Friedman's flea circus - artist Tom Friedman, various galleries, New York, New York

Art in America, May, 1996 by Ken Johnson

Below the funny, deceptively modest surface of Tom Friedman's mercurial art runs a penetrating critical inquiry into the nature of the modernist endeavor. The diversified oeuvre of this Chicago-based artist (b. 1965) can be classified into three areas: some works revolve around the properties of various unlikely materials (e.g., soap, pubic hair, spaghetti); some depend mainly on a painstakingly fulfilled process (list every entry from a paperback dictionary on a single sheet of paper--Everything, 1992-95); and some are devoted to the construction of a particular, usually punning or paradoxical, image (a photograph of the artist lying on the floor turned upside down so it looks as if he's lying on the ceiling). One or two or all of these approaches may be combined in a single work.

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The most immediately material-oriented work Friedman's recent New York solo (his fourth) consisted of a wad of bubble gum stretched some 20 feet from the ceiling to the floor, a reach that in the middle drew the gum into a nearly invisible thread. Like an earlier project in which he molded 1,500 pieces of chewed bubble gum into a pink, grapefruit-sized sphere that stuck, seemingly on its own, to the wall [see A.i.A. Sept. '92], this could be viewed as little more than an amusing stunt. However, by allowing the physical properties--chewiness, stickiness, elasticity--of such a demotic material to determine the sculpture's realization (as Richard Serra did, for example, with molten lead), Friedman produces a witty Pop-conceptualist parody of Minimalism, process art and modernist reflexivity.

A pencil-on-graph-paper drawing demonstrated Friedman's preoccupation with procedure; the exhibition checklist described it thus: "A line is started at the lower center of the paper. The end of this line generates two more lines at 45-degree angles. The ends of these two lines generate two more lines each ..., and so on up to the 15th generation. Each generation is 1/8" shorter than the previous generation. Each line is numbered as to its generation. The drawing ... has over 36,000 lines." This Sol LeWitt-like recipe yields a linear network of wondrous complexity, but unassumingly pinned to the wall sans frame, the drawing deliberately eschews the pretensions of high art, and of system-based art in particular. It looks as though it might have been made by a bored high-school student. A sculpture made by systematically gluing 30,000 round toothpicks outward from a single point into a starburst form (an emblem of enlightenment?) similarly mocks, by virtue of its banal hobbyist's facture, ideals of formalist essentialism. But these strategically "dumb" works hold an invigorating and paradoxical philosophical snap: the sort of modernist autism they target is exactly the kind of reflexive consciousness by which they are conceived. Implicitly querying the elemental rules of creative thought, Friedman's satiric spins on modernist modes tend to compound rather than demolish modernist self-consciousness. He makes fun of the church into which he was born, but he is no apostate.

Friedman's conceptual intrigues should not distract attention from the considerable visual gratifications that his works offer, however. One particularly compelling piece, for example, was made by gluing end to end hundreds of short segments of ordinary pencils. Because the segments are cut at 45-degree angles--mitered, basically--the line of joined pencil stubs turns continuously around its own starting point, eventuating in an 11-by-14-inch ovoid mass that occupies the floor with deadpan, minimalistic self-possession. The piece puns on the idea of a pencil-made line, and the generic pencil color and shape add a Pop dimension. What captivates, though, is how orange-yellow facets and angular joints create a squirming, imploded crystalline field.

Frequently, as the foregoing suggests, dense accumulation of marks or things accounts for the visual attraction of Friedman's work. So, too, does the scrupulous, long-term, hands-on care with which the artist carries out the improbable tasks he assigns himself. Its labor-intensiveness distinguishes Friedman's work from that of Richard Tuttle, to whom he has been compared, or from newer forms of deliberately low-energy slacker art. He has been linked to Bruce Nauman, too, because of his conceptual restlessness and refusal of signature style, but Friedman's earnest craftsmanship makes him a closer relative of Ed Ruscha.

Finally, but not least in its visual impact, there is Friedman's canny way with scale. Though his works tend to the diminutive, they hinge not so much on smallness per se as on the relationship between the little and the big. His play with scale involves, on the one hand, the concentration of a large quantity of things--lines, toothpicks, pencil segments, etc.--into a small area and/or, on the other hand, the isolation of something tiny within a comparatively vast space. A humble pharmaceutical capsule assumes a poignant, comic presence when stranded on the expansive plane of a relatively grandiose white pedestal. That presence is vivified when, on closer inspection, you find the capsule filled with myriad minute, variously colored balls, each individually rolled from Play-Doh by the artist. Friedman's propensity to work small bespeaks ironic skepticism about the requisite bigness of the major modernist art work. (Joel Shapiro's little-houses-on-the-prairies-of-gallery-floors, ca. 1975, come to mind.) It also serves to heighten and focus perception; you look closely and attentively to make sure you're not missing anything, and you are rewarded by otherwise unnoticeable discoveries. The elevated awareness thus precipitated induces a subtle intoxication.