Disk and Diamond Pulse
—New Work by Head Clausnitzer

In our day-to-day culture, we are constantly encouraged to get into single file behind new and sometimes disingenuous expressions of the times. Obey your thirst and finding the real thing blend together in our minds with the likes of have it your way or be all you can be. Fortunately, the arts counterbalance slogans that box us in intellectually, and spiritually as well. If there is a mission for art, it is clearly to allow people an opportunity to think outside of the box.

Head Clausnitzer is an artist who is used to thinking outside of the box. His show for Micro Museum titled “Disk and Diamond Pulse” is a case in point. In this show, we are liberated from conventional square or rectangular paintings, and treated to a crazy clash of inventive modern design and New Media materials, all on canvas shapes that seem to allow for maximum optical play.

In fact, Clausnitzer’s work operates very much at a highly optical as well as retinal level. His pictures pulse and radiate with color harmonies which create a sense that the artist’s work is operating at the brink of chaos while, oddly reassuringly, remaining firmly grounded. His pictures seem to swirl and dodge out into the space in front of them just at the tip of a viewer’s nose. However, turn away, and then back and all will become still, as if the optical movement of a lenticular has come to rest at its median point.

During the summer of 2003, the UK-based Op artist Bridget Riley enjoyed major attention in Europe on the occasion of her retrospective exhibition at the Tate Britain in London. Also, a renewed interest in the once over-exposed Op artist Victor Vasarely has emerged. Both artists’ reputations suffered during the ‘80s and ‘90s for various reasons, but now it seems they are back and ready for prime time (though perhaps, of a different sort) once again in Europe as well as here in New York.

While Clausnitzer recognizes, and on many levels, admires these two artists as well as others of their kind, as influences, he states that his work “does not (seek to) boggle the senses” as does the work of these artists. He maintains that “taking visually dazzling surface effects too far can close down other possibilities in a work.” He goes so far as to say that “after all, Op art was all about dazzle and not about depth.” He points out that, regardless of the real visual joys in Riley’s work, it is “all merely surface play,” sort of like light effects on water, evanescent, gone in an instant. Likewise, Clausnitzer maintains that Vasarely had a tendency to overplay the “Zowie!-effect,” setting up a simple surface premise and then in a show of “retinal chutzpah,” bending the compositions in his works in and out upon themselves. To Clausnitzer, once observed, these eye-popping effects cease to satisfy.

The “depths” in a picture he refers to are not only the literal depths inherent in the act of creating three-dimensional effects on a two-dimensional framework, that has been part of the picture maker’s enterprise for centuries, but also, the pictorial creation of movement and a sensation of interactive time. With all this however, he hopes not to be overbearing or to dominate the overall judgement that the viewers of his art may realize individually.

Regardless of the current resurgence of respect for pure painting and graphite drawing—both of which he is strongly capable of—Clausnitzer’s utilization of a New Media approach is positively pioneering in the world of visual art. Clausnitzer is a contemporary creator, and yet he is uncomfortable with these declarations because, as he points out, “there are so many artists working in innovative ways.” To me however, the larger point of view should be that his work is pushing the envelope in unique directions.

In Clausnitzer’s work, there is an important digression from a complete alignment with the technically driven side of world New Media art. This digression serves to set up an edgy relationship in his work between “slick production values and the old fashioned evidence of the artist’s hand.” New Media is being embraced as a total methodology, but it is frequently unable to look immediate and fresh, to appear spontaneous, and is nearly always unable to deliver breathy energy. By their very nature, New Media methods are not personal in these ways, as well as in others. They are in fact once or twice removed from original sources. Clausnitzer’s ability to create compelling pictures that utilize technological effects in ways that give us a hand-made feel is a driving factor in all of his works on display at Micro Museum.

It is in this New Media approach that Clausnitzer finds himself at his most inventive. Inspired by the many new mediums available to artists of all kinds these days, he at the same time sees new questions and problems arising for picture makers. He also sees that a few artists are beginning to address these issues. Such notions as “when should the evidence of an artist’s hand or his or her thinking processes in a work of New Media art be made apparent and thus incorporated as a part of the overall esthetic of a finished work?” The development of modern visual technologies has tended increasingly toward a perfection of product. Clausnitzer believes that we find part of our enjoyment of visual art in the evidences of the act of creation. These are, of course, brush strokes or pencil marks and the small glitches of surface that are left behind in a piece of art that says to us that this thing was made by hand.

