Harry Anderson: Turn on the Lights by Patricia Stewart

(From the catalog) There is a haunting passage in Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria in which he describes how that “tenacious woman, hoarding her valuables, decreed their immortality.” Each object’s position in the royal collection was “immutably fixed,” its fate “irrevocably sealed,” in an attempt to arrest the passage of time. There is certainly little apparent resemblance between Her Majesty’s well-upholstered retreats at Osborne or Balmoral, with their “serried accumulations” of china and silver, and Harry Anderson’s reconditioned factory building in North Philadelphia; Anderson’s residences, over the years, have all seemed to aspire to the condition of garage. Anderson’s building, however, is full of secret treasures, and passionate collecting is part of his art. Any discussion of his work needs to consider the magnetism of objects—both the power they exert and the power the artist assumes over them. Back in the seventies, Anderson was collecting, fragmenting, and systematically rearranging Fiestaware plates. He installed the shards of high-intensity color ceramic—radioactive red or cobalt blue—on grids in outdoor locations. At the same time, he was cannibalizing Mission-style lamps, assembling their cast-iron parts into still more lamps. Some ironic circularity was apparent there. Back then, his work seemed most historically connected—or, at least, most fun to write about—on a behavioral level. Collecting in order to break, the artist appeared to be acting out, parodying almost, an ambivalence between love and destruction. The original objects, nouveau collectibles, were culturally sited somewhere between the desirable and the despised. The final pieces seemed to vibrate, caught between contradictory impulses on both the individual and collective levels. They arrested some moment in cultural time, significant precisely because the meaning was, in part, private and never to be known. Now, however, with this retrospective exhibition in mind, as one studies some older pieces and looks at slides of others, the irony may have been only apparent—and apparent, mainly, to writers. The work is now delightedly freed from the cultural and behavioral matrix that once seemed so demanding and so rich. The broken disks of blue and yellow, red and green, now read as a kind of rococo cubism. They no longer look like some domestic reenactment of Kulturkampf—they look like garden sculpture. The early lamps are now more organic, grown rather than assembled. They look like art nouveau, only more highly structured. They glow in a corner of the artist’s studio, not like Tiffany flowers left over from the nineteenth century but a collection of more highly organized and happy specimens—Mondrian tulips in illicitly mixed colors, perhaps, or electric fuchsias for Marianne Brandt’s balcony at the Bauhaus. Anderson’s work is more lighthearted and intensely visual than it was originally. It’s not just that the lamps suggest a jazzier period—the work, at last, has synthesized its sources, passed beyond the more obvious irony of cultural quotation, while still making use of it. Revisiting any artist’s work, of course, is a humbling reminder that it was never within the competence, or, probably, even among the most shapeless desires, of art criticism to arrest the passage of time; things are bound to look different after twenty years. The stylistic development, however, underlines a paradoxical message: All qualities contain, while concealing, their opposites. Although the body of work is stylistically consistent, the pieces do not look the same. Anderson’s work has developed in a spiral; you could almost diagram its movement, if only you had a four-dimensional timeline. First, the artist overloads his formal context—lamps—by introducing new forms. These come in the shape of some new-found treasure or challenge, like a china swan or even the agitator from a washing machine. By the strategy of adding still more unlikely components—a croquet ball here, a length of copper plumbing pipe there—he arrives at a new level of visual integration that is stylistically related to the earlier work, although it does not immediately resemble it. It would be satisfying to be able to predict the twists of all this passionate rearranging and restyling. It is a challenge to graph his style even retrospectively as it moves from particularity to unity by way of the specific. Anderson does keep discovering dynamic, rising forms. His work is definitely not preconceived. Its intelligence is combinative, metaphorical rather than analytical; its continuity is discontinuous. For example, lamps done in the late seventies and early eighties were top-heavy. The center of interest was the warmly pigmented glass shades supported on sectioned, curving metal necks. The pieces were not just visually top-heavy. A few bit the dust as their owners were sweeping or vacuuming the floor around them—not, evidently, far enough around. When they were upright, in profile or in plan, however, you could see that the width of the base of each lamp was equal to, or, at least, in balance with, the size of its shade. Top and bottom edges lined up. The high center of gravity of recent lamps is more pronounced. The diameter of the head of apiece may be twice that of its foot. Vertical elements sometimes rest on spheres, like the goddess Fortuna scrambling around on her globe in midair. Nevertheless, the upward movement is more interrupted, largely because the stems are now stacks of found objects with contrasting shapes and distracting associations—a great big chrome-plated humidor, for example, or a lampshade full of stars. The contours all zigzag. The outcome is more movement, less speed. The characteristic upswing is enhanced by open form. Bases are not usually geometric solids or any other kind of solid. Typically, they are made from the skeletal armatures of older lamps or the star-shaped ends of architectural tie-rods. All negative spaces tend to be toward the bottom of the lamp. There are many branching or radiating forms. Circular saw blades are common parts; there is even the propeller from an outboard motor. The “Reddi Kilowatt” pieces of the early eighties had iron frames shaped like a broken swastika, or like a pictograph of a running man, with lightbulbs for head and hands. The necks of other pieces have been made of spiral sections of garden