John Corbin: Curated by Lynn Crawford

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John Corbin

John Corbin Curated by Lynn Crawford <]dS[PS` & 8O\cO`g #

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The first mention of Gierlmandy appears in a brief passage in Plato’s unfinished Critias. “In this island nation of Gierlmandy there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.�(1) Many scholars believe Plato’s account is pieced together from more ancient tales of a psychologically tormented nation and people. Ancient writers differ in their analysis of the legend of Gierlmandy, some holding to the belief of a lost civilization while others interpret accounts as mythic fiction.

Detroit-based artist John Corbin received a BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. On Tuesday, September 21, 2010, the first day of Autumn he woke up to find himself living exactly one mile from the hospital of his birth, an unexpected but pleasant surprise. Searching for a place to call home has been a challenge and an inspiration for Corbin, in his work as an artist as well as his personal life. He has stayed many places during the last few decades and has found a comfortable home between the pages of literary artists works, they have offered a puzzling and exciting place to reside. As Corbin has said, “A writer’s work can be a journey to uncover aspects about the world we live in, I like to go on those journeys but to best understand where I have been I need to give what is weightless, physical mass.� This statement is best explained in the few sentences that follow.

In the early days of archaeology, Fwegrid Luhacm (a self made man, scholar and adventurer) became obsessed with stories he had heard in his childhood of lost civilizations.(2) During the birth of archeology in the 19th century, he set out to find proof of Gierlmandy. Fwegrid Luhacm brought dedication, scholarship and funding to the early excavations. Using Plato’s description and additional accounts from folktales, he pinpointed a location between the Black, Irish and North Seas. Stories from locals of finding small coins and carved stone led the academic to a raised area overlooking the North Sea. Fwegrid Luhacm primarily employed the local women and children, who easily adapted to the methods of early archeology as they were from local farms and were used to long hours of manual labor. The first artifacts uncovered were carved stones with a curved meandering line entering and exiting each stone. Fwegrid Luhacm had the local women piece together a small portion of a wall on site; they followed the curved linear motif, which resulted in a four-foot section. Through trial and error Fwegrid Luhacm uncovered a cache of coins, again containing the meandering curved line, a line that is mentioned in most accounts of Gierlmandy. “The greatest find from the earliest excavation was what has come to be known as the text of Gierlmandy, The Sorrows of The Artist As A Young Man.�(3) This text has revealed a great deal about the peoples who inhabited this island nation. Cultural and Gender Studies programs in most universities utilize the text to address what appears to be an “early matriarchal society, strong women, subservient men obsessed with the approval and acceptance of the women.�(4) The text today is assembled from five versions found at different sites, “originally written in a Celtic/ Germanic tongue believe spoken by the author/authors.�(5)

George Perec writes in the preamble for Life: A User’s Manual: "Despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other."

(1) Plato's Critias follows Timaeus, usually dated 360 BC. (2) Nibroc, Jhon, Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard, an autobiography, Campbridge Press, 1921. (3) Andrew, George R., trans. & edit. The Sorrows of The Artist As A Young Man, Pinqueen Books, 1999, ISBN 978-0-557-69059-6 (4) Patient, Femme L.; Windy Springer (1996). Feminism/Gierlmandy, University of Caledonia Press. p. 3306 ISBN 347-1-62370218-8 (5) TerĂĄstios, Ego, Â&#x; Â&#x; (Introduction to Sorrows of the Artist As A Young Man). Edited with translation and comments by Nhaj Rocnib, VivlĂ­o Press, Thera, 2004

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The Autobiography of John L. Corbin by Lynn Crawford

Lynn Crawford is an art critic and fiction writer based in Detroit. Her books include Solow I (Hard Press Editions, 1995), Blow (Hard Press Editions, 1999), Simply Separate People (Black Square Editions, 2002) and Fortification Resort (Black Square Editions, 2005), a collection of sestinas responding to the work of visual artists. A new novel, Simply Separate People, Two is forthcoming by Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. She is a founding board member of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the fifth child in a family of eight. I left Detroit in my early twenties and lived in New York. I am now back in Detroit. I do not believe location says much about me or my art. My parents come from poor, white people in the South. We are not aware of any heritage except being poor, white and from the South. We must have another heritage somewhere. I try to imagine this; what it is to have a clear line to French blood, or blood from Argentina or Zanzibar or Greece or Ireland. But cannot. This explains my interest in maps. Everything interests me. I do not understand why certain boundaries, limitations, get set into place. I am a visual artist. Yet, I do not think visual arts are any more interesting or important than anything else. Novels, meals, gardens, friends, operas, scientific theories for example. They are all just as important as visual arts. I make some of those things. Meals, gardens, books. Not operas or scientific theory. But would not rule the possibility out. Everything interests me. I cannot name one thing that interests me most. But I can name one that interest me excessively. The Oulipo. A group of mathematicians and writers who follow strict exercises to make literary texts. I follow strict exercises to make art. So we are connected. I cannot tell you what exercises do for members of the Oulipo. I can tell you what they do for me. Pull me into a death match of a game. All I can think of is playing and winning. Crushing the opponent. But if you ask me who that is, I would not have an answer. I love all the writers in the Oulipo. I mention one, now, not because he is my favorite, but because he, like me, was born in the United States. I have never asked him but I do not think this piece of geographical information has much to do with him or his books. His name is Harry Mathews. He wrote a book named The Human Country. This interests me, because a friend of mine, looking at the work in this exhibition, said I should change my exhibition title, Drift, to The Human Country. She is a nice person but a little simplistic. I would never take a title from Harry Mathews. Furthermore, I have been through so much with my title, I want to stick with it. But if you look at my show, you might agree that The Human Country would be another good title.

