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the archive(s):
issue no. 6:
JD Smith
On Untitled (Dry-Wall Hammer)
1973, Jim Dine
Graphite and charcoal
Anything becomes a work of art if you look at it long enough. This doesn't mean simply changing the context and saying, "Hey, I hung a urinal high up on the wall and now it's Art." This means looking at the urinal in its normal place, a stoutly winged display of symmetrical porcelain and metal volumes suspended improbably, even brightly above the floor. If it's clean. If it's not, we can consider instead a dry-wall hammer, soiled by nothing more than gypsum dust, the scant oil of fingerprints, occasional blood of an unlucky thumb. New and brightly finished, painted in a flat tone or dull with long use, that hammer exudes its own chiaroscuro. This weight, laid against any given plane, dining-room table, a concrete sidewalk, the wall-mounted pegboard, defines hammer and not-hammer, and divides the world between them. Or posits the center of a possible world, a center with its own symmetries and weight. The curved and wing-like tines balance the face's flight through space and may, with light leverage, undo its work. Within this center is hidden the center of gravity, proven by balance in the hand. This center holds, and moves in support of the cantilevered head's drive to join disparate things‹or comes to rest upon another center. Perhaps that of a workbench or spare easel set out to be sketched; it, too, may be a work of art.
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