August 20, 2012
STUDIO VIST: THERESA ANDERSON
“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
I have always loved this passage that launches the preface to Foucault’s seminal post-modern work, The Order of Things. It describes so elegantly the enormous project of our post-modern era, which is to play out the exhaustive battle that must inevitably be waged between the rigid finality of rational classification and the subversive ambiguity of its various alternatives. Few fields have expressed the convulsions of this conflict more strikingly than the arts. Its tremors have permeated the artistic production of innumerous artists since even before Foucault first penned these words, and they continue to be the underlying momentum that feeds much of the most interesting art practices today.
Theresa Anderson is an emerging Denver artist who is finding a place for her work within the theoretical framework of this conflict. Her style, which she has cunningly self-labeled “punk-feminism,” is characterized by busy installations of multi-media amalgamations. Running the gamut from flattened and fragmented figurative paintings that strongly evoke the proto-Pop Art canvases of Larry Rivers to Rauschenberg-esque combinations of found objects; her work strives (at times quite self-consciously) to defy definition. The artwork in her most current installation (a collaboration with Rebecca Vaughan) deals deliberately with the ranking of everyday objects. The exhibition, titled “SWANK [fool]” opened Friday at Ice Cube Gallery. We met with Anderson in her studio one sweltering afternoon some weeks ago to discuss the work in progress. The following is an abbreviated version of that interview:
