
by David M. Roth
The once-intertwined inclinations of Conceptualism and Funk, once derisively tagged as Dude Ranch Dada by Hilton Kramer, are alive and well in the work of Ron Peetz, a Sacramento-area artist who’s made a long career out of fusing text to provocative sculptures made of found and fabricated objects. In this showing, incised marble slabs, a barbed wire-wrapped crucifix, a baseball bat converted to a paint brush, figures made of welded machine parts, stacked bibles, modified thrift store paintings, altered hand tools and a crushed bucket (above) figure prominently as jumping off points for serious and sometimes sardonic examinations of faith and its often toxic relationship to politics.
Peetz, 73, came of age professionally in the late 1960s, when giants like William T. Wiley, Stephen Kaltenbach and Bruce Nauman dominated the scene at UC Davis. Their influence, while discernable, has never overshadowed Peetz’s innovations. The methods by which he marries messages to objects are uniquely his.
Not everything is so well aimed. Two life-sized figures made of welded scrap metal too closely resemble (in stripped-down form) similarly conceived works by Clayton Bailey and Robert Hudson; while Swinging for the Fences, a purposefully ham-fisted abstract painting made with a brush attached to a baseball bat, targets the pretensions of Abstract Expressionism. Four decades ago when conceptualists declared painting dead, a critique such as this might have resonated. Today it feels more like a relic of a lost cause.
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Such works chart the distance Amrhein’s travelled in the past decade. In 2009, he was making raw, exuberant, exclamatory black marks on paper that recalled Keith Haring. While vestiges of that work can still be detected in a couple works in this show, Amrhein today seems more focused on visualizing the ephemeral than giving vent to the neural impulses that once governed his hand.
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Ronald Peetz: “Artifacts” and Phil Amrhein: “Mostly Black” @ Artspace 1616 through February 25, 2018.
About the author:
David M. Roth is the editor and publisher of Squarecylinder.