Allen Topolski's Once Familiar Objects

By Cyril Reade

Once Familiar, one of Allen Topolski's sculpturally transformed appliances, provides intelligible markers for the viewer to apprehend the contours of the artist's vision informing the many works assembled in the exhibition Apperceptions: Recent Work by Allen C. Topolski. The original object's traces suggest a familiar household appliance—its white-enameled volume with rounded corners and edges could recall a freezer, for example. Some uncertainty about its identity persists, as "once familiar" intimates: it had been there but it now resides more firmly in memory, or as firmly as memory will hold it. The work also inhabits the world of the "unfamiliar", the strange, or the uncanny; the title affirms the reality of the object in the past, while surreptitiously disavowing its present reality. Thus the object is and is not simultaneously, straddling the many frontiers on which ambiguity borders. If the object's references inhabit the past, its front side is nonetheless animated by a moving black and white image in the small rectangular space that an appliance dial—perhaps indicating temperature—might have occupied, and that plays out in the present. Bending down to view the image more clearly through the glass, distressed with use, one discerns churning water seeming to suggest that the cavernous interior of the machine is filled by the ocean. The artist's revelation to me that the swirling waters of a bowl were shaken and filmed on a kitchen table deflates the romantic expectations of tempestuous seas; no J.M.W. Turner having himself tied to the mast of a ship in order to experience an Atlantic Ocean storm—and the sublime—first hand here. So if this appliance is transformed from its original function—it was a mangle iron—into an electronic viewing device—an ersatz television, a monitor, a screen—it does so by lowering the volume on the hyped-up technology of the moment, away from the new horizon of inflated expectations of the digital age, locating its point of view in the 50s and 60s and their now surpassed and overblown dreams of a life of domestic leisure that the world of streamlined appliances was to usher in.

This strategy of deflation and deflection characterizes Back in the Day, a white enameled floor piece from which an electrical wire leads like a leash to a push button hooked to the wall that the viewer is invited to press. Pressing it, the object becomes a quietly humming lamp, its light glowing a few inches off the floor, a totally mundane if not useless intervention; with its short stubby legs, the object takes on the allure of a walking desk lamp. Topolski entices the viewer only to let him or her down with an innocuous event instead of a momentous epiphany, paralleling the fatigue of discovering that appliances and their technology ultimately serve only mundane human functions—and creating others in their wake—when the sheen of their newness and the status of ownership has worn thin. Topolski's objects point to the fetish function of objects that are symbolically charged—charged with the cult of ownership that this category of object can confer and the prostheticization of the body that these objects embody—but Topolski's strategy yields none of the immediate satisfaction that the fetish normally confers. The thrill of possession or the phantasmagorical projection of desire are deflected. Instead the viewer is left to deal with the outlines of the structure of the fetish, to ignore it or pursue this line of critical investigation of our relationship to technology, embedded in Topolski's practice in the object space of domesticity.

Allen Topolski's work should not be construed as only a critique of consumerism, albeit an intelligently discreet one; it is also a celebration of material practice. Topolski works his skills, patience and inventiveness—like Claude Levi-Strauss's resourceful tinkerer, the bricoleur—as he transforms discarded appliances, seamlessly assembling parts from different objects to create newly configured things. For Topolski this attention to craftsmanship in the remaking of the dysfunctional artifact "points to utility crippled and the culture's expungement of the need for, and appreciation of, craft" (http://www.courses.rochester.edu/topolski/). It also reflects the pleasure of making, shaping, manipulating, and fashioning that transcends the idea of craft associated with the functional object; while the artist begins his work with a certain recognizable type of object, his interventions continuously reinvent the products and discards of serial manufacture, emerging on the other side of this process as a beautifully crafted dysfunctional object. While the appliance-ness of the artwork holds the viewer's attention and piques her or his sense of curiosity—what is this thing, what does it do—the inventory of shapes, materials, textures and colors constitute a rich sculptural vocabulary that please both the eye and the haptic sense. Cones and cylinders, wire mesh and impenetrable casings, cubes and spheres, plastic, metal, rubber, enameled surfaces and the natural color of materials, electrical fixtures, pedestals and autonomous objects, wall and floor pieces, found objects and crafted parts, mixed media…all the sculptural possibilities are explored, articulated not to draw attention to themselves but to the reflections that animate this work. aversion

There is surely an aspect of this work that is a formal exercise—the beauty of juxtaposing line and volume, orchestrating the contrasts of material and applied colors, polishing surfaces—expressing the pleasures of the visual world and particularly that of industrial design, reinvesting the retinal gratification that Marcel Duchamp claimed he had expunged when he created his ReadyMades. The manipulation of these pieces reflects the affective investment these objects have come to represent for the artist. For Topolski the "formal appreciation of found objects has its most apparent origins in the history given to me by my birthplace. The romantic ideals, unadorned tastes, and simplified views of my home town, Shamokin, Pennsylvania, continue to contribute significantly to the character of my studio production." For the residents of Shamokin, Topolski recalls, waste was a proof of productivity and the ever-growing accumulation of mining by-products was a source of local pride. This horizon of memory projecting forth from a childhood household is available only to the artist; the recast objects act as surrogates, open to the shaping of the present through the understanding that the past has shaped. The viewer can only inhabit the present tense of the objects, their materiality, even while experiencing their ambiguous significance and the universe of memories and associations they solicit. Their physicality is grounded in an anthropomorphic surrogacy; these are after all objects made to assist us in our daily lives, and so there should be aspects that remind us of our own bodies. Some suggest this more strongly than others, as do the scale and shape of Labor Saving Devices—a pair of foot massagers turned into wall trophies. Even when dislocated, this recall of the body as the measure of this activity—and its attendant investment of pleasure—articulates the ethic of this work, the meaningfulness of human gesture, taken back from that which would rob the body of its value, a process that the digitalization of the world is accelerating.

The Imprint series, the most recent work, is a kind of blueprint in reverse of appliance design; the images project back from the discarded object onto a two-dimensional drawing scored on a recycled wall or floor covering, re-conceiving the artist's process of addressing industrial detritus in more conceptual terms. The industrial artifact is rendered in a drawing, and is not necessarily recognizable, since the volumes of the object have been collapsed onto the flatness of the linoleum or other material; only the streamlined contours belie their origin. The inscription of these lines on this arte povera surface further reinforces Topolski's tactics, differentiating them from the found object appropriation work of a Jeff Koons whose work exploited commercial value to its own end, or that of a Damien Hirst who trafficked in sensationalism. Topolski's drawings find their aesthetic in line, proportion and composition, articulated with an inventive material language harmonizing with earlier material and ethical choices, challenging the viewer to appreciate in the quotidian and the understated. Rather than creating a spectacle, Topolski lowers the volume on the hype, creating the conditions to re-encounter the enchantment of the once familiar.