Devices
by Ron Kuivila

Jeffrey Schiff’s devices center on the psychologically resonant physicality of the tool. Their formal elegance suggests careful design rather than ad-hoc ingenuity. This leads one to expect that these objects, as well-made tools, will be intelligible in terms of some underlying purpose. Instead of being stable images or representations, they act as catalysts for speculative scrutiny. As one attempts to work out their purpose, it becomes clear that these singular objects have a multiplicity of ways and meanings. They trigger an investigation which can never be satisfactorily concluded. The tools are themselves work sites — work sites for interpretation.

Device (universal set) is made up of several wooden handles each affixed to a different steel fitting. The grouping leans against the wall, resembling the motley completeness of an assortment of yard tools. But the handles are too long and the fittings do not correspond to any known task. The fittings are intriguing: three are arcs of different curvature, two are flat plates, three more are rectilinear. They constitute an oddly tasteful exploration of a range of formal possibilities. But the exploration is not exhaustive nor are the forms canonical. For the set to be universal, the tools must be capable of an entire range of tasks, but the nature of that work—who, where, what, and why—can only be imagined.

While the tools as objects imply free-floating relationships between person and place unknown, Schiff’s installations fix the place with the figure of a network, or field of vectors. These networks establish physical connections between particular tools or mechanisms and other elements, establishing concrete relations. They may suggest a flow of energy, the causal connection between elements, or the consequences of an action taken. They physically embody some sort of manipulation of the world by a presumably human agency.

Field of Play is quite explicit in this regard. An archaic plow sits with its wooden handle toward the entrance, situating every visitor “behind the plow.” Attached to the steel blades of the plow are a collection of articulated metal rods, partially hidden. The plow has forced the rods to erupt from the earth, the unforeseen consequence of a single push forward. One is placed as the site of this simple action which has created a complex web of resistance, and one is invited to repeat it.

The overall body of Schiff’s work forms a secondary network through the repetition and transformation of certain elements from device to device. These transformations establish and distinguish the crucial properties of each element, aiding the process of interpretation. For example, Device (outcast) consists of a wooden handle connecting small steel rings to a scattered series of cables. Attached to the cables are larger metal rings which are free to slide along the cable. The wooden handle and steel rings both recall Field of Play quite specifically. But here the rings slide along their cables to an end with a stop; they have become spots that pull rather than resist. It is as if they are collars for a collection of animals. A second piece, Device (ornamental whip) continues in this fashion: the cables are now rigidly attached to the end of the handle, suggesting a whip. The rings are replaced with iron decorations that, in this context, attain a rather sinister banality.

Throughout these pieces most of the materials are “permanent”: steel, stone, lead, hardwood, etc. Reference to the human figure is conspicuously absent. Occasionally, however, contrasting materials appear that possess a softness or fleshiness that is delicate and temporary. In Device (advance notice), the linked rods are attached to trays containing sponges. The trays isolate or protect the sponges from the floor, suggesting the sponges’ fragility, while the rods pierce through them, violating their delicacy. The nut at the end of each threaded rod is carefully adjusted to neither deform the sponge nor give it any free play. In the context of the other pieces, the brutality and precision of this arrangement suggests that the sponges are associated with the invisible owners of the collars and the potential victims of the wrought iron cat o’ nine tails.

Another working of the network begins with the installation under(MINING). In that project, an adobe wall was built and then brought to the verge of collapse by a single pulley system. Separate cables radiate from the pulley to individual blocks of the wall. The pulley draws the cables in , bringing the wall to the brink of total disorder. “…or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken…” is almost the same situation, after collapse. Multiple pulleys have been assembled high on a wall, the bricks have become shattered fragments of limestone, and the cables are now lead wire that makes the light it catches appear dusty, as if the collapse were quite recent. Mass Candle inverts this relation. The spools are now disordered and passive. They are strewn on the floor, wound with strings spooled pout from a table of wax. Rising through the underside of the table, the strings become an ordered grid of candle wicks. Lighting these candles and then allowing them to burn would eventually perforate the table and disconnect the strings. This gives the table a fleshly impermanence that has none of the chaotic grandeur of shattered limestone or the collapsed wall. Kill van Kull offers a similar expression of potential energy released by a grid of points. A phalanx of spears (war? pestilence?) clamped onto the columns of a deteriorating neo-classical temple are aimed across a canal at opposing rows of oil tanks and refineries.

Through the obsessive working and reworking of the figures of the tool or device, and the network, Jeffrey Schiff produces a body of work that is simply too psychological to be working out a serial principle. Instead, these works become a series of material essays or physical meditations on the nature(s) of human agency.

