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IN PRAISE OF PULP

"Slash: Paper Under the Knife", a new exhibition at New York's Museum of Art and Design (MAD), showcases work by artists who manipulate paper in unexpected ways. Its title feels provocative, daring viewers to understand paper as a profoundly mutable material–not just a two-dimensional plane to be used in the service of some other vision. This paper is an end in itself.

Like "Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting" and "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery"–the first two shows of MAD's Material and Process series–"Slash" is about contemporary approaches to a time-worn (and occasionally anachronistic) craft. And like the earlier shows, it mixes art-world luminaries (Tom Friedman, Judy Pfaff, Olafur Eliasson and Kara Walker) with lesser-known artists, all of them unified by medium, if little else. They cut, tear, shred, mount and burn–anything to transform this 18-century old material known more for its neutrality than for its Zelig-like ability to be morphed and disguised.

The show’s curatorial M.O.–and primary virtue–is its sheer breadth and eclecticism. The result is an inconceivably varied body of work. Lu Shengzhon’s "Human Brick I", when viewed with blurred eyes, resembles a rectangle of autumn foliage, but then each leaf reveals itself to be an orange frog made from tissue, fashioned according to the traditional art of Chinese paper cutting.

In Nina Katchadourian’s "Finland’s Unknown Islands", Nordic archipelagos too tiny to be named are cut from the pale blue water of a map and suspended between layers of glass in microscope slides, mounted one atop the other on a  thin steel shelf. Trimmed irregularly according to the islands’ shapes, each slide looks to display musical notes or Hebrew letters.

Garish Miami-hued acrylic is airbrushed onto laser-cut paper in Lane Twichell’s "Peaceable Kingdom (Mystic Light)" (pictured above). The purposeful tackiness prevents recognition of anything plant-based, fibrous or possibly “unbleached.” Paper, as we know it, is traded in for Sunset Strip plasticity and lip gloss-like sheen.

Many artists took the book as a starting place, as an artefact to alter and embellish. With "Between the Lines", Ariana Boussard-Reifel presents a white supremacist bible spread open atop a delicate pile of single words removed from the text (pictured top). What remains is a book devoid of content, as if devoured by some future species of hyper-accurate agnostic moth. In other cases, books are dissected like taxidermied animals: yellowed, flayed, sewn with waxed thread that could in fact be sinew. Childrens’ books are altered so as to produce paper doll characters from the pages themselves.

Paper as pulp, cutting as topography, stop-animation as narration--all further variations on this theme. Navigating such a diverse group of work inevitably yields certain formal distinctions and schools of thought. "Slash" seems split between artists who remain loyal to paper and those who make every possible attempt to transgress or obscure the medium. Both interpretations, however, demand that viewers rethink their notions of paper as a humble material.

"Slash: Paper Under the Knife" is at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, until April 4th 2010

~ ALICE GREGORY