Mirage of Loose Change

Gary Webb – The art of Supercalifragilisticoespialidoso
Katya Garcia Anton
(p. 33-34)


Gary Webb's vertiginous approach to colour material and composition, make him one of the most daring sculptors of his generation. The sense of mutability, instability and visual tension that his works generate is derived from a mixed bag of references embracing Pop art, Minimalism, New Generation sculpture, Kinetic art and the Tropicalia movement. Mining these sources is neither contradictory nor illustrative of a fickle pickand- mix attitude by the artist. What it demonstrate is Webb's innate understanding of the causes for the fall of Modernism and a desire to develop contemporary approaches from the contradictions trapped within its ruins.

Sculptural production went through somewhat of a revolution on both sides of the Atlantic in the1960s. This was characterized on the one hand by a fascination with the city recently introduced by Pop art, and on the other hand, by the extension of painterly discourse three-dimensionally. The new British sculpture of Anthony Caro and Phillip King(1). American Minimalism of the same period showed similar interests. Dan Flavin privately joked that his sculptures were better described as being “maximalist”, thus emphasizing their bold chromatic effect over the economy of means he employed (2). “It's best to consider everything as colour”, said Donald Judd, whose play with surface, colour and reflection is directly connected to the spaces and surfaces of the modern city (3). It is not too far fetched to see Judd's oeuvre as an extension of the painting of modern life, initiated by the Impressionists, towards its actual embodiment (4). In the transition from twodimensionality to three-dimensionality that we encounter during the1960s, the material becomes the referent and by representing the world outside these new artistic approaches shattered the very foundations of the Modernist doctrine.

Once we become aware of this process, it is a short step to understand that this artistic transition was much like a carnivalesque revolution (a Bakhtinian term that alludes to a breakdown of hierarchies). Webb's apparently feverish referencing of his predecessors develops facets of Modernist repression that are recently being critically revisited. A carnivalesque approach is indeed a vital part of Webb's practice today, both in the “vulgar” colours of urbanity that he mobilizes to corrupt and renew his practice, as well as in the base materials of popular culture that he lassoes into his work. Furthermore, art today has a promiscuous relationship with design, fashion and architecture, and Webb is an active contributor to this situation. For example, Webb uses glimmering 1970s textiles in The Creator has a Master Plan, mirrors in Swiss Split, candy-coloured glass and plastic in Mr Miami, as well as car-sprayed surfaces and neon tubes in Come Air. If the aesthetic revolution of the 1960s looked towards the trappings of urbanity for inspiration, this came with a new chromatic code: shiny, glimmering and artificial.

If Webb investigates chromatic urban excess, he also moves one stage further by exploring popular music as a defining element of the contemporary urban experience. Muppet Box's pulsating disco lights, for example, echo the Bee Gees 1970s hit “Saturday Night Fever”; Kylie Mynogue's chart buster 2002 song “Cant get you out of my head” is evoked in the form and title of Cant get out of my head, 2005; and finally in Mr Miami the artist broadcasts a recording of his own voice whose syncopated and highly abstract rendition mirrors the solfean [staff-like?] forms of the sculpture itself.

In Webb's practice everything is transformable; visually and onomatopoeically mutable. His sculptural practice not only stands as a painterly rendition of the contemporary experience, but it claims as vast a field as possible within which to operate. It revives the dialogue between painting and sculpture and challenges in the process our perceived ideas of what is possible today when using colour, sound, movement and material three dimensionally.