THE SAN DIEGO SUN, February 5, 1987
EXHIBITIONS SHOW THE COMMON IN UNCOMMON WAYS
By Robert L. Pincus
Art Critic

It’s wholly coincidental that Jeffrey Schiff’s and Roy McMakin’s exhibitions are on view at the same time. Yet what an interesting study in contrast these shows create.

Schiff, whose work is at the downtown San Diego gallery of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, makes sculptures that resemble an artisan’s wooden worktable or an industrial vat but they are actually objects for aesthetic contemplation.

McMakin, on the other hand, makes functional tables, vases and ottomans out of fir and plywood that aspire to the condition of art. His show, entitled “Everything: An Exhibition of Surfaces and Containers,” is displayed at the Quint Gallery.

Functionality has become commonplace in contemporary art, Scott Burton, to take perhaps the most prominent example, fashions benches and chairs out of marble and stone; some have been integrated into public settings. Why, then, should McMakin’s furniture be classified as design, while that of Burton and others who employ furniture forms be considered art?

Because while McMakin is preoccupied with the vocabulary of design, Burton, much like Schiff, is concerned with extending the boundaries of art. He makes sculptures which are only secondarily chairs, while McMakin focuses on revising on our view of a table, a cabinet and other functional objects. Schiff’s work, though it borrows from older functional forms, is not about tables or vats but the ways these forms symbolize the creative labors and working process of the artist.

This line of reasoning isn’t an attack on McMakin’s latest work. But because it appears in a gallery generally reserved for art, this is a useful distinction to apply when viewing his objects.

McMakin’s tables, cabinets, chests, vases and ottomans entertainingly and inventively undermine conventional notions of the same. And though his last show at Quint Gallery was mere eighth months ago, his quality doesn’t lag with his body of work. Indeed, these latest pieces are superior.

All are crated in a handsome, light beige fir Ð most over a plywood core. Their smooth surfaces, coupled with simple right-angled and arcing contours, evoke sources as varied as Shaker furniture and the Bauhaus designs of Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. But while all of this work adheres to the dictum that form follows function, McMakin’s clearly doesn’t and he has a lot of fun subverting this functionalist aesthetic.

“Cabinet,” with its vertical rectangle of a door, looks like an isolation chamber, too, with its little square window near the top. But if it look secure with the door closed Ð there is even a lock and key Ð that is only an illusion. Travel around to the backside and there is no back; only the shelves sticking out into the room.

His “display tables” offer all sorts of formal tricks. Using long legs and a rectangular top as his basic format, he creates an array of variations. He dangles the top off the frame on one of them and slips a shelf inside. On another, he cuts a rectangle in the top and creates a protruding shelf near the floor.

His “vases” displayed on pedestals, are startling elegant and genuinely amusing little items. Crafted in fir with white interior walls, they house glass bottles that are short and tall, fat and thin, round and arched. The wood compartments are trapezoidal and hexagonal, among other shapes. And though they will house flowers nicely, they playfully undermine accepted notions of the vase.

Perhaps best of all, though, are his over scaled ottomans in green and black. Even Kareem Abdul Jabbar probably wouldn’t sit comfortably the chair that went with one of these.

Schiff’s work has little of the polish and studied elegance of McMakin’s objects. But elegance isn’t what he is after in the three exhibited works Ð two of which rest on the floor, one on the wall.

The Boston-based artist, who provides the first one-person show in La Jolla Museum’s downtown space, creates vivid documents of the artist at work. In this respect, Richard Serra’s pieces of thrown lead from 1968 figure as an important precedent for Schiff’s art. He even uses molten lead in one of the floor works, “Forge II,” though with very different results that Serra.

Schiff poured lead into a stout wood base, partially burning its surface. The metal bar he used to create a groove in its surface still rests on top. Its’ as if the ghost of the artist still lurks in the room.

His steel “Vat” is short, sits on squat legs and has six non-working faucets. Inside is a pool of yellow beeswax, with a rippled surface that oozes into each of its short pipes but not onto the floor.

There’s an anti-art quality to this piece, for Schiff is interested here in common artifacts more than either figurative or abstract sculpture. But like Siah Armajani’s sculptures consisting of fragments from vernacular architecture, his work makes us see the beauty in ordinary things. He uses the yellow of the beeswax and the dark gray of the vat much like a painter uses a palette.

The show is adeptly installed to show each piece to best advantage. The two-room La Jolla museum space looks much better now than when it was cluttered with selections from the collection. Nevertheless, four, five, even six works in all wouldn’t have hurt the installation and our knowledge of Schiff’s art would have benefited.