Infinity and Beyond

'The technique or process of representing on a plane or curved surface the spatial relation of objects as they might appear to the eye, specifically, representation in a drawing or painting of parallel lines as converging in order to give the illusion of depth and distance.' So my dictionary defines 'perspective', a central concern of the newest work by Evan Holloway. He confronts perspective in all its ramifications and meanings: as a visual technique codified in the early 15th century by Brunelleschi and Alberti which allowed artists to depict, well, 'reality' more really, its depths, recesses and distances, its architectonics; and, more generally, as a vantage or point of view - p.o.v. of the artist considering his work and its relation to that of his peers and predecessors, p.o.v. of the audience of the object of art, p.o.v. of the art world (gallerists, curators, critics, collectors) sorting out what will be looked at, where attention will be drawn.

It is not necessary to be a scholar of Proust to figure out that these various points of view are constantly in flux and dizzyingly contingent, although many proceed to act as if they were not. With its scale, repeated use of reflective surfaces and (potentially) inhabitable recesses, all of Holloway's work situates the body (the viewer's or the artist's own) as a constituent part of what makes it what it is. If Michael Fried accused the Minimalist art object of a rancid, solipsistic theatricality, Holloway questions and probes what art would be without bodies performing or encountering it. Insider informant divulging things about the (sometimes calculated) make-believe of it all, he's also fascinated with how the art world is a stage on which endless comedies of errors, bathetic melodramas and vicious rituals get acted out for pleasure, profit and ruin.

An early work entitled Stage Ramp (1997) doubled, with its no-frills, plywood raked structure, as a rigorous homage to Minimalism, bluntly yet slyly commenting on accusations of its theatricality while necessitating, or at least encouraging, a body to interact with it, staging viewership. Robert Morris and his work often provide Holloway with a source of inspiration. A work like Morris's Untitled (Standing Box) (1961), focused attention on the scale of the artist's body and attempted to fuse (or confuse) the schism between object and performance, since by standing within the funereal structure, he 'performed' the object. Morris wrote, in 1966: 'Simplicity of shape does not necessarily equate with simplicity of experience. Unitary forms do not reduce relationships. They order them'. Holloway reconsiders how such relationships are ordered - and disordered. Black Cabinet (1997) presents a large wooden rhomboid structure, recalling an Artschwager crate, almost entirely covered in black vinyl, which, despite its austere surface, could be entered to find a player piano that could be pedalled to play one of Holloway's homemade rolls - a piece investigating the possible interiority of any Minimalist structure, as well as the performance of our own vexed interiorities. What would be found inside a Serra cube of slab steel? Paul Thek pried into Warhol's Brillo boxes - purposely drained of meaning, supposedly containing nothing - and found rotting meat, flesh in a state of decaying concupiscence. Although in Smell Box (c. 1997) Holloway vented the fumes of frying bacon from a 'scent-proof' box to a neighbourhood nearby, in most of his structure's interiors, he finds or places a self or enough space, even if only imaginary, to contain the possibility of a body.

Connecting to such architectonic and performance potential, Holloway's large graphite drawings test the boundaries of 2-D space, while his works made up of both drawing and object explore what occurs when the virtual 'space' of perspectival rendering abuts the physical presence of a thing situated in 'real' space/time. The drawings also invoke other matters, not satisfied with only the funkiness of virtual space that looks like it could be entered, a corridor to nowhere. Most of the drawings contain a banner-like palindromic phrase or mantra. Reviled LA's (1998) strange information shoots toward 'deep' space along the arches of a passageway, like words on a Hollywood Boulevard cinema marquee: 'REVILED LA VIRTUOSI IS OUT RIVAL'. It plays on LA as a place of current art world buzz about who rivals who for the title of TALENT, and also a place - especially when compared to the movie industry that dwarfs it - of just la-di-da inconsequence. Another piece announces on the floor of a palazzo corridor: DRAW AWARD (1998). The technique of perspective can be learned by any draughtsman, but what is the relation of personal technique to 'art' at a moment when fabrication is taken as a given? Who and what decides a moment's genius, the art world's darlings, and how? If the drawings are fun, as any toying with perception can be, they probe recurring doubts, potential failures, the wet wound of any ego - 'The critics love me, I'm a virtuoso, an art star!', against 'I'm misunderstood, reviled, everyone against me, my rivals!'.

