This essay was commissioned for the exhibition Cats & Dogs by Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman at Carlson, London, February 9 - March 30, 2012. It was also published in the book Cats & Dogs (Maccarone, New York/Massimo de Carlo, London, 2014).
It’s brunch, and a scruffy-haired young couple seated next to the window gaze intensely at one another. Their luxuriously distressed clothes and slinky jewelry look as if they’ve been styled by the four fashion editors conversing a few tables away. Adjacent to them is the rustic wood communal table, where a man reads the paper and talks on his cell phone in between bites of Moroccan carrot salad, next to a couple of lithe girls in high-waisted black jeans and suede booties who peer into an iPhone, whispering and laughing. The neighboring seat is empty, a drained cappuccino cup sitting in its saucer next to a used spoon. Tucked beneath it, the customer has left a $20 bill and a creased scrap of paper. A waitress scoops them up along with the cup and saucer, carries the dishes behind the counter and tosses them into a shallow plastic tub. “He’s gone, you can come out now,” she says to her coworker, handing her the note. The girl grimaces, stands up from where she’s crouching, and unfolds the paper:
BRITTANY,
AWESOME SEEING YOU AGAIN. SORRY WE DIDN’T GET TO TALK YOGA...MAYBE GIVE ME A CALL (XXX) XXX-XXXX IF YOU EVER WANT TO HANG OUT.
-IAN
On the clean walls of the gallery, the note is pasted at about eye level. It’s actually in the center of a huge canvas, long and orange but badly faded like something left out in the sun, with sharp lines of color where the linen seems to have been furrowed, balled up like a giant rag to absorb stains of pigment then stretched taut as a drum. Overall it looks like the floor of a garage, scarred with oily stains and black scabs of paint. The artist, Nate Lowman, has put the note off center toward the left corner of the piece, right about where you might pause and have a conversation during the opening of this London gallery, with its small roster of young artists and crowded list of collector clients. Like the restaurant, where wait staff can be targets for the unwelcome advances of a customer, this too is a commercial establishment, where the service is sometimes made to endure a similar kind of forced conversation, or attempted conversation: where one must tolerate the other for reasons of professional livelihood.
Puddled in the corner to the left is a slick dark spill, ensnaring a broken black umbrella. It’s one of the semi-disposable kinds available for five bucks at the street vendor or the closest deli, a piece of crap only good for a few uses before you break or lose it. On rainy days, these bits of cheap metal and plastic and black synthetic are often seen about, caught in drains or skewered in trash cans like the busted wings of some monster bat bred in the biohazardous sewers of Chinatown.
A sculpture by Hanna Liden, Untitled (Puddle), (all works 2012 unless otherwise noted) the piece is buttressed by two large beach umbrellas, Mustique and Mosquito, folded shut and nastily painted black with their orange fabric showing through the pleats. The umbrellas are each immobilized in a heavy block of concrete, also painted black.
This is “Cats and Dogs”, the second in a series of two-person exhibitions held over the course of a year between fall 2011 and fall 2012 – “Umbrellas and Dropcloths” at Maccarone in New York, “Cats and Dogs” at Carlson in London, and “The Triumph Arch” in a temporary space in Paris sponsored by the latter – by the New York-based artists Hanna Liden and Nate Lowman. Liden is Swedish and Lowman was born in Las Vegas. The two met in New York over a decade ago and have been friends ever since. In these three exhibitions, the artists present new works – in dialogue but not collaborative – from their respective sculpture and painting practices.
Residue is the starting point for the “dropcloth paintings” exhibited by Lowman in these shows, an ongoing series of works made from canvas dropcloths collected from the floors of his own studio and those of others. Covered in splatters, footprints, and scuff marks, the canvases vary in color and surface quality: some are single swaths accentuated by a pasted-on feature, like the note on the aforementioned long orange painting, Ian, The Patron, while others, like Slutty, shown in the third exhibition, are made up of torn vertical strips stitched together like battered patches on a denim jacket.
Lowman’s work avidly quotes and reshapes familiar things from the world, and he often repeats and enlarges eye-catching objects like bullet hole car decals and Arbre Magique air fresheners, and clips tabloid snapshots and news headlines so he can re- paint them in grainy xerographic dot style.
