David Armstrong Six

Scanning the sprawling display on view at Red Bull 381 Projects, I found myself craving a boozy boost, perhaps a Red Bull martini. David Armstrong Six’s installation was indeed a challenging cocktail: its disparate elements—crafted and readymade, high and low, material and immaterial—were combined precariously in ways that prevented me from feeling comfortably centred and from finding any particular part of the work that would easily unlock a central meaning. The Law of the Excluded Middle, 2010, hence seemed a suitable title for this installation, as I circulated and considered the complicated patterns strewn about the floor and walls: concoctions of lines, masses and protuberances, all rendered mostly in white. At first, as a defensive reaction, I began itemizing some of the scattered components, recognizing varied and ambivalent relationships to the everyday world. A group of parking stops seemed convincing as concrete but were actually composed of wood. Florescent light fixtures both hung from the ceiling and were interspersed with other low-lying motifs. Stuck to the floor, silver-and-black electrical tape appeared to signal directional cues, perhaps for an experimental theatrical production. Tubular forms made of wood dowelling extended erratically about, providing a circuitous and unruly plumbing network, maybe intended for the transfer of energy or information. In addition, I noticed resin-covered plaster casts of paint cans, white-dusted wall nuts, a rectangular section of window glass, a flowerless vase, a beaker lifted from a lab and sinuous electrical cords connecting floor-based lights to outlets.

The artist’s restricted palette and emphasis on reductive forms recalled historical avant-garde projects such as El Lissitzky’s Proun Room, 1923, reflecting idealistic and universalizing beliefs in the power of abstraction as a means to instill a more progressive society. However, compared to Modernist hard-edged visual vocabularies that subscribed to an ethos that is rationalist, humanist and tied to preconceived iconographies—white represents purity, for example—Armstrong Six’s imagery was far less prone to being decoded systematically, partly because it was not fully present in the gallery. Hanging on two walls were a dozen pictures, each containing remarkably faint impressions of stencilled shapes, stains and spurted arrays of conventional colours such as blue, red and yellow. I speculated that they were the remnants of cloud formations or the after-effects of flares; rendered in spray paint, they registered as atmospheric or, possibly, spectral in origin, a less-than-conscious phenomenon, either of forms fading away or coming into being. And they conveyed a palpable sense of absence: within these frames, there were no commodities present that were coherent and convincing enough that they could be consumed readily in the here and now. Only the misty ghost of things survived, perhaps after some abuse in the distant past. This lack of imagery provoked me into reflecting on my own reflection in the transparent glass that covered these paintings—a hint toward portraiture that was wonderfully tentative.

I discerned a few other slight signs of suffering: one cast paint can seemed to have received painful cracks and an insensitive immersion in liquid white pigment, while another of these degraded receptacles was crumpled and placed in the service of supporting a light fixture. A parking stop had been battered as well, with the added (non)adornment of a bit of unpretty purple paint, converting this object—conventionally used to prevent further vehicular motion—into an unlikely “painting” set upon a primed white field. Elsewhere, another stop became the setting for a spray-painted black line, only the beginning of graffiti statement but still too rudimentary to qualify as a tag. A piece of window glass stuck up from a mass of other stops; like the paintings, it reflected its surroundings, especially a long fluorescent light bulb and its metal housing placed nearby. This bulb appeared in the glass as a glowing and ethereal beam of light, an emanation of the material world that gave me renewed confidence in the idea that Armstrong Six’s entire project was an enormous interactive machine that employed mundane material to generate ghosts. And knowing that another version of his show was occurring at the same time at Sporobole Gallery in Sherbrooke, Quebec—featuring the same compositional components, but arranged differently in response to a relatively expansive and sunlit space—bolstered the uplifting thought that this machine could be re-created repeatedly and adapted to draw upon the earthly and supernatural circumstances of diverse sites and audiences. ❚

“The Law of the Excluded Middle” was exhibited at Red Bull 381 Projects in Toronto from April 28 to May 29, 2010.

Dan Adler is an assistant professor of art history at York University in Toronto. He is currently working on a book manuscript about sprawling, sculptural art exhibitions.