L E S L I E   S M I T H   I I I 

My studio practice is concentrated around visual abstraction as a method for communicating stories about everyday human situations involving various types of power relationships I make both small and large narrative abstract paintings in addition to works on papers. Currently, I am focused on psychological trauma as something we inflict on each other, as an effect of human power dynamics. Resulting in a series of works that portray the nature of fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress amongst other negative aspects of the human experience.

You’ve had this conversation before: Nice to meet you.  You’re an artist?  What kind? A sculptor.  A photographer. A performance artist.  Even when these labels don’t quite fit – a painter, who has recently been working with sound – the response will invariably be related to the medium of the work.     

The tendency to begin vernacular and formal classifications of art and an artist’s practice through their medium makes sense in light of recent art history.  Modernism’s concern with the nature of specific mediums and postmodernism’s introduction of high-low pastiche have positioned the medium as the point of origin for classifying art-making and art makers.  While the thingly qualities of art are indubitably as important now as in the past, classifying artwork in terms of the medium also classifies the artist’s process in these terms.  Do these classifications still fit the way that artists work in the present?  

At the 2009 Tate Britain triennial, curator Nicholas Bourriard introduced the term “altermodern” to describe today’s art and artistic processes.  Bourriard sees contemporary art not as an object, but as a network or trajectory.  He describes his concept through the term “hypertext,” a sequence of interconnected forms in which artists work as “cultural nomads” exploring space, time, and signs.  He created a new term, “homo viator,” from the Latin word for “traveler,” to replace “artist.”  For Bourriard, the medium of all art today is asequence.  

Leslie Smith III and Tim Roseborough use common forms of communication to enhance the interactivity of a viewer with sequences of signs motivated by, and embedded in, their prospective works.  It is what drew curator Tod Roulette to select their works for an exhibition at Strivers Gardens Gallery in Harlem, New York; October 27 to December 31, 2011.  Roulette sees these sequences of signs in Smith and Roseborough’s works as “visual code” that interactively engages the viewer. 

Smith uses a series of object-characters to enact dimensions of psychological tension in his oil paintings.  Roseborough’s prints translate selections of text printed in an illegible alphabet, encrypting the legibility of the text but hinting at its meaning through other elements such as color. Roulette says: “I love that he (Roseborough) uses colors that we African Americans think we understand.  But then if you look at them, there is so much more to them.”  

Is it computer code? Some kind of blueprint? Or perhaps some version of the black and white square QR codes so prevalent today? Tim Roseborough’s recent works come predominantly through the invention of his Englyph writing system.  Inspired by the shapes of the letters of the Latin alphabet, his abstracted shapes are nestled one inside the other to form words and sentences consistent with the structure of the English language.  It is in some ways similar to the processes utilized by data visualization artists, but in Roseborough’s case he is re-processing the linguistic structures through which the data is understood.  He said “I am taking something that is clear to those who can understand the English language and ‘re-obfuscating’ it, taking our familiar language and making it unfamiliar.”  His illegible Englyph complicates a common form of communication and draws attention to the structures and processes of that type of exchange.  In his recent Englyph project for Art In America magazine (2011) Roseborough wrote, “I saw words as too closely tethered to their meaning, often lacking any fresh sense of the visual.”  His use of illegible Englyph subverts the viewer’s ability to comprehend textual meaning and instead focuses on the meaning-value accumulated through other visual characteristics, such as color.  This is especially powerful in his recent Englyph prints, Show me the race… whose red, green, and black colors unequivocally communicate a sense of black empowerment.  The prints are iterations of his complete artwork, accessible online as a website, www.panafrican.com.   

For Roseborough, the medium of his work is a website.  It’s online format permits the kind of interactivity that animates his concepts for viewers (or perhaps more appropriately users). He uses this format in order “to expand the reach of the themes and concepts that I want to express,” rather than comment upon the medium itself.  It is a practice unlike “glitch art, which seeks to exploit and bring attention to the paradigms of the online medium.”  Roseborough’s digital medium is simply his raw material. 

