Transforming Tie-Dye

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The New York Sun

Michael Phelan’s first exposure to the fine arts came as a small child in his grandmother’s house in Beaumont, Texas. There, in her living room, a series of Frederic Remington paintings was on display. “I was fascinated by them,” Mr. Phelan recalled. The paintings of horses, cowboys, and the Wild West, Mr. Phelan eventually figured out, were fakes. But while the art may not have been authentic, his grandmother’s appreciation of Remington’s work was genuine and, Mr. Phelan said, it was this understanding that became the underpinning of his own development as a conceptual artist.

Today, working from both his Chelsea studio and his home in Marfa, Texas, Mr. Phelan, 39, appropriates culturally loaded and often commercially produced imagery, text, and objects and transforms them into fine art. He has shown his installations, sculptures, and videos in private galleries in America, Asia, and Europe, and major collectors, such as Charles Saatchi and Melissa Soros, have acquired his work. In his current show, an inaugural group exhibition for the Eleven Rivington gallery on the Lower East Side, however, Mr. Phelan has expanded the practice of appropriation to claim the funky, countercultural technique of tie-dyeing. Mr. Phelan’s monumental raw linen canvases each contain a target motif constructed of alternating bands of color, with the white striations and watery dye marks instantly recognizable as tie-dye sunburst patterns. And in returning to the traditional artistic construct of canvas, support, and wall, Mr. Phelan has also appropriated elements of some of the most significant movements in modern American painting as well.

Mr. Phelan observes that tie-dye, like so many American trends and fads, is itself an appropriation of foreign cultural heritages, specifically the ancient Japanese practice of shibori, a resist-dyeing technique for textiles. In its American reincarnation, however, what was once a hippie, nonconformist, anti-fashion statement is now a fully assimilated and ubiquitous clothing motif, found on couture runways as well as in suburban strip malls. When Mr. Phelan decided to relocate tie-dye within an art-historical context, he turned to the color-field painters of the 1960s, who eschewed the brush and instead used saturation techniques and raw linen to create dramatic chromatic effects. The bull’s-eye motif recalls art-historical motifs explored by Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland.

The actual craftsmanship of tiedye is not what captivates Mr. Phelan so, to produce his work, the artist located a tie-dye entrepreneur who, working from Mr. Phelan’s blueprints, trusses and dyes the linen sheets and then returns them to Mr. Phelan in New York City. Mr. Phelan must then resoak the canvases to remove the wrinkles and begin the strenuous task of stretching the linen as tautly as possible over its wooden supports. In their final form, the raw linens are wrinkle-free and pristine, and the targets are cleanly centered. The effects are purposeful and part of the aesthetization of the craft of tie-dye. “I’m interested in this beauty,” Mr. Phelan said. “With tie-dye, there’s no consistent technique. The chemistry is always different, so the canvases are unique. I like that chance and accident are part of the process of making. I also like the removal of my hand, my handiwork, from this handmade product.” The technique is ultimately instantly recognizable, and thus linked to its textile origins. But through its monumentality, spare abstraction, and art-historical associations, it is also made to conform to the demands of fine art.

Titles are critical to Mr. Phelan’s works in that the text and image are unified to push the art past its formal concerns with color and shape and into the realm of historical narrative. The title of the three canvases on display at Eleven Rivington, “The best way out is through (No. 31, 32, and 33),” is Mr. Phelan’s improvised version of the quasi-Eastern affirmations found in greeting cards, self-help books, and other inspirational products. Mr. Phelan’s wall text pieces operate in a similar manner. “Bless you Taco Bell,” now stenciled on the wall of Mr. Phelan’s studio, picks up on Madison Avenue’s tendencies to secularize religious language by transforming, as in this case, a prayer of benediction into a corny one-liner uttered by a Chihuahua.

But while Mr. Phelan’s work does tend to focus on how “the West kind of perverts and co-opts certain historical modes and models,” there is also, Mr. Phelan insists, a great deal of sympathy for commercialized, mass-produced consumerism. After all, he noted, “I loved Taco Bell as a kid.”


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