John Beech at Miles Bellamy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Robert Taplin

John Beech's recent show was installed in Barbara Flynn's elegant quarters on Crosby Street, which were temporarily transformed into the Miles Bellamy Gallery. A West Coast sculptor in his early 30s, Beech has taken an ironic, historicizing attitude toward Minimalism, creating objects formally reminiscent of the work of Andre and Judd, but made out of the "wrong" materials. Car-Mat Strip with Transport Sleeve (1 993), for instance, is just that: a checkerboard grid of rectangles cut from variously colored, used car mats. They lie in a strip along the floor with the neat black "transport sleeve" of sheet steel leaning against the wall nearby. Whereas Andre's shining copper and lead plates covered the floor but were never actually walked on, Beech's materials were, in their prior lives, literally underfoot, sailing down the American Highway. Having elevated the mats to the status of Fine Art, Beech has also thoughtfully equipped them with a lightly armored carrying case (the transport sleeve) to protect them from any further insult reminiscent of their former existence.

The effect is quite marvelous and funny. The off-beat colors and dingy, industrial patinas of the worn rubber mock the rigid machined surfaces of Minimalist sculpture while paying homage to the formal strategies of the last coherent art movement. However, the piece is also full of honest affection for the strange cast-offs of modern mass-production culture. Beech's evident affinity for the junkyard recalls the other pole of '60s sculptural production--funk and junk.

Several other pieces use more strictly formal means to call up, then undercut the vaunted clarity of the Minimalist approach. Neoprene Sleeve (1 993) is a large rectangular wall piece that projects out from the wall perhaps a foot. The smooth metal surface presents the viewer with a blackish patinated field, inviting a quasi-pictorial reading. On closer inspection, however, one discovers a large vertical slot at one side, lined with, once again, rubber car mats, this time all black. In fact the whole piece is in the form of a large envelope containing an inner void that is not immediately apparent. The sexual connotations of this hidden slice of space are strong and create a set of psychological and bodily references that strict Minimalism would abhor. There is also a feeling of incompleteness to this piece. Maybe it, too, is just a protective holder for a real painting which is elsewhere or has been lost.

This self-effacing and slightly defeated demeanor is familiar from the art of many of Beech's contemporaries. A true mannerist, Beech sets various voices in recent art against each other to form new absurdist icons. Effete, self-conscious, elegant, assertively peculiar and sly, Beech's work is engaged in a tightly enclosed art dialogue while making a good-humored if somewhat ineffectual attempt to find a wider range of reference.