GEORGE STOLL

George Stoll

pairs partners and conversations

03/09/24- 04/06/24

Opening Reception: 03/09/24 6-9 pm

George Stoll: pairs, partners, and conversations

by Sabrina Tarasoff

I often find that writing to someone, or speaking to someone—even if just in my head—focuses the search for an opening into a given body of work. Something about the conversational tone sets a course straight into the accident of substance; perhaps, simply, by allowing the voice to be guided by, and so embrace, the mind’s natural drift. To find a secret addressee at the elusive other end of the text, in the works themselves, provides directive. Or, at the very least, it concentrates voice into style: a concept that is especially apt for the consideration of formal composition as a kind of discourse. Ask to enter the private quarters of confab, and the work, too, opens sesame.  

Pause, here, to recall the twilit dénouement of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously published final work, On Certainty (1969). The sequence of propositions that leads us to the end of his ‘certainty’ arises in a sequence of propositions questioning whether or not it is possible to forget that one has been on the moon. Then, after spending a few propositions pondering the forever-fascinating stoner question about how its possible for us to have hands (or not have hands), he is brought back to the world, namely, in the stellar insight that his thoughts are held together not in singular lines, “but a nest of propositions.” A few lines later, he comes around to the work’s most elegant moment of self-recognition: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions.” 

To understand is elegant but fragile. 

Gaston Bachelard echoes this sentiment in his chapter on nests: “In this domain, everything takes place simply and delicately.” He also writes: “The moment we love an image, it cannot remain a copy of a fact.” 

George Stoll has, over the past thirty-or-so years, engaged in a process of making often hailed as clement, humorous, and fragile. His works bask in their own blissful pastime, which has entailed the precision-craft of noticing, and so engaging, the spiritual lives of certain minor items. Culled from the rush of life’s relay into the calmness of the studio space, his sculptural works ask us to consider the serpentine stillness of party leftovers, the mundane beauty of Tupperware, and the patterns and textures that fix memories to mind. As fragments of being’s boring elation, or forms pointing to inner life (per the life inside, at home, in hotels, or rec rooms,) these sculptures imagine the festive occasions that come to pass, time passing, and pastimes, in the simple act of resemblance—sculptures that look like stuff left lingering. Trash, tokens, remainders; not silver-misted as memorial objects, but as keepsakes go: things that promise to continue to contain the moment. Stoll partakes in his hometown’s triumphant tinsel world—and, transposes it to Tinseltown—but also sees the delicate potential in his chosen subject. Sponges, streamers, and cups come to contain the atmosphere of home. As Bachelard would have it, “A nest—we understand right away—is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.” To be clear, Stoll is definitely a nester. 

What matters is less the specifics of any single event, but what these days occasion as universal grounds. Stoll’s hallmark is the holiday spirit: art’s ceremonial edge. His works decorate the space beset between the all-encompassing and the individual: two spaces that seem cyclically connected. Like calendar dates and chores, one tends to lead to the other, and vice versa. Holidays come around again.

Not past reflection (per nostalgia): rather, presence, continuity, contact. Stoll tells me, in conversation, that his chosen objects are ones commonly shared in the world. Ordinary things, things with some kind of use-value. Even—or, especially—as surplus: décor, daily ephemera, disposables, and ornaments that we can place, and that also place us somewhere; things that we accrue, but rarely consider in the aftermath of their raison d’être. Sponges, cartoon-ish bones, toilet paper. Leaflets, advertisements, and surfaces. Stoll’s attention catches life for its details, though one’s often designed to leave only the softest impression on our minds. In this, the sculptures bask in the simplicity of witness—perception, visibility, being noticed. Halted in the sculptures is something of life’s relay: Stoll’s collecting tokens from the flow of time, marking festive occasions and clean-ups, elation and ennui, or things noticed and things forgotten, as if to salvage them from oblivion. Simone Weil said something, like, “company is the eternity of the well.” 

Beauty lies in the subtle conflation between conventional aesthetic categories: a natural blurring, or integration of the eventful and the uneventful, the holiday and the working day, low brow and high brow, the mundane and sublimated. Stoll’s objects have naturally, and over time, found pairs, one object seemingly necessitating another into being, or images, like friendly ghosts, spooking to be re-summoned. Stoll’s works seem to emerge out of our craving for conjunction: one thing after the other, not always expected. It forms, over time, into a kind of counterpoint of things: life’s material musicality—soft, catchy.

Regarding these pairs, Stoll and I did not speak so much about the distinction between doubling as premeditated “concept” and as the result of an ongoing process; however, we did speak quite a bit about the process of looking, and the persistence of vision as central to the work. And this, on both ends of the object—looking at the world of things as an artist, in order to make something of it, something that bids attention; and so, also, the aesthetics of reception, from the end of an audience. In the presence of these pairs, intimated is the necessity of something of a mutual surrender—most simply, to the objects fixing our focus (as doubles, cognates, or versions of the same.) But, to be more precise, this surrendering is also to a kind of cyclical time, a revolution of ideas, as an amatory discourse, a fact of daily life, something we sometimes barely notice, as engrossed into our tasks. 

