Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s Essay on One Year Edit Published by Golden Age, 2011
Erik Lindman considers himself to be a painter, but the body of work comprising One Year Edit clearly has more to do with scraping, like the peeling away of a cocoon. William Blake writes about scraping off “all that is not of God alone”. Alongside the scraping there an innocent bubbling, as of a spring.
This scraping-and-bubbling is a journey partitioned into three vectors. Maybe these three vectors pertain to socially mediated (digested) gestures that Lindman plays like the keys of a piano (patches in a sampler), producing a melody that rises above the social and historical. Or maybe it’s not such a complex operation – it’s hard to be sure. What’s certain is that the state of balance between these vectors opens a stable window into pure Innocence.
The vectors are Residuum, Selection, and Struggle.
Residuum. Everything that is presented is and is presented as detritus, as a leftover, as a side-product of a creative process. The residua are produced outside of view, in the dark, ex-timately connected to the field of intention (a piece of the studio wall, a portion of a failed painting). They are part of the creative process but not the essential part – they are the chaff. Here Lindman is the Catalyzer, no more and no less. The residua are concretely existent, aleatoric indices of a creative act, perhaps one that failed.
Selection. The residua are chosen, arranged, recombined and revised according to the heart, intuition, taste. The result has an unmistakably generic beauty. This is because the chance operations are subjected to selection. They are reanimated, given new breath. A pure universal creative selection subject neither to attack nor to defense. Lindman is an interior decorator, a fashion photographer, a basketball card collector. “Ah, this is right”. A flicker of the Good – the moment of selection and recombination is scraping and bubbling combined into one.
Struggle. The struggle is obvious. The existent exceeds and escapes the intention as the reins of revision drag the process around. Lindman here grapples with the reins and struggles to define what he is doing. He acts according to a quasi-pure creative urge (a secretion or a bubbling) interpenetrating with the struggle both to define (invent a story about) the result in a way that matches critical expectations of current discourse and at the same time to not do this. Here is the spectrum between Virtue and the Possibility of Possibility. The works in One Year Edit lie at the impossible and penumbral point where Mind and Being kiss; the vertigo of self-awareness resolves into the earnest, naive, pure act, cutting its balloon cord so as to touch together the ends of the alpha and the omega.