Tim Thyzel:
Slots and Dots

at
Cynthia Broan Gallery

Hooked, 2004
peg board, metal hooks

Iconoclasm careens into homage in Tim Thyzel’s installation of works that combine minimalist forms and the ubiquitous backdrops of consumerism. The result is a collection of works that are seriously funny. The comedy of Tim Thyzel’s Slots and Dots is a necessary precaution—it breaks the depressive emptiness of consumer culture and the powerlessness of the artworks referenced to offer a meaningful alternative.

The slatwalls and pegboards common to all of these pieces are the iconic materials of the here-today-gone-tomorrow merchandise, store and factory. These materials connote a modularity not just through their societal function but also through even striations and uniform surfaces. Mr. Thyzel found inspiration in an empty retail space in Chinatown where bared slatwall was the corpse of one retail business awaiting resurrection as another—cell phones one week, Halloween costumes the next—all without gutting the interior.The materials of Slots and Dots are parergonal; they are the always seen but seldom acknowledged frames of most retail experiences. Slatwall and Pegboard bespeak the nature of the new export economy; of inexpensive retail goods distributed worldwide. They define the contextual rhetoric of Wal-Marts, Targets and other big-box stores; the areas of pharmacies, mall chains and seemingly temporary boutiques; the retail spaces of deep-discount “dollar” stores that further spin the surfeit. Their grids and repeated horizontals are the background noise of low-end retail venues, of countless Gap, Radio Shack, Payless Shoe Source, $1.00 Store, Duane Reade, and so many other spaces. The materials themselves (objects consumed by the retail trade) are as low-end, foreign produced and artificial as the goods oft hanging from them—the slots and holes are molded from compressed sawdust, their medium density fibers (MDF) held together through the chemical miracle of urea-formaldehyde resin coated with melamine. In retail space they connote the warehouse, no-frills, and cutting out the middle-man. With accessory hooks, shelves, and racks, slatwalls and pegboards allow endless configurations of endlessly changing merchandise. The lattices formed by machine- drilled holes and slats are profane versions of the modernist grid that Rosiland Krauss once called to our attention. Hooked (2004) includes over 700 metal protrusions that punningly suggest retailing’s seductive approach. Through its form, Hooked is a post-industrial Duchampian Bottlerack (1914)—a readymade recontextualized in the gallery space. In negating the hooks’ use function through dense arrangement and willful emptiness, Thyzel also makes an object that is menacing and destructive instead of a source of retail plenty and pleasure. The naked mannequin torsos and legs in other Slots and Dots works similarly recall voided retail space and betray their function. The feet of the tripod of female legs in one work are uncannily arrested in demi-point—their arches betray missing high-heels.The Bank of China Tower (2003) is the first in this series and ties together so many innate themes. In this work one of the most recognizable Hong Kong structures hailing the continuity of economic growth in the newly reformed Chinese economy is materially transformed into slatwall. Here the material connotes the neoSinoindustrial—the retail presentation of consumer goods made less expensive and higher-margined through cheap labor and special trade zones.The density of the Slots and Dots installation evokes the concentration of goods in discount retail spaces. This crowding in a street-level storefront gallery is an inversion of so many high-end retail spaces (lately taking over gallery neighborhoods) that emulate the emptiness of white-box galleries in order to achieve the fetish of exclusivity.Thyzel’s lamps (2004) are equally paradoxical—though their cheap, pegboard materials mock the fetish of modernist design, they remain compelling objects. These well-crafted, elegant sculptures radiate a warm atmospheric light and seem to betray Thyzel’s affection for minimalism even as they seem to be the reductio ad absurdum of high design as retail strategy. They will beautifully shed light on your Michael Graves Target teakettle. Modularity and quotidian materials are also the language of ABC art and Gruppe Zero. Thyzel invokes Sol Lewitt and Günther Uecker’s grids, Tony Smith’s variations on the prism, and Heinz Mack’s architectonic towers, among other primary structures. In rejecting many tenets of traditional art making, including the skilled hand of the artist, individual expression, traditional or precious sculptural materials, manageable scale, and the singularity of form, these artists seemed to rebuff exactly what made art sellable or collectable in the early sixties. (Of course, per Theodor Adorno, these movements were themselves soon subsumed by the culture industry.)Thyzel’s is an applied minimalism. His primary forms reject universality and formalism’s last reductivist gasp, favoring a pathos in which the materials evoke social critique for our time. These Slots and Dots are dialectical sculptures that contain the language of ostensibly anti-market works within the materials of our super-consumer economy. Despite all this gravity, the works remain humorous as the modernist forms find a new humility—Frank Stella at the dollar store, a Tony Smith point-of-sale yarn display, I.M. Pei-Mart—now this is funny.

William V. Ganis

Tim Thyzel: Slots and Dots is at the Cynthia Broan Gallery, Chelsea,
May 5 - June 4, 2005.