Being Greg McHarg, Exhibition Essay for ‘Picnic’, Red Head Gallery, Dec. 2000
by Patrick Mahon, 2000
I am trying to think about what Greg McHarg is thinking about.
Works of art and perhaps paintings in particular challenge us to think about things as if we were inside of someone else's head. We therefore attempt to become imposters, possessors of the artist's thoughts. With Greg McHarg's works in the exhibition ‘Picnic’, I am reminded that I can never fully think the artist's thoughts – but neither can I really escape them. Yet I'm also aware with these works that I need to think about two things at once: about landscape, as an emblem of the world we know; and about painting, as an emblem of the world that we don't know.
In Greg McHarg's art, the grid is the ineffable construct that insinuates itself on everything. This presence can be explained by his earlier education in making formalist abstractions – but only the way that a particular child's education might explain why he has a grasp of arithmetic, while another child's education could explain why she understands numbers is having the potential to invent beautiful narratives. In trying to think about McHarg's work, we might say that the grid is really a gravitational force. It is the attractor that holds the paint (or sometimes the objects we see) together. And it infers a system of ordering which reminds us that disorder hovers about these works insistently, threatening the equilibrium we might expect to find within them. The grid also functions like the phrase “as if”, (i.e., as if the horizontal and vertical axes constitute a logical territory; as if this painting follows from the one that was made before it; as if this works speaks across time to Malevich and Mondrian, and to painters of commercial signage). And in some ways the grid in McHarg’s paintings reminds us of The perennial piece of family fiction that comes up at both the best and the worst of times: it is the story that won't go away.
Earlier I mentioned landscape and painting, but not landscapainting. Greg McHarg does not make landscape paintings and so it would be trite to think of his recent works as nods toward the flyover views of farmers fields that prairie people (like McHarg once was), so often encounter. The paintings aren't supposed to be read that way. Let us imagine, instead, that the artist took a gingham tablecloth and laid it upon the undulating grass; two flat rocks over a low, brown picnic table And let us say that he subsequently found a way to hold up the resulting ‘traces’ for our inspection – of this one, this one, this one, and this one. Each “try” we would encounter as a painting; as a stab at making sense of the stuff that surrounds us; and as a small scrap of art that we haven't seen before. But could these objects be anything more than that... visual poems dedicated to the place where illusionism and flat space meet together? perhaps they could, but of course they don't need to be.
There is the moment when you're on the beach on a windy day and all of a sudden a gust grabs your beach ball and sends it flying toward the surf. Within seconds you are on your feet, but not before some wild invisible propulsion system has caused the ball to really get moving, to keep advancing far beyond your grasp. In a dream about it later, there's the odd sense that the ball is tracing a line, at first across the sand, and then across the water. And gradually you realize that the lines on the surface of the ball are unraveling themselves, marking a strange ecstatic path that moves away from you. In the dream, you wonder whether you couldn't just pull on the line to bring the ball back, but it just keeps moving further and further into the distance.
Greg McHarg's beach ball works appear to ask questions about how to think about a flat surface that is located upon a sphere. But why such puzzling? Haven't the efforts of sea-going explorers from long ago, and the satellite photographs that seem to have been taken minutes ago, told us about how to understand the simultaneous flatness and roundness of the world? I think they have, yet they aren't able to tell us about how painting – with its paradigmatic flatness – and the world – which purports to roundness – cohere. Perhaps McHarg is able to do this here.
With the beach ball works we are given the Toys R Us version of a flattened spherical projection that simply maps color, shape and line. In doing so the artist manifests an experimental slippage, so that our orientation to the possible “up and down” of the aestheticized globe-realm we are considering, becomes skewed. The effect of this suggests that in Greg McHarg’s world o’ painting, bordered alliances (between for instance a country overrun by cadmium and a territory swathed and turquoise) have been set in motion. If we turn momentarily to our own world again, we note that globalizing trends concerning, for example, economics and communications, have made geographic boundaries increasingly questionable; in the beach ball planet, on the other hand, lines of demarcation remain intact but are dramatically shifted to infer a kind of hysterical mobility. Can such geographic sorcery lead to any new social conclusions? Perhaps so, but more importantly, it can also remind us that as we enter into a dialogue with spaces that appear fixed – whether because they are charted by painted grids or bounded by curvilinear borders – we may do so with a heightened sense of the possible.
In trying to think about what Greg McHarg is thinking about, something I could not otherwise have thought suddenly made available to me.
