Robert Birch Robert Birch

relocating to Windsor/Detroit TBD

after 35 years in business, in the city I was born and raised in, I am taking the chance to relocate to a less chaotic city…

I will continue to work with a number of the gallery artists from there until they have representation in Toronto again

please feel free to email requests to the general info@ email address and I will respond as quickly as i am able to - Thanks!

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Robert Birch Robert Birch

Ihor Holubizky

many routes and thinking through Five Shapes in the form of correspondence and in the spirit of co-creation - Ihor Holubizky on Micah Lexier 2023

Micah Lexier: many routes and thinking through Five Shapes in the form of correspondence and in the spirit of co-creation

 Micah Lexier’s Five Shapes exhibition title is a transparent declaration – what you will see – simple yet not simplistic.  Beyond, and to the sides, is a method that characterizes Micah’s lateral thinking.   Method is paramount and titling – and hence, naming – is important to him, as is numbering.  Five and twelve are recurring and orchestrated in this project.

 While there is an affinity to systemic approaches – to establish and follow the rules—it is never a rulebook for Micah.  There is consistency but not predictability. Terms and propositions are in play and are to be played with.

 UN PETIT JEU ENTRE MOI ET JE/A LITTLE GAME BETWEEN MYSELF AND I - Marcel Duchamp

 Micah selected Five Shapes from a found source, a graphic item purchased online [more about that later]. The shapes, as he wrote “are intentional but not particularly meaningful” in that no symbolic meaning was ascribed by him. They “are not classical (Euclidian) geometric shapes, other than the circle…which was not part of the original source[s].”

 Micah then approached 12 artists to help him make some decisions – artists whose work he admires, although they did not need to be  working ‘in the same game’ as Micah: Polly Apfelbaum (New York), Lolly Batty (London UK), Ruth van Beek (Amsterdam), Claude Closky (Paris), Faye HeavyShield (Standoff, Alberta), Paul Ramírez Jonas (Brooklyn), Jill Magid (New York), Jonathan Monk (Berlin), José Quintanar (Rotterdam), Kay Rosen (Gary, Indiana), Ricky Swallow (Los Angeles), and Elsa Werth (Paris).

 Collaboration and co-creation has been an aspect of Micah’s work and method since 1982, and for Fives Shapes, his way of connecting to a larger world. Each artist was provided a script of terms and instructed to place the five shapes within an 8x8 foot square template/blueprint. The shapes were then ascribed a colour from a group of 12 PMS/Pantone colours chosen by Micah, and which are used in commercial printing. (As of 2023, there are 2,390 PMS colours.)  Micah’s colour choices were intuitive but kept muted – black, white, three greys, two blues, brown and several warm colours, yellow, orange, red and pink.  Not a colour scheme or painterly colours.  How the colours will be distributed among the five shapes is part of the intuitive method rather than a system.  The artist-arranged Five Shapes are thereby transformed again.

 Other routes taken.

·        Explorations of the Five Shapes in various materials by other artist/fabricators – people Micah has known over time or though prior collaborations, but not needing to conform to any terms for the 12-invited artists.

·        Five Shapes by Joel Robson, working with a piece of linden wood felled in 1999.

·        Five Shapes glass blown by Jocelyn Prince in Providence, RI (Micah has known Jocelyn since his University of Winnipeg days).

·        Five Shapes in ceramic made by Susan Day of London ON (Micah and Susan were in a 1987 two-person exhibition at Forest City Gallery).

·        Five Shapes cookies by Toronto baker Lindsey Gazel, glazed in the 12 Pantone colours, and to be served at the opening.

·        A white work jacket embroidered with Five Shapes by New York-based creative director and Micah’s long term collaborator Lisa Naftolin. The jacket is to be hung on a hook in the gallery.

·        Five Shapes painted in black on a wall in Delft, Netherlands, by Dutch artist Erris Huigens. The documentation is presented as a 12-page newspaper given away during the run of the exhibition.

 The Bauhaus (the house of building) comes to mind.  Shape and Shaping.  But the Bauhaus ethos should not be reduced to the bon mot and pragmatism of ‘form follows function.’  The mind generates form, as it did for the 16th century polymath Wenzel Jamnitzer.  (See Frank J. Swertz’s 2013 study of Jamnitzer’s five platonic solids.) Form and forms are generated by the inquisitive mind and the engine of curiosity.

