R. H. Quaytman

On the dust jacket of R. H. Quaytman's 2011 monograph and treatise Spine, the artist writes: "The medium is painting, not what the painting is made with." This passage provides perhaps the essential point of entry into the artist's encyclopedic body of work-a systemic practice of composing exhibitions as chapters in a book. While the works are elegantly constituted objects resulting from masterful material processes, their layers of gesso, silk-screen inks, and oil paint might mislead us to fixate on the single surface of the work. Various media accrete: sculpture, in the construction and placement of the panels themselves; painting, either applied through a screen or with a brush; photography, whether from an archive or by the artist; and finally language, in the works' use of narrative. The contradictions, doublings, and negations in this work create an ineffable tension that hums between and among these layers of signification, like the buzzing created behind one's eyes when perceiving one of Quaytman's optical patterns.

The works gathered for "Empire State" are primarily portraits, introducing a social network's weblike configuration into the logic of Quaytman's system. Most of the subjects depicted in the artist's portraits own a piece of the chapter in which their portrait appears. Quaytman's painting-chapters act as a visual date book, showing the passage of friends and colleagues through this world-artists such as Dan Graham, K8 Hardy, Andrea Fraser, Julia Scher, and Thomas Beard, codirector of the experimental film and video venue Light Industry. Quaytman has worked with and admires all of these sitters. In the portraits, as in our lives, places become characters as well: We are brought to a party at the artist Tom Burr's apartment; to the office of Pat Hearn's pioneering gallery space; to see the work of Dan Graham and Michael Asher at the cooperative gallery Orchard, where Quaytman was the director. In these spaces the liminal tension returns as a temporal anxiety-dreamlike, we stand present at the edge of a moment that has passed. How is it that Quaytman leads us to rooms that no longer exist?

The perspectival north-facing windows of the Whitney Museum of American Art set the scene in Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 (A Woman in the Sun-Yellow), 2010. In the painting K8 Hardy stands holding a cigarette; her nude figure and placement recall Edward Hopper's 1961 painting A Woman in the Sun, which is in the Whitney's collection. In Spine, Quaytman writes, "unlike in the Hopper painting, where the viewer is a voyeur, in my painting the viewer is virtually in the depicted space, in the company of the nude-an individual in a private moment in the public space of the museum." Quaytman's images are allegorical decoys, hieroglyphs with their own vocabulary and syntax: The piece is the artist K8 Hardy in the Whitney, but it's equally Hopper's woman in a bedroom, a platonic canonical nude, a photograph, a silk screen of a photograph, a trompe l'oeil, and a mirror.

The swath of yellow across Quaytman's piece, much like the Op-art abstraction of Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15, 2009, returns us to the physicality of the object and ourselves. If Quaytman's plywood panels can bear the weight of one more signifier, it would be the likeness of the viewer in the portraits: the posturing, the passing-by profile, costuming nakedness, absence, presence. Thus, we make manifest the tensions in Quaytman's oeuvre by embodying its aggregate layers of meaning ourselves. Just as the recurring figure of Thomas Beard stands before a work of art in Beard, Chapter 19, 2010, we are in front of and within the painting.

Alicia Mountain