The Oil Tanker (Part Three)

Atlantika Collective Member Sue Wrbican's show titled The Iridescent Yonder recently opened at the Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg, VA and was reviewed in this space on July 14. During Atlantika's monthly meeting, Sue walked us through the multi-faceted show, which includes photography, painting, and installation. She emphasized that the exhibit was conceived as a response to the tragic loss of both her brother, Matt Wrbican, and her mother within several weeks of each other. In fact, the exhibit centers around a large-scale collaborative painting of an oil tanker created by her brother Matt and two collaborators, Phil Rostek and James Nelson, in 1991. During the walkthrough, we were introduced to Phil, who not only helped us to appreciate the importance of Matt Wrbican's accomplishments, but also regaled us with tales about collaborative efforts the group initiated in the 1980s under the name "DAX," or Digital Art Exchange. Phil's recollections of their joint efforts and the early responses of artists in the 1970s to 1990s to important cultural developments, including the advent of the internet, proved extremely fascinating, and we invited him to elaborate on the very significant "paradigm shift" that he witnessed in art during this period. We hope that this series of posts will not only shed light on innovations in American experimental art during this period, but also flesh out the relevance and significance of Sue's recent work. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.

by Phil Rostek

I was very happy to see the wonderful installation that the Oil Tanker received at the Craddock - Terry Gallery, Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg. The Oil Tanker is comprised of four 6’ high by 4’ wide panels that are bolted together to make a 6’ high by 16’ wide surface. Matt and i were pretty deliberate in making something that would last; and the tanker survived 30 years of storage without much structural deterioration. It was stored in 2 commercial venues over the years - both were dry and climate controlled. The weight of the piece requires a solid wall for installation. To take the stress off the piece, the installation in Lynchburg supported the tanker in a rather ingenious way. I was delighted to see this beautiful presentation.

As i wax philosophically about memories of long ago, i hope i do not digress into far-fetched tangents. I see relationships everywhere and to a fault. Even the posts that support the Oil Tanker in this photo evoke symbolic significance for me. Being a helpless grammarian, it raises these two words in my mind: Foundation and origin. My mentor Robert Lepper defined design in several ways; this is one that i remember: “Design is the mutual dependence of the components of a system.” For me the collaboration that brought the Oil Tanker into the world enjoyed additional creative input in Lynchburg that further described what the Labyrinth show aimed to suggest. The components of a system had further described the concept of distributed authorship. A foundation was provided that was integral to the practicality of need; yet remained within the mutual dependence of a system.

That thought raises implications about what we expect when we impose the notion of aesthetic into our consideration of most everything? Extraneous things, when removed, are perceived as improvements. The door then opens wider toward open ended thinking. It provides more room to take in more. When a system is efficiently contained, in the context of The Iridescent Yonder, it all becomes a component part within a larger schema. The very life of Sue Wrbican, the imagination and inclusion of Claire McConaughy, and the Oil Tanker all set sail together on some voyage into a 3 person installation:

From Sue Wrbican’s installation “The Iridescent Yonder” at Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg, VA.

Fragile Rainbow, Claire McConaughy, 120” x 40,” 2021.

If art and life are indeed a unison (or are at least believed to be a unison) and art and life together are considered to be an inseparable entity... relationship experience expands to appreciate subjectivity within a guarded attitude that is respectful of, not fearful of, subjectivity. I believe it is that zone that empowered Sue Wrbican to take on the The Iridescent Yonder. The loss of a mother and a brother, especially if we have shared similar trauma, needs little explanation. The impulse to place that in full view via the creative act stands close to what we all know, what we have all have felt, what we all call up in our hearts from time to time. The will to celebrate being alive in the midst of those considerations brings the term “Yonder” into rather sharp focus. Art and Life ponders eternity without apology and without a “look back,” as Claire said in her painting, “Fragile Rainbow.”

Plan for Labyrinth exhibition, Phil Rostek and Matt Wrbican, 1990.

