Alan Magee
The Mystery of Form at
Hollis Taggart Galleries
BY Maureen Mullarkey
Go on, admit it. Be honest with yourself. You really do enjoy
trompe-l’oeil. There is something disquieting, almost
voyeuristic, in witnessing such intense, obsessive love of
illusionistic detail. When it is good — and Alan Magee
is wondrous — it packs a particular frisson. The pleasures
of trompe-l’oeil are ingrained and enduring. Depictions
of things standing still, things at rest, things that suggest
their history, remain as appealing to moderns as they were
to the ancient Romans. However much our codes of viewing might
have changed since Vesuvius covered over Pompeii, we live
out our lives surrounded by belongings no less now than ever.
Even more now, some would insist. Discarded items are the
artifacts of our own past and remind us of personal and cultural
progress toward obsolescence.
From the clutter of the world, Magee isolates a few homely
objects, much of it detritus, for intense scrutiny of their
worn surfaces. Like Buddhist brush painting, his artistry
is as much a contemplative act as an exercise of skill. His
paintings are meditations on the mutability of things, stand-ins
for mortality. A spark plug or a wrench, salvaged from the
junk heap, becomes an eloquent memento mori.
Protocols of appreciation among trendy, moisturized bratpackers
are likely to classify Magee as an illustrator. Yet all
art illustrates something, if only an artist’s pretension
to ideas. Do not let preconceptions get in the way
of your seeing the show. It is a small treasure that does
not come around often. Magee has not shown in New York since
1990, at the now-defunct Staempfli Gallery. George Staempfli
represented a particular sensibility — precisionist,
modest, often tender — that has been largely exiled from
the contemporary scene. Hats off to Hollis Taggart for giving
New Yorkers this opportunity to see Magee again.
While Magee’s motifs and compositional approaches are
distinctly modern, he works within a long American tradition
of realist clarity. He shares with John Peto and William Harnett,
no less that with Raphaelle Peale and John James Audubon,
an emphatic physical realism and convincing spatial atmosphere.
We could pick up the spark plugs and the wrench and put them
in our pockets. The architecture of them, offered to us for
its own sake, is stunning. How could we have not noticed before
the conceptual elegance of an ordinary bolt, a stretch of
chain?
Magee’s palpable, naturalistic renderings place a high
premium on technical finesse. It is this insistence on ability
that places it outside the fixed idiom of so-called contemporary
art. It also makes the work accessible, removing it from consideration
by bien pensants who prefer theory over actual works
of art. Magee’s preternatural precision challenges the
chattering class’ preference for free-associative dead
ends that require the services of said class to make sense
of it all.
His painting of a timeworn, outmoded drill, Artifact,
1999, is a good case in point. The tool rests within the arabesques
of its electric cord, the weathered steel a relic of industry
that no longer exists and, by extension, a requiem for the
era that sustained it. A metal plate incised with the manufacturer’s
name and serial number functions similarly to the tombstone
inscription in Joshua Reynold’s famous double portrait
of two women examining the phrase: Et in Arcadia Ego.
With the title as a cue to understanding, Magee’s elegiac
panel possesses greater and more accurate social reference
than whole square miles of the pseudo-critical McArt that
winds up in places like the Whitney. No one needs a press
release or a wall plate to grasp either the sculptural beauty
of the image or the poignancy of it. All the casual viewer
needs is perceptivity and memory.
Magee’s visual wit is subtle and informed, shaped by
art history with a certain enthusiasm for surreal gaming.
Never merely descriptive, his work is quietly sympathetic
to Marcel Duchamp’s intention to put painting "at
the service of the mind." Eight bosc pears in Harmonic,
2000, are arranged, stems curving upward, like the staffs
of musical notes across a page. In Couplet, 1999, hardware
items take on figurative qualities, their curves and indentations
suggestive of human anatomy. A discarded iron bucket, still
standing in spite of rust and bullet holes, becomes an exquisitely
realized emblem of endurance. I love Carl Little’s comment:
"It is, in a manner of speaking, an ‘Ode on a New
England Urn.’"
Do not miss the show. Exceptional dexterity and powers of observation
are the first things that greet you. But give yourself time
to reflect on what you see. Magee’s precisionist temper
is combined with a grace of mind that is more remarkable —
and more significant — than his expertise. The uncommon
gravitas he brings to his art is given its due in Carl Little’s
knowledgeable, discerning catalog essay.
ReviewNY
April 2000
