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Attachments to Time: Mixed Media by Mark Tobin Moore Mark Tobin Moore's mixed media works are evocative clues to the many layers of late 20 th and early 21 st century experience, as the maps of William Smith exposed the clues to geologic time trapped in England's sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. Art may be seen from many points of view: among them are the intentions of the artist – her/his vision; the influence of the process – the action of art making within the opportunities and restraints of the chosen media; and observer perception – the work itself as encountered by the viewer. Mixed media assumes infinite variations and juxtapositions and invites the viewer to a wholly unique world of surprise, filled with interrogatives, even shock, and the possibilities of new revelations. Assemblage, collage, and mixed media work in art are found in the Cubist, Constructivist and Abstract movements from the first decades of the last century and through to the new fin de siecle Post Modernist expressions, which still linger. A proto-seminal, mixed media work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Philadelphia Museum of Art) made from oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels by Marcel Duchamp, 1915-23, exhibits the often ambiguous and personal selection of materials and a near-Gnostic choice of title. Site specific sculpture, or installation art, and complex mixed media works can be seen as descendants of the paper works of Braque, Cornell's exquisite boxes, and the major works of Robert Rauschenberg which include scrap metal, doors, pillow ticking, a goat, and as in Canyon (on loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art) a large stuffed eagle. More recently Michael Lucero's Greek , 1995 (Carnegie Museum of Art) from his Reclamation Series, makes comic substitutions for the missing parts on a miniature replica of a 5 th century B. C. draped figure when he replaces the lost parts – the head and arms – with brightly colored ceramic vessels of his own design. The selective use of words as in Barbara Kruger's prolific use of text and image combinations (recent exhibition at L. A. MOCA's Geffen Contemporary), which derive from her long experience as a Conde Nast editor, is typical of the mixed media tradition. Moore, too, is a chronicler – a timekeeper, carrying and fixing time and his view of events to and within his art. His creations present an adumbration of time – a sketchy outline, prefigured indistinctly, partially, even guardedly. As ground for his work he chooses paper, canvas, Masonite (sometimes with the regular perforations of pegboard), and a door. In recognition of the fleeting nature of found objects, glue, nails, rivets, and bolts are used to attach a myriad collection of cast-off things – plastic toy soldiers, wire, chain, a lock, LP and 45 records, a slide bolt and a military carry-all for a web belt. His use of paint ranges from abstract fields of color behind objects, a Lichtenstein-like use of cartoon-style frames with dialogue bubbles, to drips and blobs oozing through the punch holes of pegboard. Primaries of blue, red and yellow sometimes yield to the additive primary green and become reduced to achromatic grays and drab army greens or the disguising camouflage. Three or four vivid repetitions are found in this array of works from 2000, 2001 and this year: the American flag, the word remember , the date 09//11/01, and the image of Tom Hanks' Captain John Miller from Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan . We recall, with some contrast, Jasper John's White Flag , Capt. Miller's challenge to his patrol to guess his pre-war occupation (it is revealed that he was an English teacher), and there is no forgetting (or erasing the images of) the date September 11, 2001. Moore re-works, or rather weighs, the concept of macho masculinity, a-la John Wayne, in contrast to the citizen soldier in “just wars”. There is little room for androgynist sentiment in this art. To Be a Man is a title thematic to much of the selection shown here. The Door includes a photograph of a gravestone for “Jacob Gibson/4 Regmt/Co D/Ind Cav/ 28 Aug 1862. Embattled incorporates cartoon clippings of GI's with readable dialog including, “TAKE COVER,” “GET DOWN”, “DIG IN” (the command) “BREATHE”, and (the menacing) “DON'T WRITE US OFF BECAUSE WE ARE WOUNDED”. Behind the pale minimalist white to beige palette as the viewer backs away from reading the cartoon frames, a large and shadowy Tom Hanks/John Miller appears. Ideas from popular culture of the 70's and 80's are part of the accretion built up with appropriated magazine and newspaper clippings, dust jackets and records. Johnny Cash – Crosby, Stills, and Nash – Jackson Browne – James Taylor – and (of course) John Lennon and the Beatles float and sink throughout several works. Alternate responses to the “attack on America” are explored in the A Time for… series. This rich collection of Mark Tobin Moore's recent work offers a striking combination of chance procedures, carefully plotted constructivist studies, and laborious craftsmanship, perhaps also risking occasional improvisational excess, to identify, in both sharp detail and veiled suggestion, and asserting a test of our alertness (in spite of paralysis of a brain-dead consumer culture) to this unforgettable piece of time we have all shared. Richard H. Ressmeyer Note: Mr. Ressmeyer wrote this essay to serve as the main text panel for my one-person exhibition, A Time for Justice , at the Museum in the Community, Hurricane, West Virginia, in the summer of 2002. |