Thanks for sticking with me today while I continue talking about William Christenberry’s current show at the Katzen Art Center at American University. I have been thinking about a discussion that arises with the idea of the grid and how it relates to WC’s art in an era that could be defined as reductive – by this I mean the early seventies and into the very early eighties, the early stages of his mature artistic output.
I have always thought of the work as documentary in style and presentation – while I still find this to be true, I’m starting to think about the serial nature of the places that are photographed in Christenberry’s work. Why for instance have I seen more that 10 different versions of The Palmist Building, The Green Warehouse, Sprott Church, and The Bar-B-Q Inn. Certainly these images could create a grid of changes to the location or even a timeline of the same, however could we now start to see that structure as a formal 3 dimensional grid that could represent; image of the location, deterioration of the location, year of the location, anthropological uses of the location. An x,y, and z axis if you will. This grid (or cube) could now start to also work in other disciplines – his drawings, paintings, and sculptures of the locations (or details thereof) of said subject combined.
There is a secondary question to this that needs to be asked as well – Is this an intention of the artist or is this something that has sprung from reading the output of his practice. Or is it a combination of both, in my mind, probably both. While this says nothing definitive of WC’s work, it does raise a curious thought about art we (especially in the DC area) have grown very accustomed to.
Clearly this post is as much me thinking aloud as it is definitive theory – I have been kind of rolling the idea around for the last couple of days just to see where it might stick.