Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains

It is not necessarily rare to be amused by the simple coincidences that often foreshadow the events in life that determine specific experiences. In this case, the word foreshadow has been cautiously selected due to the fact that this is not a fictional event and it’s even less of a story. However, when stopping off at my friend Brian’s place when in route to the Al Taylor exhibition titled, Wire Instruments and Pet Stains currently on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA), it was impossible not to notice the “pee pad” on the balcony of his 4th floor Long Beach apartment which is used in an attempt to train his new Ewok--looking puppy where to urinate(as you may know, potty training any living being is a trying task, just ask my twenty month old daughter and thirty year old wife (insert smiley face emoticon here). With the foresight of knowing some of Al Taylors Pet Stain work, I observed the “pee pad” like a New York collector looking at a Rauschenberg in the viewing room at Christies. Meanwhile, Brian carefully (French) pressed himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, which ten minutes later splashed its way onto the interior of my 2006 Honda Element. Looking back at these incidences after an afternoon at SMMoA suggests that occurrences that happen outside of the studio can facilitate an approach to the practice of art.

Looking and observing the daily mundane is evident in the playfulness of Taylor’s Wire Instruments and Pet Stains. His subtle didactic qualities can be viewed as a way of looking at objects, life, words, existence and accidents, all with a sense of humility and humor which is evident in this quasi retrospective of a series of works made in a span of two years from 1989 to 1990. A small sketchbook drawing that has been torn out of its binder and exhibited in a frame, rightfully, does not have a title. This work is a depiction of studio or gallery floor with an abstract splatter of black ink on the wall and smudge of white paint on the drawn floor boards and resembles an occurrence, yet its scale is intentionally odd and accidental. This creates a conversation between the smudge and the black splatter and a conversation about the way Taylor approached his studio practice with humor.

Taylor’s 3-dimensional Wire Instruments hang off the wall and should be approached as if they are drawings. Constructed from materials such as wood, latex paint and wire to construct these works resemble a certain type of “amateur” approach to the tinkering and working through ideas. The shadows cast on these works on the museum wall decidedly read as drawings even when exhibited next to the pre or might one say post-liminary drawing of the actual object. Whether the drawing of the object was made before or after the object was made means little. What is most important is the way Taylor used the flatness of the wall to bring up questions of how an artist uses structural elements to suggest how a drawing/sculpture can be made. The simple fragility and delicate nature these works embody almost read as “minimal” but frankly, they are way too funny to be thrown under the umbrella of the austere conceptualism that minimalism suggests.

Confronted with a half dozen sculptures that resemble drawings all on the same floor of a museum is ambitious, and at the same time, can be seen as conceptually didactic. However, because of the sheer lack of hierarchy between these drawings and sculptures in Taylor’s Pet Stain Removal Devices they read as proposals. The notion of an art object having a function as an actual stain removal device is impossible to come to terms with. The Stain Removal Devices instead act as a support for viewing paintings that look like stains. Taylor’s use of Plexiglass on multiple plains allow for the viewer to see the push and pull of space through the use of poured paint in multiple variations of a similar experiment. The poured paint on the Plexiglass of these objects that are held together with scrap wood blocks, wire, screws and metal rods create an appearance of the paint going from place to place. The pre/post-liminary drawings of these sculptures propose that sculptures are actually drawings. The function of the drawing is then a reminder that time reconciled through the movement of line acting in space but not about space is the purpose for these works.

Taylor’s witty approach to looking at the most mundane daily occurrences through a conceptual practice, results in object-drawings and actual drawings. These works then propose that he has two positions that illustrate his ideas. However, Taylor’s work is not necessarily about ideas. Wire Instruments and Pet Stains show an artist functioning on the necessity of making things by looking at the world around him, a simple proposition with unlimited possibilities.