• The Obsessive Art of Tom Friedman
• Shakespeare in Love
• Zeitgeist and Star Wars
• 'I Am Pigman!'

• Terri Kramer

Untitled, 1995, toothpicks, 26 x 30 x 23 inches: A starburst construction made with 30,000 toothpicks.

The Obsessive Art of Tom Friedman

A survey of early works

"'Obsessive' is a convenient word to describe one aspect of my work, but it doesn't take into account the reasons behind the acts that are characterized as obsessive, so it's a failed approach."¹ Failure is an appropriate place to begin a discussion of Tom Friedman, since initial impressions of his works are, in effect, failures. A lonely piece of white cloth, a tissue perhaps, hangs delicately in the distance. As you walk closer, the wispy object reveals itself to be an artifact of destruction: an ordinary piece of white paper, poked relentlessly by a pin, until it is forced to give up its rigid, rectangular form. The paper hangs, defeated, from the pin that poked it (Untitled, 1991). In the mind's attempt to construct an understandable landscape, a fiction of familiarity was imposed on the object — paradoxically — to make sense of it. Friedman's work hovers somewhere between simplicity and absurdity; "between the assumption of casualness and the discovery of intensity."² An investigative process defines Friedman's work, as he loops in powers of ten from the ordinary to the complex and back.

Friedman's breakthrough work begins in 1989 while still a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His work until then was primarily focused on large, charcoal based drawings. "At the time, the program was very conceptually based, and this language being used to talk about art was so foreign to me. I was forced to address why I was doing these drawings and it paralyzed me."³ Frustrated, he cleared out his studio, boarded up the windows, and painted everything white. "At this point I sort of dropped the idea of making art; it was more about discovering a beginning."⁴ Metaphorically clearing a mental space, the studio also served to mimic a museum's starkness: "[The museum] is this place that demands you to slow down experience, and bring all of who you are to the experience."⁵ The space allowed him to isolate the interaction between himself and the art. "Everyday I would bring an object from my apartment and place it in the space."⁶ The objects began to acquire meditative qualities, reflecting the experience Friedman was bringing to them.

Work from this period explores material transformation through minimal, focused, repetitive interaction. Friedman's signature spirals inward until the pen runs out of ink (Untitled, 1990). He unrolls and then carefully re-rolls a single roll of toilet paper, minus its cardboard tubing (Untitled, 1990). He spends hundreds of hours collecting debris from erasers (Untitled, 1990). "I found there would be an element of logic that would connect them, like the process of erasing with an eraser and achieving this minimal focal point as the idea of erasing."⁷ Friedman describes this process as revealing a "circular logic" — the idea that the end reveals the beginning: that the erasers have been erased. An unexpected side effect was that his work became funny. "That just sort of happened, because of the nature of these irreverent, dumb materials. They became very beautiful."⁸ The beauty comes from the leap between the monotony of the acts and the complexity of the form. After hundreds of hours of erasing, the shavings are sprinkled onto the floor in a soft-edged circle — revealing the vibrancy of a powdery nebula.

The soft-edged circle, concentrated in the center and diffusing outward, is a reoccurring motif in Friedman's work. Simultaneously imploding and exploding, the form, like the big bang itself, haunts him with its circular logic. Dim to perceive yet fascinating to ponder, Friedman began obsessively mapping out complex systems. Not to understand them (impossible), but to reveal something in quantity. "What interests me is my inability to process everything I'm confronted with and the idea of the whole."⁹ From 1992 to 1995, Friedman transcribed every word from a standard English dictionary onto a 36 inch by 36 inch sheet of paper (Everything, 1992-1995). The words are spread out heterogeneously, like paint splatters, mapping a textured blue landscape. The words represent a total system (the English language) defined in a space (the paper). The piece alludes again to Friedman's circular logic. A conclusion never departs from the work itself — "The explaining becomes the object [art] as opposed to the indicator"¹⁰ — that is, the conclusion becomes the question.

Things are getting kind of wacky. Friedman is the first to admit that his work stretches understanding to the point of thinness: "I did this piece where I stretched a piece of bubble gum, stuck it to the ceiling, then stretched it and stuck it to the floor (Untitled, 1995)."¹¹ The piece became analogous to the direction his work was taking, tenuously connecting complex ideas. Reality was becoming swollen, portentous, bloated — like garbage bags stuffed inside each other until no more could be added (Untitled, 1992). The limits of reality were being pushed. Like the expanding Universe, the only logical thing to do was let go of the rubber band — snap back from reality and barrel towards fantasy.

And there was a bang. A starburst construction made with three thousand toothpicks (Untitled, 1995). The piece seems to throb with a wooden heart. Arguably one of his most beautiful constructs, it's hard to believe the project was put on hold for several years. It wasn't until he started testing the waters of pure illusion that he could return to the project. Filling an empty gelatin capsule with hundreds of colorful spheres of Play-Doh, he is finally ready to make the leap (Untitled, 1995). "I saw the toothpick sculpture as a response to consuming the pill containing Play-Doh as its medicine."¹²

Terri Kramer, 2005