Stitches in time: Oliver Herring's knitted sculptures and his stop-motion videos and photos might seem unrelated. In fact, the author argues, all result from cumulative processes in which stitches or frames mark time - "Split Reverse" video exhibition at Palm Beach ICA

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Janet Koplos

If you missed Oliver Herring's 1999 show at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, or if you saw only the main room of that exhibition, you got a surprise last winter at his new show in the same gallery, and you probably said: He's doing video? What happened to the knitting? How did he get from there to here?

Despite Herring's international recognition during the '90s as an artist employing the unusual technique of knitting, the major new work on view was a five-channel video, Little Dances of Misfortunes (2001), which gave its name to the show as a whole. In this short but complex composition, just as in his knitted sculptures, Herring's method of making is central to the meaning. But yes, he's still knitting. In the back gallery was a squashy globe more than 5 feet in diameter knitted of silver Mylar tape. In addition, from the sidewalk outside you could look down into the gallery's basement viewing room to see two other knitted works, a pole about 12 feet long (with a rigid plastic core) and a circle of gold Mylar, which appeared to be draped over a ring of some sort that allowed the fabric to sag into its empty center.

The German-born Herring, who has his B.F.A. from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford and his M.F.A. from Hunter College, started out as a painter. He took up knitting for the work that first brought him widespread attention, A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger (1991), a tribute to the performance artist of that name who had committed suicide after he was diagnosed with AIDS. Herring chose the technique because it is a traditionally female activity and because he wanted a process that would reflect the passage of time. For his material he chose not yarn with its plethora of colors but plastic tape of noncommittal transparency. For this extended project, Herring knitted coats and blankets, constructing these protective, comforting, consoling forms in this cool, contemporary, visually ethereal material. Appropriately, there was a performance aspect to the Eichelberger works. When they were shown at New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993, for example, Herring sat in the shadowy gallery, knitting. (1) His presence emphasized Eichelberger's absence. And garments are always surrogates for a person.

By the time of Herring's 1996 project room show at the Museum of Modern Art, he had shifted from surrogates to actual figures. The most striking of these was Wounded Knee (1995), in which a crouching man seems to be knitting his own body. Herring's next step was to develop a way to depict motion. His 1999 show at Protetch included two life-size sculptures that suggest movement through a sequence of connected partial figures, an approach that harks back to the stuttering image in Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. The sculptures also recall Etienne-Jules Marey's early photographic studies of motion, in which the figure is seen in continuous, overlapping states (unlike Muybridge's more famous discrete shots in his "locomotion" series). In Soft Landing, the figure incrementally falls from his feet onto his knees and into a prone position; in Double Rocker, he is seen tipping forward and backward in a rocking chair. Herring worked out the positions by taking videos of himself. Although he knitted the sculptures, the process led him toward video.

Herring commented at the time that he had continued to employ knitting as his means in those sculptures because he could seem to bring the form into being in a continuous stream. A knitted line is, in effect, endless, since a new filament can be imperceptibly spliced in; at the same time, it can be subdivided into innumerable repetitive actions. These individual stitches in time can be compared with the photographic frames that are the integers of films; both stitches and frames remain distinguishable, even as they build into a larger whole.

In '99, along with his knitted representations of falling and rocking, Herring showed his first videos, made the previous year. Unlike conventional films or videotapes, they do not capture motion realistically but rather employ a series of briefly shown, closely related still shots of Herring alone or with his partner, the painter Peter Krashes, posing and interacting with furniture, fabric and various props in a studio setting. (2) These stop-motion sequences are compositions in color--an esthetic element significantly absent from the knitted works. The videos, with their casual, homemade look, are seemingly as low-tech as the sculptures.

Herring has worked steadily in video since then, continuing to employ the stop-motion method. In stop motion, the stills are presented far too slowly and infrequently to register on our eyes as "real" motion. They suggest movement in discrete increments, much like the hand of a clock that marks seconds in ticks instead of a sweep (thus resembling Muybridge now). As Herring has noted, motion is not actually shown in his videos but is implied by the performer's change in position from one image to the next. You fill in the blanks.