When I asked Clausnitzer to cite whom he shared an affinity with among the New Media Artists working today, he referenced Torben Giehler and Polly Apfelbaum, for starters. In these artists’ works, we see that they are striving for an energetic amalgam between the new-fangled and the old-fashioned. In important ways, Clausnitzer, along with Giehler and Apfelbaum, is making a bridge effort in the current arts conversation by insisting on making art with New Media that is uniquely personal in all the ways that we have traditionally thought of as personal. Clausnitzer seeks not to cover his tracks or to put one over on anyone while they are viewing his work.

Most of Clausnitzer’s works are photographically derived.We still think of photography as the epigraphic medium of our time, and the artist believes that this will remain a fact into the future whether images come from “a shutter and film and emulsions, pixels, or dpi.” Clausnitzer photographs and employs in his work fields of color that are either observed from what is around him or obtained from commercial color systems. But he also photographs things other than color fields. He favors domestic objects with high design content, architectural motifs, and “well-manicured” landscapes— particularly business campuses or modern houses. Sometimes he re-photographs images from published materials from the public domain that reflect these interests.

If Clausnitzer’s work sounds like collage, this is emphatically not the case. There is no paper present on his canvases. Unique to his art making alone, the surfaces of his work are thinly applied areas of color and imagery that are skimmed from the surfaces of his photographs. For lack of a better way of describing this new method of applying image to canvas, in the past, the artist has called these skimmed areas “photo-skins.” The combination of photography and actual paint that sits on the surface of the works and is so thinly applied that each medium whispers to the viewer instead of dominating the overall effects is but one of the physical qualities exhibited in this beguiling series of canvases. Each overlay creates dimension and each textural component creates depth.

I said above that the artist puts into his compositions well-placed slices of the figurative things he photographs. As his abstract pictures seem to bubble up and out from the canvas, it becomes apparent how grounding these figurative elements are in his work. By grounding I mean that these things offer visual anchors that allow us to enter more fully into the life of the picture before us. Snippets of photographs of lamps, chairs, windows, and corners of buildings become abstract structural motifs that set up entrance points and references that help us enter the work of the overall abstraction. Everything percolates with connections from within the picture and then seems to engage our minds in associations from the world around us.

Clausnitzer seems almost acutely aware of the ideas of those who precede him in the flow of art history and how their thoughts might compare with his own. Some of these people might have turned up their esthetic noses at the thought of incorporating images of corporeal things into abstract work and he knows it. In the artist’s view, and despite these reservations about aspects of his own art making, he points out that there are divergent points of view on how best to bring forward abstract art now. He believes that, in its worst tendencies, current abstraction has to be understood as foundering in regressive gestures. As a practitioner of abstract art who seems to see possibilities for further development in this direction, the artist seeks to comport himself well with all that is progressively satisfying in the art of our time. He seems willing to try to expand upon the conceptual framework laid down in the past.

The circular and diamond shapes suspended on the walls of Micro Museum evoke portals or openings into a place where lights and shapes, and maybe even atoms, sprite and wheel and cavort. The shuffling and shifting and hinging weights in these extroverted compositions evoke the freedom of the energetic movement inherent to dance. This seems to be one of Clausnitzer's natural themes as he demonstrates his command of materials, his intuitive sensitivity, and his compositional expertise. The playful balance of shapes and colors in his work for Micro Museum reflect from wall to wall as we pass between them, just as in a funhouse, where opposing mirrors reflect upon one another into infinity. Yet stand still, and focus on just one work, and you will be treated to an inter-dimensional play of surface elements and sunken treasures.

—Kathleen Laziza
Curator and Director, Micro Museum
Catalogue Essay for Clausnitzer’s Show at Micro Museum
Titled, Disk and Diamond Pulse
October 11 – November 20, 2003

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