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Sufficient grounds: Johanna Burton on the art of Blake Rayne
ArtForum, Oct, 2006 by Johanna Burton
IN 1966 JOAN DIDION wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine profiling Joan Baez, who at twenty-five years old was nearly as famous for her activism as for her folksinging (which is to say very). Baez had opened her own school--the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence--in California's Carmel Valley, and Didion's piece detailed the legal proceedings initiated by some of that area's less "liberal" occupants after finding the organization in their immediate vicinity. But, however focused around this local issue, the essay ultimately crafts a subtle portrait of a figure produced by and for a public. Baez, as depicted by Didion, is shown to have filled a role--for fans and detractors alike--in the cultural theater of politics. "Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person," Didion writes, "and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be."
Perhaps the era when lawsuits were filed against hippie chanteuses eager to spread the teachings of Gandhi and Thoreau (to say nothing of Krishnamurti) is all but impossible to imagine today. Even so, there's little question that the manufacture and consumption of personality observed in Baez by Didion has, in the past forty years, only intensified exponentially. And if there is such a countercultural figure for our time, it would have to be Julia Butterfly Hill, who in 1997 (at the age of twenty-three) scaled an ancient California redwood and lived in its limbs for 738 days in order to keep loggers from cutting it down. Hill-a fresh-faced eco-activist from Jonesboro, Arkansas--had enthusiastically volunteered to "sit" the tree when none of her fellow Earth First! compatriots stepped forward. In a video interview conducted in her roost almost two hundred feet from the ground, she took no pains to conceal that her still-forming convictions, however fiercely held, were also imprecise to the point of ethereality. "I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt I was meant to be up here," she explains breathlessly. "I wasn't quite sure why; I just knew I was meant to be in the forest doing something...."
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This year, nearly a decade after Hill's vigil began, the painter Blake Rayne exhibited work at the newly opened Miguel Abreu Gallery, a small storefront space on New York's Lower East Side. During the run of his show, Rayne received a slew of phone calls from friends who, having been to the exhibition, thought he would be interested to know that Hill, now in her early thirties and founder of the activist group Circle of Life, was back up a tree; this time, she was protesting the sale of a plot of land in South Central Los Angeles used mostly by poor immigrants as a community garden. Rayne was interested, but only mildly and bemusedly so--a surprise, perhaps, given the ostensible theme of the works he had just hung. While the show at Abreu's space loosely focused on a kind of shared structuralist impulse between Rayne's work and that of the filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet (two of whose films were shown during special screenings throughout the monthlong exhibition), the painter offered his own unusual press handout in addition to the gallery's, in the form of an appropriated, slightly altered Wikipedia entry on one Julia Butterfly Hill. Rayne's handful of paintings would, from the looks of the checklist, seem to take Hill's granola glamour and the events surrounding her flowering conscience as their "subject." All untitled but each bearing parenthetical subtitles (including "automated dicing saw," "California redwood," and the like), the works established themselves as constellating this minor modern drama in its scant details. Yet for all his seeming attention to his narrative source, Rayne's canvases weirdly shed such content even while evoking it.
In part this shedding expressed itself materially, in the literal lack of depth characterizing Rayne's more or less representational canvases: ghostly black-and-white, quasi-photorealist underpaintings depicting, say, an old-fashioned tape measure or an ecocelebrity shot of Hill, with thin washes of brightly colored geometric abstraction painted atop. But even more striking in this regard was the artist's decision to test the one-to-one relationship between captions and images we've learned (a la Walter Benjamin) to naturalize--and in particular to see how such operations might play out when it comes to paintings whose "style" is meant to be recognized immediately as "nonobjective." Borrowing tactics from Martin Barre, Simon Hantai, and Daniel Buren, Rayne has recently adopted a variety of techniques for producing--rather than conceiving or authoring--abstraction: folding or crumpling his canvas, spray painting or using a roller on the exposed areas, and then flattening it out again. Two of these gestureless, self-consciously abstract paintings were included in the exhibition, in addition to the works that were representational (if obliquely so). But in the Abreu show Rayne's overtly anachronistic, "conceptually driven" abstract images, even given their clearly broadcast allegiance to a particular breed of reflexive nonobjectivity, were not afforded any immunity from the artist's referential frame. The aforementioned designation "California redwood" had been given to a diptych of the crumpled, sprayed, and stretched variety that looked a lot like early James Welling photographs of rumpled foil; similarly, a chunky composition that came across as a by-the-book Hantai, while managing to look an awful lot like a Franz Kline at the same time, took its own titular aside from the date of Hill's ascent ("December 10, 1997").
