Tom Burckhardt at Caren Golden

What an artist fundamentally needs to carry on with work, besides space and intellectual resources, is the kind of question that burrows deep when self-doubt takes root. Tom Burckhardt, a painter of meticulous but buoyantly hectic abstractions, put such a question to himself when a variety of obstacles had brought him to a halt--the Full Stop (2004-05) of the show's title. He spent his eight-month-long busman's holiday fashioning an artist's tool kit in the form of a full-scale studio, rendered wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling in corrugated cardboard and black paint applied in an expertly cartoonish style.

Disorientingly, you walk right into the studio when you enter the gallery, and it is crammed with wonderfully clever detail. There are tubes of paint and bottles of India ink, Post-it notes scrawled with things to do, fragments of rejection letters from grant applications and postcards of work by artists ranging from Vermeer to R. Crumb. There is also an eclectic assortment of books, with subjects ranging from Adolf Wolfli to robots. Existentialism takes up a fair amount of shelf space, along with Marx, Joyce, Ginsberg and Burroughs. The oddly outdated reading list is one clue that the studio is not Burckhardt's own, but a pastiche: the pot-bellied stove is Edward Hopper's, the Savarin coffee can is Jasper Johns's, and--here only a very few can expect to get the reference--the view out of a window is the one from Rudy Burckhardt's studio. (Rudy was Tom's father; his death five years ago was among the factors that ultimately led to Full Stop).

Implicitly, it is also possible to read in Full Stop the presence of work by painters ranging from Velazquez to Courbet, as well as allusions to the fetishized studios of Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian. Red Grooms would come to mind even if he were not among those to whom the installation is dedicated. Among younger artists, David Sandlin and Yoshitomo Nara are conjured; the latter recently constructed an artist's studio of his own at Marianne Boesky Gallery, on view at the same time as Burckhardt's. The conclusion that the anxiety of influence is a central subject for Burckhardt is supported by the installation's centerpiece: propped on a big cardboard easel is a cardboard canvas that is utterly blank, as indeed are all those stored in racks and hung on walls.

In the gallery's second room are the enamel-on-wood paintings that Burckhardt subsequently made, which as before are gracefully eccentric geometries. What is new, and deftly amusing, is the introduction of little men in work clothes who perch on the various swirls and lattices of paint as if they are scaffolds, or lug them around like Sheetrock and lengths of pipe. That art-making is a kind of blue-collar labor was an article of faith for some Post-Minimalists, including several painters tacitly acknowledged in Burckhardt's work (Mary Heilman, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, Jonathan Lasker). Burckhardt's willingness to make a joke at his own expense--and not without some cost to those he honors--suggests the infectious optimism of an artist whose dark night of the soul produced an installation of such good cheer.

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