Nathan Mabry

Nathan Mabry
Cherry and Martin

Through April 5th, 2008

I am almost certain that I am going to over-think Nathan Mabry’s work. I want to warn the reader of this at the outset. Elements of his work, for example his whimsical titles or his masked Maillol sculptures, definitely make me feel on the outside of a joke of I don’t understand. There is something wanton and ugly about those Mabry’s masks, as if they came out of the window of a Hollywood souvenir shop, as if Todd McFarland was running around defacing art. However with that said, Mabry’s work is far from a series of one-liners, and the more I reflected upon it, the more serious it became. Of all the sculptors in the Hammer's 2005 Thing exhibition, I am probably most interested in Mabry.

Mabry mixes artistic styles across historical divides and ideological incongruities. For instance, he can place Pre-Columbian statuary atop Minimalist sculpture by Sol Lewit, Tony Smith, or Donald Judd. He prints out patterns you might find in either high minded abstract paintings or on mustard stained adolescent tee-shirts as c-print photographs. Also, he masked Rodin’s Thinker, which he bought on the internet, with a face slightly reminiscent of Jar Jar Binx, unifying two clashing counterpoints in smooth black matte patina. The sculptures move between design, furniture, sculpture, and historic artifact efficiently and cleanly, all the “whys” of the work easing into the beauty of the “what” of the work. They are beautiful objects.

I am tempted, however, to go a little deeper into Mabry’s historical hodgepodge. For instance, how might one regard a doubled votive or fetish African sculpture leaning atop a bronze version of a John McCracken? Besides the obvious “finish fetish” pun, are we allowed to let out mind wander across history and through lost civilizations, through the inevitable losses and modifications of meaning, until we arrive in the present? Perhaps we should think of Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void, Invisible Object, 1934, a piece that is close in sensibility to the Mabry and a work that seemed for its time everywhere at once, at the same time thousands of years old, new, and thirty years in the future.

When you try to go past the beauty of Mabry’s objects, you find a contemporary discourse on the shifting nature of meaning and ideology, but Mabry presents this discourse in a dead pan fashion. Take his Pre-Columbian Judd, which he coyly titles, It Is What It Is (The Old In and Out), 2008. With the Pre-Columbian figures, you have religious figures from an ancient civilization, but more importantly figures that have lost their ritualistic function and purpose over time. They are now artifacts for the tourist and art student in a museum, but they still contain the memory of what they were and what they meant.

The Judd, on the other hand, is not a religious object though some may argue it a spiritual one in its own right. Instead of praising the unseen or divine, Judd praised the objective and things that could be verified in experience – you could say he valued immanence over transcendence if you wanted to get all philosophical on the matter. Certain aspects of Minimalism once had the rhetorical weight of religion – its pronouncements perhaps as final as a pre-Columbian ritual. In the Mabry, the Pre-Columbian and the Judd sit cozily together, one atop the other like an indoor furniture version of a totem pole.

So what are these Mabrys then? Are they deeply cynical, laughing like a nihilist at a dinner party? My answer currently is no, although I do think they are laughing in some sense. They are certainly fun and fun to think about. Is Mabry just wandering the expanded field or does he really have his hand on the pulse of something? Well, these things I currently don’t know.