A Spellbinding Conversation with Allan Wexler

Photo Credit : Claire Esparros

Allan Wexler (b. 1949) was an early member of the group of architects and artists who questioned the perceived divide between art and the design disciplines in the late 1960s. They called themselves Non-architects or Paper Architects. In 2017, Lars Müller published Absurd Thinking: Between Art and Design, a book on Wexler’s work and creative process. The book features projects developed across the artist’s career that mediate the gap between fine and applied art using the mediums of architecture, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing.

Wexler earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts (1971) and his Bachelor of Architecture (1972) from RISD and his Master of Architecture from Pratt Institute (1976). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a winner of both a Chrysler Award for Design Innovation and the Henry J. Leir Prize from the Jewish Museum. He has executed and collaborated on public art commissions at several locations, including Hudson River Park at 29th Street (2006), Atlantic Terminal, Long Island Railroad (2009), and Pratt Institute (2008, 2012), among many others. Wexler has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at La Arsenale, Biennale Architettura, Venice, IT; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA; Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, Hagen, GE; De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; among many others. Wexler currently teaches at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

SANDRO: Could you elaborate on the theme of Probably True and how it aligns with or departs from the conceptual frameworks you've explored in your previous works?

ALLAN: My current exhibition at Jane Lombard Gallery, Probably True, continues with many of the themes and experiments that have always been the core of my work.

The two-dimensional works in this show continue an exploration of man’s first actions and interactions with landscape. A shovel is forced into the ground. We lift earth skyward. We turn solid into void and back into solid. My works take you on a journey through an invented history of architecture and civilization. The sculpture and photo-based images in this exhibition define those first acts.

Many of the works in this exhibition originate from a landscape sculpted from plaster and white museum board. The plaster, the chisel, the scrapers become my “actual” shovel and rake. The camera allows me to enter, the lens are my eyes. It is photo-shopped, printed in twelve parts, tiled together by aligning registration marks, glued to wood panels. Graphite, pastel and colored pencils highlight and re-shade.

The seeds for many of these images originated during my fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2005 where I discovered On the Art of Building in Ten Books by Leon Battista Alberti. This Renaissance primer on architecture inspired my work. They take us back to basic principles and simple acts in and on the land.

Other three-dimensional works included in Probably True, some as early as 1989, help to contextualize the current work and reveal continuity of theme and experimentation.

Courtesy of the artist and Jane Lombard Gallery

S: Your practice often blends functionality with absurdity, challenging traditional notions of utility. How do you see this interplay evolving in pieces like Interchange or Light Table?

A:  Albert Einstein said that if an idea is not absurd there is no use for it. Duchamp removed function from useful objects. I remove function from common human experiences to uncover and highlight what lies beneath our daily lives. I then return the functionless back to objects that appear to be functional once again.

My work was inspired by the music of Steve Reich and John Cage and other composers of serial music or phase music. For me the Chair is a fixed phrase to be held as a constant. The scientific method is used. With each experiment a different variable could be introduced to help break through preconceptions as to what a chair could become. Interchange is an example of one of many pieces that transform the ordinary chair. As a metaphor for human interaction the chair activates ritual and ceremony.

A few years I began “updating” the Futurist Cookbook first published in 1932 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as an extension of my work with food, dinnerware and eating related sculpture. Light Table is a sculpture from that series. Light sources are housed below a tabletop transmitting light through clear glass dinnerware. We have invited a chef to prepare a meal of transparent and translucent food which will be staged in the darkened gallery.

S: The transformation of objects, such as in Burnt Chair / Charcoal Drawing, reveals a cyclical relationship between material and meaning. What inspired you to explore this dynamic, and how do you see it resonating with contemporary audiences?

A:  In 1990, I built a chair everyday for 16 days, creating Chair A Day. In 2007, I revisited this work beginning with my alterations to existing IKEA Stefan chairs. I drew an axonometric drawing of the Stefan chair and made fifty-four photocopies. Consciously, I forced myself to see the copies as lines on pages rather than representations of chairs. With pencil, knife, paper and glue the images were augmented, dissected, wrinkled spliced, cut and collaged. After a brief time away, I looked at the drawings and saw them as possible proposals for seating. The drawings became chairs that are physical manifestations of abstract drawings.

