Placeholder image: flier for spring 2010 CCAI Courthouse Gallery exhibition. Design by Simpson Creative.

CCAI Courthouse Gallery
February 9 – May 7, 2010

On the occasion of the artist's fiftieth year of creative practice in northern Nevada, the Capital City Arts Initiative is honored to present Work Bench Project, a site-specific work by Jim McCormick at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery. Below is a catalog essay by art historian Marcia Cohn Growdon, former Chief Curator and Director of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Please note that while the essay is complete, CCAI plans to update it in the future with additional illustrations and links.

We are grateful to the artist and writer for their brilliant efforts, to our colleagues at the Carson City Courthouse for their collaboration, and to the many generous donors whose financial support has helped make this project possible.

Jon Winet
Curator
June 2010

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Jim McCormick: Work Bench Project

A. workbench: noun; a sturdy table at which an artisan works

B. bench: noun; has as many as twenty meanings, of which at least
three refer to the judiciary, e.g.:
1. a seat occupied by an official, esp. a judge.
2. such a seat as a symbol of the office and dignity of an individual
judge or the judiciary. [i]

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CENTRAL to artist Jim McCormick’s original concept of this exhibition was that it connect with the people who work in the Carson City Courthouse, and that it should be a catalyst for community building within the work sphere of the Court House. McCormick has long been interested in and committed to the idea of workers, rather than employees. Work is the active form of being employed, and there is a long history of idealism about labor in the United States, going back into the 19th century. McCormick’s interest in the dignity of work comes out of his family history, beginning with great-grandparents who were part of a group of idealist immigrants known as La Réunion. La Réunion established a short-lived socialist commune outside of Dallas, Texas in 1855. [ii] Coming out of the Depression years in Oklahoma, McCormick’s family reared him with a respect for workers and workers’ rights, an interest further fostered by the principals of the Unitarian Universalist Church, an organization with which McCormick has a life-long affiliation. Thus, the opportunity to design an exhibition to engage the Courthouse workers in the exhibit was wholly appealing to McCormick.

Gordon Peteran, an artist best known for his interpretation of furniture as sculpture (and vice versa), once “…drilled a hole in the surface of a fellow furniture maker’s expensive new workbench and sunk a compass into it. …A maker’s bench, and the studio surrounding it [was] a still center with which to navigate the world.”[iii] I was reading about craft and skill sets, and was struck by Peteran’s Workbench (Compass). It seemed an apt metaphor for McCormick, as well as for this project: work bench at the heart of the studio, with a reliable guide (compass) to the world, and yet a place from which the artist can explore wherever his imagination will take him. Work Bench Project is a collaboration between McCormick and almost two dozen workers.

Before turning to the artwork itself, there is the matter of the title for this show. It seems straight forward, and yet, embodied within it is another aspect of the artist’s personality. There is nothing Jim McCormick likes better than a pun. He understands punning as a reflection of the flexibility of the English language, and he delights in extending puns into the visual realm. In fact, it is difficult to have a conversation or an email exchange with McCormick, without him slipping in at least one groaner of a pun! But they are never mean spirited. The puns alert us to alternative possibilities of understanding, whether it be a phrase or an image. [iv] So the Work Bench Project, with its gentle pun, asks all the participants – artist, workers, visitors -- to meditate about the people who daily make the Court House workplace function.

McCormick began his career over fifty years ago in Oklahoma as a painter, concerned in those days of surrealist-influenced abstraction, with symbols, especially banners and flags. McCormick counts as important influences on his thinking artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, but he also includes the important social realist artists Käthe Kollwitz and Alexandre Hogue. In 1960, when McCormick joined the faculty at the University of Nevada, Reno, he was asked to teach in many media. He left behind painting to pursue printmaking, drawing, collage and as the years progressed, other mixed media. His subject matter ranged broadly from social justice issues to natural forms drawn from landscape to utilitarian and found objects, sometimes things as simple as a man’s tie. [v] McCormick says that despite the fashion of abstraction that dominated so much of the American art world in the mid-20th century, he found his interests rooted in the object, with an overriding interest in the tactile, often sculptural quality of the object, even when the finished artwork was two dimensional. [vi]

The art in this exhibit represents collaboration between the artist and the owners of the component objects which they scoured from their desks. The owners, trusting that the artist would treat them with respect, allowed him to explore what the tumble of miscellany might mean or reveal. This is not the first time McCormick has engaged in collaboration. Perhaps his most notable experiment was his Artist in Residence installation in 1980, for which he moved all the furnishings of his living room to the Sheppard Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno. He was then in residence twenty-four hours a day for two weeks, interacting with whoever came to visit or wandered through! Of course, the whole operation was a lovely pun on the academic tradition of visiting artists-in-residence.

