HOWARD FROMSON May 1 to September 1 2003 By the high Middle Ages (twelfth-century), students at the Universities of Paris and Bologna were practicing philosophy through an elegant method of reading and parsing sentences. Peter Lomabrd’s great work, Libri quatuor sententiarum (The Book of Four Sentences), or the famous Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas were structured as a series of sentences, questions or statements of philosophical principles which were then dissected, supported, nuanced and clarified in the voluminous commentaries that followed. The foundations of modern science were laid at these universities, and were slowly built up through this technique of simple statement, followed by richly detailed, exquisitely argued subsidiary text. Modern science, and indeed modernism itself, maintains much of this combination of simplicity and complexity. But taking simple ideas and developing them into powerful industrial, mechanical or artistic applications is something that defines not just the development of modern science and industry, but modern art as well. Sol LeWitt’s open cube structures, Donald Judd’s sculptural blocks, the work of Carl Andre and Rachel Whiteread all derive from the endlessly varied re-articulation of extremely simple ideas. Installed in the gallery here are three sculptural forms, chairs actually, that were derived from a series of simple ideas that took on complexity as they ricocheted through the processes of invention. Howard Fromson’s modernist chairs are based on an extremely simple concept: the equilateral triangle. Based on the geometrical principles of the triangle, they are, properly speaking, formed by simple tetrahedral forms joined to each other and then bridged with a plane to transform them from strict geometric forms to functioning chairs. Howard Fromson, an inventor with more than 100 patents in the fields of metallurgy, printing technology and various other industries, also has a patent on these chairs. One wonders why Fromson would choose to patent chairs that, I would argue, constitute ‘art,’ but are minimally at least ‘furniture.’ Did Fromson expect to sell these chairs, license them to a design firm or become a manufacturer of specialized furniture? I don’t think so. When understood as part of a larger intellectual practice, I suspect the patent for these chairs is not about attempting to corner the market on tetrahedron-furniture so much as it is a habit, part of the way his mind works. Like a modern-day, indeed a modernist Aquinas, Scotus or Abelard, Fromson’s patents are in fact intellectually identical to the Sentences and Summas of the great scholastics. Projected on the wall at the far end of the gallery are, in sequence, the patent number, the declarative sentence of what the invention is, and a drawing from the patent on file at the U.S. Patent’s Office in Washington for all of Fromson’s patents from 1952 through 2002. There are other patents pending. Each declarative sentence reads like the opening statements of a book of 12th century scholastic theology, or a Sol Lewitt utterance. Lewitt’s famous Sentences on Conceptual Art and Peter Lombard’s Book of Four Sentences are both examples of how simple ideas become complex as they are taken to their conclusions. Lewitt’s sentence number 5 (“Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.”), Lombard’s medieval statement (“Every doctrine concerns things and/or signs.”) and Fromson’s patent description (“The present invention relates to a photographic printing plate for use in planographic printing and the method of making the same.”) are each simple statements that set off explosive growth and spawned complexity in different ways: Lewitt in conceptual art, Lombard in philosophy and science, and Fromson in the technology used to print newspapers. So what is on exhibit here? Physically, three chairs, an early model, a slide show and a framed patent. But these are surrogates for a larger, more complex creativity than the sum of these parts can account for. What is really on display is a pattern of thought, the thought of an inventor at full volume whose success as an industrialist is only one manifestation of the power of a restless, insistent intellect. Steven A. Holmes Director of Visual Arts and Public Programming May, 2003 - top -