By Clay Matlin

Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s art has come to a distinct and troubling crossroads. With Surface Tension, her fourth solo show at James Cohan Gallery, Taylor has moved away from both her kitsch and camp leanings. Taylor presents six large-scale images of nature in the urban world. Except now she has added oil paint to her images. They are perhaps more beautiful than before, but it’s not clear how much that matters. So skilled is Taylor in marquetry (the use of colored inlaid wood to make decorative objects) that it is no longer certain if she is making art or craft. Even if one were to accept the gallery’s claims of her affinity with Thoreau and Emerson, this would do nothing to disabuse one of the notion that these are merely beautiful objects. I realize I have placed art in a binary opposition to craft. However, this is a needed distinction as Taylor’s newest work allows us to address the fact that we have descended into a sort of artisanal hell wherein we see all skilled producers as “artists.”

The problem with our fetishization of the artisanal and the craft-made is that not all craft is art and not all artists are craftsmen. You can be good at your craft (i.e., a gifted carpenter) and not make art just as you can have no skill in a certain craft and still make art (Barnett Newman and the fabrication of Broken Obelisk). John Dewey drew the important distinction between craftsmanship and art. “Skill” proves nothing, other than one has the facility to do something well; and to have this facility does not make one a creative thinker or an artist. Art possesses emotion; this is not its most significant feature, but it is, as Dewey observed, “like a magnet drawing to itself appropriate material: appropriate because it has an experienced emotional affinity for the state of mind already moving. Selection and organization of material are at once a function and a test of the quality of the emotion experienced.” When emotion is absent there may be craftsmanship, but there is not art. For craftsmanship to approach the artistic it must be “loving.” Not in love with the material, not lost in it, but, as Dewey wrote, art demands that deep care for the subject matter upon which skill is exercised is present.

Taylor is making objects, that much is certain. Perhaps even objets d’art. But the idea that she is making art, something which conveys the immensity of life; or that there is somehow some value to it beyond her considerable skill and capacity to make things beautiful; or that this work is possessed of rich and full emotion and conceived in an act of loving—these are other issues entirely.

This is not to argue that objects cannot be art. Richard Tuttle is clearly an artist who makes objects that also happen to be art. The beautiful object, however, does not equal art. Were we able to simply marvel at the beauty of Taylor’s work, it would probably be enough. Taylor, though, asks more of us. She wants us to be invested in her creations, to come to them and not only take in their beauty, but to open ourselves to them as vehicles of experience. Yet, what is that experience? There has always been a tension in Taylor’s work—that rather than being purely art her lush surfaces might in fact be kitsch or even camp.

Taylor’s first show at Cohan in 2006, Idyll, with its images of the less fortunate denizens of her native Southwest (Taylor hails from Las Vegas) was, even if only in appearance (the use of marquetry to portray her often shirtless subjects in what can only be characterized as culturally barren, grim Southwest subdivisions) comes perilously close to kitsch. Somehow Taylor managed to avoid the cloying and aggressive trap of easy emotional access that is kitsch’s hallmark. She did this by—and here I use Clement Greenberg’s distinction between kitsch and art—illustrating cause rather than effect.  Which is to say that Taylor did not provide us with a guidepost to experience; there was no predigested narrative. Kitsch, as Greenberg rightly understood, is a means by which the arbiters of culture ingratiate themselves with the masses. It seeks, in the words of Milan Kundera, to cast “a rosy veil thrown over reality.”  Though not exactly avant-garde, Taylor’s early work did none of these things. There was no sugar coating. Instead, it maintained an important critical removal. While it was unfortunate that her larger artistic and social aims were perhaps subsumed by the kitschiness of the work’s presentation, I remain unsure whether or not this effect was unintended.

