The
paintings in the artist Ryan McGinness’s new series, “Signals,”
immediately invite interpretation — and then, just as quickly, elude it.
Each of the pieces is a circular wood panel, 18 inches in diameter and
ringed by a thick red outline. Inside are a handful of stark, graphic
black-and-white symbols (a bomb with a seedling sprouting from it; a
string tied around a middle finger) that strongly evoke meaning, without
giving it all away. “They use the visual language of universal sign
systems and therefore give the illusion that they are communicating
blunt pedestrian information,” McGinness notes, “but they undermine that
same visual language by evading elucidation.”
McGinness’s
particular symbology takes inspiration from the early 20th-century
designs of artists like Gerd Arntz and Augustin Tschinkel, whose
pictograms proved politically useful in the European radical workers’
movement after World War I. “The images that they were making were used
to communicate very clear information, like statistics, and they were
used on maps and legends, and it was the very beginning of an early sign
system,” he says. “Once you attach utility to pictures, basically, then
it becomes something entirely different.”
More
recently, he cites the influence of artists like Keith Haring — and his
own upbringing in the surf- and skate-heavy environment of late-’80s
Virginia Beach. “I was always interested in how the application of those
symbols on what are otherwise ordinary objects, like skateboards and
T-shirts, really transformed the value of those things,” he says. “When I
couldn’t afford the cool brands and the cool surf-shop shirts, I would
just make my own, in some cases bootleg versions, or in other cases with
my original artwork.” The other kind of relationship between art and
commercial production compelled him, too: He had a poster of a Warhol
Coke-bottle painting on the wall of his teenage bedroom.
In
deciding which symbols to draw from his sizable archive of drawings
when creating a “Signals” painting, McGinness says “a lot of the forms
are combined and pulled together based on very basic compositional
concerns, like size and visual weight.” Each of the paintings has a kind
of relational, nonlinear narrative, too, but the artist is careful not
to overstate them. “The images are very legible, and yet the meanings
are very slippery and open to interpretation,” he says. “In many cases, I
have very clear intentions, but art doesn’t necessarily operate that
way.”
Below,
McGinness provides shares thoughts on a few of the components of three
“Signals” paintings — but preserves plenty of mystery, too. Roll over
each image to see its annotations.
Farzad Owrang, Courtesy of Ryan McGinness
Studios, Inc./Art Resource, NY, © Ryan McGinness, via Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Farzad Owrang, Courtesy of Ryan McGinness
Studios, Inc./Art Resource, NY, © Ryan McGinness, via Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Farzad Owrang, Courtesy of Ryan McGinness
Studios, Inc./Art Resource, NY, © Ryan McGinness, via Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
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