ERICSON & ZIEGLER | PERROTIN

Galerie Perrotin, Paris is pleased to present “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones,” the first solo exhibition of Mel Ziegler in France, presenting a selection of new and recent works by the American artist. The show will also include works from his influential collaboration with Kate Ericson, beginning in the late 70s and continuing until Ericson’s premature death in 1995.
Synthesizing conceptual, Land art, and interventionist strategies, Ericson and Ziegler developed a distinctly American community-based art outside the orbit of New York. Working directly with local iconography, sites, and communities across America, the pair staged interventions with and for these communities, and produced works, largely sculptural, from these interventions. Throughout their collaboration, the couples’ work was exhibited by numerous galleries and museums, and was the subject of the traveling retrospective “America Starts Here” in 2005 (organized by Bill Arning and Ian Berry), as well as a comprehensive exhibition at Galerie Perrotin New York in 2014. In 1992, Emmanuel Perrotin dedicated a solo show to the artists in his first gallery, from which two pieces, “Vinegar of the 48 Weeds” and “Untitled (National Archive stones and Paris rain water)” (1992), are presently on view. 

Following the passing of Kate Ericson, Mel Ziegler has continued an artistic practice founded on the central concerns and strategies he and his partner established in their collaboration, but which has, over time, loosened formally and methodologically, allowing for a new degree of humor, serendipity, and a certain craftiness to enter his work. 
In the first room of the gallery, both the roots of his practice with Ericson as well as a more relaxed sensibility are evident with “Rock Hard Individualism” (2010). At first glance the work appears as a map of the United States composed of a variety of found stones. A second look reveals that each stone might be seen as a face. Ziegler, who has a thing for collecting these rock faces as he finds them, offers up a little bit of playful irony in his maturity: individually, each stone might not read as face to anyone except Ziegler, but organized together, we can no longer help but see each rock as having a countenance of its own.
On a nearby wall is an arrangement of some two-dozen brightly colored toy guns handmade by the children of the artist “Untitled” (2009-2013). Production was undertaken out of necessity—the artist was unwilling to purchase toy guns for his children on moral grounds—and so, fashioning the toys out of cardboard, duct tape, foil and paper with reference images from the internet, Ziegler’s children made their own. Like “Rock Hard Individualism”, this untitled work plays both with and against much of Ericson & Ziegler’s earlier iconic participatory work, wryly replacing the distinct local communities who engaged in projects with the community of his own nuclear family.

The family and its relationship to community, nation and politics—though again with an injection of levity—is a theme which carries through into “To Carry a Big Stick” (2015), a title which makes partial reference to President Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy of “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick.” Antique ammunition boxes, each lined with red velvet, have been filled with “fetch sticks.” “Fetch sticks,” as Ziegler calls them, are the sticks which he has collected and used over the last five years to play fetch with his dog. This American pit-bull named Sister, with whom Ziegler sometimes plays in front of the Capitol Building in Washington, is a sweet, affectionate animal, and no more inherently vicious than the sticks in the disarmed, luxuriously-lined ammo boxes on display in the present exhibition.

The exhibition also features two new iterations of “Stuffed” (antique gun cabinet and grandfather clock), a site-specific project installed throughout Vienna for Ziegler’s solo show at the Wiener Secession in 2003. “Stuffed” arose in part out of the observation that museum showcases, especially in a city like Vienna, form an integral part of the grammar of presentation for not just the Arts, but also for the display of salable luxury goods in the city’s famous shopping district. Taking about fifty museum vitrines, Ziegler relocated them around the city and stuffed them full of plain straw, drawing a viewer away from the object behind the glass, and redirecting him to attend the case itself and its role in creating an “aura of display.” A viewer is further encouraged, by this inversion of display and what is displayed, to consider the relationship between luxury goods and art objects, public presentation and private consumption, as well as the social, commercial, and institutional frames and behaviors that contribute to establishing these distinctions.

Mel Ziegler was born in 1956 in Pennsylvania, he resides in Nashville, Tennessee. His significant collaboration with Kate Ericson (from 1978 to 1995) was the subject of over a hundred exhibitions, group and solo shows as well as museum retrospectives. Several solo exhibitions were dedicated to his recent  practice since Ericson death, including at the Secession, Vienna (2003), at The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2001) and at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2000). In 2015, The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art will dedicate a extensive show to Mel Ziegler, as well as a selection of works from the duo’s earlier collaboration.

