Dan Lutzick Essay
#18 Rhea Carmi (Visiting Painting)
#19 Dan Lutzick (Responce Piece)
The painting I received in August 2010 was minimalist in nature. It was composed of earth tones and three elements: two heavily textured areas that together look like a cliff face, and a peace symbol in one corner. My live/work space is near the Painted Desert in northeastern Arizona, and the painting’s color, texture, and imagery reminded me of a desert landscape or a sandstone formation.
The only element in the painting to which I could easily attach meaning was the peace symbol. I looked it up and found that it was created for the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1960s. I am interested in forms and symbols and keep a collection of books on the subject in my studio library. I am not overly concerned with specific meanings associated with symbols (I am suspicious of absolute meaning applied to anything), but I am attracted to the various ways the information is broken down and categorized. I am more interested in the method and process than particulars of the data.
The Circle of Truth project is built around a similar interpretive action. The artist reacts to the prior piece without knowing the intention or process of the prior artist and sorts that information into a new piece. The resulting sequence of images and objects are linked but do not necessarily share a sequence of meaning. I am a process artist and tend to create in an additive manner, and my instinct is to manipulate the process. Given one symbol, I am inclined to add others and lock those symbols into a framework of my own choosing.
With this in mind I looked around my basement studio, which was once the sporting goods section of the old department store where I live and work. It is filled with leftover items from construction projects
that I have stored as potential assemblage material.
I immediately spotted an old frame, some used hardware cloth, and several sprinkler head covers. These items quickly resolved themselves into a grid framework into which I decided to introduce more symbols. I chose a heart, cross, circle, arrow, star, and triquetra to fill the outer spaces, which left the center of the piece unresolved. I have been working with a white queen figure in various sculptures and decided that a version of the queen as a power figure would best complete the piece.
The object I have created is in some ways the opposite of its predecessor: industrial rather than natural and intricate rather than minimal. I am interested to see how the next artist will break down the symbol sequence and what role the white queen, if any, will play in future permutations.