Jack Massey—Light & Dark

 

 

One of the things I learned from Jack Massey is that there is a lot of light in dark. Jack always pointed out that the stark differences between these opposite ends are far less interesting than the more subtle tones between.[2]

 

 

 

 

Poetry is not about what is on the page, but relates to something else. The thing you read on the page gets you there in a sense, bit by bit, pointing toward things not seen in front of you.[4]

Jack Massey, 2016

 

 

 

Jack Massey—Light & Dark is the second of three exhibitions to explore Light & Dark from different vantages. The theme for this year’s exhibition series was suggested by the Cambridge School of Weston’s (CSW) English Department and voted into Thompson Gallery itinerary by CSW students. Jack Massey—Light & Dark presents a select group of collages, drawings, objects and an example of one of his installation pieces. Spanning 6 decades between the oldest and newest works, Light & Dark is the largest retrospective of Jack Massey’s work mounted to date and introduces many works that are exhibited for the first time. Whereas the first exhibition, Charlie Nevad—Light & Dark, looked at the traditional artistic trope of light and dark—chiaroscuro, naturalism—to ultimately reveal ideals of “oneness” and self enlightenment, this second exhibition explores the poetic allusions of Jack Massey which illuminate the elusive nature of making connections between seemingly disparate things.

 

Jack Massey was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. He studied at the Albert C. Barnes Foundation (Merion, PA) and the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Massey served in the military during WWII and fought in the Battle of the Bulge—1944-45—in the 3rd army, 346th regiment, near St. Vith, Ardennes Forest, Belgium, under General Patton’s leadership.[5] After serving in the War, he attended art school and graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine arts in Philadelphia—the oldest art school in the country. After graduating, Massey was awarded a Prix de Rome and spent three years at the American Academy in Rome, later returning as an artist-in-residence there. Massey’s experiences abroad have been a consistent source of reference, inspiration and reminiscence throughout his artistic and professional careers.

 

In 2014, Massey was honored with the title Professor Emeritus at RISD, where he was a long time senior faculty member since 1963. Massey is esteemed for how he respects and encourages his students, his collaborative spirit, his contributions to the Freshman Foundation program, for being a founder of the Carr Haus gallery and a founding member of the artists/architect design team that rehabilitated RISD’s once derelict Woods-Gerry Mansion—transforming it into RISD’s main exhibition space for student work—and, as an important founding faculty member of RISD’s European Honors Program in Rome, where he was the Chief Critic for several years. Massey’s work has been exhibited extensively in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Yourk, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, California, Florida and Rome. His work is included in many private and public collections including The RISD Museum of Art (Providence, RI), Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh, PA), Philadelphia Museum of Art, (Pennsylvania, PA), Albright-Knox Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Westmoreland County Museum of Art, (Greensburg, PA), Colgate University (Hamilton, NY), Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA) and the American Academy in Rome.

 

 

 

“Massey also has a more playful side. In fact, many of…[his] pieces convey a sense of amused improvisation…”[7]

 

 

 

“Reverence for the historical” is “a predominant theme” in Jack Massey’s work.[9] Considering the myriad references to art history, the vast array of techniques Massey employs and explores that mix, borrow, infiltrate, if not blur, the distinctions between art-historical –isms, and, the array of subjects and ideas he explores, along with the artist’s tendency to meld traditionally flat methods of art with architectural possibilities, Massey’s work is easier to reminisce with the history of Modern Art on the whole then it is to pin his work down to any single style of art making. Massey does not however copy artistic genera, but rather, he allows artistic possibility to arise in the work as it is being made, similarly to how jazz musicians allow musical rifts from other musicians and eras to wander in and out of a performance. Massey’s distressed paper collages, for instance, meander around and relate to Abstract Expressionist improvisational brushwork, mysterious Surrealistic spaces, the familiarity of Pop Art’s appropriation, the elegance of Minimalistic patterns and forms, and, the atmospheric Romanticism of painters such as J. M. William Turner and James Abbot McNeil Whistler—which are all immediately evident even before viewers contemplate the artist’s primary poetic allusions, homages and direct references that abound in the works. And then there are the specific references to which Massey knowingly plays with in specific pieces such as Ellsworth Kelly’s minimal structures, attitudes toward space, architecture and human scale, or, the advent of Duchamp’s readymades and idea-based art or Picasso’s sculptural juxtapositions. Massey’s work has never been confined by any category of artistic production—he playfully ventures into any territory in order to bridge the gaps between things—that is the game he plays and he invites his viewers to play too.