The Oil Tanker was a portion of a larger show called the Labyrinth which closed with a long hallway. The wall and table presented pictures of the participating artist's mothers. My mother was alive then. Now i join Sue in the iridescent Yonder of recollection.

The awareness of experience as it is lived can include an awareness of some larger gestalt. This has engaged the minds of great thinkers throughout the centuries. Times of insight. Those times when things seem clear. Those times when you see yourself in the bathroom mirror - when you see what is there - not a memory that avoids the stark truth of what time has done to a face. Art can take us to this awareness. Art can move us into a receptivity to awareness. It can beckon us to engage the Yonder.

Ocracoke Path, Sue Wrbican, 53 1/4“ X 40 1/4”, 2017.

This is a view of that awareness, that disappearing path, that acknowledgement that things, including ourselves, move through time.

And so the sails that propel us through our lives are given pause in this presentation. Easy chairs help to anchor the sails. A reference to repose, a reference to times when there is time enough to step back and look at life, a look that seeks the mind not just the spirit. In my opinion this is more about analysis than it is about simplistic capitulations to recollection.

Sue speaks of a show where she includes her friends - as a way of getting a message out. In classic artistic reservation she does not spell out her opinion any further than that. There are only two friends in the Iridescent Yonder show. Both have to do with the show’s intent. Both were selected with care. Both retained a life of their own while mixed into relationship that was aimed at expressing the ineffable.

This is quite compatible with thought processes that were employed in making the Oil Tanker. Three artists acting in concert and acting with autonomy - at the same time. The desire is to avoid premature conclusions and the temptation of self proclamation.

I close with this image from the Labyrinth show. It is a wing wall reference to the Oedipus riddle. The picture on the wall (that Matt Wrbican chose) depicts Sue, as a child in a party dress, running past her grandfather who is holding a cane. It is gesture that unnerves me a bit. It is so much in keeping with the sensibility of Matt Wrbican and the fusion of art and life that i have enjoyed with Matt and Sue over many years. I also knew Matt’s dear mother. i also knew her cats and her garden and her intellect.

From the Labyrinth Exhibition, 1991.

The Oil Tanker (Part One)

Atlantika Collective Member Sue Wrbican's show titled The Iridescent Yonder recently opened at the Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg, VA and was reviewed in this space on July 14. During Atlantika's monthly meeting, Sue walked us through the multi-faceted show, which includes photography, painting, and installation. She emphasized that the exhibit was conceived as a response to the tragic loss of both her brother, Matt Wrbican, and her mother within several weeks of each other. In fact, the exhibit centers around a large-scale collaborative painting of an oil tanker created by her brother Matt and two collaborators, Phil Rostek and James Nelson, in 1991. During the walkthrough, we were introduced to Phil, who not only helped us to appreciate the importance of Matt Wrbican's accomplishments, but also regaled us with tales about collaborative efforts the group initiated in the 1980s under the name "DAX," or Digital Art Exchange. Phil's recollections of their joint efforts and the early responses of artists in the 1970s to 1990s to important cultural developments, including the advent of the internet, proved extremely fascinating, and we invited him to elaborate on the very significant "paradigm shift" that he witnessed in art during this period. We hope that this series of posts will not only shed light on innovations in American experimental art during this period, but also flesh out the relevance and significance of Sue's recent work.

by Phil Rostek

The Oil Tanker, a 1991 collaborative work by myself, Matt Wrbican, and Jim Nelson, has seen the light of day after 30 years of storage. Thanks to the energy, commitment, and creativity of artist Sue Wrbican (Matt’s sister), the Oil Tanker now looks like this in the Craddock - Terry Gallery at Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg, VA. It enjoys a space within Sue’s exhibit entitled “The Iridescent Yonder."

Detail of The Oil Tanker, Matt Wrbican, Phil Rostek, and James Nelson. Discarded plastic objects, paint and tar, 192” x 72”, 1991.