The other aspect of the Work Bench Project that is deeply rooted in McCormick’s work, is the use of ordinary objects, in this case objects which are, in a sense, found objects. McCormick has long explored repurposed objects and collage. One notable series used intricately cut and pieced topographic maps to make a three-dimensional collage that was itself imaginary topography. [vii]

Collages made with found or recycled objects and objects repurposed as artworks have a distinguished pedigree, going back to the early 20th century. Both Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque incorporated bits and pieces into their early Cubist collage work around 1910. Marcel Duchamp, with a wicked sense of humor (how can one view it otherwise?), invented what he called Readymades, the first being the famous porcelain urinal which he titled Fountain, signed as R. Mutt, 1917, and submitted anonymously to an exhibition in New York City. [viii] Duchamp created all kinds of other objects, as well as complex, often mysterious assemblages of art works in traveling boxes, as well as the very large formatted The Large Glass, formally entitled The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even. [ix] Various explorations of the object descend, in a genealogical manner (or emerge, in a more biological manner) from the idea of the Readymades, including Pop Art (Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and others), environmental installations (especially Ed Kienholz), or recycled materials in assemblage (Robert Rauschenberg). The Dadaists, working just at the end of the World War I, pursued related lines of thought, creating art from recycled materials, especially Kurt Schwitters with his Merz works. Almost all the Surrealists were willing to use non-traditional materials often in mixed-media creations, to convey their ideas.

Within the Surrealist tradition stands Joseph Cornell, whose works consist almost entirely of collages and boxes, all incorporating recycled materials, found and repurposed objects. Cornell’s work is densely layered. The viewer perceives the original objects, the repurposed and remade objects, and then the ensemble of objects. The original objects are almost uniformly humble. The way in which they are repurposed and then grouped is at once meticulous and mysterious.

I do not think it is going too far to say that any artist since Cornell who chooses to use the format of a box is working to some extent in Cornell’s shadow. Aside from the thematic legacy of an assemblage within a box, McCormick’s work parallels Cornell’s in his attention to detail. Because of his love of small, controlled detail, printmaking came naturally to McCormick. Later projects - the Topographic Map Series and the room-sized Vista project [x] – required meticulous control of the media, tiny cuts and layering of materials. About a year ago, McCormick did a lush series of small pen and ink drawings, still-lives of driftwood and other small pieces of nature’s flotsam and jetsam; he reveled in being able to convey the beauty of these objects at a small scale, inviting the viewer to lean into the work and visually explore the corners.

The boxes of the Work Bench Project are small, bamboo drawer organizers, which are all 3 inches high and are either 3 inches square, or 6 or 12 inches long. Each person’s objects are limited to two or three boxes, one of each size. Oversized objects have been scanned or reproduced to make them small enough to fit. [xi] The objects are arranged to tell stories the artist found or imagined, to inquire, to produce delight. The craftsmanship is meticulous. The inventory of objects is at once banal and surprising: family photos, golf ball and tee, sand dollars, logo pins, rocks, tiny toys of angels, cars, a horse and a dog, a miniature Eiffel Tower, Mickey Mouse souvenirs, fishing lure, Tootsie roll, tea bag and even a worn garden glove. All the objects were delivered in labeled, brown bags, and McCormick only opened one at a time. Each opening brought surprise and wonder. Early in the process, McCormick decided he needed more clarity about the contents of one bag so he called the owner. The resulting conversation prompted by the objects so enriched the collaboration, that he subsequently called each person who had provided a bag. McCormick did one box for himself, a dark meditation entitled The Unknown Worker with tiny tumbled objects from the extensive collection of miscellanea in his studio.

