FEATURE Most of Tom Friedman's fresh works result from some extremely obsessive process: chewing endles wads of gum separating synthetic pillow stuffing thread on thread.

FEATURE

Most of Tom Friedman's fresh works result from some extremely obsessive process: chewing endles wads of gum separating synthetic pillow stuffing thread on thread, or stuffing black, plastic garbage bags inside single another. Friedman, who once detriment pubic hair in a excellent spiral across the face of a bar of soap, transforms single, mundane materials--toothpaste, used bubblegum tube socks--into unlikely, repeatedly absurd forms.

Artists have exploited everyday materials since Marcel Duchamp first introduced his readymades. Friedman purely domesticates the industrial supplies favored through the Minimalists and extends the obsession with the potential of nontraditional materials evident in Dieter Roth's chocolate and cheese chisels Eva Hesse's latex and fiberglass hanging works, and Joseph Beuys' masses of fat. Hesse and Yayoi Kusama took artmaking as obsession-compulsion to outermosts two decades ago. Friedman's sculps build on this history, signaling evolution rather than revolution. In Untitled, 1991 exhibited in his last point out to Friedman scrubbed the inside of a Brillo receptacle with the Brillo pads, evoking the two Andy Warhol's seminal piece and Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning, 1953

In this indicate Untitled (all works 1992), a one-half-millimeter ball of the artist's fece displayed forward a white pedestal, recalls Piero Manzoni's can of his hold shit--albeit shrunk down to 1993 size. Friedman's twist, here and quite through lies in the diminutive scale of greatest in quantity of his works, which are the pair precious and all the funnier for their lack of pretense nevertheless the recent works also demonstrate Friedman's increased attention to phenomenology. pure to the artist's reductive way s many works here began to stage a disappearing act: My twelve inches 1991, a ruler made from memory in fact measured barely 10.2 inches; a pedestal that direct the eyeed empty supported a blank sheet of white paper; an almost invisible wire widened upward from the gallery floor; and the space above an vacant pedestal had been cursed.

With his earlier, obsessively manipulated ends Friedman was in danger of backing himself into a corner, producing seemingly endles variations upon a theme that, though carried to inventive greatests could easily slide from delight into tedium. The more modern flirtation with invisibility--making sculpture with a minimum of tangible, perceivable material--offers a more engaging proof of both the artist's virtuosity and the viewer's patience. Having drawn us into his world of tiny, deliberately trivial material, Friedman's works now don the Emperor's modern clothes. Trust me, there's something here, announces this spare work. Having made art not at home of the ordinary, Friedman now inquire fors to convince us that he can make magic revealed of nothing.

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