Karl Haendel: The Idea and the Object

Karl Haendel is the kind of artist who should have a slick appeal for those who closely follow the art world circuit. He does meticulous (i.e., transparency projections-to-paper), big drawings of everything from a single, blown-up penny to New Yorker cartoons, scraggly doodles to Escalades. My love for Ed Ruscha goes without saying, and clean figurative drawing always manages to seduce me. But I remember wandering haphazardly into Haendel's solo show at Anna Helwing last year and initially thinking that his output was impressive; but as I kept looking, seeing the mega-sized Harper's Indices on the walls, Haendel's elbow nudges of cleverness seemed just a little too clever.

With Haendel, we have a really smart guy--no less than a Brown semiotics acolyte--who knows what these symbols mean, where they exist in our contemporary world, and, more pointedly, that a certain set of images will give a certain amount of pleasure to a contemporary bourgeois audience. Indeed, Haendel iconizes precisely that which we consume--either because we buy them or because we see them constantly--from air conditioning units to President Bush's bouncy face. And though it is executed with crafty expertise, there's something pleasurable missing in what Haendel does... Cheesy as this sounds, it feels like Haendel is all head and no heart.

I'm sure the argument against such criticism is that Ed Ruscha's images appear just as aseptic, seem to avoid the hand, and, to add another artist to the mix, Richard Prince is the perfect example of someone who has simply appropriated and presented us low parts of culture. But what sets these two contemporary heavyweights apart is that it never seems like they take positions of distance. The way the images are executed always leads me to believe that they're interested and fascinated by the images they choose, not necessarily just the culutrally-infiltrated idea of blowing up the Marlborough Man (in the case of Prince) or gas stations dotting California (in the case of Ruscha). These guys know that their practicing within the realm of irony, but it's irony that comes a split-second after the fact; it's irony on the edge. There's the object and then the world that contextualizes the object. And the audience gets the pleasure in figuring where the object fits in the world, how it's been transformed by the artists in order to recontextualize it.

Haendel's object is irony, and what seems to me to be his motivation is the idea of the object, not necessarily the object itself. The fact that display is such a major component of Haendel's process belies the fact that he sees his drawings working in tandem with one another -- that the ideas of the objects bounce off of one another -- in order to create a message, not unlike advertising. He connects the works in order to wink at his audience. And this is not to say that the images aren't interesting when construed together because clearly they are.

But Haendel seems to create an uncomfortable viewing experience because it's almost as though he wants to be smarter than his viewers, rather than endowing them with their own sense of his work and, almost, with their own work to do to engage with it. It almost revels in the idea that he thought of this before we did. Indeed, Haendel knows his work better than we do (as all artists do), but there is no sense that he wants to leave things up to the chance of looking; he seems to have strict strategies for how his images should be received, and how they should be interpreted. It's all interesting, but not much more, really, than the word itself.

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More on Haendel: Thanks to Linda for the heads-up on David Pagel's review of Karl Haendel's MOCA Focus show. A Heather's view on Haendel's 2005 show at Anna Helwing over at art.blogging.la. And old UCLA Bruin article about Haendel's work in an MFA show.