Burnt Chair / Charcoal Drawing, a realization from one of the above pages, is both a chair and an axonometric drawing using a piece of charcoal that is a burnt fragment of the chair portrayed in the drawing.

S: You’ve drawn from the Fluxus movement and pedagogy in your work. How do these influences manifest in the new series of “landscape interventions” introduced in this exhibition?

A:  The Fluxus movement was a big influence on my work. I was first introduced to their work through a friend of one of my Rhode Island School of Design professors, Raimund Abraham. Dieter Roth experimented with decay and materials that were never associated with art making. Daniel Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance continues to be an inspiration which preserves a random moment in time. My landscape interventions imagine the origins of civilization constructed from materials like earth and trees that would have eroded or decayed leaving no historical record. Hence, we are left with a history only revealed through stone as in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Courtesy of the artist and Jane Lombard Gallery

S: Your work often engages with themes of human intervention in nature, as seen in Reframing Nature. How do you view the role of architecture and design in navigating the boundary between organic and artificial environments?

A:  Armed with a tape measure and an axe, I went into the woods to explore the roots of architecture. Searching for sacred space, I measured the distance between trees searching for a perfect square but failed. Three trees were chosen and another cut down. Scaffold was attached to support this additional tree. A square formed when the portable tree was moved into relation with the others. I called this “Architecture.”

About forty years later I built Reframing Nature. As I get older, I am realizing that I have very few ideas and I continue to experiment with them.

Courtesy of the artist and Jane Lombard Gallery

S: Having a career spanning over fifty years, you were part of a group of architects and artists in the late 1960s who questioned the divide between art and design. How do you see the relevance of those early ideas in today's multidisciplinary art practices?

A:  The late sixties, during the Vietnam War, were a period of great social turmoil in the United States. As students in architecture, we were disenchanted with the current state of the profession. Alternately we engaged in a practice of anti-architecture, de-architecture, non-architecture or paper architecture. Art galleries and journals became forums for the development of a new architecture. 

S: Your approach frequently involves reimagining ordinary domestic objects to foster new social interactions. Could you discuss how this intention plays out in works like Extruded Dinnerware and what they reveal about our daily rituals?

A:  Spaces shape our behavior. Spaces are transformed by our use. I make theater out of everyday life. I investigate how daily habits, and deep-seated rituals inform the spaces we inhabit. The human form is rarely depicted - its presence implied. I am less concerned with creating architecture and furniture and more with the human spirit within the spaces where we dwell.

Projects like Extruded Dinnerware attempt to illuminate how our environment shapes us, how spaces we inhabit choreograph relationships between strangers, couples and family. The Japanese tea ceremony has been a rich source of inspiration for me. This ancient tradition gives pause to each action and element of a simple activity.  

S: In your teaching at Parsons, do you find that your students’ perceptions of architecture and design align with or challenge the principles you've championed in your career? How does teaching influence your practice?

A:  I have taught for many years at Parsons but more recently at Pratt Institute where I offer a cross disciplinary elective with architecture, industrial design and interior design students. Last semester the course called The Fine Art of Applied Art introduced students to contemporary art. They worked on short term projects that balanced between art and design. Next semester the course, Food Space, will explore how the ordinary objects and spaces for eating and food preparation can become ritual, ceremony, and theater. We will reconsider food preparation and delivery, as fine art and culinary art. Students will consider nourishment as food for body and food for thought.

My job as a teacher is to direct and guide from behind not leading but pushing the hesitant student to go further, to push ideas, to develop the theme, to reinforce the concept.  The concept is the drive, the urge and the need. When off the track how do I as a teacher guide a student back on track. When is it OK to allow students to take another track?

Teaching for me is what Joseph Beuys called Social Sculpture.

For more information about Allan’s artwork, please visit his website here. He can also be found on Instagram. The magazine did a showcase feature on his latest exhibition, which can be found here.