The Oil Tanker was originally part of a larger presentation exhibited at the then Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, National Gallery. It was funded by the Painted Bride / Philadelphia and also was supported by the formidable commitment of director of exhibitions Mr. Murray Horne. The show was called the Labyrinth and it was a “walk through exhibit” - a kind of inventory of effects that intended to stimulate an observer to ponder speculations about what the world was like and where it might be going. In 1991 those conjectures most likely included many of the same thoughts that still plague us today and still require candor and inquiry, i.e., environmental concerns, sustainable resources, reasonable parameters of digital outreach, and the phenomenon of multiple identity.

The book of contributors to the Labyrinth exhibit (pictured below) included the conviction that, as organizers of the show, Matt and i considered ourselves “stewards,” not authors. The exhibit included a spinning tree and microphone which looped anything that was said into it. It included wise sentences from historical personalities that were scribed by hand as small as possible. Other rooms included audio tapes and lazy boy chairs, references to Shakespeare, the Ancient Greeks, Alcoholics Anonymous, and a video of Lower East Side metal banging in the Rivington Street “sculpture garden.”

Installation views, The Labyrinth, 1991.

The backstory of Oil Tanker is rather integral to a collaborative effort that included 14 artists all in all. The thrust of the exhibit attempted to laud the virtues of what i called “structural collaboration.” Quite simply that referred to my bias that overt process orientation prioritizes the participants - observers are for the most part left alone to untangle impenetrable interaction. The Oil Tanker may provide a good example to make this more clear.

I thought our Labyrinth should have a “Minotaur” and that was, in my opinion, oil and the amount of it that suffered catastrophic spills back then. Matt and i agreed on this and we invited Jim Nelson to help us express something, somehow. By consensus we agreed a tanker in high profile would fit the bill and agreed upon a rough thumb nail sketch. Later there was a separation of input. I did the tarry water, Matt worked inside the outline of the boat, and Jim painted a background setting.

Here’s me with the initial idea.

Phil Rostek standing with the original concept drawing for The Oil Tanker, 1991.

Here’s Jim Nelson painting in the background, which evoked The Gulf War. I met Jim at Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. Our graduate student studios were in the basement of the Margaret Morrison Building on campus. We remain very close friends to this day. I’m pictured also - touching up the tar at the bottom of the painting.

Jim Nelson and Phil Rostek creating The Oil Tanker in 1991.

And here is the creativity of Matt Wrbican who saved oil based products for months and then organized them from thin to high dimension within the hull of the Tanker. Neither i nor Jim was expecting the passion that Matt brought to the project; but i was not surprised then nor am i now. Matt Wrbican was a unique and stellar talent.

Plastic (petroleum-based) objects collected by Matt Wrbican for use in the creation of The Oil Tanker, 1991.

There is something ineffable about my experience in Lynchburg. It haunts me in ways that evoke, or perhaps better, reawaken the aspirations of The Labyrinth. Seeing the Oil Tanker but not seeing Matt was telling. The Labyrinth exhibition coincided with the retirement of my mentor and Matt’s mentor - Bruce Breland. I studied with Bruce as a grad student at CMU 1971 to 73. We did mail art and concept pieces together. i had given up lyrical painting and opted to wear white tie and tails to school every day. I was also studying with Robert Lepper - a teacher of Andy Warhol. Between Lepper and Breland is a volatile and heady place to be. Each had a keen sense of the absurd, and at the same time, each had a keen penchant for very pragmatic thinking. Both liked Duchamp. My leanings toward Fluxus would later inform my thinking when i wrote theory for Bruce Breland’s DAX Group (Digital Art Exchange) in the 80’s.

Phil Rostek, from a photograph by Bruce Breland, 1973.

It was in the 80’s that i met Matt Wrbican. Matt was then a grad student working with Bruce in coursework called “intermedia.” During the decade of the 80’s the DAX Group contributed to many distributed authorship pieces during the early days of the internet. La Plissure du Texte 1983, a text exchange organized by Roy Ascott comes to mind - as do contributions to Network Planetario / Laboratorio Ubique at the Venice Biennale 1986.

