Kass Meets Challenge of New Materials
The 1980s produced a kind of artist who worked in whatever medium best satisfied needs of the moment. The 1990s extended such non-specialization into an unconcern about how the results could even be art.

Paul Kass’ solo show at the Beret International Gallery, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave., beautifully illustrates these characteristics.

In his late 20s, Kass is a sculptor who paints and a painter who sculpts, doing both with unorthodox materials and resisting characterization.

Nearly all of the 10 pieces on view grew out of professions other than artmaking plus a personal obsessiveness regarding the repetition of manual techniques that were difficult but not necessarily artistic.

You get the feeling the objects exist simply because their materials-wood, aluminum, drywall, various laminates-challenged the artist to assemble them, and Kass did so until he fulfilled some inner standard of proficiency.

The form of most of the works based on a single small unit the artist reproduces and joins, like liks forming a chain. Dimensions of larger pieces are, at times, determined in relation to walls of the gallery. But otherwise viewers sense a king of indifference to presentation, as if Kass were more interested in constructing each individual module than in assembling and arranging them.

Some of the pieces-“Drywall Wall” and “Cube Train,” in particular-do not resolve as much as stop; one could be lower or higher, the other shorter or longer. But because Kass focuses on process, he leaves such details open-ended.

Several of the modules are geometric. Cubes, circles, rectangles and cylinders abound. The five pieces with laminate embedded in beamlike boxes that lean against the wall also seem to have colors arranges according to a system.

This suggests some sort of a play on minimal art. If so, it’s winkingly wry, amounting almost to a parody in “Crimped Corner Bead” which evokes in a grid of aluminum works Eva Hesse’s hanging forms of rubber. (Even more pointed is the way “Cube Train” see Sol Lewitt floor sculpture through the eyes of a toymaker.)

Two of Kass’ three wall pieces imitate the look of paintings. “Grey Square” uses different grades of plaster compound to evoke the famous “Homage to the Square” series by Josef Albers. “Blue Burst” embeds small bundles of Styrophome in a field of packaging popcorn, recalling “thick painting” of the 1970s/

The wall piece titles “Work Party” is of a different order, using five colors of ribbons from construction sites to create what initially appears to be a cross between a loom and a botched relief from, say, early Soviet art. It’s not as successful as the other works, but it bites off more than they do-and fails more honorably.

Our pleasure in even his flawed pieces comes in part from Kass’ willingness to wring something positive from the brute materials with which he earns a living. A lot of artist rehab buildings, but few have shown the determination (or humor) to bring the effort into line with what they’d rather do in such a way that proves enriching.

Paul Kass at Beret

Paul Kass makes sculpture from construction materials: plaster, melamine, corner bead, concrete, stock lumber, fixtures, and fasteners. Visceral qualities of the components are clear: the chalk-like luminosity of sanded plaster, the porous nap of milled pine, the grainy surface of cast concrete. Creating archetypes of form, Kass employs utilitarian media to introduce questions of finish and identity. While blurring distinctions between domestic carpentry and sculpture, his results are often closer to surrealism than deconstructive minimalism.

This exhibition presented ten new works: three framed material “pictures,” one object resembling a barbell, five cabinet-like sculptures on slender wood legs, and a puzzle-like floor piece. These likenesses confound modernist form and sculptural expectations. The work is economical-the results are as direct as mathematical conclusions-but the objects are not severe, and many invite handling. Acknowledging that the language of craft has a priority in Minimal art practice, Kass takes measure to avoid distancing audiences.

