Thomas Lowe: They Think It’s All Over

Issue 51, Summer 2011. See the entire magazine online here.

Horton Gallery, New York
7 April – 7 May

By Jonathan T.D. Neil

Dada photomontage – think Hannah Höch’s iconic Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919) – was meant to disrupt the plenitude of the ‘bourgeois’ easel picture. It was syntactical rather than mimetic. Like an editorial, one had to ‘read’ it, which would be a political act, and photomontage a political form, given how it countered any conventional ‘aesthetic experience’. One gets the sense that Thomas Lowe is after a similar politics of form, though with this series of deft coloured-pencil drawings, we’re firmly back in the province of mimesis, but now the mimesis of photomontage itself.

Photomontage means something entirely different in the age of iPhones, Google Images, Photoshop and Flickr, however. One could say that ‘reading’ images is what we have all been trained to do. The ubiquity of imagery ensures that its native condition is syntactical (how else to understand the title of Juxtapoz magazine?). But Lowe’s translation of montaged imagery does something to the normal syntactical legibility that we expect from these kinds of pictures. One is tempted to say that it lends it the metaphorical seamlessness of a (computer?) screen.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered. (all works but one, 2011) is exemplary here. It combines much of what one sees in the other drawings, such as body parts, particularly hands and eyes, along with their accoutrements, such as sunglasses and eyeglasses, or their internal armatures, such as bones, tendons and musculatures. The sheet is fully covered, but its imagery is not as dense as other works (Benda and Daddy, 2010, are the densest). Cutting across its entirety, though, are horizontal bands that mimic the striated texture of raster lines or corrugated cardboard. That the latter is what Lowe intends is confirmed by the trompe l’oeil cross-sections at the top and bottom of the sheet, even though the direction of the corrugation there contradicts the direction of the bands. Accuracy isn’t the point, of course. Representing the drawing’s imagined ‘ground’ is. Getting the direction ‘wrong’ only demonstrates that this ground is one more floating image among many.

Lowe’s pictures deny their materiality even as they constantly point to it: the composition in Private School reveals an internal seam that bifurcates and so indexes the sheet on which it’s drawn; Panglossian Paricide does the same by leaving an area at the bottom edge blank; and hands, those most primordial of drawing tools and tests of draughtsmanship, are prominent in nearly every piece. (The large lobster claw that figures so prominently in Thanks. Come Again.would seem to attest both to that primordialness and to how alien and clumsy our hands can feel when we engage them in some intricate and difficult task, such as drawing.) There’s a name for this: it’s self-reflexivity, and it means that Lowe’s work is far smarter than it may at first appear.

See this article with full illustrations, plus the entire Summer 2011 issue of ArtReview magazine free on your screen, here.