Doggie-style perspective isn’t above a grade-school joke. The myopic have four eyes. (4-Eyed Dog, Pencil on paper)
Currently at Ambach & Rice, Eric Yahnker draws as if the camera hadn’t been invented and he’s the unreliable narrator assigned to keep a record. Exactitude is his straight man. He renders tongue, teeth, slack lip, the golden shine on the short hair to set up the punchline.
Another artist who drew this well would stick to drawings, but Yahnker has the nervous energy of a comic on stage. Visual jokes tumble from him. Part of the joke is their production: Serious craftsmanship is essential to being absurd and saves him from the trap of visual one-liners.
Dorothy’s trip to bright lights, green city exposed a sham. If she’d read a little Existentialism, would she have bothered to go? Online, the drawing itself is hard to see, but in person, pencil on paper orchestras a drama – soft light pools across the top of her head as shadows curl around her fingers and deepen into the nape of her neck.
Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacement is the source of Yahnker’s Analogous To The Fall Of That One Empire (Moby Dick); roughly a million cut-out and alphabetized letters from Moby Dick on 27 mirrored panels (26 for the letters in the alphabet and one more for punctuation).
It’s also a tribute to Andy Kaufman, who read The Great Gatsby on stage.(here on YouTube). What to do with a masterpiece? Scholars who analyze cut it up, while cut ups like Yahnker take the process to its literal (and fatal) end.
Less Than Zero to 101 is a shelf full of CDs cassette tapes, LP’s, books and magazines whose titles number in order from <0 to 101. Less Than Zero, Absolute Zero, The Beatles 1, Two Dads, 2 1/2 Men, Three Amigos! Four Brothers….7th Heaven, 7th Season, …12 Monkeys…18-Year-Old Virgin, 26 Gasoline Stations…36 Hours to Die…Around the World in 80 Days to 101 Dalmatians.
Detail:
Yahnker is a maker run deliberately amuck. His methods are rigorous, and his results absurd but not frivolous.
Analogous To The Fall Of That One Empire (Gap Shirt), shirt in which all of the thread has been removed excluding the pinstripe pattern:
Drew Daly did something similar with chairs: Whittling away a sturdy one to produce a pair of barely-there ghosts.Yahnker began unthreading the shirt after Bush was elected for the second time, in 2004. The empire that fell is our own.
Jake Yahnker says
interesting stuff as always Eric… 🙂