 

Throughout his artistic career, the vehicle for Massey’s forays into the past and back to the present again has always been collage—the preeminent agent of connectivity, ever since Georges Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s experiments with papier collé in 1912. Everything in Massey’s oeuvre is collage-based and that gives his work a recognizable look, but Massey “avoid[s] the sense of ‘craft’ in [his] collages. As he notes in one of his many artist statements available in the checklist booklets, “I don’t think that quality relates to what I wish to convey.”[10] Massey pushes at many boundaries and artistic tropes in terms of the physicality of the work, but his ideas and musings, the software of his art, so to speak, is the most elusive aspect of his work; what is there is not what is seen before his viewer’s eyes.

 

In our age of hyper connectivity, today, anyone who is able to wield a smart phone or computer with their built-in world wide network of anti-Socratic recollection software—Socrates was against the industry of writing things down and publishing books, fearing the eventual laziness of memory among the populace[11]—people today have become accustomed to connect with anything that on their minds in a strictly digital way. Considering the ancient philosopher’s guardedness, is today’s world destined to prefer digital retrieval over analog memory in the near future? Massey’s work offers an alternate potentiality. Well before the establishment of the Internet, Jack Massey developed a network of connections between artistic genera that would define, if not explode his studio practice into an interconnected universe. Accordingly, Massey aligns with Socratic skepticism while also being open to possibility. But Massey is carful, editorial and selective, often choosing to work with, overlooked, quotidian, lost and forgotten things.

 

Working with overused and clichéd imagery is absent from Massey’s work. What is obvious is often a decoy, a trap of distraction that both draws attention to itself and prevents other things from being noticed. It may be said that Massey has made a career of avoiding the obvious unless people are generally blind to seeing or finding something. Massy’s work reminds us of the importance of exercising the powers curiosity, recollection and the skills of connection. His work is about finding if not pointing toward frames of reference and that aspect of his work is best understood though good-old-fashioned thoughtfulness.

 

Regarding physical frames, with few exceptions, the only works on display in Jack Massey—Light & Dark that are framed in the traditional sense are those works loaned from a private collection of his work. Massey dislikes frames, “they are a problem” for him. Massey often paints over, or builds on top of his frames, never uses a matte, always selects a frame for his various works that has the thinnest sidewalls—minimizing the frames constricting enclosure. And when no frame at all is preferred, Massey uses “glass to serve as a frame over the collages placed on a wall.”[12] Massey wants, like Ellsworth Kelly—and artist Massey deeply admires and a longtime favorite inspiration—to “make [art] part of the architecture of the environment.”[13] In Massey’s work, the physical forms that house the artist’s work transform what are traditionally categorized as works of art on paper, into art objects—treasure troves for the mind—objets trouvés.

 

When we humans find things, when we make discoveries, the human mind gets a spark of enlightenment—a shot of endorphins that inspires—a light in the darkness. Massey’s art is like an out of body synapse—a bridging between two parallel and previously unconnected things via the thoughts or experiences that connects them. The spark literally creates a bridge and forms the basis for new understanding, even when the things being referenced are nowhere in sight. Visual poetry. As the human mind works to understand, anything that is new, as long as it is useful, exercised, and repeated through reminiscence and the processes of memory, the brain responds by a process known as “myelination.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines Myelin as “a mixture of proteins and phospholipids forming a whitish insulating sheath around many nerve fibers, increasing the speed at which impulses are conducted”[14] and myelination is the formation of the protective coating around the actual connection. It is rather like the plastic insulation around telephone wires. The reward of using memories and making connections is the increased speed of thought, but more importantly, the protection and storage of ideas. Unless thoughts are repeated, they are doomed to stay in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

It has often been said that art has no utility; art is not like a fork, or a pencil in the sense that it gets picked up like a tool and is used in a practical sense. And yet art has inspired countless ideas and has instigated change throughout the millennia. The playful, connective, and positive spirit of Massy’s work activates and instigates. At 93 years of age, with all the giddiness of a schoolboy enthralled by what he is learning, Massey remains an active artist today and his work inspires much of the same in his viewers. Massey’s work reminds us in a very real sense, that we are always in the dark until we connect with something, anything, so long as it is true and relevant. His work is ultimately an invitation to play—to make something useful of our thoughts if not ourselves or the physical things we construct.

 

Below this wall text, in the wall-mounted plastic holders, visitors are invited to peruse and return several laminated images of famous things that have been purposefully unnamed and unattributed. Each laminated image refers to a worldly thing that is not inside the gallery physically, but nevertheless relates to one or more works on display in Jack Massey—Light & Dark. They are included as aids to connection—to provide examples of Massey’s inspirations and musings—but viewers will have to do the actual linking on their own! Go ahead, bridge the gaps, make the connections and the leaps of imagination, and then, as Jack Massey would say, “just go make something.”

 

Todd Bartel

Art Faculty

Gallery Director, Curator

Thompson Gallery