Banks Violette

My Review of Banks Violette's recent shows at Team and Barbara Gladstone as it appeared in the most recent issue of Artillery:

There’s something about Banks Violette’s strategy of melding high and low (Minimalist sculpture with the aesthetics of Death Metal) that I find a little obvious. It’s as if his high art credentials are meant to validate the cultural slumming while the sub-cultural cachet of death metal injects crusty old forms with a jolt of intensity or an air of authenticity. In actuality, it feels more like an exercise in stylistic genre-blending than invention - averaging out into something safe and accessible rather than remaining either rigorous or marginal.

It’s a given, anyway, that the monolithic and serial forms of Minimalism are symbolically kin to tombstones. Infusing Minimalist tropes with death metal theatricality is both obvious and almost campy in its literal take on the genre’s latent symbolism. Violette wants his art to be about big issues (death, morality, etc…), but the work’s marriage of these disjunctive forms is so jarring that it’s impossible to see beyond their function as art-historical or cultural signs.
A work featuring fluorescent tube lights hanging askew and large black wooden beams in a rectilinear formation is obviously meant to recall Sol LeWitt’s Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes (as well as Dan Flavin’s use of fluorescent tubes, and Donald Judd’s - or Liam Gillick’s – commercially fabricated objects), but these are intentional over-deliberate references rather than assimilations of those artists work. It also presents what seems like an obvious metaphor for entropy that doesn’t embody this quality in its presence: entropy as an image rather than a product of process. This effect makes his work feel more like commercial product than sculptural form. It also makes his work’s take on death (itself a product of entropy) seem a little tepid.

Violette’s work is best seen in comparison to other emerging artists working in similar territory. The Neo-Gothic werewolf sculptures of David Altmejd and the rock-inflected chaos of Anthony Burdin’s videos are, respectively, more complex, visceral, and less amenable to art-historical parsing. Violette also draw heavily on Damien Hirst’s melding of Minimalism with death-inflected subject matter but lacks the accessible clarity that Hirst, at his best, can achieve.
Despite his obvious intentions to deal with serious issues, his work’s most striking effect is art-historical. As an extension of Minimalist-derived techniques for using commercially available materials and procedures in art, Violette shows how the planes and surfaces of Minimalism could become the scaffolding of a rock concert set or the more complex articulations of musical equipment. The variegated knobs, swiveling arm, and tripod-like structure of a cymbal stand are closer in form to one of Judd or Flavin’s “specific objects” than we might normally think. Unfortunately, this formal innovation say too little about Violette’s ostensible content - death, morality, homicide, or death metal subculture - but it is an accomplishment, however short it falls from realizing his larger ambitions.