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Scott Fife at Platform
Art in America, Sept, 2005 by Matthew Kangas
This small grouping of four sculptures by Scott Fife followed a larger survey at the Tacoma Art Museum. The 55-year-old Seattle artist showed his painted-cardboard figurative sculptures in Germany and Switzerland throughout the 1980s and '90s. The current work represents an evacuation of color that gives the heads, busts and reliefs a ghostly quality.
Initial impressions of Fife's work might recall Red Grooms, but Fife's subjects and differing fabrication processes appear more solemn and visibly labor-intensive. Archival cardboard is cut into sections and layered to perfectly define facial features, here those of four important cultural figures: Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Popeye. As Fife builds up the cardboard using nails, screws, staples and glue, each figure's features can take on a Frankenstein's-monster-like appearance that does not inhibit the remarkable, lifelike gaze.
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Frida Kahlo (2005; 25 1/2 by 12 by 16 inches)is a small effigy of deathly pale white and blue skin with the characteristic unibrow and mustache. The head sports elaborately braided cardboard hair that is offset by earrings and by tears beneath each eye drawn in red pencil. Fife's version of Kahlo, idol and cult figure as well as artist, suggests either a cheesy monument or a tattered mockup for a larger bronze.
Popeye (2005; 24 by 15 by 20 inches) is closer to Grooms with its cartoon subject. The character's exaggerated features lend themselves well to Fife's mixture of delicate surface-drawing and comparatively crude method of slicing, molding and forcing cardboard sections into a large three-dimensional head.
With a background as an architect, Fife makes his sculptures resemble reverse blueprints (blue on white instead of white on blue) for structures that are unlikely to be built. He reinforces the satirical quality of his depictions by presenting his subjects in a provisional state.
A wall-mounted diptych of two relief heads, 18 by 16 by 1 1/2 inches each, Study: Young Andypies (2005) borrows a youthful image of Andy Warhol complete with a carefully crafted floppy wig. Empty holes replace the artist's pupils. Like Warhol, Fife makes the heads differ slightly. The white-painted cardboard is perfect for Warhol's real-life pallor.
Most successful at exploiting the fallen monument theme is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (2004; 20 by 40 by 30 inches). Here, Fife tips the International-Style architect's head on its side. The effect recalls the toppled statues of Cold War dictators.
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