Rob Cherry - Transmission

15 December - 30 January 2000 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight: he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from past and future; he is wrenched from the uncertainty of time; he is outside time; in other words he is in a state of ecstasy.

Milan Kundera

To chart the territory occupied by Robert Cherry’s latest work, we need a strange set of co-ordinates: imagine a vector diagram where the ‘x’ axis is ‘modernist painting’ and the ‘y’ axis is ‘heavy metal music’. The point where these two lines of force might conceivably intersect—somewhere around AC/DC’s Live Wire album, c.1975—might loosely be termed ‘transcendence’. Simultaneously recalling the hard-edged geometric abstraction of mid-century modernism and the racing stripes of 1970s muscle cars, Cherry’s paintings are hybrid objects, belonging simultaneously to two artistic traditions—both of which, respectively high brow and low rent, are concerned with driving towards a better place.

It would be too easy to suggest that Cherry’s paintings are all about cars and girls: that his intention might be on the one hand to offer up an ironic comment about rites of passage for young men in Western society (Version A: didactic); or on the other to provide an intellectual cut-and-polish to greasy teenage male fantasies about the curves of a classy chassis (Version B: gratuitous). Cherry’s work is infinitely more complex and more interesting than either of these options. Likewise, simply to note that Cherry’s paintings speak the language of international modernism is to miss the point of what these works might have to say.

The images give shape to what has shaped Cherry: objects of desire variously manifest as heavy metal music, fast cars and modernist art. There is a compressed economy to Cherry’s practice, whereby layered fictions and memories are built up over a single spot like the automotive spray lacquer used to construct his paintings. Commenting that listening to heavy metal as a teenager was the first time he experienced transcendence, Cherry has compared the effect of his work with ‘the temporary pick-me-up’ of a guitar solo.

To be transcendent is to be out of one’s time, released from the tyranny of consciousness. It is to give oneself over to the inexorable rush of the speeding moment and thereby intensify one’s hold over life. In the 1950s, conceptual artist Tony Smith found transcendence one night driving fast on the unfinished New Jersey turnpike, when he realised that the filmic intensity of this modern experience signalled the end of pictorial art. ‘There’s no way you can frame it,’ he said, ‘You just have to experience it.’

Robert Cherry has found a way to make paintings that transmit such an experience. Their associative quality reveals the possibility of muscle cars to function as fast-moving modernism, or for abstract paintings to be viewed as potential styling for sleek bodywork—auto-abstraction. If they are ‘about’ anything, Cherry’s works might be about the enduring power of the image to stand as a symbol for a utopian dream—whether in the noble failed manifestos of early 20th century modernism, or in what cultural historian Greil Marcus has described as ‘pop culture’s unpredictable interplay of three minute utopias of sound and everyday life.’ Cherry’s work is tinged with nostalgia for a lost historical moment. He comments: ‘It was as if we reached a utopia in the 1970s, but no one noticed until it was too late.’

 

Lara Strongman