Dennis Balk at American Fine Arts - art exhibition; New York, New York

Art in America, July, 1993 by Jerry Saltz

Dennis Balk's one-man show last year introduced a tantalizingly cerebral artist whose ideas hovered just on the brink of obscurity. He traced humankind's progress towards private property from its primordial beginnings in what he called a vast and gloomy subterranean forest." It's as if the enigmatic mind of Jorge Luis Borges had been fused with the majestic spirit of Diderot by way of Rube Goldberg. For this--his second show--Balk, 41, seems to have gone over that brink. The work in this show was hard to follow, beginning with the first two pieces you saw on entering the gallery. One--Incomplete Display for a Fund-Raising Event--consisted of a lectern scattered with corporate brochures, cards, books, posters and annual reports furnished by the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory; it didn't look like anything so much as a mess. The other work looked a little crazy, like the remnants of a nursery school genetics experiment. Titled Preliminary, it consisted of two rows of three rickety rectangular folding tables upon which the artist had arranged 48 separate groupings of 49 little carrot sticks and 69 celery sticks. These pieces made it apparent that Balk's next-to-nothing esthetic is modest, nondescript and banal. But there's something compelling about it nevertheless.

The work may sound dumb and look dumb, but if artists were given nicknames, Balk's would be Brainiac. He's smart--really smart--but more than that he feels inspired, as if his work could usher us over a bridge to something just beyond the reach of our imaginations. His first show did that. The problem is that in this show we couldn't cross that bridge because Balk had gotten too far out in front of us. Balk is a latter-day Conceptualist--maybe the best one working today--whose work is animated by something vaguely prophetic; you feel that you should know about the things he's trying to tell you about--which makes his new show all the more frustrating. Balk's best works are schematic diagrams drawn in fine-point markers on cloth dinner napkins that he pins to the wall in irregular grids of four, five or six. The diagrams are zany and visionary, as if the artist were suddenly possessed with ideas and just had to get them down. The napkins are chock full of criss-crossing arrows, scrawled drawings of salamanders, flowers and train cars, little marks, captions, boxes of words and lists of names. In the four napkin-diagrams here, Balk massed an enormous amount of content on a tiny act--he tried to encompass the phenomenological implications of setting down a glass of water. But the diagrams were so complex and impenetrable that the work started to collapse of its own weight. I didn't know what it was about until I was told (and I read those things for the better part of an hour).

Balk hates A to B to C logic. He loves tangents, incompletion and reversal. He inverts thought, turns it inside out, takes unexpected turns and juxtaposes different ideas in order to create new perceptions of the world. He layers information the way other artists layer materials. Imagine an encyclopedia in the form of a Rubik's Cube and you get an idea of Balk's approach to knowledge.

Perhaps the best piece in the show is a 57-page book that Balk wrote and published. Titled Alexandria, it takes you on an amazing journey through early Christian texts and the fabled ancient library at Alexandria. It's lucid and nothing if not brilliant. But it's a book--not an object--and the key to any successful conceptually based art is to be able to embed thought in material. Otherwise everything's just a dream.