By the end of the decade Matt was working at the Carnegie Museum of Art during the installation of a Carnegie International, archiving Breland’s legacy at CMU, and doing the Labyrinth show with me -all at the same time. It was stressful for Matt but he succeeded in doing it all. He was, very shortly afterward, hired by the Warhol Museum as an archivist in charge of moving work from Warhol’s factory to Pittsburgh. Matt is identified with the Warhol time capsules as well acknowledged as one of the foremost authorities about the life and art of Andy Warhol in the world. That is not an overstatement.

As i step back now and think about the volatility of those times; i cannot say that i have much to contribute to the understanding of it all. Great turmoil was let loose when “the individual was replaced by the collective’” via technological innovations; innovations that spawned an unprecedented acceleration of information. Information speed-up continues to shape the world and the people who live on it. The relationship between art and life seemed obvious when NYC was a center. The very notion of a center continues to fade into a horizontal world that runs flat. The Labyrinth tried to anticipate what future existence would be, and the Oil Tanker was something that seemed necessary to avoid and replace.

More installation views of The Labyrinth exhibit, 1991.

It seems that having one foot in a national world and one foot in a global one - is a chasm that has not narrowed but widened.

As science takes the place of art and religion, one area seems impervious to any form of apprehension. If i could replace the Oil Tanker in today’s Labyrinth, if i could speculate about Minotaurs today, i would offer this. The one area where there has been no “progress” or even significant conjecture is: an understanding of what consciousness actually is. We know it’s what disappears under anesthesia, but we don’t know much more than that. Science would deny that dead things have it at all. But when it is present as a combination of multi-sensory experience and flux - what we commonly call life - it seems to avoid science’s favorite word: “someday.”

It is curious when the notion of “what” is eclipsed by the notion of “how.” Hyper-individualistic living begins to fear time itself. Humility becomes obsolete. A culture, or the tribal equivalent of it, comes to think that time can be reversed and, moreover, that it can be reversed in the spirit of righteousness. The effect of information overload does not see the imminent dangers of the present; it ironically draws obsessive attention to the past. Somewhere in the meat of the brain there is a capacity to recall times that have gone by - but in today’s culture this can only be noticed in the context of the present.

What do contemporary people do when eternity itself has become a thing of the past? That is what i felt when i saw the Oil Tanker after all these years. That faint glimmer of who i used to be seemed unusually informative. That feeling is connected to the elusive charms of what we call, for lack of a better term, art.

The Iridescent Yonder: A New Exhibit by Atlantika Collective Member Sue Wrbican

Mark Isaac

It is a time of loss, and even as vaccinated people poke their newly maskless faces into the world and think about new beginnings, we all have a need to process the tragedies that have surrounded us for a seeming eternity -- and threaten to pursue us into the future. 

But of course, loss was always with us. And every day and in the course of normal human events, we are faced with the loss of family, friends, acquaintances, those we never knew. We also face the loss of the environment as we once knew it, and the increasing likelihood of epic ecological collapse. We’ve faced a period of endless wars that blended one into another. Each one a tragedy, each a reminder that life can never be immune from death.

Now comes Atlantika member Sue Wrbican, whose latest multi-faceted and highly accomplished exhibit operates as a tool for processing loss. On July 2, her show titled “The Iridescent Yonder” opened in the Riverviews Artspace in Lynchburg, Virginia, a capacious setting that gives ample breathing room to a formidable installation of large-scale sculptures, diverse photographs, and two accompanying paintings by select collaborators. One day later, laptop in hand, she guided us through the show piece by piece during Atlantika’s monthly meeting, elaborating on her inspirations and intentions, and introducing us to some of the people who are central to its themes.