Each grouping is installed in a linear pattern, with the two or three boxes either lined up horizontally or vertically on the gallery wall. For the viewer entering the gallery, the installation reads as if there is a series of linear marks, a coding not unlike the bit patterns underlying all computer architecture. As the visitor moves into the gallery and comes closer to each work, the assemblages begin to reveal themselves: the detritus of desk drawers reconfigured into an ensemble which suggests mystery, humor and hopefully a glimpse of the human who uses that desk.

While there are no names associated with the boxes, Reno photographer Loretta Terlizzi took full-length photographs of each collaborator, and those photographs have been incorporated in some way into that person’s boxes. For the visitor who knows no one in the building, there is total mystery and anonymity. For those who work in the Carson City Court House there is the mystery and delight of figuring out whose box is whose. For anyone there is the question of what might all those objects mean, and is the artist’s interpretation at all relevant to the original objects and their owner?

The final collaborative act of the Work Bench Project is that each signed ensemble of boxes will be returned to the worker who provided the objects.

Marcia Cohn Growdon
Reno, Nevada
February 2010

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i Definitions are drawn from www.dictionary.com. January 15, 2010. [back]


ii Ermance V. Rejebian, “La Reunion: The French Colony in Dallas County, “Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online. Vol 43, No. 4, 1940. See: www.tshaonline.org/publications/journals/shq/online/v043/n4/contrib_DIVL7152.html . [back]


iii Workbench (Compass), 2002, photograph courtesy of the artist, in Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Berg Publishers, New York, 2007, p. l35 and Fig. 4.12. [back]


iv There are visual puns in many of the boxes in this exhibit. I think one of the artist’s favorites is the small metal toy car with a dime tucked just under the front end: stops on a dime! [back]


v The Red Tie Series, colored papers, printed and collaged at Twinrocker Handmade Paper in Brookston, Indiana, 1980. [back]


vi Jim has graciously let me see this project unfold, meeting with me on several occasions in December 2009 and February 2010 as he began to think about the mechanics of the project, and then as he began to open the bags from each of the courthouse workers. [back]


vii The Topographic Map Series, 1994-ca.2000. First exhibited at the Stremmel Gallery in Reno, 1994. [back]


viii The exhibit was sponsored by the Society of Independent Artists in New York City.  Not knowing what to do with the urinal, despite having promised to exhibit all submitted works, the Society hid the work by the unknown R. Mutt. Duchamp subsequently resigned from the Society’s board. Fountain was photographed in Alfred Stieglitz’s studio, but lost shortly thereafter. Duchamp authorized reproductions in 1950 and in the 1960s, and they are in various collections. A number of Duchamp’s other readymades were likewise lost, and later reproduced with the artist’s permission. http://www.sfmoma.org/multimedia/interactive_features/37# . January 26, 2010. [back]


ix The title in the original French is: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. Mixed media, 1915-1923: Collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. [back]


x Installation, Sheppard Art Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, 1990. [back]


xi It is notable that McCormick expects this may be his last major project involving close, detail work. He is suffering from neuropathy in both hands which robs him of any feeling. For all practical purposes, his hands are doing what the brain asks of them by drawing on muscle/nerve memory. All the feedback is visual; there is no sensory feedback. McCormick says that to some extent it reminds him of one of his first jobs, when, as a student in Oklahoma he developed a proposal for an art project working with people who had various disabilities. The proposal was so good, he was asked to implement it. Just as he finds himself today, those patients were dependent on visual feedback, rather than touch. [back]

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FURTHER Reading: Information on Dadaism, Surrealism, Pop Art and all the artists mentioned in this essay is readily available in a wide array of general art surveys and special studies on each movement, both in print media and on the web.

• One of my favorites is the now slightly older publication by Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art – Its rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall [New York: Knopf, 1991].

• On the subject of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell, an especially interesting study is the book which accompanied an exhibition at the Menil Foundation in Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in1998: Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp….In Resonance [Germany: Cantz Verlag, 1998; Copyright Menil Foundation, Houston, TX.]

• A more general essay about McCormick’s work is “Jim McCormick: The Topographical Mind” in William L. Fox’s Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada [Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999. Chapter 1, 3-28].