English Art, Arte Ingles: William Cannings

ARTL!ES Summer 2006 (pg. 103)

William Cannings: Pop Up
Pan American Gallery

Peter S. Briggs

Late on a Sunday evening in mid June, a rerun of a 1970s episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus flashed across my television screen. Toward the end of this witty cacophony, an image—a chain of bursting bombs, perhaps atomic—reverberated in black and white commemorating the gape of modern insanity. I immediately had a fleeting epiphany, conjuring indeterminate connections between British humor, art and explosions. Mentally jumping across the proverbial puddle, I landed in William Cannings’ exhibition Pop Up, a two-person show with Charlotte Smith at the Pan American Gallery in Dallas. Cannings originally from England, studied art in Virginia and New York and now lives in Texas where he teaches at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Cannings had eleven works in this show; all but one, Silver Clouds, were created in 2006. These sculptures materialize from but sheets of steel or aluminum welded, heated and, while pliable, expanded by forced air. On occasion—both by design and happenstance—the metal explodes from excessive pressure. These ragged breaches stand in sharp contrast to the sensual plumpness of the surrounding inflated metal works—a juxtaposition that may connect with the artist’s former occupation: doing bodywork on Formula One race cars.

Cannings obviously fetishizes over the surfaces of these sculptures. Silver Clouds, an homage to Andy Warhol, is a suspended constellation of hand-polished aluminum pillows whose reflected light penetrates the eyes like sun spots. Other works, all floor, pedestal or wall-hung pieces, trigger blistering retinal assaults with blazing retro-Pop colors; pink, iridescent green and orange, silky, rubbery black and more. One group of pastel-painted sculptures, Patched, Full and Split, echo the palette of another Englishman; Richard Hamilton. The shapes of Cannings’ works morph to suggest vernacular inflatables: a vinyl recliner for the swimming pool (Raft), the inner tube of a large truck tire (Tube) or throw pillows. Other shapes (e.g., Fold) are vaguely familiar growths that rebuff common parallels. Cannings frequently leaves attached to his sculptures remnants of the structure of pipes and air nipples used to inflate hot metal, as in Kink, providing not only insight into the mechanics of the work’s creation but also the accord between formal and functional structure and the inherent suppleness of the inflated forms.

“Inflated objects have become a symbol of our popular culture: cheap, disposable, fun and whimsical, sometimes frivolous and distasteful,” Cannings notes in his statement. But his work certainly suggests much more than overinflated colorful vinyl beach balls. The unstable edge between awe and the potential danger of exploding metal versus its containment within sensual, wonderfully organic forms mimics the Monty Python crew’s fascination with the bomb and its seductive but deadly mushroom cloud. There is a tinge of nervous anticipation about what the potential limits of the container might be and more than a little anxiety about the tension between each objects destructive capacity and its attendant ability to maintain itself as an artifact. Cannings’ inflatables seek a similar expectation: latent destruction or transcendent control.

The childlike fascination with the gesture of blowing air into something pliable and watching it expand into some preconditioned shape guides Cannings’ sculptural process. We can calculate with near accuracy the physical effects of heat pressure and other material dynamics to predict the range and character of each sculpture, but the rigidity of such calculations seems at odds with the seductive playfulness of the work. The visual and ideological tug of war between the serious, and the material, the scientific and the flamboyant colors and eccentric shapes lends these works an energetic tension.

Sex. It seems almost too obvious that it fins a welcome home in Cannings’ heated processes. Whether as a metaphor for prolonged orgasm or selective forms that suggest male and female genitalia, his sculptures embrace eroticism, and autoeroticism seems to fit unreservedly within his artistic passions, given the physicality of the work – a sensual adventure of creases, folds and subtle nuances between welded seams and skin-like flourishes of metallic flesh. Touching these intimate zones is like stroking a body, but the metal’s hardness amends our erotic expectations, unyielding to searching, pliant fingertips.

Dallas Observer June 1-7, 2006 (pg. 44)

Pop Goes the Easel
The works of Smith and Cannings explodes

Charissa N. Terranova

The dripped bumpy surfaces of Charlotte Smith’s paintings and the bulbous pneumatic contours of William Cannings’ sculpture convey explosions. You’ll find no destruction of apocalypse in the exhibition Pop Up at Pan American Art Gallery. Rather, theirs is an artful blast that, in the case of Smith, makes for patterns of candy cane-colored tiny stalagmites and, with Cannings, smooth, shiny and taut steel skin that subtly ruptures at the seam. Smith makes canvases wherein surface quality becomes fingery and thing-like and painting’s necessary flatness gives way to a skin disorder. Brightly colored carbuncles dapple the picture plane in disturbing fashion. Similarly working in a palette of the bright opaque hues signature of ‘60s-era Pop art, Cannings heats flat sheets of steel in kilns, making them soft and malleable so as to blow them into large and small pillowy inner tubes.