Given that Holloway's work always engages some bodily aspect by calling attention to its absence or removal, or reflection, his project can be seen to be about finding a path away from or beyond the ego. Left-Handed Guitarist (1998) has a polystyrene Kurt Cobain-like musician teetering on the edge of a gracefully curved platform overlooking (ballasting) a drawing of a shaft hurtling down to a virtual bottomlessness. The quest for the beyond can end in enlightenment or extinction. Rock-and-roll and art, and the mind-altering substances (drugs, booze, sex) stereotypically associated with them, are linked because of the way they alter perception, fucking with it. Such shifts thrill: inside/outside confused, interiority/exteriority (the mind encountering the world - or is that the world encountering the mind?) questioned. As with the virtuoso banners, the blunt sculpture-cum-drawing interaction of Left-Handed Guitarist provides Holloway with a way to contemplate (and poke fun at) the historic hierarchy of artistic media (painting as the apex of artistic endeavour).

Such contemplation has an acute pertinence which is not only of the moment. Rosalind Krauss wrote of Eva Hesse's crucial concentration throughout her work on the 'condition of the edge, the way it makes the edge more affective and imperious by materialising it. In this way, the edge that is displayed by Hesse is not focused on the boundaries within a painting and sculpture, but rather on the boundary that lies between the institutions of painting and sculpture. In the language of anamorphosis, we could say we are positioned at the edge from which the meaning of death is understood literally as the condition of the world disappearing from view'. 1 For all his art historical references, Holloway attempts to illuminate a similar between, and at the same time engage popular culture's zanily intelligent vernacular. He's thinking about just how different his goofy perspectival articulations of Renaissance space, situated within the context of the art gallery, are from the illusionistic, Escher-ish posters that might be hung in an introverted teenager's bedroom alongside pictures of Kurt Cobain or Marilyn Manson or Joy Division, artists making music for shouting, thrashing, grooving, or aching to something beyond. Who decides what cultural work has 'depth', deep serious meaning? Perhaps such meaning is as illusionistic as the depth represented on a flat piece of paper - and perspective's famed 'vanishing point', governing all orthogonal plotting, could be the vanishing point of a career and fame disappearing, vanishing point of interpretation, meaning fading out, vanishing point of the world disappearing from view, for an instant or forever.

Whatever dire consequences are suggested, wackiness, however sly, leavens the work. Elegance accrues in Upsidedown White Rauschenberg (1999), Holloway's shrewd reformulation in painterly white fibreglass of his favourite Rauschenberg Combine, owned by MoCA in LA, but it'd be stupid to miss the humour of his cleansing, appropriative gesture. Untitled (1999), Holloway's gently patinated, carefully welded, steel obelisk-ish structure situating a painted maze, has a slot at the top. Deposit a coin and a cymbal shatters brashly - but no more brashly than Holloway who collects the coins. A method for circumventing the art world's various commissions and tithes? A commentary on the imbrication of art and commerce? Or just a canny nudging of perspective so that the cold imponderability of the object smiles, suggesting a coin-operated arcade game?

In his most breathtaking and perhaps calmly daring works, 3-Part Sculpture (1998) and 7-Part Sculpture (1998), the Light and Space movement is renegotiated into collapsible structures of aluminium, perspex and mirrors. The three-part piece balances on its own support, forming a kind of dressing room in whose curved mirrors appears a figure (the viewer) whose squat, distorted legs are topped, because of the reflective play, by another pair of legs, upside down. 7-Part Sculpture props 'naturally' glowing, brilliant orange and purple perspex on a trunk of eucalyptus constructed of five chunky blocks. Holloway displays and deconstructs the site where the synthetic and the natural - a complexly fabricated dichotomy analogous to and mapping metaphorically painting/sculpture, 'reality'/'virtuality', horizontality/verticality, etc. - meet at the sharp edge of the perspex confronting the blunt, chipped wood. The gesture, the joining, is deft. The meaning undetermined until light fades away. You're left to figure out what foundations support the imaginary structures the art world (via art) builds. Your belief in perspective's workings is not unlike your belief in them.