Anthony Adcock, “Bones,” 2024, cast hydrocal, 15″ x 10″/Photo: Anthony Adcock

Published in New City. 12.5.24

On the heels of a contentious and historic presidential election, the perennial cold war between the class that works and the class that reads finds a timely arena in Anthony Adcock’s trompe l’oeil universe of mixed signals.

Beneath the tribalism and pageantry at the core of politics is the question of how to best prioritize our attention and resources. Adcock’s identity as a painter with an advanced degree and a union ironworker straddles the reading-class-working-class divide that permeates American culture.

Adcock masterfully transforms a flat surface into the appearance of plywood, rusted metal, gold leaf, caution tape, landscapes and skulls rendered exquisitely on panels shaped like road signs or religious altar paintings. Some depict arrows pointing up or down which hover like transcendental directives above a landscape, or point us outside of the paintings. Skulls protruding from a number of the panels—a long-established trope of illusionistic painting called memento mori (reminders of mortality)—emphasize that death patiently awaits, whatever our priorities. But the deeper target of these illusions has to do with the nature of representation itself, both artistic and political.

Anthony Adcock, “Horizon,” 2024, oil on copper, 15″ x 10″/Photo: Anthony Adcock

At the end of a long day in the trades, you may have the skeleton of a building to show for your labors, and a paycheck for your time, and weekends to spend watching football and hanging with the family. A day of illusionistic painting may yield a three-inch section of faithfully rendered wood grain. So what is at stake in such zealous devotion to a sheet of plywood?

To put a finer point on it, another artwork devoted to attention as its subject is Tom Friedman’s iconic work “1,000 Hours of Staring” (1992-1997). The medium is listed as “stare on paper,” a thirty-two-and-half-inch by thirty-two-and-half-inch blank sheet of white drawing paper in a white frame, in front of which a typical union ironworker might snicker at the idiots who fell for this charade, while the art enthusiast might smile in delight. Whether or not Friedman actually did what he claims, there’s nothing to see, and that is the point. The artwork is stripped down to pure belief. Did he or did he not actually stare at it for five years? Similar calculations might be, is this actually Michael Jordan’s jersey? Is this actually the blood of Christ? Will the Bears make the playoffs this season? Are we actually living in a simulation? Is this reiki-infused mineral water actually better for me than tap water?

If true, this blank piece of paper is saturated with the currency of five years of Friedman’s attention. Let’s imagine if Adcock were to paint a panel to look exactly like a blank sheet of drawing paper, and maybe call it “Homage to Friedman.” Friedman’s “nothing” becomes Adcock’s “nothing,” which gets deeper (and more diluted, and more absurd) with every iteration. But in Adcock’s real
paintings, there is something to see, but nothing spectacular. Nothing that couldn’t be seen by turning your head in any direction at a construction site, like booking a safari to catch a glimpse of a squirrel. So whatever is there to be seen must be under the hood.

Anthony Adcock, “In Standstill,” 2024, oil, 23.5k gold leaf and gold metal point on aluminum prepared with a traditional metal point ground, 15″ x 10″/Photo: Anthony Adcock

Doubtless, some evolutionary process is at work in us that we should have evolved both the interest and the capacity to so faithfully mimic appearances. Simulated woodgrain is now a species unto itself, birthed into our universe through human ingenuity, but there are less painstaking ways to accomplish the task. Apart from the ambition to willfully deceive ourselves, attention for its own sake can also be a devotional practice that may yield rewards like patience, curiosity, acceptance, endurance, gratitude, clarity, maybe even revelation if we are lucky. But it can also be an escape from boredom to fix one’s attention onto something—anything will do, as long as it takes our minds off our own grief or anxiety. And these impulses can be simultaneously present. Spiritual practices like meditation could, from all outward appearances, be described as scheduled boredom.

What divides us politically are often the things we choose to believe in and pay attention to. And what we choose to believe in has something to do with the return on our investment: financial, social or spiritual. It requires a particular belief system to have feelings for a blank sheet of drawing paper, and another to internalize the fate of a football team as if it were your own. In both cases we are displacing our own lack, and that may be the most fundamental human bond: to congregate around a shared lack.

Rife with competing directional imperatives, Adcock’s works explore both the ambivalence of desire and, by extension, the hazards of identity. Just after the moment of thinking, “Wow, I really thought that was a piece of plywood,” is where the social world pixelates. Meanwhile, Adcock’s paintings act as existential traffic signals, placeholders for opposing cultural forces. While we snarl and bay for each other’s blood, maybe the only hope of averting a hot war is a cold one, and Adcock provides a temporary ceasefire amidst the battlements.

Anthony Adcock’s “Signals in Standstill” is on view at Ignition Project Space, 3839 West Grand, through December 7.