Introduction

This exhibition, brochure, public lecture and artist visits are programs of the Art and Art History Department and the Olin Art Gallery, and are supported, in part, by Alumni and Parent Programs, the Inaugural Planning Committee for President S. Georgia Nugent, the Provost, and the Mesaros Fund.

With this body of work, Anthony Luensman enters into a collaboration with his past. He comments on the multi-layered relationships stemming from the people and artwork encountered during the time that he matriculated at Kenyon College. Luensman adopts a strategic approach that at once embraces, avoids and subverts traditional models of collaboration. Even the title of the exhibition, Eolian, embodies this complex, nuanced strategy as well. Referring to materials carried or arranged by the wind, and also cleverly containing the name of Kenyon's gallery, Eolian implies that Luensman's experiences here in this space have been carried with him. Many artists react to the physical spaces holding their work. Luensman looks beyond the gallery as merely a container to hold his work. He responds to the history of a space, to the psychological space of a gallery, to the audience, and to the intersection of his own history with that space. Luensman deals with personal histories and institutional narratives, much of which are necessarily at some remove from the direct experience of his audience. While his work is challenging, it is, nonetheless, important to him that it remain accessible. In this way, the artist is cognizant of his viewers, subtly guiding them into a range of responses and interactions. Luensman generously invites the gallery visitor into an active dialogue with artwork that serves as proxy for the artist. This body of work is simultaneously sculpture, painting, action, performance, environment, soundtrack, literature, readymade and situation. Taken individually, each work in the exhibition draws upon very specific moments in history, although drifting between personal, institutional and experiential histories. Taken as a whole, a commingling of the deeply personal and the ostensibly public strikes at the core of Luensman’s processes.

The artist’s process is not necessarily linear, but rather, more cyclical or cumulative. This manifests itself in practical ways and in metaphorical value. Eclectic avenues of inquiry inform Luensman’s practice. He has studied painting, literature and sculpture. He is a self-taught musician capable of handling a variety of traditional instruments, but more notably, he “masters” a strange, growing cache of hybrid, invented and appropriated instruments (which are often found incorporated into his installations). He has learned enough about electronics, circuitry and programming to animate—to breathe life—into his work. Luensman is the co-director of the highly influential, Cincinnati-based performance group Saw Theater, which has infused his work with a suitable sense of theatricality. As each of these varied skills and activities (and surely countless more yet discovered or admitted) provide the tools by which Luensman builds his projects, they are paralleled by the narratives and personal histories operating just beneath the surface of the work.

Pearldiver (1988-2003) is an excellent example of just such a personal form of collaboration. Luensman dusted off one of the few sculptures still extant from his Kenyon years and has given it a new setting and updated content. The sculpture is a figurative work that developed out of collegiate investigations into sexuality, reflected in the work of many young artists. In the original work, a nude figure was depicted standing on a bed of pearls submerged in a fish tank. The updated piece retains all of the same components, but the tank is completely filled with pearls, rendering the figure nearly invisible— effectively appropriating and subverting the earlier work. This gesture recalls Robert Rauschenberg's famous erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing although this particular obfuscation is realized through an additive process. Like Erased de Kooning (1953), Pearldiver represents a communication between "old" and "new" perspectives, but given that the old still exists within the new, Pearldiver implies a more subtle maturation than negation.

With the work, Ohio Tru-action Cowzandpigz (2003), a somewhat more traditional collaboration was initiated with fellow Kenyon classmate, Patrick B.Williams (’89), whose work Luensman admired. Luensman asked Williams to recreate elements from an early work that contained miniature hand-sculpted cows. Luensman has taken the cows and inserted them into one of his own environments, playfully blending Williams’s work with more recent kinetic and participatory elements of his own. Luensman’s process serves as a very direct reconnection to his past (contacting a former classmate) as well as a more generalized homage to the notion of communal learning (gleaning as much from classmates as professors). Ohio Tru-action Cowzandpigz also engages another of Luensman’s material tactics. The “playing field,” as it were, is the lid of a large stainless steel vat scavenged from a Kenyon salvage yard. (The vat itself has found its way into another of Luensman’s pieces, Thunder Vats and Motor Rain) The lid languished in the studio until, as Luensman states, it “suggested itself” as a natural arena for the cows and pigs to playfully battle for supremacy over the Ohio landscape.

A third approach to collaboration is evidenced in the work Peirce, Chambers & Church (2003). This work highlights Luensman’s pointed hyper-responsiveness to a space and its history. Retro-fitted bike horns, which are installed over the entrance to the gallery, are sequenced on a timed cycle. They animatedly move back and forth, emitting lectures delivered by past presidents of Kenyon (their images hang just beyond the gallery in the library atrium), while one horn interjects an amalgam of lectures by former Professor of English, Philip Church. Church’s influence and ideas have continued to inform Luensman’s work well beyond the classroom. This work interjects an intensely personal history into the broader institutional history of Kenyon College, and in this manner suggests that the college nurtures multi-layered legacies. In this instance, legacies brought to the fore include the polished, enduring public face of Kenyon, as well as the less lofty but profoundly significant impact of the teacher-student relationship. In the gallery, we hear rhetorical, well-mannered lectures by past Kenyon presidents who proclaim the oft-stated mission of the institution in a cacophony of sound. In contrast to this presidential form of address, we also hear Philip Church wrestling performatively in the classroom with the works of Yeats, Woolf and Becket, enacting for his students the deepest meanings of these authors’ learned texts. In amusing fashion, when the Church horn “speaks,” the presidential horns pause and turn deferentially. The technology and apparatus of Peirce, Chamber & Church is juxtaposed with a small, simple gesture that is easily overlooked. Just inside the entrance to the gallery, in a seam in the carpet, Luensman has installed Threshold Fray (2003). Peeking through the seam is a small section of gold leaf, an efficient nod to the history of art, and to the Olin Art Gallery’s history. Luensman playfully points to an underpinning of the gallery, a “hallowed ground” that in its frayed décor evidences the rigors of generations of foot traffic.

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Anthony Luensman, Pearldiver, ceramics, pearls, painted wood, air pump, 72" x 24", 1988-2003