Throughout this series of exhibitions with Liden, he uses his muted dropcloth surfaces as a ground for iconographic images like the Statue of Liberty (Statue Painting #4, 2011) and motifs that reference his own artworks, such as the oversized bullet hole silkscreened onto a deep orange dropcloth canvas in the artists’ initial, descriptively- titled show at Maccarone in late 2011. Titled Marigold, 2011, it looks like one of Lowman’s signature works viewed through a cracked, flaming lens.
Other paintings depict umbrellas cropped near the frame of the piece, or incorporate actual dropcloths used by Liden in the fabrication of her umbrella sculptures.
By the final show, we see a dropcloth wrought in the shape of a flattened hunk of Swiss cheese, holes and all (Swiss Cheese (Cyclops), 2012). Its clean angles are disconcertingly precise against the ambient marks of the stained canvas, and glued to its face is a crushed aluminum can and the centers of two bullet holes, black ringed with orange and yellow. They are cut out to resemble an eye’s colored iris, which seems to regard Liden’s umbrellas nearby, hung vertically from the ceiling by black chains. Around the corner Lowman has hung a long rectangular work bearing the black outlines of several umbrellas stenciled on a filthy gray expanse, stitched to a blackish-crimson square printed with a bullet hole. Placed in front of it is a Liden sculpture, Arm, 7th Avenue: a blackened arm reaching out from a cube of chimney brick, holding an unopened umbrella that pierces the air like a lightning rod.
Burned black, charcoal black, fluid black that morphs and studs a canvas with black drips: this mono-palette helps to link Liden’s umbrella sculptures with black and white photographs, giving the impression that these three-dimensional works are models for – or living versions of – still life photos, which she has been taking since the mid- 2000s. Some of them appear in the “The Triumph Arch”: square prints in thin black frames (Untitled – Umbrella 1 and 2) showing a raggedy black umbrella floating on a white background. Liden’s past subjects have included black-painted flowers, motorcycle jackets, arrays of dripping candles melted down at different lengths to resemble post-apocalyptic cities, and self-portraits with plastic deli bags pulled over her head. These black umbrellas also recall those used to direct light in studio photography, and their omnipresence almost suggests a strange mutiny on the part of these dumb props, come to life and striking melancholy, slapstick and anti-heroic poses. Some imply something sinister, like Hanger, which dangles from a chain neatly screwed into its handle. Another, Beer, perches on a cube of bricks, topped with a crushed black aluminum can.
The can has the kind of logic shared by cigarette wrappers, cardboard coasters, and labels on alcoholic drinks, a logic echoed in the photo on the invitation card for the exhibition: a close-up shot of a cardboard matchbook curled up on a table. It’s a view from the realm of things fingered, ripped up, doodled on, and worried over as time passes, as the hands occupy themselves while the body drinks and the mind ruminates at a bar or a friend’s kitchen table.
Superstition warns against opening an umbrella indoors: they’re bad-luck gestures, these candid umbrellas. But like a bit of hair of the dog, maybe this pre-emptive dose of poison can exterminate the particular demons indigenous to the districts where Liden’s sculptures lurk.
Like a middle finger – which Liden has cast in multiples and exhibited in piles at galleries elsewhere – the open umbrella is a gesture of defiance that could be protective, a talisman against the cloudy motives that might darken the galleries and art fairs that display these works, as if meant to invoke remorse in the buyer who apparently has no conscience of his own. (How much for that “Fuck You”?)
Adjacent to Liden’s “Cats and Dogs” pour is Lowman’s painting Sun Shower: thousands of tiny dots on raw canvas depicting a newspaper photo of a woman covering her head with a crumpled umbrella. It brings to mind umbrellas in crowded streets wielded like shields by pedestrians, beading up with drops of water. Above them, rainfall would patter against scaffolding, and someone might toss a burning cigarette from a fire escape, which would quickly extinguish on the wet black asphalt below, trailing smoke that catches in the breeze, which yanks it upward. The alley would be coated in graffiti, its leftover drips and fine mists of color shining on the soaked pavement. Pedestrians’ sneakers would leave impressions on the slick wet streets, and the sidewalk silt – a mutant peat soil host to cigarette butts, boredom, annoyance, and other nuisances – would build up and finally disappear down the drains, to be stretched and hung on a wall, or hardened in a block of civic concrete.
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