Artist: Erica Baum
Exhibition title: A Methode of a Cloak
Venue: Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany
Date: March 14 – June 6, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
After exhibitions in 2009 and 2013 at Lüttgenmeijer in Berlin, Markus Lüttgen is delighted to present Erica Baum’s “A Method of a Cloak. Square is the Chatter“ as part of the Düsseldorf Photo +, thus presenting her first solo exhibition in the Rhineland.
In her photographic works, Erica Baum repeatedly refers to archival and textual media and our everyday use of them: opening a book, folding a page. This supposedly familiar character gains poetic quality through the artistic adaptation of these techniques. Playful recontextualization eliminates the familiar systems of reference and makes the rules that these objects and actions are otherwise subject to less thematic. It is also possible to unfold tension-laden and contradictory contexts of meaning which – unnoticed in everyday life – are enclosed in them. Quoting Gertrude Stein, to whose “Tender Buttons“ the first part of the title is owed: “Play. And. Plain. They may. Gain.“
The works from the series “Dog Ear“, “Naked Eye“ and “Newspaper Clippings“ in the rear room of the gallery offer a concise overview of the techniques Baum has been using for over two decades to explore the poetry of the everyday. The entire front room is dedicated to the more recent series “Patterns“ (2018-19). The two rooms are linked by the work “Square is the Chatter of Birds“ (2013) there and “Better Birds Sheet“ (2019) here. While the horizontally staggered sentences in the newspaper clippings signal an openness to various meanings, this poetic openness appears in the “Patterns“ series in a new way. The starting point of this series are sewing patterns, which – rearranged and superimposed – together with words, only appearing occasionally and freed from the burden of the unambiguousness of their former context, release surprising semantic prospects. They also question the associated patterns of action, which, following Talcott Parsons, can also be understood as patterns with corresponding decision alternatives. If those sewing patterns are the expression of a cultural technique of cutting and tailoring, which result in dressing or even disciplining the body with garments giving it shape through their inconspicuous lines and curves, Baum opens up new spaces for action precisely the other way round. In “Better Birds Sheet“, for example, the translucent paper enables two birds to enter into either a joint dialogue or comparative competition. The shimmering layers of numbered forms associating actions of differentiation, selection and ordering, also suggest myriad possibilities.
Through the materiality of the works, the spaces of action thus thematized are at the same time bound back to the openness of the poetic in a further way. The high-resolution photographs suggest a tactility of the surfaces, which in their evocative power call up the materials from which the clothes and objects were ultimately made. In this evocative power, the works reach beyond themselves; the surfaces in their delicacy, roughness, unevenness produce new phantasmatic fabrics that present us with the unexpected of such poiesis. If color is no longer an accidental property with Gertrude Stein, but is capable of creating new color – “the grey blue purple is the red rose color and the pink white cover is the fine broken china“ –, this is accordingly extended to materiality in general in the “Patterns“ series. Thus understood, the works continue to weave this text. Turn it around. Then take up the grain again. Again the seam, the hem? Another one.
-Sebastian Hammerschmidt
Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York) received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984. Recent museum exhibitions include Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY ; Face à face, frac île‑de‑france, Campus de Villetaneuse; The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lever le voile, Frac île-de-france, Paris; Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include A Long Dress, Bureau, New York; Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York; The Following Information, Bureau, New York; Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris. Selected biennials include; AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012.
Her work is held in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and the Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, A Methode of a Cloak, 2020, exhibition view, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf
Erica Baum, Corpse, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm)
Erica Baum, Elegant Solution, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm)
Erica Baum, End There, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm)
Erica Baum, How Long, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm)
Erica Baum, Mad, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm)
Erica Baum, Shoes, 2009, (Dog Ear), Archival pigment print, Image size:: 9 × 9 inches (22.86 × 22.86 cm), Paper size:: 30 × 30 cm (11 3/4 × 11 3/4 inches)
Erica Baum, Methylene Blue, 2018, (Naked Eye), Archival pigment print, 44.25 × 40.64 cm (17 3/8 × 16 inches)
Erica Baum, Monstera, 2018, (Naked Eye), Archival pigment print, 44.25 × 40.64 cm (17 3/8 × 16 inches)
Erica Baum, Flattered, 2019, (Naked Eye), Archival pigment print, 48.26 × 39.37 cm (19 × 15 1/2 inches)
Erica Baum, Hug, 2019, (Naked Eye), Archival pigment print, 39.88 × 40.64 cm (15 3/4 × 16 inches)
Erica Baum, Sperm Whales, 2010, (Newspaper Clippings), Archival pigment print, 14 × 12 1/4 inches (35.56 × 31.12 cm)
Erica Baum, Square Chatter, 2013, (Newspaper Clippings), Archival pigment print, 15.38 × 20 inches (39.07 × 50.80 cm)
Erica Baum, Place, 2018, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print, 40.64 × 42.62 cm (16 × 16 3/4 inches)
Erica Baum, Ease Magenta, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print
Erica Baum, Edge, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print, 40.64 × 44.40 cm (16 × 17 1/2 inches)
Erica Baum, Grain, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print
Erica Baum, Hip, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print, 40.64 × 39.73 cm (16 × 15 5/8 inches)
Erica Baum, Seam 33, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print, 40.64 × 42.29 cm (16 × 16 5/8 inches)
Erica Baum, Better Birds Sheet, 2019, ((Patterns)), Archival pigment print, 40.64 × 41.35 cm (16 × 16 1/4 inches)