About Looking: An Introduction to the Art of Al Taylor in Five Easy Pieces

Al Taylor, exh cat., Haunch of Venison, London, 2006

‘I have given it a great deal of thought, and, I don’t have anything to say. My work is about looking.’[1] 

 I.

One night in 1992, returning home in New York after a few drinks, Al Taylor found a large plaster marlin, chipped and discarded, in a skip outside an Italian restaurant. Such chance moments were the engine that drove his art and Taylor recognised an opportunity. He carried the fish back to his studio, a fortuitous catch.

In bringing home a cast-off piece of commercial sculpture, sawing it into sections and hanging them on the wall with lengths of wire, Taylor enacted an artistic process that typified many of his concerns: the use of readymade or found objects, willingness to find inspiration in unexpected places, and robust and engaging humour. The exploration of the properties of an object by sectioning it, the suspension of gravity, a kind of deadpan invention, were ideas he returned to again and again.

Having cut it up and hung it in his studio, Taylor made many drawings of the dismembered fish; a group of very beautiful old-masterish studies of the play of light on its flaked scaly sides, a number of brief, tonal sketches, as well as more abstract notations to visualise how it might appear in different configurations. In Taylor’s practice sculpture and drawing were two sides of the same process, ways of wringing the maximum number of returns from any given situation; but also ways of navigating a way on to the next interesting scenario. He embarked on a series of collages using coloured images of fish which were surely cut from a specialist tropical fish-keeping magazine deliberately sourced for this purpose. In the collages he imagined whole schools of fish, all cut into sections and hung off a wall with pieces of wire; hopelessly mixed up, their photo-realism playing up the absurdity of the vision.

Al Taylor’s art was a form of speculative investigation. In the thirty years before his early death in 1999 he developed a diverse body of work in which his thought processes echo back and forth. His inspirations were extraordinarily wide and varied; from the piss stains left by dogs on the pavement, to wave theory, and the possibilities of x-ray vision. Typically, the materials for his sculptures were the things that surrounded him. He worked with what was at hand: scavenged pieces of wood, old broomsticks, tin cans, net floats; whatever was available.

Taylor’s was a unique sensibility: eccentric and curious. His work is a form of questioning. He asks, what if? And having established a (sort of) answer, he modifies the question and asks again, what if now? He himself regarded his work as successful when it transcended his expectations and ‘made itself.’ Al Taylor asked the questions but he didn’t necessarily expect definitive answers.

 II.

 ‘I normally make drawings to forget (record) something that I have been thinking (looking) about; but it usually backfires and just gives me something new to think (look) about (to record). I don’t think too well, but I can look OK.’[2]

 Taylor grew up in Wichita, Kansas and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute[3]. He made his first trip to New York in 1966, moving there permanently in 1970. Soon after he met Robert Rauschenberg and started working for him as a studio assistant in 1975. Through Rauschenberg he met and became friendly with an important group of artists including Brice Marden, James Rosenquist and Cy Twombly

Taylor spent the ensuing fifteen years focusing on painting – exhibiting in group shows but receiving little critical attention - before shifting his emphasis to sculpture and drawing in the mid-1980s. Two important factors contributed to this crucial change in his practice.

In 1980 Taylor travelled with his wife Debbie to Africa. They spent five weeks in Uganda, Kenya and Senegal and for Taylor it was a decisive experience. He was deeply moved by the way people worked with the materials they had to hand; the notion of everyday improvisation and craft. Yet beyond this very practical inspiration there was an important philosophical spur, a question of attitude. He later wrote: ‘My experiences in Africa had a profound effect on both my work and career as an artist. Africa taught me about making do with what you have at hand… Uganda, in particular, taught me that humour is a tool that can be used for much more than personal charm. It was permission to use an element of humour in art.’[4]

The second factor was a period in 1984-85 when he collaborated with the choreographer Meg Eginton on a series of sets for dance performances. He noted that after completing these projects, his loft had become ‘a construction zone instead of a painting studio.’[5] As he would again and again, Taylor responded to his present situation and began to work with the materials and conditions that were available. He made sculptures. He drew them. The drawings suggested different approaches. He made more drawings and more objects. And so on.

From this period onwards Taylor adopted a practice in which ideas were developed simultaneously both as sculptures and drawings, each informing the other, with neither taking precedence. Thus the dog-piss stains he saw on the Avenue Junot in Paris in 1990 would stimulate a series of drawings of ‘pet stains’ and ‘puddles’ which explore the graphic possibilities of liquidity, chance and gravity, while gently mocking the existential rhetoric of abstract expressionism. These in turn suggested the ‘Pet Stain Removal Device’ sculptures and the extraordinary hanging puddles made from rolled steel. Likewise, the idea of sight and sightlines explored in the X-Ray Tube drawings and works such as Shrunken Heads with Vision 1993, was further developed in the Endcuts.[6]

The Endcut drawings function as maps. The sculptures render these in three dimensions. They are cross-sections of sight, but also sighting devices. Taylor was fascinated by the possibilities of seeing through. By cutting the plaster marlin into five ‘parts’ he created a view through its hollow guts – the means of its construction thus revealed – but each section also became a kind of framing device for seeing the other. This aspect of the work was emphasised by Taylor’s decision to hang the fish parts on either side of a doorway, as if it were leaping across the space, so that a viewer could literally pass through it.

