Comment on this story What: SubUrban: Michael Raedecker When: Thru Dec. 5 Where: Knoxville Museum of Art, 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive (call 525-6101 for information)

Michael Raedecker finds freedom in ambiguity

by Heather Joyner Spica

The titles are as mysterious as the pieces they accompany: “Pulse,” “Soliloquy of Chaos,” “Way Through.” Images of forlorn settings that aren’t quite real or entirely imaginary feature objects like eggs, a bonfire, a small lake, books, or palm trees, and they play with the meanings we ascribe to various things and places.

Paintings by the esteemed 41-year-old Dutch artist Michael Raedecker have been called inscrutable and unsettling. It’s been said that he dismisses any sort of projected meaning, identifiable context, or traditional beauty. As viewers, we’re assured that his work’s logic is somehow private, if there’s indeed any logic at all. His spacious canvases are filled with all kinds of things yet seem to contain relatively little. Why, then, was the London-based Raedecker chosen to present his first U.S. solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art? What use is there for art with any of the above intentions or attributes? Seeing Raedecker’s work in person, we can possibly arrive at answers to those questions.

As the latest installment in the KMA’s ongoing SubUrban series featuring “emerging” artists, Raedecker’s show is relatively sparse. Nevertheless, each of eight large pieces occupying the ground floor’s Thompson Gallery is a world unto itself, cliché as that sounds. And each world dares to include the ordinary alongside the sublime, heightening the effects of both. Says Dana Self, the KMA’s new Curator of Collections and Exhibitions,

“[Raedecker’s surfaces] seem both dirty and beautiful...like finding a hair on the soap, we are repulsed by mundane objects that, before commingling, were considered clean and acceptable. [The artist’s materials] become the other side of beauty.”

Be it the desert-like scenario of the painting titled “breakaway” or the mood of “Now,” a Del Sarto-inspired portrait-gone-astray, we find in Raedecker’s work a complexity beyond the artist’s unusual combinations of materials. The artist says he is “pointing in a direction without giving everything away,” and that he wants viewers to discover his work on their own. He remarks, “I don’t want to be the dictator of what people see.” But however open-ended, Raedecker’s is a complexity wound up in juxtaposition, contradiction, and sheer chutzpah.

A recent finalist for Great Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize, Raedecker is one of a select group of younger artists considered to be the newest wave in painting. His introduction of needlework into canvases is perhaps what most sets him apart, both within that group and within the international milieu of contemporary art. The Curator states, “Raedecker subverts and fictionalizes embroidery, this familiar artistry, by denormalizing it and placing it in a foreign land....stitching, knotting, and embroidering provide heft and authority to the work, moving it beyond painting into other fetishistic arenas such as piercing, for instance.” Whether or not we regard Raedecker’s stitchery as hip, it is undeniably distinctive.

A little less distinctive are Raedecker’s allusions to popular culture and media kitsch, and his fascination with iconography. Yet given his offbeat palette, archetypical “sets,” and reworking of typically Dutch themes, those obsessions become specifically his. He says, “The images come from everywhere and nowhere. I might take inspiration from catalogues, film stills, or magazines...from [both] high- and low-culture...[but] I never use a whole image. I use the parts that I find useful and fundamental. And because of their source, the result is a feeling of familiarity...the imagery is part of our collective memory.” The same sort of selective appropriation was apparently at work seven years ago when Raedecker made a record sampling Elvis tunes and Lounge Core tracks. As for the aforementioned incorporation of fiber and other textiles into his paintings (a nod to his background in apparel design), Raedecker effectively introduces ordinary craft into the realm of fine art, forcing us to discern the differences between the two.

Although much has been made of Raedecker’s addition of fabric and thread, his command of that material is only one aspect of his paintings. No matter how we slice or snip it, his art is a version of Surrealism as well as an outgrowth of the figurative “New Image Painting” of the ‘70s. Surrealism’s love affair with the incongruous—with what its founder André Breton called “thoughts dictated apart from any control by reason and any moral or aesthetic consideration”—is reflected in Raedecker’s sometimes perplexing compositions. Dali and Magritte are synonymous with the desire to create a “super-reality” bridging the chasm between dream-like irrationality and reality—particularly one arrived at via detailed realism.

In part, Raedecker’s paintings are about experiencing and trusting one’s responses to that which is strictly visual in art, whatever its components might be. Forgoing an urge to produce social commentary—say, the kind found in Philip Guston’s similarly cartoon-like images—Raedecker instead allows his painting to be about itself. Any “private meanings” aside, his work is really about no more than what we see and what we bring to what we see. It can be argued that almost a century after Surrealism’s first stirrings, Raedecker’s work represents a new generation’s flirtation with comparable forces inspiring exploration and originality. And those forces are still revolutionary in the best sense of the word.

September 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 39 © 2004 Metro Pulse