dayoutlast: Tariq Alvi "Reaching for the Beginning" @ Michael Benevento

dayoutlast is a record of my direct engagement with mostly contemporary art, mostly Los Angelean.

As this blog has evolved since its 2010 inception, so has my perspective. What I once perceived as central within the investigation was what was central, literally, within the photographic frame that I shared here. While still an important consideration, such thinking has also given way to more peripheral considerations, ones also accompanied occasionally by text (written manifestation of thought) and the oscillations between them. What's missing here are larger unknowns surrounding issues of presentation and representation; the amount of time and space it actually takes to accomplish such first-hand observations; and the quandaries between documentation and interpretation.

Despite my attempt to communicate here with image and text what is essential in some respect about the artwork, neither representation should ever be considered a substitution for the primary viewing experience. Of course, occasionally there are exceptions.

Most of the time, these posts are merely remnants---residual fragments---from my last day out.

--Justin Lowman

Saturday, January 13, 2018

Tariq Alvi "Reaching for the Beginning" @ Michael Benevento

Almost, 2017

Galvainzed steel scaffolding poles, acrylic medium, magnets

84 x 168 inches

The above four images appear courtesy of the Michael Benevento gallery website.

As can be seen from the first four images above, lighting is everything with respect to how a work of art can be, well, um, seen in its best light. If that's not enough, the work, at a glance, is strikingly similar to Robert Irwin's more recent works that stage fluorescent light tubes in similar arrangements, vertical lined up side by side to an overall horizontal arrangement (see here). Whereas Irwin is concerned with the condition of light and its effects, this composition by Alvi seems, as with all his works, about the tenuous relation between structural elements (often poles or similar), which is to say how things hang together or how they adhere. Common grounds between works may revolve, literally, around certain polarities, magnetisms, certainly radiant. See "XX" or "Deep, East, Real" for more examples from Alvi's previous two shows at Michael Benevento.