Demonstrating how Taylor’s oeuvre is a hall of echoes, a drawing, Untitled 1996 [D-96.198] which grew out of the Endcuts series, seems to visualize a stack of Endcuts or sighting tubes, hung on a wall, one inside the other, like a group of headless and tailless fish parts…..

 III.

 ‘This isn’t sculpture. It’s more like a pile of drawings that you can walk around.’[7] 

 Taylor felt that the world was intuitively seen as flat but experienced as multi-dimensional.[8] One result of this particular understanding of sight and spatial experience was that he tended to regard his sculptures as a form of drawing. In fact, he said: ‘I’m not a sculptor. I am just trying to make a lot of drawings all at once. For me sculpture is about making a lot of drawings efficiently.’[9] This is primarily a comment about the ways that we see the world, but Taylor’s objects certainly do have a drawn character. Open structures, they are about line and space, not mass and volume. The solidity of the metal Endcuts is an exception. Taylor’s sculptures display characteristics typical of drawing: linearity, weightlessness.

As well as sight, it was perhaps also a question of tactics. For Taylor drawing was a means of reflecting on what he had done, and visualising the next move. He said: ‘Everything is possible with just a pencil and paper’[10] 

Despite this, it is interesting to consider that Taylor, who spent the first ten years of his career as an artist concentrating on painting, always regarded himself as a painter. He was, as he described it, trying to find ways of ‘backing into painting.’[11] 

 IV.

 How then can we locate Al Taylor? He belongs to no school or movement. His sensibility is unique. For a British audience the early work of Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth is perhaps a reference point for aspects of Taylor’s project. In Cragg’s figurative – drawn – accumulations of plastic detritus, made in the 1980s, and Wentworth’s oxymoronic objects (and especially his ongoing series of photographs, Making Do and Getting By) punning wit is allied to serious consideration of the materials of the world and the conditions of contemporary life.

In the US his work displays an aesthetic empathy with that of the group of artists with whom he was friendly; Rauschenberg, Marden and, in particular, Twombly. Yet, despite a number of shared characteristics – the use of the everyday things of the world, an occupation of the gap between art and life (in Rauschenberg’s distinctive formulation), and the provisional nature of the finished work – Taylor’s art is distinct. His use of wire and predilection for hanging structures recall Alexander Calder and certain works by Richard Tuttle, but again, ultimately, such comparisons don’t lead us any closer to Taylor’s work. In this sense, he is an artist who makes his own world.

The artist who was perhaps most important to Taylor, and who most informed his work, was Marcel Duchamp. Mimi Thompson has perceptively suggested that Duchamp and Taylor ‘shared a concern with making an object outside the confines of, but in dialogue with, the idea of fine art. The use of measurements which seem indeterminate or skewed reveal both artists’ penchant for making rules or systems that are meant to be shattered when the game becomes boring.’[12]

They also both embraced the idea of chance as a generator of art. However, their attitudes differ. Taylor’s views are perhaps typified by a characteristically comic aside: ‘Let’s say an ink bottle falls over, or let’s say my dog walks across some wet ink on a drawing that was drying. Normally that would make me a little angry. But if the dog draws good that could make me a little happy…’[13] 

 V.

 Humour can be a serious tool, as Taylor learnt in Africa. The playfulness of his art should not be confused with frivolity. He said: ‘If a viewer realizes that they are looking at drawings of levitated urine stains they might laugh, but when they leave the exhibition and they come across a dog piss stain on the street they might approach it differently. Art should give you a new perception, new ways of seeing life.’[14] 

It is an oft-repeated cliché that the work of certain artists offers us a new way of seeing the world. In the case of Al Taylor the truism is absolutely true. After seeing his work it is impossible to walk the pavements without viewing the tapestry of ‘stains’ and ‘puddles’ in an entirely different light; the networks of overhead wires that map the space above our heads, casting shadows onto the road surface on a bright day; the way a window frames a view; the chance arrangement of scrap wire and an empty window frame in a skip; light reflected in the surface of a cup of tea. Al Taylor delivers ‘new perceptions’. All these chance things, happy coincidences, everyday circumstances, offer the possibility of revelation.

[1] Unpublished notes, May/June 1990

[2] Quoted in Michael Semff (ed.), Al Taylor: Drawings, exh cat., Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2006, p.67

[3] He studied there 1966-70. In 1969 he also attended the Yale University Summer School of Music and Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme.

[4] Al Taylor, unpublished notes, December 1998

[5] Ibid.

[6] Just as Taylor created a puddle in steel, and then subjected it to the force of gravity by hanging it from the ceiling, the Endcuts render cones of light as solids - or more accurately as voids defined by solids - and were put together by a blacksmith. Taylor delighted in a counter-intuitive use of materials, rendering light and water in solid metal.

[7] Quoted in Semff, iop cit., p.117

[8] ‘These works probably came about because I wear glasses. My eyes tell me that things are flat, my experience tells me something else. I try to believe what I see.’ Unpublished notes, May/June 1990

[9] Quoted in Semff, iop cit., p.117

[10] Ulrich Loock and Al Taylor, ‘A Conversation’ in Al Taylor, exh cat., Kunsthalle Bern, 1992, p. 36

[11] Unpublished notes, May 1986

[12] Mimi Thompson, ‘First you turn on the power, then you can change the channel’ in Al Taylor: Lures & Cures, exh cat., Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1999, p.61

[13] Taylor, 1992, p.38

[14] Taylor, 1992, p.48