They rethink “pop” art in terms of a literal burst. Smith’s paintings are volcanic landscapes reminiscent at once of Dr. Seussville and the imaginary spaces of the painter-cum-raconteur Trenton Doyle Hancock. Cannings’ distended shapes belch open with tiny and gaping fissures. There is a literalism at work here that verges on banal decoration-an invocation of pop according to a blast of form and color instead of double entendres criticizing mass-media image. Yet it is precisely the coruscating color alloyed by form-intense color given body as nipply buboes in Smith’s paintings and swollen pool toys in Cannings’ sculpture-that keeps this work from being dumb in a boring way. The dumbness of these objects, there literalism, flares with suggestion and clever meaning.

Member of the cognoscenti have long held literalism in art to be a bad thing. The art critic and Greenbergian Michael Friend pejoratively called the work of Minimalist sculptors Donald Judd and Tony Smith “literal,” demoting their hermetic black boxes to the realm of theatrical set pieces of furniture. It’s not so much that Judd’s untitled galvanized iron boxes (1965) or Smith’s “Die” (1962) were functional like furniture, as they were not. In calling them “literal” Fried meant to underscore how they are objects in our world: He criticized the work of emergent Minimalists for being materialist rather than transcendent, concerned with phenomenal experience rather than a metaphysical world beyond. Translated into belief systems, if you’re an atheist, “literal“ is a good thing, and if you’re a hold-out for art as a spiritual (i.e. Christian) experience, “literal” is a bad thing. Less religious and more besotted, the English architecture critic Colin Rowe similarly deployed the adjective “literal” in a derisive mode, using it to rank Le Corbusier’s complexities about those of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus.

For once the old white guys weren’t all wrong. There are different types of literalism—some good, some bad. Good literalism is frank and forthright yet still engaged. Good literalism includes Leonardo’s drawings of flying machines, J. J. Grandville’s drawings from Another World, Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” Rauschenberg’s “Odalisque,” Warhol’s “Cow Wallpaper” and the cheesy big-box projects designed for Best )an appliance store in the ‘70s) by SITE architects. Bad literalism is mindless and anti-intellectual. Artist and architects working in this vein “just want to make art” and desire to “to get back to the basics.” Examples include Jack Vettriano’s “Singing Butler,” anything by Thomas Kinkade or Norman Rockwell, and any design by New Urbanist planners Duany Plater-Zyberk or anyone inspired by their work.

Smith, a good literalist and native Texan, carefully stacks drips of paint. The dripstacks have grown taller over time, and with each cycle of paintings emerges a more fantastically craggy surface. Works from 2005 such as “Aquatica” and “cherries Jubilee” betray an artist obsessively at work. In “Aquatica” tiny thickets of dark seafoam balls emerge from a bubbling surface of multicolored spots. Bright red blotches cover the picture plane of “Cherries Jubilee.” The bumps are the result of a radical meticulousness: a monomaniacal process of delicately amassing tiny narrow mounds of dripped paint. The bright cheery colors counter the odd bumpiness, creating a painterly scrofula of sorts. This year the artist had ratcheted up the weird quotient, piling ever-higher thin blobs of paint on the top stretcher bar. The drips no longer emerge from the façade alone but from the top and sides of the paintings. The paint on “Over and Out VII” and “Over and Our I” stands on end like a fresh buzz cut.

Unfortunately, this new work is almost crushed by the installation. Presumbaly for reasons of sales, there are far too many paintings on view. What becomes palpably apparent in this poorly installed half of the show is the overwhelming power of Smith’s work. There shouldn’t be so many paintings in one room as the number does a disservice to the work: Their collective presence overpowers the individual pieces.

By contrast, the portion of Pop Up devoted to Cannings’ work is balanced and smart. Like Smith, process is central to Cannings’ work. The bright green open mawed inner tube of “Remnants” began as a flat, unpainted sheet of steel. Cannings welded it into circular form, placed it in a kiln, injected it with compressed air to make it expand and then coated it in the shiny powder-based paint used for cars. At the center lies a sheaf of curly matte-black steel spindles. “Raft,” a gleaming neon-orange raft, leans against the wall of the gallery. The silver-painted aluminum pillows hanging from the ceiling of the gallery are too close to what the artist is referencing namely Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” the helium-filled metallic balloons installed at Leo Castelli in 1966.

At the same time, Cannings’ work is not solely about appearance. Their color and shape might be misleading here, because they have an iconic presence on par with much of Warhol’s work, as well as Jeff Koons’. Cannings is equally interested in materials—their manipulation and the verisimilitude it creates—that he transforms the bulk of heavy steel into lightness and air. Perhaps more significant than iconic presence is the fact that the pillows are made out of a lightweight grade of metal, aluminum, that has been heated, molded and hung pendulously overhead. In the adjacent gallery, where there are too many of Smith’s paintings, sits “Loop,” an orange-red inner tube with a burping seam on top. The piece marks a thankful counter-balance to the onslaught on the walls.

Smith and Cannings inject metaphor into literally explosive form. If Smith’s surfaces burst forth like so many pustules exuding unction in color then Cannings’ shiny tires eruct as though fat bodies swollen with hot sweet air.