|
|
|
|
|
|
|
JIM ISERMANN |
For the last twenty-five years, Jim Isermann has been poetically and skillfully examining the increasingly blurry boundary between art and design. His intention is not only to highlight how high art inspires low design –how a biomorphic form by Alexander Calder or Isamu Noguchi, for example, can become a 1950s clock or wall decoration – but how mass-produced decoration can inspire high art objects and installation.
Isermann’s earliest works were installations that recalled 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s suburban homes, and a range of handcrafted wall hangings, rugs, stained glass, and fabric-covered cubes inspired by minimalism, op art, and color field painting. His more recent projects involve digitally designed wallpaper, vacuum-formed plastic shapes, and tiles that adorn gallery spaces, apartment buildings, stores, and museum entrances. (Isermann created patterned floor mats for the Gallery’s Gordon Bunshaft building on the occasion of the 2005 exhibition Extreme Abstraction.)
Isermann believes that good design can make the world better. Rather than focusing on how this belief will affect the future, as did many artists and writers in the first part of the twentieth century, Isermann focuses on the happiness that can be found now “in the rigid logic of repeating geometric patterns and the beauty that is defined by the limitations and specification of characteristics of fabrication.” Isermann’s beginnings – as a thrift store collector of 1960s flower power furniture and kitsch decoration during his graduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts in the 1980s – have inspired a quiet revolution in the art world that is redefining the considerations of aesthetics and functionality, laying the ground for a younger generation of artists including Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger, and Pae White.
Untitled (0397), 1997, is Isermann’s last labor intensive, handmade work. He created the “capsule” shape (which is also the nickname of the artwork) by bending thin strips of wood into a frame, and then braiding thin strips of cotton onto the wood, techniques that are traditionally used in basket making and rag rug making. The cylindrical form with rounded edges resembles the shape of a pill, and is an allusion to the artist’s belief that good design can bring relief. The narcotic allusions also humorously critique the mid-twentieth century critics’ pointed aversion against the “cheap” pleasure found in suburban crafts and bright colors. The size of Untitled (0397) (six feet by three feet) also refers to minimalist traditions. Here, Isermann counters the masculine, theatrical authority of the 1960s movement, while celebrating the beauty of everyday, yet radical forms.
– Claire Schneider, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art