Joe Zucker, who handed away on Might 15 at age 83, as soon as informed me a narrative that I’ve repeated many instances, typically to college students. Within the late Sixties, shortly after he and Chuck Shut turned shut buddies, Shut moved into the constructing the place Joe had his studio. Quickly after, he requested Joe to be one of many topics of his monumental, black-and-white photorealistic portraits. Just like the others on this group (Philip Glass, Mark Greenwold, and Richard Serra), the portray “Joe” (1969) was based mostly on a scientific, mugshot-like {photograph} of Zucker taken by Shut. Based on the New York Instances obituary for Shut in August 2021, the work have been “indistinguishable from pictures when seen in replica. When seen in particular person, that they had a monumental, uncannily imposing presence. The large, expressionless faces gaze again at viewers with vaguely discomfiting inscrutability. At an in depth distance, the work flip into landscape-like fields of facial particulars, with each hair, pore, wrinkle and blemish enormously magnified.”
Made in the course of the late ‘60s, when Frank Stella’s “what you see is what you see” mantra dominated a lot of the artwork world’s considering, Shut upended this relationship by making work that modified relying in your viewpoint. Zucker, who possessed a sensible, sardonic streak, determined that he would reroute the sleek move from {photograph} to portray, elevating one other query: Would the portray nonetheless be telling the reality if Joe altered his look? All the time thorough in his undertakings, Joe used hair tonic to slick again his hair. He placed on a white shirt and tie, and stuffed wadded tissues into his cheeks. He stated he wished to appear to be a used automobile salesman, which he did.
Joe wasn’t simply being flippant. He had a deep-seated want — without delay mental and emotional — to push previous all conventions, beginning with portray itself. Greater than every other artist of his era, Joe rejected the conventions related to Summary Expressionism, notably its subjectivity. He was not fascinated about what Harold Rosenberg known as “Motion Portray” or Clement Greenberg’s insistence on flatness and paint-as-paint. He reached this understanding early in his profession. When the gallerist John Corbett requested about his grid work, made between 1963 and ’68, he responded: “As an undergraduate I used to be paralyzed by having to color a form. Having been confronted by a clean canvas I had the epiphany that how a canvas was woven was actually an answer to my issues, as a result of it was referring to the canvas as an object, not as an illustration or phantasm, however merely repeating its corporeal existence.” Joe acknowledged that clarifying portray’s corporeal existence was central to his venture.
Zucker had a profound, revolutionary understanding that portray (just like the altering human physique) was a mixture of kind, content material, and course of, and that “reality to supplies” may very well be expanded past artwork supplies, comparable to oil paint and metal. He was guided by a extremely analytical intelligence, a pointy sense of the absurd, and a refusal to settle right into a signature fashion, materials, or course of. His imaginative transformations of supplies comparable to cotton balls, sheetrock, pegboard, crates, woolen mittens, and gloves are unmatched. His work may very well be each hilariously absurd and lethal critical. Nobody else has walked this tightrope with such precision and charm.
What elevates these works — they aren’t portray, sculpture, abstraction, figuration, or any hybrid — into their very own inimitable area is a mixture of untamed creativeness and seriousness. He used cotton balls to make work of the antebellum South, reminding viewers that one of many roots of racism is American capitalism. These works additionally deflated the concept that there’s such a factor as a “pure” portray. How may a portray be pure when it’s painted on cotton duck? It’s a false splendid. Within the scenes that Zucker selected to depict, segregation was apparent and violence typically felt imminent. There’s nothing conventional about this or different topics that Zucker pursued with unparalleled rigor. For him, craft and art-making have been inseparable, and the supplies for each have been accessible on the ironmongery shop. He liked artwork, however not the way it had turn out to be an exalted kind. His engagement was visceral and mental, physique and thoughts.
In 2013, he had an exhibition, Empire Descending A Staircase, at Mary Boone in Manhattan. The present’s title suggests the work was celebrating the centenary of the 1913 Armory present, particularly the debut of Marcel Duchamp’s portray “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2” (1912), whereas exposing the parable of America’s ethical superiority. In an effort to deal with these two divergent topics, which I can’t think about anybody else doing, Joe scored a chunk of sheetrock measuring both eight-by-two ft or four-by-four ft right into a grid of quarter-inch squares. He then flaked off the protecting paper, leaving the scored gypsum uncovered in a grid that consisted of 1000’s of small however distinct sections and methodically utilized one monochromatic dot of watercolor at a time, starting from gentle grey to black. At first, it isn’t clear what Joe is portray. The dots hark to the cotton balls of the early weave work, an aggregation of models or cells, every comparable and distinctive: Artwork as a dwelling factor, not lifeless matter. It is just after extended trying that we see the columns and capitals holding nothing up. Our protections fall away.
Joe’s work have been greater than art-about-art. Utilizing gypsum board, a staple of home constructing, he implicated us all. I’ll at all times love him for exhibiting me that you possibly can dwell on this world with humor and despair, and by no means lose sight of magnificence and the enjoyment of constructing one thing whose existence was not assured.