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John Corbin has a highly refined and distinctive sense of structure that often manifests itself as pieces of a puzzle inserted into a space—the space between that is both metaphoric and literal—these structures are a synthesizer of ideas that might not be connected except for Corbin’s imaginative juxtapositions. Most of his work is modular, consisting of many small parts like a jigsaw puzzle or mosaic made out of various materials fitted together to create a whole, a format he often uses. This gives the viewer a sense of trial and error and is representative of Corbin’s philosophy that “there cannot be art without failure.� The Detroit based artist (with a BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York) now works out of a studio in East Detroit that he had created out of a once-vacant storefront. Corbin has exhibited widely in New York, Michigan and Italy and collaborates frequently with poets, writers and other artists. This new installation of Drift shown at CUE Art Foundation in New York is a further exploration of genetic drift, which inspired the previous Drift exhibition in the Spring of 2010 21

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at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan. His work, overall, is an assemblage of visual and conceptual complexity that speculates about origins, ethnicity, culture, science and technology—visual theories of everything. Some of Corbin’s early works such as 1000 Plateaus, Molecule (1999) have presented concepts that have evolved into the present installation. 1000 Plateaus, Molecule, is composed of several glowing, large-scale molecular models of glucose and fructose that, when combined, create sucrose, or table sugar, a different substance and another instance of synthesis and transformation. Corbin typically merges aspects of his many interests and inspirations: mathematics, biology, puzzles and literature—especially the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. He is fascinated by the theory of “genetic drift,� defined as the variation in the gene pool of a small population that is strictly random and, with natural selection, a force in the evolution of the species. Genetic drift takes place over time when a small population is isolated and certain traits become pronounced—in Corbin’s words: “it has become a closed system.� With this theory in mind, Corbin brings together seemingly unrelated entities and systems into his own version of genetic drift. In so doing, he discovers characteristics that they share but were previously unseen or unnoticed. In the earlier installation of Drift, the image of the hexagon—which Corbin continues to use in the new installation as a structure with the potential for infinite stability—was repeated throughout the show, in particular in two works, both called Drift (2010). One piece was based on Shakespeare’s plays and consists of countless short sections of cut-off, white PVC pipes, some of which are filled with a round of colored-coded beeswax (green, for instance) that represents a character type (prince) but not a specific character (Hamlet). The sections are arranged in a pattern of multiple hexagons in which each hexagon signifies a play and visualizes the emergence of unsuspected common traits within a closed system, as occurs in genetic drift. The other Drift is based on the Fibonacci code and it is apparent that a struggle to return to simplicity and a perfect whole is in progress. Corbin presents the code as a sequence of organically grouped cardboard cylinders of different heights and diameters. As the sequence proceeds, the symmetry breaks down and the organization of each set becomes more and more chaotic. The final form, however, is a hexagon and returns to a state of stability, indicated by the dimensions of the cylinder sections, now all the same size.

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Corbin’s hexagons can also flow, as they do throughout the works in the installation. That flow can be seen especially in Flaneur (2009-2010), where Corbin has built a net-like form with linen tape and collaged map that drapes across the wall. The hexagons seem to lose their structural integrity in this arrangement as they shrink and expand, angles askew, only to reform again into the unexpected beauty of chaos. This breakdown in structure mirrors the breakdown in geographical boundaries that Corbin is exploring as well as the blurring of cultural differentiation and ethnic identities. Further illustrating dissolution—and in this instance, re-formation—Gierlmandy (2010) combines the outlines of Germany and Ireland, replicating the merger of the two country’s names in the title. A horizontal piece raised off the floor to the height of a coffee table, the surface is a pattern of warped and re-constituted hexagons. The sides are shelves filled with books by Irish and German writers, the whole an invented landmass born through a synthesis based on the autobiographical—Corbin is of Irish and German ancestry. Sorrows of the Artist As A Young Man 2010 is another conflated project that refers to linguistic synthesis. In the form of a book, it alternates chapters of Goethe’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917). This exploration of national and cultural identities is continued in Sara (2010), Hazel (2010), and Samantha (1993-2010), named after friends that he represents by manipulated maps of the multiple countries of their origins. Made of colored acrylic medium similar to stained glass and based again on a hexagonal structure, these and other works form an atlas of sorts, immersing the viewer in a provocative creation of new, overlapping geographies and increasingly hybrid ethnicities. John Corbin has a great affinity for structural manipulation and latent chaos. Searching for the factual as well as the metaphoric, his art is an encyclopedic massing of concepts that expand the designation of the in-between through the use of both proliferating patterns and degenerative structures with their unpredictable outcomes. The current installation of Drift is a microcosm of forces—of actions and reactions—that are shaping and transforming today’s world.

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The writer, ;=@5/< ;/@3<B71 , is a recent graduate of College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. Her paintings have been displayed in local exhibitions and publications in the Detroit area. She is currently working on a minor in Critical Theory and researching prospective graduate programs to earn an MFA.

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The mentors were :7::G E37 and 0/@0/@/ / ;Q/2/; . Lilly Wei is a New York-based independent curator, essayist and critic who contributes to many publications in the United States and abroad. She has written regularly for Art in America since 1982 and is a contributing editor at ARTnews. Barbara A. MacAdam is deputy editor of ARTnews, where she has worked for nearly 20 years. She has also worked as executive editor of Art + Auction, and was an editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts and of New York magazine. She has written on design for ID magazine, reviewed books on art and literature for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Newsday, and The New York Times Book Review, and has written for a number of other magazines and newspapers on art, design and literature. She has also curated art exhibitions at nonprofit spaces.

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