hose. The spiral forms look suspiciously like synecdoche. Is a particular lamp representing, and making fun of, the whole crazy oeuvre? The twisty, gestural frames certainly add a cartoon quality to Anderson’s pieces. A bit of Walter Lantz’s manic background music might be appropriate here. There are other, more optical, illusions at work. Anderson regularly uses translucent components. Marginalized objects redolent of glamour—cut-glass doorknobs, the illuminated red taillight from a 1959 Cadillac—are frequently placed on or below the center of gravity, a practice that tends to lighten both the apparent mass and the tonality of the pieces. Lightbulbs shining out through perforated or translucent bases create a similar effect. The sculptures seem to soar off the floor—just like Earthworm Jim in the video game. In some of the newest lamps, the light source is in a globe of glass in the center of the piece, with found objects stacked on top. Light coming from below blurs the distinctions between the objects and flattens them into a single silhouetted entity, like a finial, pointing up. In one related piece, small objects—buttons, dice, a toy airplane—are affixed to the conical glass shade. When the light is turned on, the angle of attachment flattens the little mementos into silhouetted shapes; they are no longer discernible as silhouetted objects. Anderson may indeed collect objects obsessively, but not nearly as obsessively as he transforms them into some presence that goes beyond object. Color plays a catalytic role. Some objects are arranged in sequences shifting from warm to cool, others are juxtaposed in complementary pairs. Anderson favors red/green pairs. Color and space expand slowly, then rapidly contract. It is color modeling, although the sculptural context makes it hard to see it, or, more accurately, to recognize it when you see it. In a neocubist way, the color fragments the objects while unifying the field—the three-dimensional field, that is. Calling Anderson’s preferred colors red and green may be helpful in defining their three-dimensional role, but it is not precisely accurate, since all of his colors tend to be odd blends with a definite period flavor. A faded yellow-green, streaked with ocher, found in both glass and plastic, is a favorite. There are many swirly textures, like those in marbleized bowling balls, pigmented when cast. Red appears in such forms as a magenta anodized-aluminum Dixie Cup holder, turned upside down. Most common, probably, is copper, usually as lengths of plumbing pipe . Anderson enhances the brightness of the copper pipe by burnishing it. He ups contrast by patinating it dark and then drawing spirals around it with a power tool, producing more upward movement. He works and reworks his found objects. If it is not scraped off, it is recoated, or turned upside down. 11 may be all three. Nothing stays the same; nothing is immutably fixed. Anderson’s obsession seems less an attempt to arrest the passage of time than the result of a compulsion to take over and drive time’s car. The grouping of work in what appears to be its sense of time makes for an interesting taxonomy. On such a basis, Anderson’s is not just a dynamic aesthetic, it may be a futurist one. All the collecting and hoarding seem very nineteenth century, but visually his work is founded on cubism. You can think of the lamps as orphic cubism in three dimensions, a comparison that associates Anderson with artists like Robert and Sonia Delaunay, whose view of technology was radiant, even visionary. Anderson’s work, despite its pictorial quotations, its tongue-in-cheek quality, its grunge factor, seems to have gotten beyond post-modernism. Or postmodernism may be more upbeat, uplifted—more modern—than we think. We may have returned to the modernist passion to transcend history. It seems time to turn on the lights. The pieces are working lamps as well as critically provocative sculptures. Luminescence and reflectiveness are part of what Anderson finds and transforms. Much of his reworking process complicates the reflectiveness of his different materials. Consider one lamp; take it from the top. Steady light spreads out through the widest part of the lamp, its multi-colored—green, blue, and white—polyhedral shade. Light from the same bulb shines directly down through circular perforations in the ring supporting the shade. Magically, the artist produces two different lights from one source. The strong downward light is reflected brightly from copper lines spiraling up the neck of the lamp, then more softly from a spun-brass collar below. Scattered patches of light appear next on an inverted turquoise plastic plate. Underneath, a tonal reflection glows dimly from a burnished copper pipe and from the earth-red and bronze-green ceramic cone that supports it. Complementary colors catch the light unevenly and add to the contrast of surface reflections, creating a complex dimensional movement. Finally, the now-faint light from above blends with the warmth from orange lightbulbs inside a sparkling cut-glass bowl, turned upside down, that constitutes the lamp base. Despite all the internal contrasts, the result is not scattered fragments of light; rather, there is a soft, allover wash of color and reflections. The effect enriches the artist’s materials. Mass-production china and plastic glow like ivory and polished coral. What once seemed to be the artist’s ambivalence toward his materials has now been resolved; all that glitters may as well be gold. The effect of light on sculptural form has changed crucially in Anderson’s pieces over the years. In the earliest lamps, when you turned on the switch, the body of the lamp essentially disappeared. Only the richly glowing, paradoxically dark light seen through the shade seemed to matter. In the more recent pieces, with their highly contrasted, more volumetric frames, the effect is more complex. When you turn on the switch, localized color and internal contrast fade out, but the apparent mass of the lamps expands. Their bodies become bigger and more unified. They are transubstantiated lamps. To reverse the punch line from one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s tales of redemption: Here, praise God, everyone can be fooled. Back to catalog page Galleries Directory | Levy Gallery Artists Registry | Publications & Artists | Email Moore College of Art and Design

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