Galerie Perrotin, New York presents a selection of iconic works by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler whose collaboration, beginning in the late 70s, continued uninterrupted until Ericson’s premature death in 1995. Two decades after showing their work in his first Paris location in 1992, Emmanuel Perrotin is proud to revisit the full span of the couple’s career in the gallery’s inaugural year in New York. In addition to the major works on display here, such as “Give and Take” (1986), “Dark on That Whiteness” (1988), “Feed and Seed (Gelsinger Farm, Buckwheat)” (1989), “Peas, Carrots, Potatoes” (1994-1996), “From the Making of a House” (1995), “A long Line” (1995-96), Perrotin is pleased to offer a collection of never before exhibited sketches and drawings, essential to the artists’ practice.

Synthesizing conceptual, land-art, and interventionist strategies, Ericson and Ziegler developed a distinctly American community-based art outside the orbit of New York. Working directly with local iconography, sites, and communities across America, the pair produced works and staged interventions with and for these communities as much as the works themselves informed onlookers back in the institutionalized art world. As Bill Arning puts it in his introductory essay to America Starts Here, the companion catalogue to the traveling 2005 retrospective of their work:

“When their collaboration began, conceptual art practices were consigned to the past, belonging to the previous generation… New York’s art world marked the focus of international art discourse… The rest of the United States—with the possible exception of Los Angeles—remained virtually invisible as artistic producers, receivers, collaborators, and subjects. Americana-based iconography could only appear ironically, if at all. Political art limited itself to a confrontational mode most appropriate for crisis situations, and artists rarely worked within communities to achieve political or ethical goals” (Berry and Arning, 11).

Indeed, an ethical engagement with the various communities, occupations, materials, and locales, combined with an acute awareness of the potential pitfalls that a well-intentioned artist faces when trying to engender social or political discourse in a community not his own, is the common thread throughout the duo’s practice. This is particularly evident in “Camouflaged History” (1991), for which Ericson and Ziegler, presenting themselves as artists, approached the owners of a house that needed painting in Charleston, South Carolina. The house was located just outside a line demarcating the more affluent “historic city”, where building codes were more stringent, more costly to meet, and for which the local Board of Architectural Review had prescribed a list of approved house colors. Organizing meetings to establish the consent of the neighborhood, and offering a tangible service to the owners of the house in exchange, the artists, with the aid of a nearby military base, had the house painted and labeled in a camouflage pattern composed with the full board-approved palette. Perhaps surprisingly, the owners and their immediate neighbors were pleased with the end result. The house punctuated the neighborhood with flair, color, and wit, showing cheerful irreverence for such comically solemn things as Boards of Architectural Review with historical mandates. Of course, comically solemn things can also be of significant political, social, and economic consequence. It was perhaps less surprising then that more affluent members of the community, across the line in the “historical city,” objected to the camouflaged “eyesore.”

The kind of locally sensitive, pragmatic intervention of “Camouflaged History” is exemplary of Ericson and Ziegler’s practice. Mechanisms like consent, consensus, community meetings, classified ads in regional newspapers, the exchange of labor and proceeds with participants in the production of an artwork or intervention characterized the artists’ ethics. It is worth noting that by no means are these radical or revolutionary tactics; they do not seek to upend communities under the assumption that the artists have a superior social arrangement in mind. Rather, the ethics at work here are largely in keeping with the democratic ideals of self-governance and self-determination which, though often ignored, forgotten, or violated, underpin the American political enterprise. Whether this is the result of patriotic commitment or mostly a matter of pragmatism is a question better left to the artists. But perhaps it goes some way towards seeing what is American about not just the material and locales of Ericson and Ziegler’s work, but more integrally, what is inimitably American about their methods and the entirety of their innovative practice.

