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ALEX HUBBARD
The Border, The Ship
The future will have been perfect. Alex Hubbard is the final artist that will have taken part in Has Art?, a series of exhibitions that will have inaugurated the gallery's new space. For one year, artists will have been be paired with a writer and a page from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés. The writer will have provided a critical response to the work as it relates to the poem as well as offered scholarship about the artist’s practice as a whole. As the solo exhibitions progressed, a publication will have been growing - chapters will have been added each month - and an idea of a group show will have been emerging. Alex Hubbard will have joined Isaac Layman, Jeremy Shaw, Bert Rodriguez, Wynne Greenwood, Carolina Silva, Cris Bruch, Elena del Rivero, The Reader, and Jennie C. Jones in an evolving constellation and exhibition.
William Owen, the essayist selected for Alex Hubbard, will have joined Kolya Rice, Jessica Powers, Gean Moreno, Amra Brooks, Matthew Offenbacher, Robert Mittenthal, Carolina Silva, Elias Hansen and D.W. Burnam as the crew of authors that will have been commissioned to this shipwreck.
Alex Hubbard was born in Toledo, Oregon in 1975. He attended Lewis and Clark College and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland before taking part in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has held solo exhibitions at Standard, Oslo; House of Gaga, Mexico City; St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art (with Oscar Tuazon); Nicole Klagsbrun, NY; Castillo/Corrales, Paris; and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY. His work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, and in other group exhibitions at: Spruth Magers, Berlin; Greene Naftali Gallery, NY; The Ballroom, Marfa; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; The Kitchen, NY; Johann Konig, Berlin; and Musee Juif de Belgique, Brussels. Hubbard lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Alex Hubbard
by William Owen
Too much is written about painting and pleasure, and not enough about art and appetite. Things are hungry to be, and this excitable appetite irrupts uncontrollably into anything nearby. Appetite destabilizes living bodies, forcing them into full interaction with one another’s juicy realities in order to find their own vitality. Going further down the rabbit hole, Anglo-then-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead conceived of appetite as the driving force between inanimate objects – appetite propelling asteroids through space, or appetite driving hydrogen molecules to bond with oxygen. For him, this was the best way to keep in mind that without consciousness, without perception, without even life, there still exist a multitude of heterogeneous identities in fluxuous processes, leaving marks of their rugged and ragged independence on anything that doesn’t destroy them completely. For Whitehead, even that realm of reality where inanimate objects interact is driven more by the corporeal aesthetics of appetite than mechanical determinism.
This speculative viewpoint is the secret metaphysics of a great many artists during those phases where the hand ponders the head. Through experience, it’s hard to ignore the sense that the inanimate has individual existence, and is marked by the experiences that it encounters through time, often to the point of developing certain aims or abilities. This does not mean that things have conscious access to their surroundings, or can develop knowledge (only the most dogmatic shamans would assert this). Such an access is possible for the inanimate, but only through aesthetic encounter, as one object encounters the qualities of another, without criteria.
Alex Hubbard, maker of digital video action paintings, wants to show you what things can do. In The Border, The Ship, as compared with previous works, the objects are foregrounded as eager characters testing their skill and being marked and altered across time. The Border is a featureless white background, the kind that I can easily imagine in a commercial photo studio in where Walgreens™ would photograph new generic products with a quick and thoughtless ease before sending them into circulation. Gone are the cars, tables, walls, or ooze that played the role of a ‘canvas objects’ in previous works. Gone also are the objects which Alex quickly destroys to produce painterly textures, and the jittery editing and almost exaggerated impact sounds that gave his early works their cartoonish, cinema-of-amphetamines feel has also been greatly toned down. What is left is a sense of poise, finesse, and precision that seems to be taken on by each object as it makes its appearance within the frame. The objects are, in a wide sense, tools, or inanimate objects that are easy to read as animals. They act out with care and strained calm in lieu of intelligence, approaching their successive tasks with a cool, adroit aim that feels alien. Precarious pauses and quiet shows of accomplishment only seem to have meanings for the objects involved.
The Ship seems to be transference through time –a series of disparate recordings collaged together within the same border; each recording was taken at a different time, usually using the same objects. This is the 4th dimensional cubism of the work, where the each object is seen at different times all at once: the same black tubing which deftly handles, juggles, and shoves other objects into a showman’s vaudeville act will simultaneously spend much of the video stretching down from the upper-left corner to spew blackstained liquid on the southern border of the frame. The timeline of this video is measured by a succession of escalating occurrences and events, where visible marks are all we can use to keep track of each thing’s storyline. Because there’s usually no obvious border between the collaged elements, gravity becomes a tricky character, giving the otherwise verité work occasional jolts of the unreal.
How does The Border, The Ship change when juxtaposed with Mallarmé’s Un coup de Dés? There are a few obvious shared elements: “the hard bones lost amid the planks/ born/ of play” appear early on in the film, falling left to right, later hoisted by pulleys and dyed blue in a deep bucket of paint. Perhaps there’s a shared indeterminacy between the breaking of the visual form of the poem, which causes a few insolvable syntactical problems – which line goes after which? – in Un coup de Dés, and the fragmenting of the time image through digital videocraft in Hubbard.
But the divergent spirits of the two works is much more keenly felt. Mallarmé’s poem, if we’re in the mood to extract some sort of scene or image, begins with the mess of a shipwreck, followed by the image of a ship’s master, whose fists once grasped the helm of his ship and hurled it into the storm, but now finds himself frozen in hesitation, “a corpse by the arm”, clutching dice in a gambling parlor, terrified by the hazards of uncertainty, finally deciding not to throw. Nothing could be further from Hubbard’s hands, which appear as energetic technicians of the stage, drawn on by the excitements and uncertainties that his transforming instruments direct him into.
Likewise, there is an inverted relationship to chaos and purity in the two works. Mallarmé spends the final two pages of his poem on the cosmological outcome of the master’s inability to confront the abyss of chance: first, a place will have taken place where all results in view are null, and all reality dissolves in the reaches of the waves. Then a constellation appears in the pure and vacant beyond – the number of the unthrown dice in some ideal realm. Thus purity emerges from chaos. Exactly the opposite is true of what happens within the Border – where a clean sheet only exists before some thing decides to make its mark there. Hubbard’s is a world of ever increasing entropy, where even inanimate things take on the agitated persistence and stubborn individualism of sailors and border dwellers.
Works Cited
Badiou, Alain (trans. Alberto Toscano) Handbook of Inaesthetics, 2005 Stanford University Press.
Mallarmé, Stéphane (trans. Basil Cleveland) A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance, 2005 Ubuweb