Analyzing the historical process of signification of the red-green-black chromatic triad is at the heart of Roseborough’s online work,Pan African.  The website includes Roseborough’s Englyph translations, a music video, and historical ephemera which interactively engage the viewer to consider the temporal transformation and cultural signification of these three colors through a series of historical events.  He uses interactive components such as rollovers, where the user can move the mouse across the screen and reveal Englyph-English translations of the Garvey quote and subtitles to the music video to both encrypt and decode the significance of the historical material.  It is an interactive and processual experience.   

For an online artist like Roseborough, the medium is easy to rectify with Bourriard’s Altermodern concept.   After all, the viewer experience is in itself a sequence of choices, self guided hypertext, as the user determines their own journey through a sequence of interactions, clicking on one page to the next.   But how does this idea function within something like painting?  

Over the last six years, Yale MFA graduate Leslie Smith III’s painting practice has moved away from the pictoral forms of his earlier work, and moved toward a mode that “requires more investment from the viewer.”  He explains: “Ultimately, I really strive to create an image, an object, a painting, whatever you want to call it, that encourages a participatory experience, so it’s not just a one way street.”  Smith, like Roseborough is heavily invested in engaging viewer interactivity through common forms of communication.  Smith says, “I look at a lot of film, TV, sitcoms, contemporary narratives that vibe off how people understand things.”  He uses these tools and tropes to introduce a familiar experience to the viewer, “so people will know how to respond to the paintings.  They may not think they are responding to them, but they are responding to them…very similarly to the way they are to that billboard or that big building on Avenue of the Americas on Canal Street.”   

Smith initiates this familiarity and interactivity by sparking the viewer’s curiosity compositionally, through visual voids.  He describes these voids as disruptions of a classical narrative, wherein characters would normally engage with each other and the viewer observes from beyond the four edges of the canvas.  “What happens when you paint one of the characters out and the viewer is made aware of that void because something is missing...and that something is themselves?”  

Window’s deceptively simple design and smaller size (24 x 24 in) makes the effectiveness of his technique noteworthy.  In this work, wind blows a diaphanous curtain through a window while a speckled metallic light shines in from outside enlivening the interior space with color.  The visual void that Smith has created is alluded to simply by the reach of the curtain projecting from the window, attempting to bridge the physical space between painted object and viewer.  (It is a compositional technique similar to that of the microphones in Speak Up.) The quality of the paint, the surface’s glistening candied cherry red and deep black matte are really what make these techniques work.  Simultaneously absorbent and reflective, airy and heavy, the light and spaces of Smith’s Window tease and entice the viewer into its uncertain space.  

The organic, curved shape of the window reappears in several of Smith’s new works, as does the cloth curtain though in the form of a veil or shroud, ear buds, microphones, and other new additions to his lexicon.  His use of repeating character-objects layer and deepen the viewer’s experience with them.  It is reminiscent of Philip Guston’s repeated use of boots and Ku Klux Klan hoods, but in Smith’s case he frequently chooses objects that are inert and relatively benign.  The objects become characters through his manipulation of them within in the compositions, animated and charged by their interaction with the viewer.  This is the fundamental basis for Smith’s work.  “I use objects and arrange space and position these things together.  The curiosity that comes out of that, allows for the viewer to be able to come to terms with what the painting means to them.  That is indicative of the experience that one would have with a lot of images, but in this case it becomes the impetus.  Not just of the image, but of the experience, what is most important, and what drives the experience.”   

The concept of network as introduced by Bourriard’s altermodern, posits that all art today is created as a series or sequence of signs.  While it is difficult to accept a singular term to define all contemporary art today, altermodern’s expansive definition makes it an attractive possibility.  Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art curator, Naomi Beckwith, surmises that the concept of medium as a network is best considered as an attempt to “de-center the artwork, not as the end of a set of aesthetic decisions, but one of the many things that come out of a certain set of processes.” It is shift in classification that appropriately respects the importance of interactive and process oriented engagement with signs in artwork by Roseborough and Smith.    

