The witty and conceptually cogent, if incessantly referential work of US artist Jack Pierson - including the word sculptures he is best known for - is brought together in an Imma exhibition that spans 20 years, writes Aidan Dunne.
AMERICAN ARTIST Jack Pierson makes sculptures by rearranging the letters from discarded signage. He'll take a bunch of letters that may once have adorned a theatre, a bar or a shop, and spell out words with them, words that we would not usually associate with signs, such as "Helpless Hopeless", "Secret", or "Rose Rose Rose". Sometimes, as with Secret, the works are more jumbled than conventionally laid out in a line, so that they are more like concrete poetry. Secret's secret, as Pierson observes, is the word itself, hidden in its tangle of letters.
Another piece, titled Abstract, consists of a vertical stack of Os, and Pierson, who has a wry, self-mocking sense of humour, says he made it because he found that he had built up a disproportionate number of Os.
As you will see if you visit his exhibition at Imma, he doesn't just make word sculptures. He also makes word drawings, drawings as such, paintings, installations and photographs. But he has become particularly identified with the word sculptures, perhaps because, of everything he does, they are the least like what anyone else does, they are unmistakably by him, a not-insignificant point for collectors in the private and public spheres, among whom his work is very popular.
There is a logic to his use of signage in the wider scheme of his work. It's not just the letters in themselves that appeal to him, it's the metaphors attached: the allure of city lights or the glamour of showbiz, for example, the largely illusory nature of that glamour, its underlying tawdriness and transience. One of his installations consists of a cheap tinsel curtain in a corner of the gallery, like a stage in a sleazy club. As the show's curator, Richard D Marshall writes, Pierson "infuses his work with literal and visual references to lost love, sexual longing, faded glamour, fleeting moments and sentimental musings," while at the same time being acutely aware of how it is formally structured and situated in terms of art and cultural history.
In fact, in this exhibition, which spans about 20 years of work, his stylistic self-consciousness, the extent to which a great deal of what he does is a commentary on, a riposte to or an ironic version of something else, such as another artist's work or an art movement, feels very much like a cumulative weakness. It can make his own work seem arid and limited in being unable to see beyond the horizons of its references. It is also, by the way, usually witty and conceptually cogent, so whether its incessant referentiality is a drawback or not depends on your own attitude to art about art. Abstract expressionism, colour-field painting, Picasso, movie stills and star portraits, beefcake and fashion magazines, advertising imagery: all are visited and revisited by Pierson.
He was born and grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and he went on to study at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, graduating in 1984. After college he moved to New York, where he still lives and works, though he also spends time in southern California. Red-haired and wearing a blue denim jacket and jeans, he is relaxed and likeably unpretentious about his work, which is not to say that he doesn't take it seriously. He happily explains his rationale in each case, his thought process and his own opinion of the result, and on occasion his opinion is scathing. "Don't look at that," he says more than once, and rushes on to the next room. Equally, though, he is brashly enthusiastic about most things he's made.
HIS FIRST solo show is substantially recreated in Imma.
Characteristically, he went back to a series of photographs he'd taken years before (he often mulls over material for years before doing something with it), went through them, and printed some up on a large scale. They are casual snapshots writ large, some bleached out by sunlight, some blurred, some more carefully composed and lit. They don't make up a linear narrative, but one feels there is a narrative thread all the same, as though they are frames from a road movie, recalling people, moments and events along the way.
Behind them looms an influential style of realist, transgressive photographic narrative pioneered by Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Their downbeat work spawned a generation of what became known as grunge fashion photography and heroin chic. Pierson says that he was taking their conspicuously factual method and reworking it as a formal style.
"It's like I was asking: What is 'real'? And the answer is that 'real' is a style too. 'Real' is a set of rules, a glamourisation, just like other styles." He went on to make works based on other admired exemplars, including Françoise Sagan's novel Bonjour Tristesse and a monograph on photographer Diane Arbus. Like much of what he does they are in a sense autobiographical. "I think they give clues as to where my version of reality was coming from. Sagan's heroine is only 15 years old but she's already disillusioned with everything."
The Arbus piece pointed ahead, though. He took the monograph apart and blanked out the images, leaving only the captions. "I was enthralled by the titles. In a way they were even more important to me than the images. They are like one-line poems."
A box of letters dumped outside a theatre that was closing down led to the beginnings of his word sculptures: "I just started playing around with them, cut and paste." Pierson's fascination with style is everywhere evident. He was drawn to American icons including James Dean, Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, seeing them all as theatrical personas. After looking at several pieces that use Harlow as a point of reference he pauses and remarks: "It's not that I'm especially obsessed with Jean Harlow, it's just that I think she's a good, all-purpose icon."
A line of rough sketches of Jackie Onassis, drawn from a postcard, recall not only her celebrity but also Andy Warhol's silk-screen multiples of her image.
WITH RESOURCES and experience, his photography became more technically polished. As he became well known, fashion magazines asked him to do shoots, and his personal work adopted the glossy magazine vernacular. His Self-Portrait series features a succession of men who aren't, in fact, him. It's about the dramatisation of identity. "It's a trick. It's not narrative but there are certain narrative devices. You look at this guy and wonder why he's sitting on the beach . . . to me it's the same thing as the early photographs, only in this glossy format. It's more funny than serious." It's fair to say that these thinly ironised versions of generic originals are not his best work by any means.
One of his best pieces, on the other hand, is a reworking of Unidentified Youth, originally made for Thaddeus Ropac Gallery in 2000. As Pierson recalls it, he was wandering around Paris when he happened to witness the suicide of a young man who jumped into the Seine. "They pulled him out and tried to revive him, but they couldn't." Understandably upset by the incident, he decided: "To try to make a visual poem about the boy." His sequence of oblique black-and-white images, printed as though enlarged from newspaper reproductions, carry quite an emotional charge. Pierson being Pierson, of course, the charge is filtered through "the cliché of Parisian street photography, and Weegee's sensationalist news photos." It's irony, with feeling.
Jack Pierson: photographs, drawings, installation and word sculptures. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham. Tues-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Thurs 10am-8pm, Sun noon-5.30pm. Until May 18