Aaron McNamee
Heriard-Cimino Gallery
Following Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and a murder epidemic described by the city’s mayor as nothing less than “unnatural,” New Orleans lays claim to another tragedy—one that has been afforded comparatively little national attention. In late May, it was announced that the Times-Picayune, the region’s venerable newspaper, would be reduced to a thrice-weekly print run. The stunning cutback has earned New Orleans a new ignominy: It will be the largest American city without a daily paper. Among the countless readers whom this impacts is Aaron McNamee, a New Orleans–based artist who used the Times-Picayune as the foundation of his 2009–12 series that bears the paper’s name—his most prominent body of work to date. To make each piece, McNamee glues together a complete year’s worth of the daily’s pages, ordered chronologically. The most recent version took form as twelve long, planklike chunks (one for each month), which McNamee leaned McCracken-like, against the gallery wall. In this state, news-time fossilizes; information is trapped within layers of information, capped with an outer skin of newsprint whose content is almost totally effaced by a sanding process to which McNamee subjects the surface of each plank. Images are blurred into woozy puddles of color, headlines into incoherent verbiage.
Though McNamee’s engagement with the Times-Picayune may have to end this year, he works with multiple other serial publications, often utilizing decades-old issues—full years of Arizona Highways say, or an annual run of comics. Some resultant works were sculptural—Complete Year The American Rifleman (January 1977–December 1977), 2012, looms like a hulking, upside-down time card rack—others primarily read as two-dimensional, though all were perhaps most interesting for the ways in which they used pictorial space. For example, Complete Year The Mother Earth News (January 1977–December 1977), 2012, having been molded by the artist’s back steps, is Z-shaped. And yet it wasn’t the abstraction of the source object’s original orthogonal dimensions that was so compelling, but that of the magazine’s pictorial content. With the journal’s images transformed into psychedelic pastel blobs by McNamee’s surface treatment, informational content was reduced to a fittingly tranquil palette. If this work and Complete Year Smithsonian (January 1977–December 1977), 2012, reveled in calligraphic fussiness, the pieces made from ’90s comics—more melted Peter Saul than restrained late Pollock—sparkled with a garish visuality. An autobiographical impulse governs McNamee’s selections of materials. The Times-Picayune pieces, corresponding with the artist’s soon-to-be-lapsed daily ritual of reading the newspaper, channel mature adulthood, while 1977, the year of several source publications used in this exhibition, is also the year McNamee was born. The works made with comic book pages from the 1990s can be read as correlating to the artist’s adolescence.
McNamee flirts a bit with slickness; the traces of labor can disappear in his flawlessly elegant objects to the point that some could pass as factory-made. But, as with McCracken or Peter Alexander—other sculptors whose work was both austere and somewhat brassy—meticulous handicraft produces a prepackaged look. McNamee’s work avoids careening into the hackneyed territory of the personal time capsule in that it principally functions in the present as a meditation both on the declining print industry and the concomitant loss of our tactile relationship to reading materials, and on notions of production and “finish” in relation to the contemporary art object. There’s something of a Nauman-pacing-the-studio, Tehching-Hsieh-punching-the-time-clock asceticism to McNamee’s art. He fetishizes the tedium of routine, and from a daily paper or monthly glossy teases out an eroticism of the everyday.