Tim Roseborough is based in San Francisco.  Leslie Smith is an assistant professor of painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). 

Erica Agyeman is graduate student in Modern Art History Critical and Curatorial Studies at Columbia University.
erica.agyeman@gmail.com

Certain images are burned into our brains: a pyramid of naked men on their hands and knees, hoods over their heads, overseen by grinning U.S. soldiers; the infamous hooded man in a tattered sheet, standing balanced on a cardboard box with wires dangling from his fingers. These are among the visions left us by the United States’ activities in Abu Ghraib prison, during the early years of the Iraq War. Leslie Smith has absorbed the Abu Ghraib photographs into his imagination and created a body of work that both responds to those events and turns inward from their realities to a more inchoate place.

Some of Smith’s paintings directly reference the cruel inventions of American prison guards, such as “Standard Operating Procedure,” where the human pyramid makes an appearance. Others, like “Dead Weight,” feature what seem to be disembodied feet, reminiscent of the photos of one Iraqi prisoner’s corpse. Still other paintings seem to have originated with these images, but have become more unrecognizable, as in “Peter”, where Smith takes us closer to the realm of the ineffable, charting a course through an array of reactions to our obscene capacity for inflicting pain: stark recognition, efforts at comprehension, and finally, deep internalization.

Profile by Daniel GerwinImage: Standard Operating Procedure, Courtesy of the Artist

At once there is red, then far-too-large crossed legs with a heel kicked up dangling effortlessly, impossibly, a u-shaped teal pipe. Over the thigh a flaccid penis hangs—or is it a nose? Just barely sketched out above this object are the hints of black eyes, the spare white outline of a paper bag. This is an interrogation.

The bag repeats itself, in an earlier self-portrait, with a smaller version of the red nose staring despairingly down at a partially unwrapped chocolate bar. Another configuration places the bag closer to Klan figures, or commedia dell’arte, but with a similar pathetic gesture, innocent yet guilty, hand not quite over the black hole eyes, that red nose, perhaps looking at the pyramid of nudes, scroti hanging. 

The bag is a character along with the legs, the pipe, sometimes a white forbidding chair, zippers, underwear, a hand, a foot, yellow, red, blue.  How do you best visually articulate power, sex, trauma, which here becomes the soldier – not the violent acts committed, but the return from those acts. Or not even the act, but the birth of the soldier himself, what world he was born into. 

This series of paintings by Leslie Smith originated with Abu Ghraib, not just the scenarios, but also the written statements of the detainees. Though that narrative tie might have been displaced, the core questions are still there: how to explicate tragedy–not necessarily against the victims but of the perpetrators? How to allow the interplay of people, the scenario of war, to complicate and be complicated, not just the good and the bad?

A wedge of gums with stolid teeth forced through pipes, yellow again, under a scrim of more yellow–those teeth, that contorted gummy body cannot but come out misshapen. 

The bag born into sun yellow fluid, with its appendages: a right foot immobile, a red dead weight, while the left hand agitates to move, struggling against the space, is damned by the barest thread of a green line, the beginning of another series of feet. 

And the red painting, potentially the scene before: the bag’s or the soldier’s conception, depicted as an interrogation (of you, the viewer, of the mother, the father, the room, sex, the situation itself).

There is a story thread, but the narrative does not just link together an assortment of objects or appendages as characters, but it is also the canvas itself objectified into a character. The color gives off its own aggressive light. The discomfort here is primary; it is the red, yellow, blue, and the in-betweens that connect the parts. That you connect, as one implicated in the narrative - it is in the gaps that the gestures zing. If this is a soldier, or any man, he is wounded, compressed, and partial before he even begins.

How is someone able to do a tortuous act? Not just beating up another person, but what happens to the person beating, even if it does not leave a bruise? These paintings are the bruise, a blurred line. They force a visceral response. This is an exchange of power, the reality of the mess.
Holly Shaffer Art Historian, Yale University PhD Candidate