TOM FRIEDMAN
Another piece demanding careful scrutiny is a length of mill-cut wood lying casually on the floor near a couple of windows. Called Two by Four, this work looks so unmediated that we tend to glance at it and walk by. It seems just another pretentious, boring piece of conceptual art, or maybe it’s a carpenter’s remnant. Only after looking at the rest of the show did I return to this work for another look. The media, listed on the wall label, are acrylic and wood. This information is crucial. By kneeling down for a close-up view, I discovered that the whole surface of the wood had been painted to imitate the real wood-grain pattern underneath it. You can just barely see a viscous liquid effect in some areas of the beige and off-white moire pattern that signals what the artist has done.
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On a wall near the eraser piece we find a wonderfully strange work that displays a risque humor similar to that of the bubble-gum sculpture. This time Friedman has applied an aqua-colored gel toothpaste directly on the wall in the shape of an asymmetrical rectangle perhaps three feet by four feet. Because its right side is shorter than its left, it looks like it’s receding into the wall. This “painting” obviously pokes fun at more traditional forms of the medium, but it functions on other levels, too. The implications of the material and its quantity again elicit the image of a physical action–here toothbrushing–repeated infinite times, whether by the many (the masses) or the one (the artist). In terms of the masses, toothbrushing may be regarded as a necessary but automatic private act of little consequence. But toothbrushing analyzed, represented, and recontextualized by the artist makes for an artwork that uses a mass-produced, low-culture material to critique high culture; the work also evinces Friedman’s awareness of himself as a humble physical being as well as his self-awareness as an artist. The gel is a wacky “pigment,” but the jewellike aqua is aesthetically appealing. The work can be read as a cogent summary of the human condition–simultaneously important and ridiculous, beautiful and embarrassing, exciting yet incredibly banal.
