HIGHLY CONSTRUCTED: SUBJECT-OBJECTS
When Daniel Mendel-Black began making the Subject Objects, he showed them to me and I commented that they looked like packages and architectural plans for unbuilt houses. I remarked on how appropriate the work was, given the artist's homeless situation following the Altadena wildfire.
Mendel-Black had begun using the shipping stencil arrows the year before. He was out of town for an extended period due to a family emergency and needed to work small on paper. The cut-ups, started by the artist a few years prior, had taken a new turn and he was anxious to see where, if anywhere, it would take the work. Since they were normally stretched over wood panels, when Mendel-Black cut up the canvas, he did not really pay much attention to the back. And, according to the artist, it was not like he was paying so much attention to the backside when he started the
paper pieces, either. It was just that they were not really working and when that happens Mendel-Black pretty much always tries to solve the graphic problem with color. The work was getting garish with metallic golds, silvers, and bronzes in the mix but nothing worked. So one day, the artist just turned one over, almost out of disgust. The thing was, when Mendel Black cut the paper pieces up and glued them back together with paint, the acrylic had the same effect on the back as it did on the front. The only difference was that the back of the piece was plain paper, so there were no distractions from the color that bonded everything together. Right away the artist said he knew the back was the front. And there was something else, too. The back was where Mendel-Black signed his name, dated, inventoried and titled the pieces. And years of having his paintings misprinted in catalogs, hung upside down, or sideways also put him in the habit of drawing arrows to indicate which way was up. Now that all of that information was on the front, Mendel-Black needed to consider what it looked like. There was a correlation with the instructional aspect of shipping labels he said attracted him: he liked the idea of the work considered as its own container. Hence, the stenciled arrows came into the picture.
Even if it was a piece from the same panel, the minute Mendel-Black cut one off and reattached it, he had to consideration the relationship between the whole and its parts. The artist liked that in doing so he addressed the autonomy of a work made of pieces which rely on each other to form the finished whole. Adding multiple panels only made the point clearer. At first, Mendel Black even went so far as to sign, date, title and stencil each one separately to stress the idea that they were individually robbed of their autonomy but might perhaps regain it in concert with one another. Doing so clearly stressed the object-ness of each piece. But the artist was wrestling with the idea of his own subjectivity. Like most folks, Mendel-Black liked to think of himself as unique and special. The artist used to take his identity for granted, but years ago, a phrase of French historian Michel Foucault's had stuck in his head. In our society, Foucault argued, we are “carefully fabricated”. In other words, who Mendel-Black was was highly constructed and organized by forces outside of himself that he was not always, if ever, aware of. In school, for example, the artist was taught an official history, culture and canon; every day he received advertising, news, information, and entertainment through the media the same as everyone else; and so on. Mendel-Black understood he was the product of a vast patchwork of outside references. The more the artist thought about it, the more he began to imagine himself as a constellation of given, off-the-shelf parts, constructed from a mass of foreign objects, as if, for instance, he was made out of Lego blocks. The problem was how to locate a subjectivity in such an equation. Where was it? Did it come down, he wondered, to the way he weighed the unquantifiable external factors that made him up, how much stress he placed on one over another, the scale of importance he gave each of them together and apart? Mendel Black likes to say: We are all Subject-Objects.
—#ARTKID