited Tweety-Bird to alight up top -- she stencils a conciliatory greeting: "PEACE BABE." The collaboration rolls into competitive gear. Grey, on the other hand, another early entry, is kinder, gentler and more serious. “Nicole wasn’t afraid to add ballast,” Davis observes with belated admiration. “She also wasn’t afraid to put things in the holes.” Or, in this case, between the rungs of Davis’ ladder-like plinth/sculpture. Cherubini also “glazed” this sculpture, with more varnish and paint, this time grey, and with the flings and drips of isolated color that often mark her pots. But her defining addition, the literal ballast, is a hefty slab of marble, placed like a foot, on the bottom rung. Another less-than-innocent action.

And so it went. A pot with a hole got stuffed with a pole, and then extended ad infinitum by a mirror “placemat” that renders the “whole” a virtual, baroque Brancusi, or totem. A clay box does battle with a wood box and a pair of misbehaved jeans weave in an out of openings along lines that seem almost directly tied to the Kirkpatrick brothers' rude “snake pots,” in which anatomically correct snakes poke in and out of whiskey jugs and occasionally do damage to female genitalia or male bottoms. Throughout, the petulance of artist A and the unflappable pragmatism of artist B remain distinct, even when the artists change roles. The tantrum, unsubdued, is subjected to the surpassing gesture.

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Ohr liked to call his pots “clay babies,” playing on the congenital propriety this implied and drawing a distinction between his hand-made offspring and those that required a partner and other body parts. He called his children “live pottery.” PotBox, the latest of the Cherubini/Davis composites, makes manifest the lovechild intensity of their co-produced objects without ever allowing either artist’s creative DNA to fully merge with its mate’s. Cherubini’s hand-built, iced-cake of a vessel, once again gets unceremoniously stuffed by Davis, this time with a shiny, commercial cardboard carton. Cherubini, now gracious, lifts the violated vessel up onto a pedestal, an elegant white plaster cast of the box in which Davis had returned it to her. The ill-fitting forms, like the title, speak to the fight entailed in the process, a kind of exquisite corpse-become argument (duel?), which you can almost retrace simply by scanning the contours of the sculptural stack. AND that title, also a collaborative effort, is not exactly a decorous description of the exchange. It’s another representation of the intractable, but determined coupling -- literally, a foiled effort to fit the square into the round. It’s also a euphemism for a kind of sexual sport in which two stubborn individuals manage to create one elegant form that refuses to integrate its members; a sculpture, that is, which expresses a relationship between an author and an other.