JOE AMRHEIN May 10 to September 1, 2003 In Joe Amrhein’s work, the starting point is language — language as the vehicle of meaning, and text as an aesthetic, graphical form in and of itself. Like the spectacular wave that opened the TV show Hawaii Five-O, Retro threatens to wash over the viewer with the frothing, foaming, endless roar of contemporary art-speak. Using text taken from critical writing in art magazines, Retro extracts phrases and words from their original contexts, and renders them in carnivalesque fonts and colors. Hung in a pattern suggesting an undulating curtain, wave, or maybe the swoop of a circus tent, Retro fibrillates between an imagined mockery of the hyperbolae in art writing, and the poetry of these extracted phrases, rendered back into the art they once described. Descriptions of art become art themselves, in painting and poetry. Waves roll in, waves roll out. Similarly, Re-Site extracts words and phrases from art writing, but this time to more dramatic ends. Painted on glass (Amrhein worked for some time as a sign painter), these words are installed in the gallery in a painterly, Jackson Pollock kind of performance that the gallery goer doesn’t get to experience (see a short video of the installation process in the Loading Dock Lounge). Words are dropped, thrown and scattered into the gallery, smashing and splintering like Pollock’s paint splatters and sprays. In this, the fourth installation of the work, the words are becoming more and more difficult to reassemble since with each exhibition, the pieces become smaller and smaller. Still, as with an abstract expressionist painting looked at long enough, patterns emerge, fragments begin to reform, and through a visual forensics the words and phrases are reassembled. Is Amrhein taking revenge on the critics, doing such a deconstruction on their deconstruction that one could get actually get hurt in the process? In a somewhat different look at language, 100 Years of May 10 takes a single day (May 10, the day this exhibition opened) as a point of dissection, with Damien Hirst’s dry deftness. The plain font in 100 Years of May 10, the resistance to artistic expressiveness, allows the words to speak for themselves. A conceptual piece in the tradition of artists like On Kawara or Gerry Ferguson, 100 Years of May 10 uses the strongest tool of conceptualism, the quasi-arbitrary decision (in this case, May 10, meaningful only as it coincides with the exhibition opening date) to put in motion the retrieval of headlines from the Hartford Courant. In turn, the headlines themselves are meaningful only insofar as they coincide with the national or political interests of the moment. Looking through these headlines, one can recall many of the events that captured the world’s attention on a previous May 10, but others are now lost to all but a few. Watergate we remember. But in 100 years, will the CRRA scandal mean anything to all but the most committed of Connecticut historians? On the other hand, with the blunt fact, “Stanley is Dead,” (1904) one can imagine not just the end of the famous explorer’s life (a fame that was the invention of newspapers), but the continued political and economic misery of the Congo Republic that the now long-dead explorer left in his wake. It seems the further into the past these headlines go, the more vivid the imaginative experience becomes as words create streams, cinematic waves, of mental images, sounds and smells that few paintings, drawings or sculptural works could produce. - top -