Art
A Searing Read Clendening combined books and molten metal to create a variety of textures.
The current show at the Watkins College gallery doesn’t contain many objects. What dominates is a video projection of a young guy in glasses talking to himself in a pretend dialogue where he plays both sides of the conversation. It’s the kind of thing most people rehearse in their heads. Only in their heads.
The man in the video is Will ClenDening, who graduated from the Watkins fine arts program in 2005. He was still figuring out what to do next when he died this summer in a motorcycle accident. As a tribute to their lost friend, the people at Watkins put together a retrospective of his work, which documents his rapid development from experiments in Pollack-style drip paintings to his “mature” sculptures and videos. It’s strange to use that word with an artist who died just shy of 27, but that’s the point: in only a few years, Will ClenDening developed an identifiable visual style and a compelling artistic voice.
ClenDening’s most fully realized pieces were sculptures, most made from common, recognizable materials put to new use: machines reassembled and repurposed; simple objects—playing cards, a hammer, staples—reconstituted and reorganized; a series of books partially encased in molten metal; video monitors presented as sculptural objects. His projects reflect his desire to figure out how things work and what else they could do, like musical circuit-benders who rewire electronic devices to create strange noises.
Many of these sculptures have ceased to exist as three-dimensional objects; in the show they’re represented by photographs because ClenDening destroyed the originals. According to Watkins instructor Jack Ryan, it’s common for young sculptors to throw out their college work. The stuff takes up a lot of room, literally and psychically. But the fact that these sculptures no longer occupy physical space seems almost appropriate in the case of ClenDening, much of whose work was inherently provisional and experimental. Terry Glispin, who led the fine arts program during ClenDening’s time at Watkins, says that ClenDening “was trying to break down human frailty.” His experiments didn’t always work as intended, but even the “failed” experiments successfully put frailty into action. This focus on frailty also suggests less concern for the permanence of art objects.
In one of the machines that did succeed, ClenDening set up a floor fan which blew on a microphone. The mic fed into a speaker connected to a cord holding a pen. The pen scratched on a continuous roll of paper when the sound of the fan vibrated the speaker, which shook the cord. These Rube Goldberg connections played out a transfer of state from sound to motion ending with static visual traces. Similar enactment of changes in states shows up in much of his work.
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ClenDening had an artist’s eye, not just an inventor’s imagination, and his objects could be beautiful. The show includes photos of several of these works. “3000 Staples” was a bunch of staples clustered around a magnet to produce a fuzzy clump with an organic quality, like mold. In another, a floor-to-ceiling column of unraveled videotape streamed down in graceful curls. The surviving work on display is equally beautiful, like the painting “3 AM Driving,” a large vision of blurry lights and murky colors.
The visual appeal is apparent in three sculptures that combine books and molten metal to produce a variety of textures out of crusty formations and burnt paper. They appear to have been made by encasing a book in a mold and then pouring the metal in, partially burning the books. ClenDening left the mold sprues on one of the pieces, a decision that remembers rather than hides the process of making. In many ways these sculptures are typical of ClenDening’s interest in how things work—what would happen if you poured metal onto a book?—as well as his willingness to make fun of his pursuit of knowledge by bronzing it like baby shoes, rendering it unusable in the end. In one piece the “bronzed” book is the Guinness Book of World Records, suggesting that this act of art-making is as much a pointless feat as many of the acts memorialized as world records. Another book is The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a Renaissance goldsmith known as much for his romantic life story as for the things he made from molten metal. ClenDening was self-conscious of his identity as an artist, both as someone who makes things and as a cultural type. He was willing to make fun of the associations but was no doubt attracted to them at the same time.
WILL CLENDENING: RETROSPECTIVE, through Sept. 1 at the Brownlee O. Currey Jr. Gallery, Watkins College of Art & Design
ClenDening received some of his greatest attention for his videos, including one shown at Cheekwood. This exhibit includes two, “Wittgenstein’s Banana,” the Cheekwood piece, and “I’m Masturbating Right Now,” both of which show ClenDening interviewing himself by switching the orientation of the image from side to side. The dialogue appears to involve heavy free association, with the “interviewer” tossing out seemingly random questions like “What do you think about the economy?” or “What did you do last night?” The responses can be mind-numbingly inane, but tend to go in directions that get complicated. In one answer, he reminisces about summertime, starting with lemonade and porches, and then sliding into a riff on fans blowing up skirts and children eating dirt. All stereotypical Southern images, just not ones that usually go together.
As the second title suggests, a current of erotic fantasy emerges often. The answers also include sarcastic speculations on the nature of being an artist, including topics like whether ClenDening thinks he is a genius and the attention he gets from “art-type people.” In the video of the same name, he declares several times, “I’m masturbating right now.” He isn’t literally—he is fully clothed, sitting in a chair, well-behaved. But he is masturbating conversationally, talking to himself, pointing out that most art-making involves a level of masturbatory self-involvement and self-pleasure. In these videos he’s committed to following verbal associations into uncomfortable honesty and self-revelation.
ClenDening placed these videos firmly in the context of modern aesthetics. He closes “Wittgenstein’s Banana” with a discussion of how little the interviewer gets out of these conversations and ends with the words, “It does nothing but fill up time.” This could have come straight from John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing.” In that lecture, meant to be read aloud, Cage put forward the idea of music as sounds or events that organize time, giving it a structure “which, accepted, in return accepts whatever, even those rare moments of ecstasy, which as sugar loaves train horses, train us to make what we make.” ClenDening was wide open to the Cagean “whatever.”
To a great extent this show is an exercise in memory, with photos documenting projects that you had to have seen to understand. The continuous stream of ClenDening’s videos keeps the cadences of his voice audible for one more weekend. While the show’s organizers couldn’t pile up a ton of work, they did capture the swift quality of an artist’s mind at a stage where he was more interested in naming problems and trying out answers than in constructing monuments.