‘Steve Wolfe: Remembering Steve’ Speaks Volumes About an Artist
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Version 0 of 1. Steve Wolfe, an artist who died last year at 60, was known for the small, select library of trompe l’oeil books he created. From his first solo show in 1989, Wolfe’s sculptures and wall pieces were all-but-perfect replicas of worn, well-used copies of modern classics and artist monographs and catalogs — usually his own — tweaked to within a hair of the original. Initially anonymous and ordinary in appearance, these copies become exquisitely personal as you grasp the level of skill and commitment required to make them. They are labors of love. That love permeates “Steve Wolfe: Remembering Steve,” a memorial exhibition at Luhring Augustine. It is the first show of the artist’s work in New York since 2009, when the Whitney mounted an exhibition of studies for the books, and the first show since 2003 to include any of the book pieces themselves. The writers here include Leo Tolstoy and Henry James, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and Allen Ginsberg and Jean Genet. The catalogs feature the work of Pollock, Warhol and Walker Evans. Also included are a few of Wolfe’s trompe vinyl records, among them Patti Smith’s “Horses,” an LP, and the 45-r.p.m. single of the Beatles’ “Help.” Seen together, these works form a poignant self-portrait. The show opens with Wolfe’s rendition of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” its green cover gently creased, like aged skin. It pays tribute to the various writers and artists, many of them gay, who, it seems safe to say, formed Wolfe’s understanding of himself as an artist and as a gay man. For the most part, Wolfe made his book pieces from a combination of oil paint, modeling paste, lithography or screen prints and carved, painted wood, a thorough mixing of media to fashion work that melds art with literature and music. If a cover had a metallic finish, like Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon,” he also used bronze-casting. The first clue to the specialness of Wolfe’s “painted sculptures” (his words) is that they hang on the wall, inviting scrutiny and savoring that usually reveal signs of artifice and process. These are especially evident in the studies, which vary often, but not strictly, according to book type. Studies for books with black-and-white covers tend to be executed in graphite. Those for paperbacks usually depict only the front, as with Nabokov’s “Speak Memory,” whose white cover Wolfe set aflutter with brushwork. For hardback books (but also some paperbacks), their typically ragged dust jackets are usually splayed open to expose front, back and spine — more than in the final piece. One example, Gertrude Stein’s 1948 monograph on Picasso, plays with perception: You can’t tell if the textured brushwork of the painting on the cover is meant to show Wolfe’s hand or imitate Picasso’s. In all the final pieces, you simultaneously contemplate the love of the book as text and as design, and the life of the book as an object — a mass-produced one worn to a state of uniqueness before Wolfe began making his copy, memorializing one point in its particular disintegration. Often there is a resonant dovetailing between the condition of a book and its subject and design. For example, the white dust jacket of “Walker Evans American Photographs,” a 1962 catalog from the Museum of Modern Art, has appropriately suffered light damage: a permanent shadow creeps across the front. Wolfe’s rendition of the familiar Penguin paperback of Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” is of a copy swollen to twice its size. It has, in effect, blossomed, the way Anna did when she fell in love with Vronsky. The pages fan outward delicately, like the gills on a mushroom. The book wasn’t submerged in water — nothing so crude. It was Wolfe’s beach reading one summer, consumed in high humidity and often “with wet fingers,” he once said. The drifting snow in the cover image — taken from a 19th-century Russian print — is beautifully painted. Wolfe’s books honor the exacting labor of cherished writers and artists by returning the favor. But they are also hidden in their labors of love, enacting the frequent need for homosexual attractions and bonds to remain undeclared. This show brings a new clarity and depth to Wolfe’s art, through its attentive selection and installation, and because it is now, sadly, finite, fixed. But perhaps we give ourselves to it more fully because it’s all that is left. |