About the Artists

During their collaboration, Ericson and Ziegler were featured in over one hundred exhibitions, including the 1989 Whitney Biennial, and three shows at the Museum of Modern Art (twice in 1988, and once more in 1990). Their work may be found in several major American collections, notably the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. In 2005 the pair were subject to a traveling retrospective organized by Ian Berry and Bill Arning, hosted by The Frances Young Tang Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the Austin Museum of Art, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. Companion to the exhibition is the thorough and invaluable catalog, America Starts Here (MIT Press, 2005).

Kate Ericson, born 1955 in New York, died of brain cancer in 1995. Mel Ziegler was born in 1956 in Pennsylvania. He currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee, where he works as an artist, a farmer, and is professor and chair of the Arts Department at Vanderbilt University. Both Ericson and Ziegler received BFAs from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1978; the couple continued their studies under Michael Asher, Douglas Huebler, and John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts, from which they received MFAs in 1982.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 25 — A favorite fantasy of the art vanguard is the idea of intervention: the artist introduces something into the cultural mainstream that may or may not be recognized as art, but causes those who see it to reconsider and, ideally, to change their relationship to conventional values.

Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler were influential collaborators in social interventionist art, beginning officially as a team in 1985 and continuing until Ms. Ericson died of brain cancer in 1995. Their career is the subject of an illuminating time capsule of an exhibition now at the M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center here. "America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler" was organized by Bill Arning, a curator at the List, and Ian Berry, a curator at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, where the exhibition opened last fall.

Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler, who were students at the Kansas City Art Institute in the mid-1970's and attended the California Institute of Arts in the early 80's, did not usually make objects for display in museums and galleries. They preferred nonpermanent projects in settings away from art institutions. The ones involving private homeowners are especially amusing. Once they paid a homeowner to allow them to remove all the doors in a house and stack them in the living room. Another agreed to mow only half of his lawn and groom half of his large yard for a period of time, to the consternation of his neighbors.

Dada may be what started this sort of thing, but Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler were not absurdist pranksters. (At CalArts their mentors were Michael Asher, John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler, conceptualists known for their wit but not for extravagantly provocative gestures.) Their major projects involved extensive research into the history and current affairs of particular places, and the goal was to raise the social and political consciousnesses of the local residents.

In the exhibition at M.I.T., a house model painted in a colorful camouflage pattern represents a project executed in 1991 as part of an arts festival in Charleston, S.C. Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler asked an elderly man and his daughter who lived just outside an officially designated historic district to let them paint their house in camouflage, using colors approved by the city's historic preservation review board. The commercially produced paints had names like Moorish Maroon Red and Confederate Uniform Gray, and the project, pointedly titled "Camouflaged History," became a lesson about history and economic, social and racial divisions.

While working on "Camouflaged History," Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler kept local residents informed about what they were doing and why in a series of community meetings. In an interview in this show's catalog, Mr. Ziegler recalls that after the festival, the immediate neighbors favored keeping the new color scheme. But residents in the nearby historic district objected, calling it an eyesore. Perhaps they also disliked its implicit exposure of differences in wealth and privilege between neighboring communities.
Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler did not refuse to work in museums. In 1990, while engaged in a project for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they discovered that its curators favored different shades of white for the exhibition walls. So they created an arrangement of bottles containing those shades, each etched with the name used by the museum's painting crew: "Rubin White," "Riva White," "McShine White." The current show extends that idea by painting different walls in the gallery with the curators' favorite whites, and identifying them with discreet signs. One thought this prompts is about how power can be both all-pervasive and subtle to the point of invisibility.

Among the more tangible works on view is an antique wooden Dutch cupboard that displays a full set of fine, gold-trimmed white china, produced in 1993 for an international art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Look closely and you discover that the dishes have printed on them in fine script the names of more than 800 types of products made by Akzo Chemicals, a company based in Arnhem (now Akzo Nobel). They include sealants, acne control medication, poultry antigens and impregnating products. This creates a nice tension between refined traditionalism and a vaguely frightening industrialism.

The problem with presenting art of this sort in a gallery is that almost nothing is clear without a good deal of explanation. But if you read all the labels — or better yet, the excellent catalog — you get a clear picture of an enterprise marked by intelligence, earnestness, diligence and optimistic pragmatism. Whether Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler managed to change much in the real world, they remain inspirational role models for the wonkier conceptualists and social workers in today's art world.