With each act of creative expression, the artist locates him or herself in
relationship to the surrounding world. Artistic vision is fundamentally no different
than any other sort of perception. Every work of art unavoidably says something
about where it is looking, what it is looking at, and where it is looking from.
Regrettably, it is considered some vile, critical "no-no" to reduce
art to such glib terms. However, if for the moment we can allow ourselves this
consideration of art as it is usually, without being so concerned about the
multitude of exceptions, it is possible that we may see in this, the simple
beauty of what's so complicated in Neustein's art. For over twenty years, Neustein's
art has been an odd index of conceptual gestures focused on a number of different
issues. Yet, every change in what and where Neustein looks is traced some more
in the larger pattern of how he sees things and why.
Neustein is too sly and enigmatic a performer to give up
art's sense of mystery for the sake of supplying answers. Adamantly adverse
to accepting one correct reading for any of his work, Neustein's manner of perception
fixes its sights on emotionally and intellectually loaded points of converging
perspective, without ever stating his own point of view. The emphasis is not
on what to see but on ways of seeing. In this way, Neustein's artistic landscape
is an existentialist topography of process and multiplicity. He has charted
this shifting terrain in environmental art, performance, photography, drawing,
painting, and sculpture. His art is not about, nor does it reside in, one particular
place. It exists, rather, in the spaces between places, as a kinetic geography
of transience. Each dramatically distinct phase of Neustein's oeuvre is tempting
in its simplicity to be read exclusively within its own terms. The field of
experience, however, extends across a broad strata, at times operating only
on one level, and other times simultaneously situated on a number of planes.
Neustein manufactures waves of cultural interference to outline the treacherous
avenues of contradiction and their dislocations and distortions in the surface
of meaning. Approximating these fault lines within a vast gridwork of physical
and metaphysical orientations, Neustein sows the fertile terrain of reciprocity
among the divided regions of geographic, linguistic, political, emotional,
geological and artistic significance.
p.2
Joshua Neustein's most recent body of work has constructed its arena of relative
values upon the subjective social science fic_tions of the geo-political map.
Of all his work to date, this is perhaps` the-most ideal surface he has found
to express the volatile under-currents of subjectivity that lurk beneath the
placid flow of abjective reality. Neustein's map as the new landscape is a tableau
artistically deliberate in its scale and graphics. His field of vision is markedly
international, more inclusive in scope than his previous site specific earth
works or aesthetically formal works on paper. In fact, his painting assemblages
of the past year encompass the entire nexus of issues central to his earlier
work. The map and attached object compose a new genre of landscape painting,
registering emotional, political and semiotic turbulence with a global eye.
It is-a medium of generalized communication, a text so totally open
to interpretation that its points of reference provide complications rather
than explanations. The functional ambivalence is no clearer when pondered from
a distance or scrutinized under close inspection. Is the map, for example, to
be understood as a picture of national powers, cultural characters, geographic
situation or abstract surface texture? What kind of information we see contained
in these media-savy graphics determines in turn what type of landscape is in
question. It is with such unsteady footing that the viewer wanders, never sure
if the trek is across ideological, political, social or artistic ground.,
The questions of content and intent are tightly intertwined in Neustein's art.
The uncertainty as to what something means becomes symbolically central as a
debate over what that something is. Is the map, we begin to wonder, information
or imagination? It is on one hand, a found object, but on the other, it is a
painting. The exact manner in which we-respond to this art's myriad
of possible statements is not predetermined by the hidden agenda of its creator,
but rather it is our personal predisposition which determines how we see the
artist's intent. These art-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder parameters probe our definition
of art's physical presence as much as they investigate the shapes of aphorism.
Both efforts are involved
p.3
in an undermining of territorial absolutes. The former strategy was one of
major consequence in Neustein's critically lauded epistemological paper pieces
of the seventies. Neustein's manipulation of paper's two-dimensional form; tearing,
folding, cutting, interweaving and layering it, produced an entirely new physical
framework out of a surface whose stability has long been taken for granted.
Neustein's work are deconstructions of art's implicit geometry. Works 'such
as the folded-over paper paintings that nullified the line, separating front
and back, inside and outside, and even relevant and irrelevant sides of an artwork,
and his "Erased Square" that inverted art's dimensions over the axis
dividing the void from the viscera, create black holes in the physics of art's
expanding universe. These rips in the fabric; collapsed picture planes of undeniable
density and gravitational attraction, still unravel form and content in Neustein's
continuing aesthetic eddy.
In his most recent work the problem remains- where does the art begin and end?
