But questions remain: Why is it significant that the five colorful Marcel Breuer chairs in the piece Untitled Action Sculpture (Five Enron Chairs), 2007, were taken from the Enron offices? A museum exhibition can be an opportunity to show an artist’s B sides, or bring out the subtext of a body of work—the kinds of things the tight focus of gallery exhibitions and group shows doesn’t tend to accommodate. But here, what Mr. Guyton means to say about Enron is tough to suss out. The inclusion of an early work, The Devil’s Hole from 1999—two small photographs of red-lit spelunkers in a cave—is also opaque. The presence of these awkward pieces only makes one feel relief at the fact that Mr. Guyton has stopped using original subject matter. Critics like The Brooklyn Rail’s John Yau have called out Mr. Guyton for a lack of “curiosity of any sort” as an artist, and therefore such moments of engagement with the world are worth some explanation. (Potentially a better use for wall text than those how-tos.) Mainly, though, Mr. Guyton’s early, Erased de Kooning moments revolve around eminently legible encounters with modernism: one evening in 2001, he found a Breuer chair on the street in the East Village, and wrestled its steel armature into a sculpture; the resulting Untitled Action Sculpture (Chair), (2001) also on display at the Whitney, indicates a face-off with high modernism that is easily resolved by the piece’s installation in the Whitney’s Brutalist Breuer building.
But it is fitting for a young artist that the exhibition looks forward, rather than backward. Instead of dwelling on juvenilia, “OS” gives us two monumental new works. Untitled (2011) consists of twin canvases that mirror the Whitney’s grey concrete walls. The red and puce striped friezes of Untitled (2012) have a museum-scale ambition that tests the pretty, gallery-friendly formalism of his work. That much of what is included here is borrowed from the collection of the artist, rather than from an institution or collector, gives the show a present-tense feel.
If Picasso’s and Andy Warhol’s most biting work was often about something—the Spanish Civil War, car crashes, presidential assassinations, sex, America’s most-wanted criminals—Mr. Guyton’s relatively hermetic body of work evinces no desire to sully art with the stuff of life. Mr. Guyton’s true subject may be the museum itself, and the process of making images. Some might say this is art about nothing; others will point out that the medium is the message.
editorial@observer.com