The Santa Fe Reporter - Casual Water
CASUAL WATER
By Dennis Jarrett
The Santa Fe Reporter – June 7, 2000
I resigned from art school – Salt Lake City’s famous Art Barn – because Minimalism hadn’t been invented yet. I went into writing because I couldn’t draw or paint. If I’d been born twenty years later, I wouldn’t have had to make that embarrassing choice. I was born minimal, and I’d always been good at Concepts, and all you really need to represent a concept is a tray of sand and a piece of lead pipe and a provocative title, like “Untitled.”
By the early 1980’s, the brilliant concept “less is more” suddenly had so much stature in the art world that you’d think it had been invented by some genius – Werner Heisenberg, for instance – during an uncertain moment in the bathtub. I picture him thinking, 2,200 years after Archimedes, “If I say ‘Eureka!,’ will that change the Eureka experience?” My imaginary Heisenberg climbs out of the tub and towels off and, as the water spirals down the drain, he notices that the tub has changed from a banal human washing machine into a piece of art: stark, white, and significantly chipped. Now that it is dry, he can call it “Water” and install it in a gallery. Who could ask for less?
It’s always been easy to exploit Minimalism. This movement made it possible for philosophy majors to graduate from college with a Senior Exhibition. But a number of real artists – Donald Judd in particular – began to produce work that was visually engaging, interesting, even beautiful. Today, Minimalism is still a viable, often exciting approach to art. It still sustains the careers of quite a few wannabes, but it also gives rise to masters and artists headed in that direction, like Eric Tillinghast.
Why do I have water on the mind? Because Tillinghast’s recent work, soon to be exhibited at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, is about capturing and displaying water: often in tiny reservoirs, reducing the world’s most plenteous substance to the level of cut diamonds. The reservoirs sit inside worked steel. Often they are lines, so bare that you can’t help seeing and believing that their cargo is precious.
The spiritual primacy of water is as ancient as the Babylonian story of the maiden Ishtar’s decent to the underworld so she can restore Tammuz with the water of life. Ivan Illich writes, “ Water remains a chaos until a creative story interprets its seeming equivocation… most myths of creation have as one of their main tasks the conjuring of water.”
Tillinghast has set himself to the task of building such a creative story about water. By minimalizing it, he simultaneously magnifies it for inspection, and for reverence. One of his most effective “stories” is a charcoal-grey steel table, about eight feet long by 14 inches wide. On it are five rectangular steel plates, slightly darker than the surface on which they sit. Each supports, or encloses, a specimen of water. That the matrix (see matter, material, mama) is steel, gives you a sense of raw power cradling the softest, most fugitive stuff on earth.
Jackson laughed as she showed me that first table, saying that this was the first time she’d ever had to feed the art. In other words, this precious commodity evaporates, especially in Santa Fe.
Whoever is in charge of Golf – the same deity responsible for the absurd Green Blazer Devotions practiced by men who are served Budweiser beer and numbered irons by other men called Caddies – came up with the fabulous expression, “Casual Water.” It’s water at its most surprising, water unexpected, water that complicates and therefore beautifies the game. Eric Tillinghast is playing at the top of his form this month.
