MICHAEL WAUGH: BOOM AT VON LINTEL GALLERY — Daily Serving Feature

Michael Waugh. Les Règles de l’Art, 2015
ink on Mylar; four panels, 102 x 42 in. each

Written by Calder Yates

Michael Waugh's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Boom, is currently on view at Von Lintel Gallery. Using ink on Mylar, Waugh reimagines an assortment of 19th-century tableaux, depicting quaint scenes of countryside estates and horse stables, as well as turn-of-the-century buildings on New York City streets. These representational drawings consist wholly of handwritten text: Scribbled sentences produce the contour lines of buildings as they crumble to the ground, while epistolary markings provide contrast to form the underside of a horse. Letters and numbers further constitute the hands and faces of male figures. Waugh has painstakingly scrawled and layered words and sentences across the sheets of Mylar to construct the entirety of every image, spending three to four thousand hours to produce each piece. The amount of labor alone puts Waugh’s drawings on par with the historical legacies of endurance works.

The incongruous titles of the drawings, such as Unfettered Markets (FCIR, part 4) (2015), hint at the content of the words and sentences used to create them. Waugh uses the Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Report to form the images of stately manors and equestrians. In Derivative (FCIR, part 5) (2015), the phrase “too big to fail” delineates the horse’s genitals. For the largest piece in the show—a four-panel work depicting a crowd watching a building collapse—Waugh plums Les Règles de l'Art (The Rules of Art) written by the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu. Like a gunshot, the stupendous amount of time and labor put into Les Règles de l’Art (2015) is immediate and breathtakingly obvious. 

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in

None of Waugh’s drawings contain a single image of a woman. Waugh depicts men circulating among more men through fictional thoroughfares or rowing along on a polite, tree-lined river. Even inside the stables, only studs are found. Waugh evokes an old world based on good manners, pedigree, and male dominance. In the far right panel of Les Règles, a couple of men grope each other. Pleasure, here, flows only between men.

By combining three basic elements—images of 19th-century “good taste,” words describing 21st-century financial catastrophe, and dominant masculinity—Waugh implies that our current economic boom-and-bust cycles are rooted in a history of gendered aesthetic calculus. In other words, the “good life”200 years ago—a life that included property, leisure, and commodities, and that excluded any instances of women or people of color—continues to inform our present-day, exploitative, unequal economic system. Waugh’s drawings are a veiled swipe at an earlier era’s role in the construction of our inherited conditions of hierarchy.

Michael Waugh. Before Our Very Eyes (FCIR, part 2), 2015 (detail)
ink on Mylar; 25 x 25 in.

As a result of their illustrative qualities, Waugh’s drawings serve primarily as a demonstration of his argument, acting as a simple equation toward his artistic logic. The works indicate a cognitive tension, all the while allowing viewers to walk away with no visceral uneasiness—mostly due to the drawings' benign imagery. The only tension in the works lies exclusively within Waugh’s implied argument that 19th-century male-dominated society may be ipso facto the very problem we have today. The drawings hint at—rather than declare—this argument, which is an unsurprising one that has already been well-articulated over the past half-century.

Other artists have created this cognitive tension while also exploring material and visual tension. Glenn Ligon's text-based paintings, for example, contain similar, damning references to hierarchies of class, race, and power. Ligon's works, however, also contain an exploration of materials: coal dust mixed with acrylic, silkscreens on unstretched canvasses, neon lettering, and powder-coated aluminum. Waugh seems to ask viewers to look past his use of materials (ink on Mylar) to consider only his imagery, while Ligon's use of materials deliberately confuses image and ground, never taking the white surface for granted.

Michael Waugh. Derivative (FCIR, part 5), 2015
ink on Mylar; 42 x 65 in.

Waugh's drawings and the tidiness of his argument suffer from the very processes he hopes to critique. Beyond the horse scrotum cheekily formed from the words “too big to fail,” there is little surprise or confusion in his work; the drawings are fun and easy to look at. Where is the moment when the viewers of the work are implicated in the drawings' depictions of hierarchy of class and power? This is the irony of easily digestible (and purchasable) critiques of hegemony. Like a flu shot, the hegemonic system has taken in and processed its critique, and becomes stronger and more entrenched as a result. When does looking at these drawings move beyond a gentle and agreeable experience, and into an uncomfortable one, in which one cannot—ought not—look away?

