I recognized certain tendencies in my Wisconsin students from the first class I taught here in 2010. They were polite, hard-working, earnest and sought objective answers to open-ended truths that neither I nor art history could possibly deliver. After more than a decade, I’ve come to associate this with a certain Midwestern if-it-quacks-like-a-duck pragmatism that has shed light on broader issues around knowledge and art’s role in connecting to it. Faced with this ongoing conundrum, I’ve had to address the issue head-on by avoiding the trap of certainty and the abyss of relativism, attempting to wrap my arms around it and dismantle it in one sweeping gesture.

Artist Michelle Grabner’s work has been an important tool in attempting this impossible maneuver. I invoke her practice in my Contemporary Art course regularly. Grabner, a Wisconsin native, makes art, indeed lives her life, as a metaphor for the age-old aporia that is the very nature of locating permanent meaning in a world of language and human culture. It’s a search that goes back to Socrates in the “The Republic,” and probably long before that. Grabner’s current exhibition “New Paintings and Sculpture” at Green Gallery through Jan. 13, 2024 continues to inventively yank at that Gordian knot of foundational symbolic thought. She does this, as she always has, by exploring contradictions, oppositions and all the visual poetry that flickering irresolution can generate.

The most unique of these new explorations comes in the form of embellished chunks of masonry appropriated from a derelict coach house at the Pabst Mansion. The pieces of Gilded-Age architecture on the floor of the Green Gallery would possess a Duchampian pop without any reworking, however, Grabner raises the stakes in post-production. She has sealed and covered each of the sculptures in silver leaf, in effect re-gilding them, literally and figuratively, so that they stay suspended indefinitely between their utilitarian origins and their paradisical conceptual possibilities. With all their deteriorated ornamentation and half-remembered craftmanship, the chunky artifacts resound as affective and effective time capsules, especially against the angular starkness of the Green Gallery’s site. They strike me as a something totally Midwestern in character. Where coastal conceptualists like Robert Barry or Michael Asher would have tried to hide the body, Grabner indulges in the flesh and blood of earthly stuff, as well as the human stuff of craft, labor, time, and even a little unexpected beauty.

Yearning for 3D

The same conceptual range has always been at the heart of Grabner’s paintings, a number of which are in the exhibition at Green. Those familiar with her two-dimensional work—which still yearn toward the 3rd dimension—will likely recall her “Tondo” paintings of radiating graphite marks on circular panels and her gingham-patterned impasto works. This new set of oil paintings also sources domestic textiles and applications to similar conceptual ends; however, the ones in the show are unusually delicate with pastel driven palettes and skewed geometries. Despite their allure as painted surfaces, they are conceptual propositions at their heart, aiming to complicate the boundaries of image and object, part and whole, organic and geometric. And states of permanence in general; a forest-or-trees problem in paint. Interspersed with these elegant paintings are a series of stunning relief sculpture/painting hybrids made from castings of the very lacey, floral-patterned fabrics that formed their compositions. Finally, punctuating it all is a series of silver-gilded pull-tab food cans, positioned horizontally at 60-on-center, that completely scramble high/low, domestic /conceptual, found/made distinctions, looking oddly monumental in the process.

I’ve told my students that one isn’t going to find transcendent meaning in a piece of art. And neither are they going to find it in a temple. Because “It” is deceptively unsingular. The Answers I tell them, if they come at all, will be a mix of internal faiths consecrated by external Eurekas. Ephemeral and hybrid. “Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” as Virginia Woolf put it. It’s a paradox that has electrified everyone from Lao Tsu to Saint Augustine to Duchamp. And Michelle Grabner, too. Somewhere between reason and revelation, mind and body, relative and absolute, Michelle Grabner’s work provides the best worst answers to my students’ never-ending pursuit of objective knowledge. Fine show, Ms. Grabner, and thanks for the ongoing assistance.

Event Listings: December 31 – January 6, 2024

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Sunday, December 31, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Architecture and Collection Highlights
• Sunday, December 31, 2–3 p.m.

Charles Allis Museum

• Free First Wednesdays
• Wednesday, January 3, 1–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, January 6, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, January 6, 10:30–11 a.m.