NYAB Event - Clay Ketter “Recalcitration”

Clay Ketter “Recalcitration”

Kansas

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KANSAS presents Recalcitration, Clay Ketter’s first solo show with the gallery.

In Don Graf’s Data Sheets: Thousands of Simplified Facts about Building Materials, Planning, and Construction - a comprehensive construction manual compiled during World War II and appreciated during the post-war building boom - materials are assigned to their applications, and those applications are described with plainspoken care. The text presupposes that, after close study, we can more convincingly manifest our needs and satisfy our desires through a measured set of materials and techniques. Graf’s book is repeated stubbornly in Ketter’s work Don, Don, Don, and assaults the assumption that certain meaning only exists in its content. These books, gritty and worn, are housed in an array of flawlessly fabricated plexiglas boxes; a recursive gesture that equalizes the tenets of minimalism through blunt utility. One book in legion with itself becomes less what it contains, and more an object for scrutiny.

Don gave me this book. We were sitting in his newly painted kitchen drinking bourbon and he handed me this book; he said something like “this book… has pretty much everything you need to know about building anything and everything… it’s all here…”.

Don championed the tangible. He was assertively defiant in the face of what he saw as a perpetually rising tide of relativism. We could be talking about pretty much anything when he would often, if not always, begin his run by asserting in his whiney shrill, “Clay, let me tell you what you wanna do.” I turned into his foreman and he turned into my mentor. He was masterfully duplicitous by nature, and had an infallible radar in the face of other’s duplicity. I remember two instances when I introduced prospective laborers to him in the office, and he characteristically asked, “so, what do you know?”. Great question. Willy from Fort Greene replied flat out, “a thing or two” and ended up Don’s personal chauffeur for the next four years. The other was a mumbler, and mumblers didn’t stand a chance with Don.

American Stack and Seven Eight Two by Fours employ building materials in their most elemental particles - drywall and two-by-four studs - and call into question what they are and represent in a shared world. Ketter encourages these materials towards eccentricity by peeling off their designations and augmenting key elements of their character, a strategy exemplified in American Stack, a 2.5-ton cuboid of precision stacked drywall with plaster-finished ends, which sits directly, obstinately on the gallery floor. The artist suggests that these materials “resent our directives and assignments. They have a life of their own, a sense of purpose, and together form a collective unto themselves. If left alone, they can join to form combinations which transcend our projected strategies for them.” Ketter continues: “what if we allow them that theatre? That is, for me, what Art has become; a theatre that I facilitate in the service of these materials. And so, I work for no one, not even for myself - I work for the thing that asks to be made.”

Clay Ketter’s work is an inquisition into the legitimacy of the common denominator. A two-by-four is certainly a basic element, but the artist negates this given by making the element. These elements are made, using the same techniques they would otherwise be slaves to by forfeiting their intended function while gaining status in another field. This is a process of recalcitration - adamantly defiant in the face of the sensible, given matrix of the everyday.

Clay Ketter (b. 1961 in Brunswick, ME) lives and works in Malmö Sweden. Selected exhibition venues include Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Venice Biennal 1997; Biennial of Sydney 1998; Whitechapel, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; Cecilia Hillstrom Gallery, Stockholm; Sonnabend Gallery, New York; White Cube, London; Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris; Bartha Contemporary, London; Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm; Brändström & Stene, Stockholm and The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

The book “Recalcitrations” is available with text excerpts and images from 1976 to 2016. The book is designed by Patric Leo, Word & Object Publications, Stockholm. It is available for purchase through the gallery.