Los Angeles-based artist Gary Cannone has been creating artwork about collapse, error, and failure for years. In a presentation he gave in my art teacher education class, he said that "roughly 70% of my work has disability or MS on its mind." Recently impairments related to multiple sclerosis has been ever more present in Gary's life, with longer and more intense episodes of decreased dexterity and mobility, as well as cognitive challenges, intruding on his daily life. He takes a satirical Pop approach to established conceptualist strategies, and in this recent presentation Gary spoke about the role of seriality in his artwork. He has often expressed his embodied limitations through neo-Dada sculptural objects and installations representing slapstick collapse. Particularly of late, however, these constraints have been expressed in text at an intimate scale. Often using embroidery, a practice that some individuals with MS will use to maintain their dexterity, Gary has generated a collection of stalemates, with lists reflecting lapses in mind and body, but also of assistive technology and language. By generating palindromes, erroneous auto-captioning, and ASL onomatopoeias alongside factual reports of his own failures of mental and physical self-regulation, he creates bluntly intentional representations of the impossible and involuntary.
In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, who abandoned art to become a chess master, the relentless fetishistic impulse toward objective detachment in modernism may be epitomized by much of what was called Conceptual Art in the U.S. during the 1960s. In writing of the recently-deceased Conceptual Art mainstay Lawrence Weiner, who took part in the 1970 "Information" exhibition at MoMA and was one of the first modern artists to be associated primarily with text, veteran critic Benjamin D. Buchloh spoke of Weiner's "innate resistance" and "programmatic rejection" of metaphor. Gary's stoic lists and acrostics make the most of this deliberately empty formalism, evoking the dot-matrix printouts that typified both medical and avant-garde record-keeping in the early information age, in order to deliver sober non-poems sprinkled with arbitrary and ambivalent punchlines, like "vegan cheese," and "Poured coffee onto upside down cup, August 18." Painstakingly stitching mundane traumas and pointless phrases in a mechanical font, Gary (along with his studio assistant) presents the viewer with deceptively offhand documents of the endless and unrequited patience expected of disabled people both seeking and refusing to seek permission to live.
Along with selections from Gary's Bloopers series, and his Nominal Aphasia series, works shown here include:
Go Hang a Salami, I'm a Lasagna Hog (detail), 2020, stitching
Lighght (after Aram Saroyan), 2020, stitching on canvas, 11 in. x 14 in.
Oozy Rat, 2020, stitching on aida cloth, 10 in. x 10 in.
Rot in a Jar / Swap God, 2020, stitching on aida cloth, 10 in. x 10 in.
Bonk, 2020, sewn thread on canvas, 11 in. x 14 in.
PLOP, 2020, sewn thread on canvas, 11 in. x 14 in
YouTube Closed-Caption Malaprops of "Arte Povera" and "Piero Manzoni," 2021, pencil on junk mail, 4 in. x 8.5 in. (detail)
-- Bert Stabler
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