A series of prints made from a single digital file by Wade Guyton, one of the most famous American artists, was recently on display at Geneva’s Mamco Museum (curator Nicolas Trembley). Some of these prints were shown in Munich at Brandhorst Museum at « Das New Yorker Atelier » exhibition.
Wade Guyton took a photo of his New York studio. An image, showing a fragment of his « Black Abstraction », 2007, as well as his sculpture from « Chair Sculptures » series, was then printed in 30 versions on a jet printer in L and XL sizes. Surrounded by this images at the exhibition, the viewer “decodes” the message and gets into the sprit of the artist’s impersonal, efficient work space of his NY studio.
Thirty versions of huge non-figurative prints are about modernity and architectural leadership, about urbanism, advertising,, commodity status of art, impersonality..
Wade Guyton’s non-art look style of “Untitled ” gets a special meaning in the exhibition halls of Geneva museum of
Modern Art. Mamco’s collection includes works of conceptualists of 60s and 70s, such as photographs
by Becher, V.Burgin and others, with a similar “visual emptiness” and monotonous repetition of the
same architectural motive.
Wade Guyton’s uses a multi-layer printing technology with a special process of feeding of canvas into
the machine resulting in prints having two vertical parts. All prints including those with spoilage, are on
display on exhibition and have equal artistic status. These prints are stylistically close to “process art”,
where emphases is transferred from an art object onto the process of its creation.
Artist’s self-referring monologue has passed through post-modernist transformations leading to a
fragmented postmodernist style. There is no longer an author, but a scriptor. ‘Scriptor of the post-
modernist times is not someone who brings about passions, moods, feelings or impressions but an
infinite vocabulary from which he takes his never-ending writing’ (R.Bart). Wade Guyton’s dictionary
includes computer rendering, ad language, ‘spectalization of emptiness’, repetition, printing runs, the
urbanistic dull, puzzle, and standardization.
Written by Irina Vernichenko
