The still early career of the American artist Wade Guyton has starred a trio of gadgets. They are the small, medium, and very large ink-jet printers with which he strangely rejuvenates the aesthetic philosophy, and the dramatic beauty, of classical abstract painting. A terrific new survey of his work at the Whitney Museum includes sculptures and installations, but the pictorial works dominate. These aren’t really paintings or drawings: they are canvas swaths or pages torn from books and magazines which have been forced through the printers, acquiring overlays of Guyton’s rudimentary digital designs—from a repertoire of shapes, lines, stripes, and typed “X”s or “U”s—and incurring smears, stutters, registration errors, and other happy glitches. But they sure look like paintings and drawings, ranging in style from busily geometric to near-monochrome black. Stretched or framed, they evoke the noble rawness of a Pollock or a Rothko. The work is ingenious, and also moving, as a counterattack of the spirit on a culture whose proliferating technical means, by eclipsing the handmade, disembody imagination. By making machines do lovely things that they weren’t designed to do, Guyton scores comeback goals for primitive wonder.
Guyton was born in Hammond, Indiana, in 1972, and grew up in the small town of Lake City, Tennessee. His father, who died when Guyton was two, and his stepfather, also deceased, were both steelworkers. Guyton’s mother, a homemaker, sometimes worked as a secretary at the Catholic church the family attended. As a child, Guyton was so uninterested in art, he has said, that he was pleased to have his stepfather do his elementary-school drawing homework for him. That changed while he was a student at the University of Tennessee, by way of intellectual excitement: the early nineteen-nineties were a heyday of academic critical theory, when thinking skeptically about art could seem as good as, if not better than, making it. The artists who counted were image-recycling gravediggers of tradition, chiefly the Pictures Generation of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince. A prevailing scorn for handcraft encouraged Guyton, who readily confesses his own manual ineptitude. But something dramatic happened in the circle of his artist friends at the university, which included two others who became successful, Kelley Walker and Meredyth Sparks: they decided that the grandparents were cool. It often happens that, in youth, we glamorize a past that our immediate elders tell us is over and done. So it was with Guyton and his peers.
Guyton came to New York in 1996. Twice rejected for admission to the Whitney Independent Study Program, which was at the time a virtual think tank of critical theory, he attended Hunter College. There he studied under the formerly minimalist, always inventive sculptor Robert Morris. Guyton also became immersed in the art world while working for seven years as a guard at the solemnly avant-gardish Dia Art Foundation. His early New York work—sculpture (most of which he later destroyed) and photographs of architecture—was minimalism redux. A re-created example at the Whitney show is “Inverted Woodpile” (2002/2012), a leaning stack of scrap lumber that Guyton found on the street and simply turned upside down. Since 2004, he has continued to fashion sculpture, in a series of fat, mirrored stainless-steel “U”s in various heights. They’re pleasant enough, but I can’t imagine what, except perhaps market demand, keeps them coming. For me, they provide only trace elements of the formal and imaginative tensions that inform Guyton’s achievements in two dimensions.
In 2002, frustrated, he has said, by his failure at drawing, Guyton hit on using his computer, scanner, and printer to alter pages from old art and design publications. In the show, scores of the results are hung on walls or arrayed on blue vinyl tiles in a row of handsome display cases. There are vaguely Constructivist geometric shapes, the inevitable “X”s, and random-seeming blotches overlaid on images of modern architecture and, occasionally, on the works of Goya, Ensor, or other Expressionist masters. The gentle vandalism stirs poetic qualities of yearning in and for the orphaned material. Stick with it. The emotional reward is a gradual simmer.
Guyton is a bibliophile, though not an especially discerning one. The edges of some spectacular works on canvas from 2006 that feature scanned images of flames reveal their source: the beat-up cover of a book, minus the title and the author’s name. A stern superego of rigorous taste, instilled by Guyton’s academic training, keeps his art’s apparent attitude distanced and cool. His passions sneak up on you and, when they take hold, can feel like your own—as if, at a formal social event, you found yourself suddenly and awkwardly in love with the host. There’s a remarkably civilized lightness about the experience, which transcends the familiar winks and nudges of complicity that are found in so much only-too-well-schooled contemporary art. Rather, there’s the ardor of a connoisseur who hopes to convert you to his vision but is too respectful of both you and himself to impose a hard sell.
In 2004, Guyton decided that what worked as a surrogate for drawing might serve for painting, too. Experimentation led to several series on primed linen canvas. Large works—the topper being a fifty-foot-long pattern of red and green stripes, blown up from the endpapers of an Italian design catalogue—are made by folding canvases, as tall as nine feet, in half horizontally and sending them through his biggest printer twice. The machine’s struggles with the unwieldy cloth produce glories of textural incident that recall the imperfections in Andy Warhol’s silk screens. Warhol looms large for Guyton, as for all artists who deal with issues of image reproduction. So may Gerhard Richter, the German master of painterly blurs, whose new show of computer-derived prints, at the Marian Goodman Gallery, makes for a chance tag team, with Guyton, of artists who are forty years apart in age. Both address the historic task, urgent in art today, of coming to sensible and sensitive terms with the global juggernaut of the digital medium.
Guyton hardly accepts every result of his process. He rejects many, he told me when I met him at the Whitney. He added that recent advances in technology pose a threat of too much sophistication. “They’re getting smarter,” he complained of the printers. To make gray pictures, for example, he must take tortuous measures to disable his newest printer’s insistence that black is a combination of nine colors. With a mental squint, I heard him talking about his high-tech gear in a tone like that of painters discussing paints and brushes—always a sure sign of maturity in a new medium. Most computer-generated art to date has been marred by a tedious infatuation with novel effects, which turn passé in a twinkling. With Guyton, the electronic becomes a class of workaday studio tools.
The show, as installed by the artist in collaboration with the Whitney curator Scott Rothkopf, is an over-all art work in itself. An arrangement of temporary walls creates a palimpsest of visual echoes and comparisons, affirming Guyton’s temperamental forte as a critical assessor of his own production. He visually footnotes his sensibility by including in the show a row of five tubular-steel Cesca chairs, designed by Marcel Breuer, in 1928. Breuer, the architect of the Whitney building, has long fascinated Guyton. A wall text states that these specific chairs, upholstered in sickly decorator colors, once belonged to the Enron Corporation. I don’t know what to do with that fact, but it is charged with something. Also on view is the frame of a Cesca chair which, in 2001, Guyton wrestled by hand into a free-form sculpture. The work is no great shakes, but its burlesque of a love-hate, Oedipal struggle with the modern tradition signals Guyton’s ambition. He wants nothing less than to weave the art-historical past, as a challenging presence, into art’s emerging future. Perilously, he’s a leader. ♦