The concrete and wood puzzle forms of Jigsaw are loosely assembled on the gallery floor. Individual elements seem to comment on the metal floor pieces of Carl Andre. Andre suggested of his work, “each piece supports a column of air that extends to the top of the atmosphere. They’re zones.” In Kass’s Jigsaw, post timbers attached to the bottom of each piece lift the assembly to a uniform seven-and-a-half inches. Like Andre’s, Kass more informal grid has a specific dimensional presence, but in contrast ot conventional puzzle pieces or the Minimalist’s cubed sections, gentler shapes are used, recalling children’s blocks. These lyrical shapes are further investigated in five works of varying heights, distributed throughout the room. What appears as end tables and night stands encased in plaster, supported by hardwood legs (generally 14 inches high), are units that demonstrate height extensions of the selected forms culled from Jigsaw, like sections of the “columns of air that extend to the top of the atmosphere”.

Clean, but not perfect concrete shapes are framed by melamine panel in Kass’s wall pieces. The material’s rougher qualities are not concealed. In Capsule a lozenge form is secured in its frame with clear plastic fasteners. The mottled surface of Square with Radius Corners offers a subtle degree of surface incident, which cannot be taken as any kind of representation. These are solid objects comfortably presented in place of more strident illusions. Kass calls attention to details of our material environment that are generally sublimated and rarely handled as playfully.

Paul Kass New Sculpture
Paul Kass fell into carpentry while in art school and makes a living by it now. He doesn’t want his sculptures, among them ten new ones at Beret International, to be seen solely as expressions of his profession, yet he acknowledges that there are important connections. His works are made mostly of common construction materials, he uses carpentry as a way of learning about them, and he’s inspired by repetitive labor. But while his sculptures may look vaguely functional, they’re not, and there’s often a wry humor in their nonfunctionality. What one might not expect is that they can be oddly moving.

White Pine consists of six wooden four-by-fours that stretch, towerlike, form the floor to the ceiling; adjustable screws connect the main part with the white base, permitting variable floor-to-ceiling distances. Though they resemble support columns, they’re obviously too thin to provide permanent support. To add to the joke, each face of each four-by-four has 27 white discs protruding from the otherwise raw wood; from a distance they’re reminiscent of track lighting or dressing room lights.

An edgy, obsessive repetition distinguishes White Pine with its six pillars and its sets of 27 discs, two sets on each pillar unaccountably larger than the other two. But most interesting is the fact that Kass uses his hands to try to efface the natural variation of the human touch-the discs are evenly spaced, and the white is a flat laminate-while retaining the variations that are the results of the materials and the room: the natural grain of the wood and the different lengths to which the connecting screws are adjusted. The idea expressed by Josef Albers and others that an artist should be profoundly aware of his materials has been replaced by a concept more self-effacing: while Kass’s overall shapes are articulate and expressive, he often leaves his raw materials alone, and the details come from their random qualities.

Since the artist has added relatively little to White Pine, where does the artfulness reside? The towers seem to gain from their placement together, but since they’re for sale individually, Kass can’t control future installations. Functions are hinted at but unfulfilled: this is fine art, meant to be looked at rather than used. In fact the way the work denies the functionality suggested by its repeating forms is what gives it much of its impact, making it inscrutable. But there’s also an odd beauty in the blank faces or empty eyes of the white discs. On view here are not Kass’s emotion but the way light reflects off white laminate or rough wood, recalling Rauchenberg’s early “white painting” or newspapers covered in black.

Kass was born in Chicago, in 1967, and lives here now, but he grew up mostly in Saint Louis, where his parents moved into a “beautiful old home with incredible workmanship in a historic neighborhood”. He recalls and early obsession with masking tape: “I wrapped up stuffed animals in it, I think. I just liked to play with it in general, taping stuff together.” A wrestler in high school and college, Kass believes he learned strategy and balance from the sport and liked “the element of sacrifice” in fasting before a match. Eventually he enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where a ceramics instructor encouraged him to “just keep making” the little pyramids he found himself creating. “This was the transition to the thought that I could make a bunch of stuff piled on the floor and that was valid in itself-it didn’t have to have some political message, like this is about crack houses.” For his final school project Kass spent six months making clay balls the size of large marbles and piling them on top of each other. “I got very fast at it, I have an appetite for things that involve repetition, I don’t know why.”

