Like Imi Knoebel’s 1970s ‘X’ projections, the support structure is transformed in Daniel Lefcourt's Breach of Contract into a variable, or placeholder, problematizing its role as a site of production and representational meaning. The use of concealment and invisibility as strategies to examine the notion of truth at the site of representation are explored in both Knoebel's and Lefcourt’s practices. Like Knoebel’s Room 19, which Lefcourt interprets as a kind of theatre set or re-staging of the site of production as an allegory of “the studio” or museum, Lefcourt’s 2012 exhibition, Mockup at White Flag Projects, considers the support structures used at the site of exhibition as “scenery” and “signage” whereby the artist assumes the role of “sign-maker” or “scene-builder.” The conventions of display becoming the organizing principle whereby Lefcourt’s MDF objects resemble paintings, or signage, some becoming frames for or doubling and inverting the architecture.
In an artist’s talk given at the DIA Art Foundation in 2010, Lefcourt describes this capacity for resemblance in relation to Knoebel’s Room 19 as existing in the MDF/Masonite material itself, like a “parasitic alien” “perfectly capable of imitating its victims” be they painting, sculpture, the artist's studio, architecture, the class room, the museum. This abstract material Lefcourt suggests, is both “of” and concealed “inside” the MDF/Masonite imitation, both becoming image, and negating image. This notion of representation as a physical concealing sign is evident in Lefcourt’s Breach of Contract (Total non-performance) 2006 a monumental black acrylic MDF object resembling a paragraph of censored centered text reminiscent of Joseph Kosuth’s Zero and Not 1986. The black acrylic surface is incised with “ruled” lines executed by an industrial plotter revealing the material beneath. Lefcourt describes the work as a reconstruction of a series of found images outlining newspaper print production process which he had seen on the Internet but which were offline and replaced by X’s when he returned to the site to download them.
In its use of an inherently abstract material and its allusion to acts of censorship, Breach of Contract (Total non-performance) as Lefcourt describes it operates as “a sign of an absence – evidence of that which has been displaced, negated, substituted or denied.” In contrast to Matias Faldbakken’s digitally printed inks using a printer which adds medium to the support, Lefcourt’s plotter is programmed to subtract the desired areas from the support structure, brining the work into being through an absence of material as opposed to a presence of form. The use of the plotting machine was highlighted in the exhibition Plot Fill at Sutton Lane Gallery in 2009 which included the terminology of industrial manufacturing in titles such as “Substrate IV” (substrate, in the context of Lefcourt’s practice, referring both to the medium, the support structure and the censored subject matter).
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X Parasite Metroid series comics (2002-2008) |
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Daniel Lefcourt Breach of Contract (Total non-performance) 2006 |