A certain temporality is implied: waiting for the moment of insight, for something to feel finished, or beautiful. Stoll takes “ordinary” things out of the world, and places them back: “different.” More beautiful, perhaps, or more delicate. To surrender to the influence of these sculptures—as derived from the Old French sur- (over) and rendre (present, restore, return, give up)—is perhaps to be moved by their presence, to see something above or beyond their usual place in the world. Being made to note the process of their making, and their textures, the singularity of ubiquitous forms: slowly, time starts to feel absent from reflection. It bends to the present moment, as if seeing something for the first time, over and over again. What remains is an amateurish attention paid to the ordinary, which, like all of love’s trivial pursuits, completely transforms our perception.  

Objects exist for us in the tinsel world of reflection, deliberation—that is, of deliberate action. (To deliberate: to weigh down scales—a Virgo quality, perhaps?) The pairs in this exhibition did not come about deliberately, but were instead a quality of the work Stoll came to notice in retrospect. As the title might indicate, Pairs, Partners, Conversations bids a question on the deliberate, singular action of making art, as a process perhaps more prone to conversational drift, repetition, and recursions than one might think. And this, not as concept—but a fact of life. Things are presented, or at least made present. Once, and again. There’s a kind of lyrical substantiality to art-making as cyclical deliberation: the ordinary, habitual act of making things seen. Like, hanging Christmas ornaments to mark Santa’s arrival, or streamers to signal the New Year. Here, the sculptures turn to fantasy—to be read in its etymological origins, via Latin from Greek phantasia (imagination, appearance) to phantazein (to make visible)—is a faculty filed under domestic desire.  

To make an imaginary visible: most commonly, this entails a relationship to the impossible, or improbable, like a mental image made manifest to reflect on conscious wishes—of futurities, possibilities, forms of life. Often, we forget how fantasy fits into more ordinary frames, or how ordinary objects come to inform the imagination of an occurrence. In this case, the possibility of pairs, partners, and conversations. 

Georg Lukacs speaks, at a certain point of his The Theory of the Novel, of “transcendental homelessness.” Searching for a means to articulate the homelessness of certain actions in social relations, the homelessness of a soul in some systems of values, he writes: “Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence; every form restores the absurd to its proper place as the vehicle, the necessary condition of meaning.” This allows us to see, in theories of beauty and surrender, ordinary life, and its circular narratives, a novelistic quality to the works. These sculptures, resembling objects dislocated from their proper actions are, perhaps, metaphors for the soul seeking its context. Elements drifting in the sublime dislocation of the artwork; i.e., in the poetics of space, literary space, isolated by their own visual limits. But in this, the works also reach the “futility of profound and genuine human aspirations,” per Lukacs, wherein we might recognize the possibility of something being irreducibly there, and so find a kind of fulfillment—a beauty, sense of completion—in its emergence. In other words, the absence of any manifest aim permits us to see the object for all its presence, and consider its form, structure, and being—without the need to analyze, or explain. This homelessness of action, of the acting soul, drives forth these sculptures. Substance alone has existence, writes Lukacs: “Only substances which are profoundly homogenous with one another can enter into the fighting union of reciprocal compositional relationships.” 

The protean event is the partnering of souls, in paired forms. As Stoll has said, the pairs and doubles present in his works—doubles of self-similar forms, colors, and textures, sights and gestures—appeared over time, as if without choice, lifted out of the multiplicity of things. The mind driven from within to repeat and revisit, to move with the works’ bewitching mobility, sometimes, as it seems, simply back to the same substance, asking to be seen again. Like a conversational subject that never exhausts itself, always equally amusing, puzzling. It’s all animated by interiority, in multiple senses of the term. 

I may have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions, like poor Wittgenstein—and still, hitting rock bottom also feels significant. Courted in Stoll’s works is not the sublime, nor sublimation, but the clement humor of the bathetic. To attempt to elevate something to a state of grace that fails the task is profoundly bathetic, and this, to be read as the profonde: the bottom, the depths of knowledge. The ne plus ultra of everyday meaning. 

Beauty gleaned in the unfortunate, the leftover, in bits and bobs, becomes the transcendental substance of Stoll’s practice. 

~ Sabrina Tarasoff

George Stoll is an American artist working in sculpture, drawing and painting. A recipient of the Rome Prize, he has exhibited his work extensively, and he has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Angles, Los Angeles; Grant Selwyn Fine Art, New York; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; Windows Gallery, Brussels; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston; and The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. Stoll's works have appeared in group exhibitions internationally, including Cheim & Read, New York; American Academy in Rome, Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Drawing Center, New York. Public collections include Hammer Museum, University of Southern California, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Norton Family Collection; The Robert J. Shiffler Collection, the Williams - Sonoma Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. He has been a visiting professor at various universities including UCLA, Yale, Otis, Columbia University, and currently at Art Center College of Design. He lives and works in Los Angeles.