The first time I saw Nick Barbee’s art was in 2011, when he was a resident of the CORE program. I found the work perplexing. (I much preferred the films of his fellow CORE resident, Kelly Sears, that were shown at the same time.). By the time I actually met him in person, he was a resident at the then brand-new Galveston Artist Residency, as was Sears. I guess if you are starting an artists’ residency from scratch, poaching two who had just finished their CORE residency is a good legitimizing strategy. When I first saw his work at GAR, I was impressed. And even more so when I visited his studio in Galveston—not his GAR studio, but one he had set up in back of a church near downtown. That’s where I first saw his sculptures of ballistic diagrams, which I thought were astounding.
Barbie and his family became full-time Galvestonians. Barbie currently has an exhibit at the Galveston Arts Center that is on view through April 17. It is a sprawling show, a retrospective of ten years of Barbee’s work while in Galveston. There are seven bodies of work, each one representing a different project.
On one side of the gallery is a group of tall, thin wooden sculptures. They are ballistic diagrams of different caliber bullets. The ballistic diagrams are called collectively CATO. CATO is named after Cato, a Tragedy by Joseph Addison, a play dating from 1712, and was popular and influential amongst the American revolutionaries who founded the USA. The ballistic diagrams are three-dimensional representations of the cavity formed by a bullet as it passes through human flesh. Cato was a senator who opposed the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
The individual pieces are mostly vertical (which suggests that the gunshot victims were shot from below). And it is strange that the shapes are formed of polished wood. Bullet holes as pieces of elegant wood craft.
Another part of the show, called Good Riddance, consists of small, black-and-white paintings of monuments on plinths with highly jocose plaques. Like CATO, this work is political by virtue of making fun of the classic civic statue, which have been removed all over the country because although we as a people decided to honor a bunch of racist traitors with heroic statues, we have had second thoughts about that in recent years. America has a forest of empty plinths at the moment. An empty plinth in one of the paintings is labelled “Fat Chance”.
An image of a wounded soldier is titled “I Am Sooo Sorry.” The figure in that painting is based on The Dying Gaul, a Hellenistic statue honoring the Greek victory over the Gauls at Pergamon around 225 BC. Surprise depicts an equine statue, but the horse is a ghost and its legs are invisible.
Another group of paintings are under the collective name Ghostbusters. These paintings all have to do with ghosts.
Like Good Riddance, these are all black and white painters. Some are practically minimalist paintings. Except for the floating eyeballs, Blink . . . Blink could be an Ad Reinhardt painting.
Eclipse is similar—the ghosts are a few white marks against a solid black background.
(Weirdly enough, the Good Riddance paintings Oh Boy and Surprise also depict ghosts—or statues of ghosts.)
Barbee’s Ask Forgiveness is a project about art and memory. Barbee has created a museum floor plan with walls but no roof that allows a viewer the opportunity to see the museum from a bird’s eye perspective. One sometimes sees photos of curators planning shows in their museum with the aid of little dioramas like this. Except in this case, it is not an actual museum floor plan. It is instead a memory museum. In the various tiny galleries, Barbee has recreated artworks that were meaningful to him. In his sketch of the floor plan, he shows us when he saw each painting or artwork and where.
Above: Ask Forgiveness floor plan sketch; Below: Ask Forgiveness museum model
What I can’t determine is whether the shape of the galleries reflects the actual galleries where he first encountered the artworks within. That level of detail would be hard to remember, but if you visit a museum often enough, you start to have a three-dimensional memory of where your favorite pieces are. For example, I can visualize precisely where my favorite Courbet and Joseph Wright of Derby paintings are in the Museum of Fine Arts here in Houston—and the shape and size of the rooms they are in. (Which works until the museum moves stuff around, as they must from time to time.)
The art memories in Ask Forgiveness range from something seen at the Metropolitan Museum in 1992 to work seen at the Hirshhorn in 2017. And one can observe a wide variety of artworks that presumably influenced Barbee, including several tiny Mark Rothkos.
A full-figure portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David.
A wooden box with a button. (I’m guessing this could be Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, but I don’t recall the big red button on the Robert Morris’s piece.)
Glenn Ligon’s portrait of Malcolm X.
And a gallery with a large boulder in it. Perhaps an homage to a Michael Heizer?
There is something beautiful about making your own miniature museum of art that you love. This feels like the most personal piece in the entire exhibit. Unless it is 5 Feet, another piece of artistic japery. 5 Feet depict five life-sized human feet, made of plaster and covered with colorful socks. Whether the feet are modeled after Barbie’s own is not indicated. And if he was going for a kind of realistic depiction of feet, he’s not quite successful. These are five lumpy, misshapen feet.
The work that impressed me the most was Barbee’s bizarre mashup of Donald Judd and Thomas Jefferson, called Marfacello. This group of objects were inspired by memories of Judd and Jefferson’s residences, Marfa and Monticello. Though these men were very different, they both had a kind of all-American self-reliance thing going. Both Judd and Jefferson designed their own homes and even the furniture in them. Most of the pieces in Marfacello are painted bright red, and because they are largish objects, they are the first thing that visitors see when they enter the large downstairs gallery at the Galveston Arts Center.
The parts that reference Judd are pieces of furniture made from plywood, while the pieces that reference Monticello include signs (which Barbee refers to “Wayfinding”) that visitors to Monticello might find.
The piece labelled “Bed” is especially hilarious—it is a rectangular piece of wood, about bed-sized, lifted mere inches above the floor. Assuming it is based on a real bed design, either Judd or Jefferson was allergic to comfort.
All of Barbee’s work is thoughtful and even conceptual, but one constant in all of these pieces is Barbee’s humor. You might laugh at the paintings of statues that form Good Riddance, or at many of the ghost paintings and definitely at 5 Feet. And the audacity of pairing Donald Judd and Thomas Jefferson may prompt a laugh or two (especially at the mash-up title, Marfacello), but it will cause one to think about the two men together and to try to compare them. I think Barbee wants you to think about how similar they were. And even if Barbee wants you to laugh, he also wants you to think about history: Jefferson, various colonial figures going to see Cato, a Tragedy and imagining rebelling against the English, old Confederate statues to which we now say, good riddance.
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