Michael Bishop at Michael Himovitz Gallery
June 2000, Artweek
by Allan Gordon
The "art of paradox" is a term that aptly describes the tenets of much modern art, especially after mimetic theories were replaced by more complex (paradoxical) mental constructs. The reliance on rationalist/realist criteria was the first to fall. The Dadaists, Surrealists, and the metaphysical painters successfully challenged and subsequently rejected the view that reason was superior to the non-rational as the only source of knowledge. They quickly went about assimilating Freudian hypotheses about the unconscious mind. The contradictions of the irrational were soon accepted as commonplace and systematized into a new aesthetics.
The work of Michael Bishop is contained somewhere along this continuum of fantasy, subconscious longing, irrational apotheosis, and the art of paradox. In 1996, Bishop stated that in his work, he was attempting to "satisfy both intellectual needs and address social concerns." Such a statement was intended to assuage the viewer and provide the work with a sense of profundity and anticipation. However, Bishop's continued proclivity for indirection and irony prevailed, and four years later, he played down the "social concerns" and chose, instead, to situate his unsettling simulacra in a relative space somewhere between general "truth" and witty entertainment. The two concepts are not equipoised. Instead, the works lean more towards the 'burlesque," and Bishop wouldn't have it any other way.
One particular piece, titled Heavy Hand, exemplifies the consistent nature of the Michael Bishop beast. It is a work which combines the object trouvé of the Surrealists (a "found" boxing glove replicated in aluminum a dozen times) with new fabrications (the bridge/table). This incongruous ensemble ("hands" on a table, gloves across a bridge) may satisfy an "intellectual need" for Bishop, but if this tableau is intended to address some "social concern" then it remains obscure.
This obscurity forces the viewer to come to grips with a compelling visual spectacle whose message is unclear, or at the very least, its symbolic import ambivalent. Is this a comment on boxing as sport? Are the gloves a veiled allegory to offer some insight into the human condition? Is this just tomfoolery and happenstance? Another work, Time & Place, Piece & Quiet, reads as an installation (as do most of the works in this exhibition). The juxtaposition of chair, bench, storage unit, collection of plates and faces on the wall are mysterious and alien. The anthropomorphic storage unit is the antithesis of peace and quiet. Instead, it is a confrontational robot which guards the stacked but empty collection of plates.
Bishop successfully combines certain concepts of the Dadaists/Surrealists with a raw assemblage technique, presenting the whole as if it were site specific. His personal iconography of dissociation and displacement is telling as he resuscitates Isidore Ducasse's "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table."