Eddie Shanken’s essay for the Print Portfolio

Edward Shanken

Michael Rees’s art delights as much as it confounds, and indeed, it confounds in a most delightful way. It simultaneously occupies multiple states of being, refusing to exist unequivocally in any particular medium, form, or dimension. Like electrons in superposition, it insists on an existential state that physicists have referred to as “nor both, nor neither.”

To be sure, the exquisite prints in this portfolio, the supersized, otherworldly monuments, such as Putto 2x2x4, and the curious computer animations from which both are derived, are all works of art. But the art also permeates zones between and betwixt the distinct forms it embodies. It defies any categorical reduction to drawing, sculpture, or film, even as it expresses the characteristics of each of those media. In other words, Rees’s work is neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, nor is it simply their amalgam. The various states it manifests might be thought of as traces of momentary conditions that the art has occupied during an ongoing generative process.

Like the reflections in Plato’s cave, the artist necessarily offers us representations because the thing-in-itself eludes human perception. In the manner of his mystic mentor, Joseph Beuys, Rees journeys to nether realms of consciousness and returns to fashion and share souvenirs of his experience with us. The resulting artworks are cosmic gifts that translate and distill metaphysical knowledge in aesthetic forms that exist at the outer limits of cognition.

Rees has described three recent series of work - Sculptural User Interface (SUI), Anja Spine series, and the Putto series - as exploring mind, spirit, and body, respectively. These three series undergird the portfolio. Although each series combines elements of the others, the Putto series lets it all hang out.

The Putti reveal much more of Rees’s personality: more playfulness, more lyricism, more sensuality. Whereas the Ajna Spine series and SUI share affinities with the obsessive, analytical qualities of northern Baroque painting, the Putto series exhibits greater kinship with the unbridled, expressive theatricality of Italian Baroque sculpture.

The stretching, twisting, undulating torso represented in alone 3, for example, recalls Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women (1583) and Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1625). Yet, while these erotically charged marbles recall accounts of premeditated sexual abduction, in the animation for Putto 2x2x4 a headless two-headed hydra struggles mindlessly with itself. As the top attempts to shed its base, the base attempts to shed its top, causing the overall form to dance uncontrollably, until a tipping point is reached and the two change roles. The freakiness of this tragi-comedy is amplified by its futility and universality, frozen and memorialized in these prints.

Debuting in this portfolio, the Hummer variations (part of the Putto series) multiply the fearsome aspects of the Putti while offering little of their comic relief. These works bear comparison with Hindu images of multi-limbed gods, Étienne-Jules Marey’s late 19th century chronophotographs, Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s equestrian sculptures, and the album cover of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s progressive rock classic, Tarkus.

In 1hummer2, an army of Putti, clad in gun-metal grey, are banded together into a precision-engineered war machine that marches in lock-step against unknown enemies. In 2hummer3, overlapping elements produce composite shadows that suggest several dimensions beyond the limits of three-space. These aggressive, muscular images remind us of the violent potential of mobs: as individual fear gives way to collective confidence, the whole manifests behavior that cannot be predicted based on the sum of its parts.

When we struggle with nature, with others, with ourselves, what are we struggling for? Or, are we just struggling for the sake of struggling? In the Putto series, the artist has animated and captured the source and essence of struggle, from its sources in quantum phenomena, solipsism, and protoplasm to its manifest relativity, ubiquity, and absurdity. In the Hummer variations, that undirected struggle has become magnified and threateningly brazen. Neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, Rees’s art confounds our preconceptions and delights our proprioceptions, forcing us to reconsider our terms of engagement with ourselves, with others, with art, and with life itself.