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<\/a>Don\u2019t believe everything you read.<\/p>\nOr at least don\u2019t swallow it wholesale, for words are slippery things. They can mask something just as easily as they can point to it \u2013 especially when those words are art labels, the mediocre adhesives we use to desperately pull together artists who themselves are inclined to break away from any controlled center like atoms at a big bang.<\/p>\n
Which is why artists rarely like us critics. Because with our words we try to rope in their works, herd them into a box that is readily comprehensible to a general public.<\/p>\n
But artists, with the need to provide biographies and artist statements for exhibitions, grant applications and gallery submissions, fall victim to the same problem as critics — throwing up art labels like sign posts which, while possibly pointing in the direction of the works, also threaten to surround and obfuscate them.<\/p>\n
Bateman creates sculptures out of books. Lots of books. Truckloads of books stacked into massive cubes, arranged as thin teetering towers, or screwed together as globe-like spheres. They are used books, from libraries mostly. Bateman is interested in the books as symbols of language — signifiers of signification — but shows little interest in the individual book itself. Often turned spine inwards, so all we see is the fore-edge, the books are essentially building blocks for his sculptures that create patterns, rhythms, and textures.<\/p>\n Bateman\u2019s choice of materials gives his minimalism a very earthy, brittle, dewy appeal. And I imagine he will like the deconstructive aspect of my appreciation when I point out that the sculptures, at least in their state of being viewed, burst out of any \u201cminimalist\u201d pen we might try to put around them.<\/p>\n With minimal materials and minimal construction, Bateman creates the maximum effect. There is nothing minimal about where these sculptures can take you.<\/p>\n Bateman\u2019s works are referred to as \u201cminimalist\u201d — a good enough guidepost, but one, I think, which is inadequate or which will lead you to only a partial view of the works. Take a moment and google \u201cminimalism\u201d and you\u2019ll begin to get a general sense of what we are talking about.<\/p>\n Bateman certainly reduces the means of his creative process, using little color or shape. But I doubt you can experience these works and not be taken to any symbolic place or experience.<\/p>\n Though books, in some circles, may be on their way to becoming anachronisms, it is the experience that everyone, or almost anyone, has had with a book that makes Bateman\u2019s work effective. (It was a lazy Saturday afternoon as I looked at Literal Sculptures<\/i> at the Kimball, and a family with preteen children came into the sparse exhibit. The kids couldn\u2019t quit talking about how \u201ccool\u201d it was. I really doubt that the reaction would have been the same if the sculptures had been created out of stacks of shipping crates or even Campbell soup cans.) Whether our experience with books is that of cheap paperback novels, like those used in Bateman\u2019s \u201cAll Our Tomorrows,\u201d |3|<\/b> or dense law tomes such as appear sporadically in \u201cSecondary Structure (How Not To Be Cowed),\u201d we have all had the experience of that small physical object, the book, taking us to the vast experiences of the mind.<\/p>\n Though sometimes Bateman creates spheres, waves and spirals with his book sculptures, in the Kimball exhibition he relies almost entirely on straight angles: two massive cubes, rectangular mats of tiny letters on the center\u2019s floor, and straight stacks of paperbacks on bookshelves.<\/p>\n In three works related to the book sculptures, Bateman moves one step down on the linguistic hierarchy, creating works using letters \u2013 black pasta letters \u2013 rather than books. They are preserved in canning jars \u2013 evoking the unused forces of language? \u2013 |6|<\/b> or, in “Accumulaton 1 & 2”, spread on the floor in a rectangle not unlike a Buddhist sand painting.|7|<\/b><\/p>\n In his piece, \u201cCustard Died For Your Sins,\u201d |8|<\/b> we recognize the colored pages of cheap paperback novels, evoking countless cowboy adventures designed to be consumed and discarded. But look at the underside |9|<\/b> and you\u2019ll see the paperback of the work\u2019s title. With the subtitle, \u201cAn Indian Manifesto,\u201d it is the underside of the romantic dime-store version of the American West.<\/p>\n Though in most instances Bateman turns the book inwards and says the actual book is not as important as the structural element it provides, his work cannot escape elements of the biographical. The biography of the books that is. When you see a detail, like the stamp of the Denver public library, on the pages of a book, you are immediately taken hundreds of miles away. You are transported through time, through the biography of the book, the hands that held it. (Think what a beautiful exhibition could be had with the old checkout cards from library books). With stamps like \u201cno return\u201d |10|<\/b>or \u201cwithdrawn,\u201d |11|<\/b>I feel a ghostly presence, and can\u2019t help but think of Melville\u2019s Bartleby<\/a>, laboring in the Dead Letter Office. I hear, echoing in the spaces of the Kimball now that the family has left, Bartleby\u2019s refrain \u201cI would prefer not\u201d and the narrator\u2019s last words \u201cAh Bartleby! Ah humanity!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nSo, when you visit the Kimball Art Center<\/a> this month \u2013 and I suggest you do \u2013 to see the installation by Adam Bateman<\/a> entitled Literal Sculpture<\/i>, don\u2019t take things you read there too literally. Even if Bateman himself wrote them.<\/p>\n<\/a>And thus we read on the placard at the Kimball: \u201cAdhering to the basic principles of Minimalism, Bateman\u2019s work is mechanical and impersonal rather than emotional and introspective.\u201d The books are the building blocks of Bateman\u2019s \u201cminimalist\u201d sculptures, but don\u2019t be too quick to put them in a shiny aluminum Donald Judd box.<\/p>\n<\/a>At Artlex<\/a> you\u2019ll find the following: “Minimalism- A twentieth century art movement and style stressing the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimum number of colors, values, shapes, lines and textures. No attempt is made to represent or symbolize any other object or experience. It is sometimes called ABC art, minimal art, reductivism, and rejective art.”<\/p>\n<\/a>Books are simultaneously dense and light. Just look at the sculptures, the weigh<\/i> books sag and bend beneath the weight of their comrades. You see and feel the weight of the pieces. But you also \u201cknow\u201d books and that is why they remain, in a sense, light. For they are filled with words and words are about density and lightness — the dense opaqueness of the ink floating across the light and infinite surface of the white paper. A book is as much about the margins and the spaces \u2013 the reading between the lines \u2013 as it is about the black ink on the page.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nLooking at some of the patterns in \u201cSecondary Structure (The Word, The Flesh and Father Smith),\u201d |4|<\/b> I can\u2019t help but think of Dubuffet\u2019s Hourloupe series. This sculpture is a massive eight by eight by eight-foot cube. Lit from just one side (or at least it was when I was visiting), each corner slips into a relative degree of darkness, making me think of our space age vision of a sunlit earth, seen in the four corner framework of the ancient Greeks or Navajo. |5|<\/b> A smaller (6\u2019x 6\u2019x6\u2019), though similar sculpture, \u201cHow Not To Be Cowed\u201d is installed nearby, a satellite or smaller planet to its larger neighbor. The planet motif is echoed by a spherical work, \u201cSphere #5,\u201d but in the straight-line context of the installation, this piece feels out of place.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>This one glimpse at an individual book is an important reminder. Whether or not we know its identity, a book is never just the sum of its physical parts. It is not just the board, the crash, the endsheet, the flyleaf, the fore-edge, the gutter, the head, the hinge, the joint, the lining, the paste down, the spine, the spine piece, the square, the tail and the text block. It is always more than this. It is \u201cA BOOK.\u201d<\/p>\n