PARTS

Judson King Smith at Transmission Gallery

August 1 through September 14

I got to Judson King Smith’s current show the day before his planned public reception. Transmission Gallery’s handout flyer accompanying the exhibit had to substitute for the artist not being there with me, but it went like a guided missile to the thing that should aid me the most: Smith’s central idea. Slightly reworded: all that we know about ourselves occupies just a moment in the passing of time. 

The show flyer prepares us to experience that concept from all of the works. We then look at the pieces on display, each one of them indeed clustering multiple historical references (whether personal or public); each one in effect collapsing time.

But that effect makes us wonder. Is any given work telling the same story as the others, or instead telling its own story?

Well, the list of titles of the works in the show reads beautifully on its own, like the table of contents in an anthology of various  poetic allegories. It argues for separate meaningful stories, which sets us testing the success of the works in that way.

The style of substance

Smith’s pieces are complex constructions rich with representations, not abstract elements or gestures. Their density is a very consistent feature across the works. This gives us a first impression that their style has the same meaning across the collection. The uniformity supports each piece's status as an example of the central idea.

It’s fair to say that in  in some collections , especially in abstract art, style is itself the subject, and each work intentionally explores that same subject. Their various ways of blending the same constituent effects are like multiple proofs that the observed style does generate meaning, as if style is a fully functional grammar that some people already know or with enough effort will discover.

In that way, the initial overall impression of a work is a "statement" by the work, affiliating it with the others. But on closer look, an opposing second impression forms, that each work intends to use its particular details to go beyond the group's common grammar into a separate statement, its own narrative or story, whether its title is prescribing it or describing it.

The telling form

Smith’s sculptures, which are assemblages of many, many parts, have the interesting character of being more like a story when seen from a distance, and being mostly a collection of pregnant facts when inspected up close. But our overall sense of the works is equally informed by both points of view. How does that work? More like wall pieces than free-standing structures, each piece presents a composition showing us what it wants us to know from pretty much a one-sided view. We zoom in on it to pick up what is mostly a psychological depth in the details, and then zoom out again to resume considering if their arrangement in the given case is telling us something distinct from what the other works do. 

Above: details from three separate works, and the fourth lower one illustrating an overall crucifix motif.

Assembly lines

Smith’s compositions are sophisticated and yet seem readily improvised. Many of the details appear not because other details logically require them to be included, but instead because they conveniently help realize larger formal patterns or shapes.

The strongest comparison I can make is to dreams, infamously populated by things that in waking memory didn’t belong to each other but show up like appropriate furniture in assigned times and spaces of sleep’s improvised script. Just as we have long been fascinated by “dream logic”, a Smith's work can fulfill us aesthetically by how the different effects of its elements become formally associated in the flow of form being performed, a stream of subconsciousness.

Smith’s “performance” is in the huge number of decisions that we see he made in adding one thing to another. His decision might seem convenient, or strategic; emphatic, or nuanced; funny, or poignant. Angels, astronauts, talismans and arbitrary detritus can be equally important, because they each can point at a distinctive time-stamped frame of mind. And while his personal choices might seem idiosyncratic, many of them make (or use) references that cross different cultures.

That reference, which provides the sculpture’s psychological depth, won’t necessarily determine where Smith decides an item is going to be used in the structure. Rather, composition seems to get the first nod, then the included item’s resonance as an emblem gets to poetically do its thing. I’ll admit that one could argue the opposite; but come to the show and see for yourself.

In the house

The title of the collection, The House of Miraculous Recovery, could itself be read several ways . Implying a powerful place, does it mean that recovery is miraculous, or that remembering miracles is what’s going on? Can it be both?

Sure, why not? The visceral presence of the work puts a less binary spin on it. We enjoy how a piece winds up intuitively feeling like it makes sense, even despite what might seem just opportunistic or unexplained choices of the observed components. This invites the apropos thought that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  

But I was struck more strongly by a different aspect. Like the Tardis in the famous science fiction series Dr. Who, any given piece of Smith’s work, and likewise the whole “house” of them in their assigned corner of the gallery space, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.