 Micah functions as a flâneur of the modern age.  But rather than the idle, detached urban stroller – or if high functioning, a Baudelaire-ist – Micah registers his thoughts beyond the ‘mere’ observation.

 The more now.  Five Shapes, as noted, are derived from a purchased thing – a ready-made – and re-imagined for Micah’s method and purpose, to de-purpose and repurpose.  What, then, was the original purpose for this and such things?  They could be cognitive playthings – brain exercises –  brainteasers. Jeanne Randolph wrote of gallery gift shop items in “Illusion and the Diverted Subject,” first published in Parachute no.48, September-October 1987].  Why are they sold in the same building where art is shown, and why do they catch her eye?

 These puzzles dramatize to me my attempts to find a way, between subject and object, to account for the subject without being overly distracted by the features of the object.  It is almost as though I want to describe the subject for the object’s point of view.

I found the following on Amazon.

Kingzhuo Hexagon Tangram Classic Chinese Handmade Wooden Puzzle for Children and Adults. It includes 11 pcs. Material: safe good quality stained wood. It smells nice.

Was Micah’s original impulse a passion and obsession due to idle time as there was some pandemic period  buying.  What then is idleness?  This, from Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness”: 

 A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.

 How ‘efficient’ is art in bringing ideas and concepts to bear in the context and framework of what is now the industry of art. We should not ask what Five Shapes means any more than we should ask composers of instrumental music. Or, in turn, to examine passages of notes, or bars and measures alone.  We can’t know the composition – its wholeness.  Likewise for Micah, who no longer thinks of individual works but the whole – the exhibition and the orchestration of gallery space as the work of art, even though ‘individual works’ can be acquired by collectors. 

 In turn, Micah does not ask the visitor/the viewer to recover his steps, nor to instruct on the steps, and the variations.  I felt obligated to provide some background, but not to extinguish the moment of individual discovery.  Perhaps the “about” for art – the pedagogical impulse –should be phrased as the “aboutlessness,” a term coined by Singapore colleague Lee Weng Choy in a moment of purposeful playfulness (we were in conversation 137 km north of the equator), in order to engage the richness that can only be in experience.

Epilogue 1

Micah’s infectious spirit brings us into his game, to play along.  Walking back after a 2 ½ hour conversation (30 minutes shorter than the film Oppenheimer, but 40 minutes longer than My Dinner With Andre), I began to play, and attuned to moments that otherwise would not have registered.  Three walk images, below, which should not necessitate explanation.

Epilogue 2

Could Five Shapes when installed, especially as the 8x8 template grid is not registered on the gallery walls, be imagined as a music score, notation without bars or measures?  Notes or sounds could be ascribed to shape and colour, scale as duration, amplitude and decay. This could be done as a computer program, but without the nuance of the performer making decisions.  Erik Satie’s written score for his Vexations composition (c.1893-94) was 104 notes with instructions to perform très lent (very slow) and to play 840 times. Satie did not indicate a time signature. It was first performed by John Cage and a team of 10 pianists 70 years later, in 1963.  Martin Arnold and Micah orchestrated a performance of Vexations for the 2010 Nuit Blanche in Toronto, with an added twist.  At the end of each pianist’s ‘turn’ their sheet music was formed into an origami object.  Sound becomes physical form.

 

Epilogue 3

We can make our own Five Shapes connections. For instance, there are five fingers on each hand (was there a ‘master plan’ in nature for five?).  Twelve – the number of invited artists – as Micah noted is the only number that is called (named),  a dozen.  Yet thirteen is a “baker’s dozen” (the same number of letters in my name).  12x12 of any made or harvested thing is a “gross,” a term derived from Old French. But above and beyond the nomenclature and the game of the mind, for Micah this is an armature and premise to connect to people.  A writer on Micah’s work cited  the E.M Forster epigram in Howard’s End (1910), "Only connect,” to underscore the value of personal relationships.  That for Micah is “the meaning of this exhibition.”

 Published on the occasion of Micah Lexier’s exhibition Five Shapes at Birch Contemporary, Toronto, October 19 to November 25, 2023.

 

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