The Other Tom Friedman

I told you my bro-in-law collects weird art. For instance, he owns a sort of hay bale made entirely of toothpicks, held together by nothing but the memory of the form it was cast in, and very slowly disintegrating, that is now worth $80,000. I can't remember the name of the (woman) artist.

It was at their gallery-manse that I made the acquaintance of the other Tom Friedman, a St. Louis-born sculptor who can be superficially described as a "conceptual artist" but is really a one-of-a-kind genius whose works combine obsessively minute craftsmanship with a naïvely revelatory, emperor's-new-clothes look at the familiar. You could call him a Leonardo of the quotidian.

he gets his art supplies from drugstores, candy stores, the human body, and the supermarket. friedman relentlessly invents intricate objects out of a range of household materials, such as styrofoam, masking tape, pencils, toilet paper, spaghetti, toothpicks and bubble gum. his work is obsessively and painstakingly crafted and is both beautiful and playful. friedman's ability to transform common objects into something new, his devotion to material perfection, the way he conceptualizes the action of the artisan, enables him to elevate the ordinary to the status of art.

My brother-in-law owns two or three pieces, including a bee that's life-sized and so perfectly lifelike that he's had to mount it high on the wall so no one can swat it. Among the other objects and phenomena Friedman has coaxed into being:

• a self-portrait carved into an aspirin
• a galaxy-like spiral spun out of powder detergent by the movements of a pendulum ending in a narrow-necked funnel (this one has to be recreated and then swept away every time it is shown, like a Navajo sand painting)
• a plain piece of paper which has, however, been invisibly transformed by being stared at for a thousand hours
• a bar of used soap inlaid with a perfect spiral made from the artist's pubic hair
• "Hot Balls," a galaxy-like cluster of balls of different sizes and colors, all of which were stolen
• a subtly deceptive 12-inch ruler that's only 11 actual inches long
• a white pedestal topped by a teeny-tiny pellet of the artist's shit

And that doesn't begin to scratch the surface of Friedman's mind, which questions everything, throwing your own mind off the rails you didn't know it was on. The creations themselves are ingenious and marvelous, but but they are only gateways to the thought process behind them, enigmatic gong-strokes that leave lasting reverberations in your own thought. Who hasn't been momentarily beguiled by the chance calligraphy of a squiggle of pubic hair on the soap, but who would think to take this to the next level, elevating it to the gravitas of a Platonic form? And what does that make you think about: the evolution of consciousness? The aspiration of the carnal to the eternal? Whether the mind improves or spoils what it becomes conscious of? (A Taoist would prefer the original squiggle.) The ruler forces you to think about all that you unquestioningly trust. The minuscule pellet of shit on a pedestal makes you laugh at its perfect metaphor for ego, art, and fame.

I found Friedman's work so pleasurably disorienting that I'm frustrated that it's fading so fast that I can give only this vague account of it. He's an artist whose corpus as a whole you have to ponder to get its full, dizzying impact, and this two-volume paperback catalogue from the Prada Foundation provides total immersion. I hope you can find it in a library, because it costs $120. If I were you and had the scratch, I'd immediately order one of the two that amazon.com has left and look at it every day just to remind myself how strange is the world that underlies and includes our assumptions.

Comments

[Walrus]

I definitely need to have you along the next time I go to an art museum. I find much of modern art difficult to relate to. I stare at it and try to see what the artist is trying to tell me, and I just don't get it. Most other art I do. One of my favourite "games" in an art museum is to stare at the piece of art and squeeze what I can out of it and THEN read the commentary. It's an "Aha!" kind of moment when they tell me back what I have already seen.

Is it because I don't speak the language of most modern art, or because the artists don't speak mine? I tend to think that a piece of art that needs a curator's notes before you can make heads or tails of it is a failure, particularly when it's one from your own time and culture.

Now if you hadn't gone and moved so DARN FAR AWAY, we could have made a date at the Met someday and maybe you could have taught me some of the lingo.

[amba]

'rus,

You know what? I'm with you about a lot of modern art. I don't know a whole lot about it. My bro-in-law does; he was probably the right person to introduce me to Tom Friedman and get him past my defenses. Some of the stuff he collects leaves me cold or worse. Some of it I like quite a lot. Friedman's work is often haunting and enchanting to look at as well as to think about -- see for instance In Memory of a Piece of Paper. (Here it is in context.)

[Walrus]

From the link you provided:

"I found this inspiring passage in the book, RAW CREATION -- Outsider Art, that encouraged me to create something without thinking too much about the audience, and to follow my own desire and inspiration."

And here, precisely is my argument with modern art: it is usually self-indulgent, often unspeakably dreary, boring and bewildering. The act of communication is lost because the interlocutor no longer matters. And I contend, rightly or wrongly, that art is primarily an act of communication and if the communication fails, it is at best a failed work of art. Granted, art exists in different "languages" and not all people speak all languages at all time.

Anyway, you might not get all of it, but you seem to be "getting" more than I do. I could never have written your post on Friedman.

[amba]

But Friedman, to me, is communicating.

[Walrus]

I saw that. Which is why I need you in the galleries.