Locations of Estrangement
Joseph R Wolin
Excerpt of accompanying text for Art Project, London with Eithne Jordan
Traditional genres of observational painting—portrait, landscape, still life, interior— represented the world in order to traffic in big ideas—social hierarchy, the Sublime, Manifest Destiny, memento mori—but also to assuage the viewer with access. Paintings allowed viewers to imaginatively enter the topography of a place, to take in the atmosphere of a room, to assess the psychology of a sitter, all the better to assert some sort of control, whether real or Illusory. But what happens to painting when the world itself no longer assuages, when we can no longer assert control, when atmosphere, topography, and psychology transmogrify under the onslaught of environmental catastrophe, the surveillance state, and scientific and technological developments that seek to remake the human into something other? What happens to painting when the world alienates us from the certainties of the past?
Colin Martin, too, paints disaffecting interiors, such as the ominously bland bureaucratic offices of the Stasi Museum in Berlin or the generic chromed shelving units stacked with vintage and obsolescent PCs in Computer Museum II. But alongside these scenes of memorials to the failed utopias and dystopias of the second half of the twentieth century, he depicts more up-to-the-minute locations of estrangement: the interior that houses the Panoptic Studio at Carnegie Mellon University, a geodesic dome outfitted with cameras for the 3-D motion capture of what its website describes as “a group of people engaged in a social interaction” (sounding like a somewhat sinister variant of Relational Aesthetics), and portraits of a child actor and a dog covered in motion- capture sensors, possibly for CGI. In this body of work, past blurs with present, the totalitarian state’s banal apparatus of control of with universities and corporations’ high-tech gizmos of simulation. Deadpan representations of the society of the spectacle’s infrastructure, Martin’s canvases envision a world meant not to empower people, but, as Richard Serra observed of television, to deliver them.
Joseph R. Wolin The New Yorker, Canadian Art Modern Painters. Time Out New York
Joseph R. Wolin is a critic and curator of contemporary art based in New York. He teaches in the MFA Photography program at Parsons School of Design, The New School. He taught in the MFA program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, He is the author of more than 170 art exhibition reviews for since 2006, and has also written for The New Yorker, Canadian Art Modern Painters.