Ben Gocker "There is really no single poem"
P.P.O.W.
This event has ended.
Ben Gocker's first solo exhibition, There is really no single poem. Quoting from a letter from poet Jack Spicer to poet Robin Blaser, Gocker takes his title from Spicer's intriguing claim, "There is really no single poem." Though there are no poems per se to be found among Gocker's bright installations, drawing series, and wall-mounted sculptures, there is significant attention paid to the idea that no work of art should or can exist alone. As Spicer put it, "[Poems] cannot live alone any more than we can." This creative ethos is reflected in Gocker's inscription of the names of numerous friends, acquaintances, and loved ones in one of the show's centerpieces, the large painting titled simply Names—as it is in Gocker's display of book covers for imaginary books, a sort of fantastic prelude to unrealized genius, called, Floating Collection. Each of these works contains elements that cannot stand in solitude, that invite other elements to surround, contextualize, and interrogate them. Each of these works is brilliantly illuminated by others in the show; Gocker emphasizes interaction, dialog, allusion, and sociability even as he mourns the ephemeral service into which these forms are pressed.
Gocker, like Spicer, takes an interest in the series. Like Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Richard Tuttle, and Martin Kippenberger, Gocker knows when to allow color and form to take center stage. This formal timing is on display in the large installation piece Early Poem, a mix of both found and made objects arranged on a page-like platform. There is also Scroll, an extended, obsessively detailed panoramic illustration Gocker has been at work on continuously, for over three years. These works construct differently punctuated narratives of time and invite the viewer (or 'reader') to play with ideas of sequence, at the same time creating a kind of half-imagined bridge between the vernaculars of American folk art and the tactics of minimalism.
Other works include Untitled, a triptych of large color wheels drawn on plaster in colored pencil. Another wall will be hung with a grid of thirty 'drawings' on plaster pages, notes the artist has saved over time and redone on the pages, reproductions of sketches from his notebooks. Lastly there will be a box, sometimes assembled sometimes not, with carved and carefully painted staffs reminiscent of Brancusi's Endless Column, titled Calendar, which Gocker will be changing throughout the course of the show.
Media
Schedule
from June 10, 2010 to July 16, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-06-10 from 18:00 to 20:00