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Artist Exhibitions:
William Radawec
BORN: Cleveland, Ohio
EDUCATION: Baldwin-Wallace
College, B.A., 1974
University of New Mexico, 1975
SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2007 Out of the Blue…, exit
(a gallery space), Cleveland
2005 (A Study), raw & co
gallery, Cleveland
2004 Berlitz Visual Art
Gallery, New York
Sawtelle, the Sequel,
Beaker Gallery, Tampa
2003 ...
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Artist Statement for Bill Radawec
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Art in America
Feb, 2003
Bill Radawec at Shaheen Contemporary - Cleveland
Thomas McEvilley
Bill Radawec was living in Los Angeles when the big earthquake of 1994 hit. His apartment developed cracks in the walls at about 40 places. He decided to make an art work of the earthquake damage. Ascending a ladder, carrying a drawing board, he drew each of the cracks in detail and measured the depths of the various parts of each fissure, which were between one and five millimeters deep. He marked the corresponding parts of each drawing with a number, 1 through 5, to indicate the depth of the fissure at that exact point.
Then he took sheets of paper one millimeter thick. On the first one he drew the uppermost layer of a crack and cut it out with an X-acto knife. Putting another sheet underneath that one, he drew the parts that were one millimeter deep, and cut them out. Then, with another sheet, he drew the parts that were two millimeters deep, cut them out, and so on. The drawing was done with pen, pencil and Wite-Out. Finally each crack was represented by a stack of five sheets that replicated it in three dimensions. In each case the uppermost sheet was painted the color of his walls at the time, a pale tan. The 40 or so obsessive drawings were then framed.
The result is a series of trompe I'oeil representations of earthquake damage rendered so precisely and convincingly that, upon seeing them, one at first thinks the artist removed the sections of plaster and framed them. Even upon close inspection they do not reveal themselves as representations, but seem real.
The glimpses of damage are esthetically appealing. Each drawing turns out to have a particular allure that is unique. Yet, despite their credibility and charm as drawings, they clearly partake of the spirit of conceptual art. In fact, they treat a classical theme of conceptual art that might be called the problem of the wall. In the 1960s and early `70s, conceptual artists in general regarded the wall with suspicion, as the site of painting, which seemed polluted by its long-standing complicity with the market system. Earlier, Duchamp had responded to this feeling by placing his works on the floor or hanging them from the ceiling, avoiding the ideologically saturated wall. In the early conceptualist period many variations on this theme were rung, by William Anastasi, Lawrence Weiner and others.
Radawec has produced an elegant variation on this theme 30 years later, when many of the concerns of classical conceptualism are being reinvestigated. His version has traits that show the passage of years and the softening of the austere, earlier principles. Radawec's works, for example, are made by hand rather than by a mechanical method; being drawings, they represent the most traditional of art-school disciplines; they are framed like more traditional art works, although they show only the wall itself; and so on. This elegant and intelligent show encapsulated a good swath of recent art history.
The fact that the works show earthquake damage--and in fact enshrine it--suggests the deep damage that the quake of conceptualism wrought to the tradition of the artist's hand and its touch. Yet, with an ironic circularity that is another classical conceptual theme, they represent this deep fissure in art history through the very qualities of drawing, hand and touch that the original conceptualists hoped to destroy forever.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
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