Al Taylor
David Zwirner | 525 & 533 West 19th Street
It is hard to know where to begin describing Al Taylor’s imagination. His practice was a somewhat hermetic, hybrid one, a private marriage of drawing and object making. Taylor (who moved to New York from Kansas City, Missouri, in 1970 and died of cancer in 1999 at the age of fifty-one) spent seven years working for Robert Rauschenberg, so his scavenger’s devotion to cast-off objects comes with a pedigree. But to say that Rauschenberg’s example somehow accounts for Taylor is about as useful as saying that Frank O’Hara read a lot of Arthur Rimbaud. Marcel Duchamp was clearly important to him,