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Artists' Wallpaper at the RISD Museum and the Fabric Workshop - Providence And Philadelphia - exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design
Art in America, Nov, 2003 by Faye Hirsch
Two "companion" exhibitions, curated by Judith Tannenbaum of the RISD Museum, examined the phenomenon of artist-designed wallpaper from 1966 (the year of Andy Warhol's Cow Wallpaper) to the present. Some 23 artists were represented at RISD, with 10 more added in Philadelphia. There was enormous variety, from the sociopolitical commentary of Renee Green (vignettes of violent slave uprisings embedded in a winding trellis of tropical flowers), to the elegant optical games of Jim Isermann and the subtle washes of Jorge Pardo. One artist, Adam Cvijanovic, exhibited a different hand-painted panoramic landscape at each venue: at RISD, a shuttle launch, Space Park (2003), and at the Fabric Workshop, Backyard (2000), an eerily generic 50-foot-wide scene of suburbia.
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The presentations ranged from single-artist rooms that had been papered floor to ceiling to smaller sections of wallpaper exhibited in vitrines. Nearly all of the artists in the shows play on the medium's propensity to repetition. Do-Ho Suh's Who Am We? (2000) is perhaps most extreme in this respect. Screenprint portraits of Korean acquaintances are gridded into thousands of tiny medallions that, from afar, disappear into a vast population of dots. Papers frequently borrow from history, as in Green's ironic use of early 18th-century French toiles. Francesce Simeti started with a fragment of a later French wall-paper in the RISD collection--a lovely chinoiserie with garden and landscape adornments. Using digital technology, he added vignettes from the recent war in Afghanistan (Arabian Nights, 2003).
Other papers have themselves become history: John Baldessari's famous I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, produced first at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1971; Warhol's cows (the Fabric Workshop added his 1974 Mao Wallpaper, overhung by three Mao prints from 1972); General Idea's riff on Robert Indiana, which changes LOVE to AIDS (AIDS Wallpaper, 1989); and Jenny Holzer's Inflammatory Essays (1979-82), cleverly, if somewhat exclusively, hung in the ladies' room at the Fabric Workshop.
The exhibition at RISD had the advantage of being in an elegant museum devoted to the historical interface of art and design. Several of the artists created room-size installations there, and Simeti even included in his a suite of antique furniture from the museum's collection. Playing to its strengths, the Fabric Workshop actually produced quite a few of the works--the Green and the Pardo, for example, which appeared at both venues, and works by Viola Frey, Glenn Ligon and Nicole Eisenmann, among others, which were seen only in Philadelphia. Indeed, the ink was barely dry on Eisenmann's hilarious Gray Bar Hotel (2003), cartoonish vignettes of a women's prison in shadowy blue, neatly traversed by a red piping that framed each scene. Virgil Marti's spectacular Lotus Room (2003) occupied a gallery at both locations, with four-color lotus blossoms screened on reflective Mylar. It was printed at the Fabric Workshop by the artist, assisted by students from the RISD printmaking department--happily linking the two exhibitions and, in its reliance on collaboration and mass production, vividly demonstrating the appeal of the medium.
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