26 May 2011

Lee Welch at Telephone Booth, Rotterdam

GLASER: Isn't it that there's no gestation, that there's just an idea?

[..]

STELLA: But we're all still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make  an object you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work is that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural elements. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of a color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?

[..]

STELLA: It's just that you can't go back. It's not a question of destroying anything. If something's used up, something's done, something's over with, what's the point of getting involved with it?
JUDD: Root, hog, or die.

[..]

GLASER: Reductio ad absurdum.

STELLA: Not absurd enough, though.

JUDD: Even if you can plan the thing completely ahead of time, you still don't know what it looks like until it's right there. You may turn out to be totally wrong once you have gone to all the trouble of building this thing.*
 
– – – – –

Telephone Booth is new a compact project space that utilizes two recently disused spaces in the Piet Zwart Institute, one a storage space and the other a telephone booth. Lee Welch's new work The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II takes the form of a parquet floor, paying homage to Frank Stella's painting of the same name, the floor consists of two identical vertical sets of concentric, inverted U shapes. Each half contains stripes of dark stained wood that radiate from the single vertical line at their center.

LEE WELCH (IRL/USA) is currently undertaking an MFA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.
He has received support from the Arts Council, Culture Ireland and Dublin City Council. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including Clifford Irving Show, Objectif Exhibitions curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, Antwerp, Belgium, A Whole New Ball Game, Banff Centre and Non-knowledge, Project Arts Centre, Dublin with future exhibitions Amikejo, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), León, Spain curated by Latitudes and (WHOOPEE) we're all going to die, Pallas Projects, Dublin, Ireland.

 
*Glaser, Bruce. 'Questions to Stella and Judd, Interview by Bruce Glaser.' Edited by Lucy. Lippard. ARTnews 65, no. 5, September 1966, pp. 55-61