Between the painted map and the attached found objects, there is so much impersonation.
that one must puzzle over the amorphous anatomy of their union, unsure as to
which is the artistic gesture; what is accidental and what is intentional, or
even what is pictorial and what is real. There is so much fragmentation and
simulation in this sign system that the creative distinction between appropriation,
mediation, and invention is hopelessly blurred. These pieces fall off the scale
of cultural and personal expression registered in their passing the extremes
of meaning and meaninglessness at once.
Neustein explains his dramatic shift away from epistemological abstraction
as a response to the need he felt for his art to become more involved with the
complex social, political and psychological environment of our times. As we
have already noted, his new work does not abandon the issues raised by his conceptual
paper paintings, but continues to draw on them, as one of many ricocheting lines
of internal stress. These maps are not Neustein's first venture into a culturally
temperamental climate. In fact, Neustein's numerous invasions into politically
and emotionally sensitive terrain, as well as his own uprooted history upon
the land,
p.4.
provide an essential legend to his disoriented world. The global eye, -the
shifting landscape, the shadows of doubt over the disputed ~borders of mutually
exclusive imperatives, describe more than the tensions building within our global
village. They chronicle the troubled soul of our epic voyager. A refugee, an
expatriate, a nomad, a Jew, Neustein was born into the forbidden zone of mankind's
blackest hour. From the 1940s to the present, he has been a wanderer soul lost
in the malevolent and benevolent currents of national, religious and racial
confrontation, Neustein has witnessed a fragile world in vistas from atop waves
of quicksand; the Danzig Corridor, Siberia, Warsaw, Israel and New York. In
the late sixties and early seventies Neustein explored displacement and multiple
perspectives, using photography as a conceptual medium to articulate the psychology
of perception. Documenting bales of hay as forms newly transplanted or no longer
there, Neustein began his unspoken conversation on absence and alienation. In
another piece of that time he superimposed different photographic views looking
towards and out of a window. Another photographic work recorded in succession
a wall's surface, inner structure, absence (seeing through it), and its other
side. Through these early works Neustein devised a structuralist equation of
displacement and changing pictures of the same reality.
Whatever discussion his work draws us into, be it intellectual or gut, Neustein's
tone never instructs, yet it teaches us none the less. Surely the art does not
lack opinion, but it has no set perspective, no definite meaning, no one language.
The world, like the artist who sees it, is shaped by a multitude of influences.
Even the extensive spectrum of meanings that spring from any of Neustein's maps
are not without the added resonant implications of an attached object. Both
the map and the object infect one another with inferred meaning. Does the rust
on this metal shelf signify something (political, cultural, economic,...) about
the land on the map? Are there similar sorts of innuendo to be culled from how
any of these shelves lie upon their maps (what is or isn't covered), or by what,
if anything, they have scratched on their surface? Does this object symbolize
a traditional landscape, or that one represent flight
p.5
patterns? The answer is; perhaps, to the same degree that on the map Italy
means pasta, Israel means Jews, Korea means war, Colorado means mountains, Cuba
means Communism, and California means sunshine. That is, Neustein does not so
much deny meaning, as he denies one meaning. He stacks up his layers of visual
information to scramble all their claims of authority but never to entirely
obscure or erase any of their possibilities. This is certainly evident in Neustein's
suggestion that the porous sprayed surface of his maps imitate another layer.
Similarly, glass panes over the surface of one map suggest the design of a Mondrian
as a visible contradiction that is also transparent. The quotation is actually
quite appropriate, for like Mondrian, Neustein's is an art of relationships.
Just as Mondrian's use of primary color kept his forms pure and seperate from
each other, Neustein's tokens accumulate in multiple combinations that defy
simplification. As much as the surfaces of meaning in Neustein's art reflect
one another, they are no more capable of being added together than apples and
oranges.
Neustein's landscape of unsettled discrepancies is built along the diaphanous
outer limits of cultural bias. His focus on the borders of conflict are not
to exploit them for creative fuel (as so much "political art" is prone
to do); but to exorcize the inherent frictions. His past performance and environmental
art gestures along hostile borders acted cathartically as ritualistic releases
of pent up frustrations. Neustein's persistent facade of inscrutability and
deliberate rejection of political rhetoric, envelopes his art with a shamanist
intensity. There is .a. hallucination of suggestion that lies on the horizon
of Neustein's social landscape. This organic imagination has a way of bringing
out hidden truths, making evident across time and space the invisible impressions
culture leaves upon the earth. It is on this rich soil that Neustein has brought
together abstraction and representation. For all the avenues of association
and interpretation we are invited to follow, there remains a haunting absence
of detail throughout this metaphorical land. It is a poetics of passage, but
one that has forgotten all specificity and speaks only to our collective experience.
