A recent work by the artist, Jim Tyack, consisted of small, painted boxes, all marked with the text: fear of eggs, executed with a calligraphic flourish. With just a hint of irony he speculates about his work:

The magnets contained in eggs exert shadowy metaphorical forces and influences. The artist whose desire is to break from the strictures of traditional pictorial language must harness this power. Problems of form and achievement of harmony are secondary. This is a machine with a taste for speculation. This is a backpack, a conduit.

In Indecisions: The Drawings 1996-1997, he continues to proceed through self invented systems intuition and grace. These drawings, on 9½" X 7" paper, proffer a potent, yet enigmatic code. The unseen viewer observes images emerging from a field. Starkly defined or casually, almost off-handedly, blurred, these evasive lines represent the mental process and expand one's elasticity of seeing. They form a family of signs, a language, though not completely cohesive, that speaks to us from somewhere in our depths.

In the accompanying text the artist continues to express the possibilities of his drawings, to examine the conduit of his art:

1. There is no left hand. What appears to be a left hand is merely an extension of the right breast. The left hand was lost during the wars in the Caucasus in 1921.

2. Her slip is showing because her skirt is about a quarter of an inch too short and a good, functional elastic had not yet been invented.

3. They appear to be smiling because they are saying "cheese," the food of choice in that part of the world.

This narrative gains perspective from the allusive quality of the drawings themselves, which exert their power in manifesting consciousness through the marks of energy that have gone into the act of making them.

In the Cup Paintings, as well, we are not merely hearing shouts in the night, but expressions of grief and joy for having succumbed to the emerging spirit within. These are cryptic celebrations of innocence lost, gratitude expressed for having overcome the precious, self conscious, literary urge. They are the results of an unexpected desire to mumble or shout something spontaneous, perhaps the simple gasp and flash of contextless banality. These are noises made in the dark where every sound is subliminal. They are inexticably intertwined with the artist's principles of experience, selection, and organization.

Jim Tyack makes machines. They are flat and constructed on paper or canvas, but they are machines nonetheless. One cannot avoid the satirical implications of his work, but each piece is built to contain its own dramatic crises, with live, moveable parts, or so it seems. Their function is played out before us in ethereal light; their kinetic wobble and blurry definitions invite us inward, and guided by the artist's stark intuition and wit, we are transformed by emotional and lyrical strength, by an authority to compel us to wonder.

He might tell you these drawings are camels outside a perimeter of sand, that each word, letter, or number, every nuance of cup, is some sweet jewel of a date dying on a dessicated palm tree in a suburban oasis, that the colors snapping and popping are merely hobnobbing with form. Or he might say that they are multivalent elements that remain irreducibly themselves -- metaphors whose thingness hangs tough even after clouds of imagination dissipate.  Or that they are meant to sharpen the conflict between reading and looking, between teller and tale, intimations of place that sometimes squeak like tight shoes, and in the zone between their concussions they perform skits of shadow and act, make a cottage industry of the smudged line, the blur and drip.  He might even suggest that their verbal loops, inane and sacramental, set out to investigate the nature of accident, the whereabouts of empty space. Maybe we should believe him.

If the numbers begin talking to eachother, I'm not responsible, he says.

The paintings are about story, the organization and disorganization of energy.  They float like ships with eyes under water while birds circle above in a maze.  They are filled with incidents that speak of the exotic as well as the mundane, the undisciplined self amid reflections of chaos.

Copyright © 1996
Postmodern Perspective