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CONTINUED AND RECOMMENDED, OCTOBER 2015 | ARTSCENE Feature

Michael Waugh, “Les régles de l’art,”
2015, ink on mylar, 4 panels, each 102 x 42"

Michael Waugh's obsessively intricate drawings on mylar have a noble and ever-poignant central core — the troubling intersections of politics, wealth and power. Using micrography, transforming written text into representational imagery, he presents scenes both urban and semi-rural, as well as detailed portraits of horses, in a graphic aesthetic consistent with their late 19th/early 20th-century settings. Using texts from capitalist theory among other similar sources, Waugh's newsprint-like imagery is so finely rendered that it only breaks down into text under careful inspection. These are not mere formal exercises. The horses and human figures alike are depicted with an innocent charm that belie the ominous forebodings made apparent in titles such as "Crisis on the Horizon," or the spot-on word-to-text interplay of "Before Our Very Eyes." "Les règles de l’art," at 102 x 168 inches on four panels, is by far the largest piece, and also the most spectacular: a city street of perhaps a century ago stretches from a corner off towards a distant bend. The fourth building down from the corner is in mid-implosion, as if detonated from within, but only the horse-and-carriage faltering just beneath its collapse appears to register the dire circumstance; others just mill about. The work is too stylized to suit the literal content of Pierre Bourdieu’s book Les règles de l’art, (“The Rules of Art”) which explores the connection between art and the social structures within society by which art is produced and received. But Waugh's message and method execute a perfect tip-toe of a sneak attack. 

Also on view are selections of Izima Kaoru’s large-scale, highly saturated color photographs from the series "Landscape with A Corpse." The photographer depicts moments of death as imagined by his super-star models. In each staging the model is dressed in high fashion, albeit sometimes covered in blood. The magnificence and power of the industrial and natural landscape depicted in the photographs, in many cases, dwarfs the figure whose dramatically staged death is thus insignificant in relationship to the architecture (Von Lintel Gallery, Culver City).

Michael Shaw / Jody Zellen 

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MICHAEL WAUGH | BOOM - Sept 12 — Oct 31, 2015

Von Lintel Gallery is pleased to present Boom—an exhibition of new work by artist, Michael Waugh. The exhibition marks the artist’s first solo show with the gallery and in the city of Los Angeles.

Waugh’s ink drawings on mylar utilize imagery constructed entirely out of handwritten text. Hundreds of pages from government reports and theoretical writings about power and capitalism are transcribed word for word into airy, visual compositions that reinterpret 19th century tableaux: stately portraits of horses, cowboys on the homestead, a team of rowers racing down the river.

The white space and sense of lightness in these drawings belie a frenetic surface teeming with cramped, labored handwriting only visible upon close inspection. Occasionally, the tight scrawls unfold into a more generous script. Discernible words and phrases like “CITIBANK” and “clearly illegal” surrender a subtle awareness of the works' larger context, raising questions about the difficult to digest text, in this case—The Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Report. The bureaucratic haze of the document is amplified and mirrored in the tension between image and word.

Included in the exhibition is the largest piece the artist has constructed to date: a four panel work measuring fourteen-feet in length. The text is a complete transcription of Pierre Bourdieu's Les régles de l’art—or, The Rules of Art—exploring the interconnection between art and the societal structures within which it is produced and received. Inked by Waugh in the original French, Bourdieu's sociological musings on cultural capital are woven into a street scene of an exploding building, threatening a crowd too distracted to notice.

Michael Waugh was born in Cambridge, MA. He earned his graduate degree in painting from New York University in 2000; but he also has degrees in writing from Texas State University and history from the University of Texas. He has exhibited internationally for the last fifteen years and his work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art in America and ARTNews. He is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Marie Walsh Sharp Space Program and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.