Michelle Grabner
During the past sixteen years, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam have presided over some two hundred ad hoc exhibitions in an eight-by-eight-foot converted shed behind their house in Oak Park, Illinois, known as the Suburban. A full-scale replica of this concrete-block structure anchored “I Work From Home,” Grabner’s midcareer retrospective: She selected four artists—Michael Smith, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Karl Haendel—to display work therein, effectively creating a rotation of shows within the show. Grabner would appear to be among the most generous artists of her generation: She is keenly interested in what other artists do; she frequently brings people, ideas, and objects together; she writes about other artists’ works; she’s an educator and mentor. The sum of these activities, together with her own studio work, constitutes a mutually inflective practice in which Grabner’s paintings, drawings, and prints mine the interstices of both material and social fabrics.
At sixty-four square feet, the Suburban’s original exhibition space is absurdly small. (Since 2003, the venue has also included another, separate room.) And while the format may have been intended as a kind of institutional critique (insofar as this white cube is a noncommercial space in a backyard), for the artists who show work in, around, and atop the structure, the Suburban also stands as a challenge with which to contend—and as an exemplar of the variety of creative activity that strict limitations can foster. Grabner luxuriates in precisely this (modernist) notion in her own work, some of which seems deliberately engaged with Ad Reinhardt and Anni Albers. In a series of paintings titled “metalpoint ginghams,” 2010–, Grabner uses gold-, silver-, and copper-point styli to draw gingham-patterned grids on rectangular panels covered in black gesso. Like Reinhardt’s, her marks are not expressive; the meticulousness of her ruled lines and the formal functioning of the grid together serve to disperse the gaze across the surface, which takes on an iridescent sheen. Despite these paintings’ limited color palette, fixed design parameters, and controlled markings, an astonishing variety emerges. This is also true of the artist’s “radial silverpoint” series, 2008–: The magic happens between the lines, in the delicate spaces separating figure and ground, in moments when Grabner eased up on the stylus, and, over time, as the metals oxidize. Her “indexical paintings,” 1993–99, share this delicate sensibility. In these works, she made marks on panels through the tiny spaces between the fibers and wires of woven domestic materials—textiles, plastic tablecloths, metal screens—later using this residue to render brilliantly enameled versions of the original patterns. Some works retain the regularity of their source material, while others demonstrate the possibility for variation when the internal dynamics of a structure—warp and weft—shift even slightly. Grabner’s formal investigation of mundane objects, patterns, and routine activities—such as baking, which is taken up in an uncharacteristically humorous video, Cooking with Confidence: The Merry Christmas Cookie, 1996, starring her collaborator David Robbins—underscores the impossibility of uniformity.
The critique of authorship (which may now seem a bit dated) has been a long-standing conceptual concern for Grabner. Her work often involves several layers of mediation; for Untitled (Nancy Holt), 2013, she made silk screens from images she copied out of a book that Holt produced of her 1985 suite “Time Outs,” in which she photographed football games broadcast on her TV. Grabner’s desire to separate the domestic from the conceptual in her studio work might also inform the distinction that she maintains between her studio work and her activities as writer, educator, and curator (which currently include cocurating this year’s Whitney Biennial). In her studio practice, Grabner’s objects perform the heavy lifting, whereas she is the agent in the latter three enterprises. Grabner’s view is that her participation in these different arenas puts pressure on the disciplinary authority that each maintains. But as evinced by the artist’s success in being Michelle Grabner, we see how the criteria for recognition in these fields seem to overlap, as the practices of making, writing, and educating become increasingly ecumenical.