August 8 - September 17 1998
Joseph Chowning Gallery
San Francisco, CA
Reviewed by Ron Glowen
Trust me.
But whom can you trust?
Is this phrase printed in Italics to denote a title, as in the name and theme of Michael Bishop's exhibition of new sculpture? Does it suggest an urgent appeal from the artist asking you to put your faith in him? Or is it I, the writer, demanding that you believe in my words and wisdom?
What we have here is a predicament.
Trust me.
Which of the assertions above is reliable? In which premise do you have confidence?
Enough of this rhetoric, you say. Art will reveal the truth and therefore Bishop's sculpture is the thing to be trusted. Then again, look closely and you will see that the language in the sculpture is much the same. Only now it deals with physical entities and properties that we trust will reveal the truth about the world around us as well as the world within. But can we trust these objects to reveal truth literally and unambiguously, as they at first appear to do?
Trust me.
Bishop's sculptures operate at several levels. The place to begin is with the interior monologue, the dialogue that the artist is having with his perceptions. The objects used in the sculptures, cast in metal at real size from original sources, are combined or juxtaposed to invent meanings and suggest relationships.
Trust Me No. 127466 is such an example, with the sword and inverted horse a power relationship that once signified battle and death. I Think Madge Knew is an interior monologue about someone else's interior monologue; its disparate elements (cast aluminum apple core and monument plaque with text) are the pieces of an episode, perhaps, that has prompted a revelation in the mind of the character in this story. The scope unfolds in other works that refer emblematically to the interior self. The prototypical house/tower/prison in Skull with Black Rectangle guards secrets that the skull--affixed to the outside--will no longer attempt to comprehend. What Bishop displays to us is the now-empty shell of that interior self. Heart with Black Square proposes an analogous situation, this time an anatomical cast human heart, from the standpoint of feeling and emotion instead of intellect and reason.
Next is the projection of the interior self, which might be expressed as the appearance of the thought-object in Bishop's assemblagist esthetic. Or so it seems. The Marquis of Some Place consists of a dollhead-like bust of a young boy, mounted on a tapered architectural pedestal, whose head touches a suspended baguette. It exists in a dichotomy of terms--head with bread, brains with dough. By casting both elements in bronze, we know that both are hard exteriors minus their "soft" interiors. But there's also a private pun at work here. The model for the head was a 1930s era Bakelite plastic toy; the bread of course is something baked.
Elements in other works move from the inside to the inside-out, or perhaps more accurately the inside uncovered and disclosed. By now, we have become aware that interior and inversion are key elements in Bishop's conceptual strategy. Full dental castings are used in Trust Me No. 3 and Bananas with Bound Full-Mouth & Timer. Analogous Set employs objects situated on a shelf: a halved orange, halved artichoke, anatomical human heart and human skull.
Trust Me No. 3 also employs another inversion, a plastic model submarine cast in bronze mounted upside-down on the underside of a wall-mounted architectural form. The submarine, the upside-down horse previously mentioned, and the upside-down bride-and-groom wedding cake ornament on the underside of the work titled Current Events, all suggest that inversion represents a loss of strength and potency replaced by a sense of the vulnerable and ridiculous.
Bishop's work reveals its truths through the prosaic vocabulary of elements, not unlike the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. Bishop exploits his expertise in casting metal by making replicas of things. Through inversion and ambiguity, the mundane and matter-of-fact assume a heightened value which at the same time does not attempt to explain away their basic ordinariness.
Like Magritte, Bishop uses ordinary objects in a rather categorical way. The object is an emblem for conditions and classifications. Bishop tends to use objects that all seem to have a related sense of being hard exteriors or coverings that conceal space or substance within. His expertise in metal casting augments this condition, whether it be bananas or bread, skulls or submarine hulls.
Still, there are as many questions posed as there are truths revealed in Bishop's work. We tend to think of truths as being absolute, whereas questions have a great deal more latitude for possibility. We think of truths as coming from philosophers and spiritual leaders, whom we are conditioned to trust. Questions come at us from all sides, often unexpectedly, which throws off the equilibrium of truth. Truth soothes us; questions put us on guard.
Trust me.
Are you soothed or are you wary? Has Michael Bishop's art found the answer, or begged the question? I firmly believe it is the latter, but for that you'll just have to... Trust me.
Ron Glowen
Ron Glowen is a Seattle-based art critic and curator, currently teaching art history and criticism at The Cornish College of the Arts.