In 2019, within a matter of weeks, Sue lost two close members of her family. First, her brother Matt, an accomplished artist and archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum, succumbed after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. Not long after that, Sue’s mother also passed. The pain of this double loss was searing, but by now it is literally soaring, since Sue seems to have used every available moment of the subsequent lockdown to craft the elements of this show, which include some of the towering cloth sails that have made repeat appearances in her work in recent years. 

Oil Tanker, Matt Wrbican, Phil Rostek, and James Nelson. Discarded plastic objects, paint and tar, 192” x 72”, 1991.

The nautical theme is especially fitting in this instance. The entire show is ordered around a very unique and prescient painting of an oil tanker created in 1991 by her brother Matt, along with collaborators Phil Rostek and James Nelson. A looming monolith of a black ship, plying a slick of suspiciously foul and spoiled waters, is visible against a backdrop of conflagration and acrid smoke. As Sue introduced us to this work, held in storage for the last 30 years, it first appeared flat, as many a painting often is. But as she moved her laptop closer, the hull of the ship was suddenly revealed to be a veritable constellation of discarded plastic products, rising off the surface as a bas-relief. And the skilled artists have crafted the oil tanker in such a way that its colossal prow seems likely to escape the picture plane and advance right on into the gallery, sloshing its unctuous cargo on our shoes.

Also on hand was Phil Rostek, one of the creators of this piece, who regaled us with tales of how it was created and how it responded specifically to current events. It was the time of the Gulf War, and our powerful republic had decided to defend its access to inexpensive petroleum. The artists not only greeted this moment of combat and colonialism with appropriate alarm, they were farsighted enough to incorporate a commentary about the pervasiveness of plastic waste, a problem that has in the meantime grown to gargantuan proportions. It is a work whose import has been appreciating every moment that it remained in storage, like a finely crafted spirit aging in a remote cellar.

Now all of the artwork gains substance and essence, in proximity to the tanker. The sinuous nautical ropes; the sculptural fish; the dramatic oversize print on silk, laid on the sails like a wardrobe accessory of the gods. The painting of a “Fragile Rainbow” contributed by friend Claire McConaughy in which a reflection of prismatic colors on adulterated water partially vanishes into an ambiguous mire. The photographs that chronicle dystopian assemblages of consumerist waste, yet at the same time point us beyond cataclysm. 

Fragile Rainbow, Claire McConaughy. Oil painting diptych, 120” x 40”, 2021.

But let us remember that it is not only the health of our environment that is at risk of loss. The Gulf War was a time of violent loss, as were the many wars that have continued after that time. The battle against COVID remains a time of stunning worldwide bereavement. The many personal losses in all of our lives continue apace through the years, without any cessation. But now, courtesy of “The Iridescent Yonder,” they all come with some valuable tools for processing mortality and moving into a new phase of life. Sue emphasizes that her “quiet, repetitive, meditative process” helped her deal with the pain she was feeling and create a fitting and eloquent tribute to her brother and her mother.

None of us knows in advance precisely how we will react to agonizing loss. But there is something especially eloquent and gripping when human beings do their utmost to overcome adversity, using whatever means is at their disposal. And there is something especially memorable when the tool is gifted and skillful artmaking in which we can all find a glimmer of our sorrow and our yearning to transcend. 

In the end, we emerge from mourning with the metaphysical challenge of deciding what to do with our remaining allocation of time. What will we prioritize in the wake of personal losses? Will the post-COVID era be a “return to normal” or will it be a time of change? How will we move beyond the era of endless war? Will we succeed in saving the planet?

In this regard, The Iridescent Yonder offers a subtle but effective push into the realm of action. Set your sails, it suggests. Protest against the intolerable. Safeguard the environment and cherish our fellow human beings. We could take it all sitting down, Sue seems to say, and there’s even a chair if you want to do that. But helpfully a nearby sign advises patrons to “sit with caution.” 

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The Iridescent Yonder was supported in part by the School of Art at George Mason University and a Gillespie Research Fellowship for exhibition assistance from Michelle Smith.