Jacob’s Ladder leads to the stars
In the matter of unified forms all artists reference, then assimilate their precursors language and economy of means. They play ‘chess’ with context, move in multiple directions, emulate means of production, add-in unquantifiable elements, and then conjure distinct iconographies.
They climb Jacob’s Ladder, step-by-step, until from the earthly realm, they reach the heavenly sphere of a mythological order, uniquely their own. Marcel Duchamp understood this very well by the time he went from cubism to ready-mades. Picasso famously said ‘a bad artist copies, a great artist steals’, which was a variation on T.S. Eliot’s, ‘a bad poet imitates a good poet steals’.
Appropriation artists well-know that to climb the ladder is to beg, borrow, and pilfer. Painters dialog with the classics, and the detritus of Pop culture, sculptors contend with the classicism of the pedestal, gravity, and physical space; photography with the ubiquity of the image, the demise of the analog and so on.
Folklore has it that there are seven steps on which to climb Jacob’s ladder. Its law of analogy is: as above, so below. This common fount of symbolism is stratified into various levels of orderly sequences. Where contemporary art is concerned, in practical terms its a mediation between structure and artistic license. In our era of cultural amnesia examples are many. For this exhibition we take liberty in our choice of artists and new fangled styles….
Anselm Reyle’s paint-by-numbers are motifs that self-referentially incorporate pictorial elements from his own previous works. They re-contextualize a universally standardized mid-20th century hobby kit into legitimate Pop icons. From Andy Warhol’s ‘Do It Yourself Landscape’ (1962), to early 1990’s Komar; Melamid, this series (executed instructional style) by Reyle also evokes the kitsch elements of Jeff Koon’s ‘Easy Fun’ cartoon mirrors (1999).