While repletion is obviously important to Kass’s work, a certain kind of self-denial sems to lie at its core. Kass abjures the artist’s traditional controlling role, yet the overall forms of his work have a strange beauty, melding order and randomness, suggestions of meaning with denial f meaning. These are works delicately poised on several dividing lines-between art and craft, grandeur and simplicity.

Spline reminds me of great ceremonial stone circles like Stonehenge and of circular ceremonial buildings, but its elements actually undercut monumentality. Flat panels are hung from the ceiling to form three-quarters of a circle that the viewer can enter; each panel is composed of eight wooden squares, arrayed about an empty center. Each of the wood squares has been dipped in white paint, often slightly more of less than halfway up, and Kass has positioned them so that the white is alternately on the top or the bottom. Here he turns the language of minimalism and of participatory sculptures like those of Robert Morris to different ends. The work’s holes and its combination of obsessive repetition with playfully curved white lines winks at minimalist “perfection” and monumentality-Spline resembles the little structures children build out of boxes and blankets as much as it does ceremonial monuments.

Four “paintings” in the show-Circle, Checkers, Pinstripe and 4 inch Stripes look like minimalist canvases that create geometric patterns out of alternating fields of white and a pale, luminous yellow. But the surface is actually drywall, and the white and the yellow are different kinds of joint compound, a material used to join sections of drywall. Like the sculptures, these works look bland at first. The surprise comes when one realizes they’re not paintings at all but sculptures. This perception is underlined by the odd yellow, far more ethereal than the flat white, a difference that enhances the relief effect.

The diptych panels of 4 Inch Stripes, mounted one above the others, also reverses the color field. At first this seemed a little minimal game, but after looking at all the work, this simple switch form white to yellow became peculiarly affecting. Like Kass’s sculptures, these panels mimic repetitive, machine-made forms in many ways-but the color switch is a modest sign of the artist’s presence that, like the curved lines in Sline seems to say that he’s quite happy with the territory he’s taken for him-self and doesn’t need any more.

Utilitarian Forms

The new four-person show a the the Evanston Art Center brings together participants unity not by a social or theoretical concept but by the artists” common use of utilitarian forms and materials

That’s refreshing because it emphasizes what anyone can readily see in the works rather than what a curator has invented and imposed upon them. But some may feel the show could have done with a tighter overriding idea that focused on installation pieces and eliminated the concluding prints that have little to do with the rest of the exhibition and tip its balance away form the theme toward just one of the artists.

Even so, “In the Material World,” as the show is called presents new pieces by three of the exhibitors, and some are site-specific, having a singular relationship to the architecture of the Center that prevents them from being seen as effectively in the same dimensions or configuration anywhere else.

This is the most true of the simplest work on view, a huge white sphere by Paul Kass. Several of the other pieces are made of individual components, thereby being able to expand or contract to interact effectively with their spaces. But Kass’ sphere did not have the benefit of that variable. When you see the piece from the central axis of the Center, the way it appears to be bursting from its room indicates success, giving a degree of expressiveness not expected from the coolness of its surface or form.

By contrast, the transparency of Paul Sacaridiz’s concentric rings of red thread supporting plumb bobs cast in wax works beautifully with the view of water and sky from one of the Center’s lakefront windows. In shape, the piece suggests an elaborate chandelier, though it in fact breaks up the light.

John Arndt’s geometric banners are more deceptive, as they might be mistaken for shaped paintings though they are tarpaulins the artist creates as shelters for wilderness treks. The act of stretching them flat and mounting them on the wall not only removes sins of their intended function but also transforms them in aesthetic objects without alteration.

Joan Livingstone’s installation of gravity-shaped abstract form of epoxy resin and rubber suffers somewhat from not communicating that each unit is essential to the whole, but separately the parts are powerful and they fulfill the show’s theme more persuasively than the prints that seem to have crept in ad addenda.

“In the Material World” continues at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Rd., through Feb. 19. Call 847-475-5300.