As Taylor’s ability with marquetry matured her work changed again. The kitsch longings of the earlier pieces was left behind. 2010’s Foreclosed, in which Taylor sought to chart and understand the collapse of the housing market and its effect on Las Vegas, saw the shift not from kitsch to craft, but kitsch to camp. As Karen Rosenberg astutely noted in her review of Foreclosed, Taylor made “powerful connections between wood, shelter and, in a more personal sense, home.” It is this idea of the personal sense of home that leads me to a consideration of Taylor’s work as camp. Now, camp, like kitsch, is frequently thought of as either flamboyant or ironic. These two modes of engagement are often confused with each other, but they are not related. The more realistic understanding of camp is Susan Sontag’s argument that camp is not ironic or aggressive like kitsch, but is in fact a way of engaging with the world in the face of tragedy. Camp, Sontag tells us, is made with respect for the object; it is a relishing of human experience, a theatricality to deal with the difficulties of life. It nourishes itself on “the love that has gone into certain objects and personal style.” Kitsch, in contrast, is rich with irony and empty of love. The housing collapse was, if nothing else, a tragic occurrence for millions of people. The camp element in Taylor unequivocally loves her subjects and laments their loss. That she chose the theatricality of marquetry, a precious and meticulous technique, to depict devastated Las Vegas subdivisions ravaged by capitalist lust is, if not camp, then as close to the line as an artist can get without giving in completely.

Now, in 2013, the gallery tells us that the body of work in Surface Tension is influenced by Emerson and Thoreau, but it was both Emerson and Thoreau who, though they may have sought a sort of supra-sensuous experience in this life, very much accepted the world that nature and man were making. Thoreau could both lament and celebrate the piercing sounds of the train whistle. He loved the life made in towns, the joys of fellowship, as much as he celebrated the solitude of Walden. The pine needles that lay scattered on the floor of the forest were as much his friend as the bustle of twenty-first-century city streets would have been to him a chance “to live what was” life. For Emerson, the lapsed Protestant mystic became a great “transparent eyeball” to more fully be in the world, to see with greater, fuller sight. It was Emerson who wanted so desperately to connect to the world that in 1844 he wrote in Experience, the strange and moving eulogy for his son Waldo, that “every touch should thrill.” There is nothing worth transcending, there is only the desire to live fully in this world.

Taylor added oil paint to her work because she believes it provides her with a “new type of surface created by the contrast of the textural qualities of the wood and the depth afforded by the paint. I found this tension was just what I needed to convey the otherworldly feeling I encountered in real life when I observed how nature adapts and mutates to accommodate encounters with the ever-encroaching urban environment.” As such, nature is depicted in Surface Tension as trees that have managed to survive, perhaps even thrive in a harsh world. We see trees that have grown over metal plates and stand tall against polluted skies. The otherworldly was an escape that the transcendentalists were not very much concerned with. The task was to be in the world; nature, in spite of its separateness from us, is the one thing that makes life intelligible, uniting both reason (our search for truth) and faith (our belief in the truth for which we search). Whether or not there is an “otherworldly feeling” is something only Taylor can speak to, though she is not particularly convincing.

Of course, these quibbles with Taylor and the gallery’s portrayal of her work over her use of Transcendentalist thought would probably mean more if there wasn’t a larger, more pertinent problem: is Taylor even making art at this point? I would like to believe that Taylor’s work is approaching Emerson’s and Thoreau’s noble pursuits, but it is no longer clear that anything is really there beyond her beautiful surfaces. The most successful piece in the show, Silver Fox, while nothing more than a large image of wood grain, offers a return to Taylor’s more emotionally resonant, earlier work. I am not willing to go so far as Roberta Smith, in her excellent if biting review, and question whether Surface Tension is more about demand for beautiful objects than “artistic development,” but there is a reliance on the beautiful here that is troubling. Taylor’s previous work had a bravery that seems lost to her now. This is not to deny beauty’s urgency; it allows us both to lose ourselves in, and bring ourselves more fully to, the world. But beauty is not immune to what Dewey called the “colorless and cold recognition of what has been done, used as a stimulus to the next step in a process that is essentially mechanical.” I worry that Taylor’s gifts are taking her away from her Emersonian dreams and towards the grimness of the mechanical. Her new work is rich with craft but the necessary loving (in both Sontag’s and Dewey’s conception of “loving”) seems absent. The beauty is cold. We forget that how we receive beautiful objects is only one part of aesthetic experience. It is not the final or first part. Taylor would do well to remember that if we cling only to the beautiful we stunt the fullness of experience. The aesthetic is bigger than just the beautiful or expertly crafted objects. It unifies us, but it must be part of an experience that is rich and complete. Beauty alone is only so interesting.