Amid all its mature frustration, there is a child moving through daniel Baltzer’s work. Baltzer’s family used glass shelves to display many of the things that held his attention as a child — photo albums, record albums, some favorite toys. He would lie back to look through the glass shelves and try to see everything on every level at once. Inevitably, he failed. Some parts were there; others were not. The significant baubles he wanted to see would not all come into focus at once. Like the images in his paintings, the shelved items intersected each other, blocked each other out, smashed the myth of transparency and total illumination. To begin appreciating daniel Baltzer’s work, then, no metaphor is better than this: the young boy squinting, craning his neck, shuffling side to side, trying to get just one glimpse of the invisible prize on the uppermost shelf.
Years later, the shelves of Baltzer’s artwork are covered with different sorts of artifacts. In his work over the last decade, Baltzer has developed and consistently renovated a set of esoteric but conventionally recognizable symbolic motifs: chairs and falling birds, cages and salt shakers, strings and arms, game boards and bits of auto salvage. Often, anonymous, androgynous or masculine nudes coil narratively around the paintings. These figures are at ease or braced defensively or on the attack. They tend to appear strong or weak rather than attractive or repulsive. Their continually returning organic presence reshapes Baltzer’s otherwise mechanistic junk-culture landscape. They reify the human presence in an inhuman setting.
The work does not have any pretensions to total, classical mimesis. Baltzer’s are obviously constructed paintings in pointedly artificial landscapes; and just as soon as any mimetic figure gives the viewer place in the painting, alien juxtapositions and immanent constructedness push the viewer out of the work and into contemplation. Not only do the images refuse to come into a simplistic focus with one another, the very construction of Baltzer’s paintings demands that the viewer recognize them as made works of art carrying heavy intellectual, conceptual baggage.
The materials, as much as the images, contribute to this intellectualizing effect. Baltzer’s increasingly ambitious incorporation of found materials and disparate media calls to mind Robert Rauschenberg’s even more ambitious incorporation of the same. The work also recalls Annette Messager’s shocking constructed montages (though Baltzer has never yet reached Messager’s high degree of political confrontation). Baltzer works as he can with increasingly complex combinations of material and imagery and, at times, text. Already, wooden doors and barbed wire, electric lights and television screens, skateboards and bathroom sinks — just to list a few items — have found their way into his construction works.
As this should make clear, the majority of Baltzer’s works to date have been hybrids: part paintings, part sculptures. Many are multi-tiered plexiglas constructions for which sheets of heavy plexiglas have been joined at the corners with spacers. The spaces formed between these sheets of plexiglas have been filled with significant debris, thereby creating an effect much like looking through glass shelves from above or below. Baltzer also paints on the transparent plexiglas and whatever he paints is then visible from both front and back. As viewers move 180¾ or 360¾ around these pieces, they will discover new perspectives on the action and new bits of bric-a-brac that from other angles were invisible.
All of this works together: both Baltzer’s repertoire of imagery and the visible construction work that goes into his paintings are building blocks and puzzle pieces which hover on the brink of intellectual connection but never quite connect. In Baltzer’s view, meaningful connections are made only when the paintings are “completed” by the addition of viewer interaction and imagination. (In this, his work calls to mind the evocative fantasy world of Joseph Cornell’s boxes.)
And so the work is intellectual. The work is also emotional. Baltzer’s ideal viewer would move between the intellectual pole and the emotional pole, revisiting intellectual connections with new emotions and emotional connections with new intelligences. Baltzer understands art to be explicitly relational. For him, the significance of a work of art develops and mutates over time as audiences return to it in different spaces, with different attitudes, on different days. In Baltzer’s view, art, and specific works of art, cannot and should not mean the same things at the end of the month or year or decade or century as it did at the beginning.
Besides Rauschenberg, Messager and Cornell, Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Salle figure prominently among Baltzer’s direct influences.
Imagery mazes like Baltzer’s are not uncommon in contemporary art, but among artists who Baltzer actively admires along these lines, Basquiat stands out.
Besides his penchant for jarring visual juxtapositions, Basquiat’s work, like Baltzer’s features a vocabulary of repeated visual images (for Basquiat, crowns and haloes and distorted human forms). However, the high-speed intuitive sweep of imagery and words in Basquiat’s most striking work is definitely more frenetic than Baltzer’s work. This is not a mistake on Baltzer’s part or a shortcoming in his work. Here, is other influences and his particular attitude show themselves.
Next to Basquiat, Baltzer is a less frantic, more potentially interpretable symbolic painter. One sees Baltzer reaching for the rich symbolic texture Picasso achieved in works like Guernica. However, the human figures used by Baltzer, as well as his birds and many of his other forms, are far more classical — that is, more classically mimetic — than the mad, urbane graffiti of Basquiat or the angular, distorted humanity of Guernica. The grasping, cowering, approaching, retreating figures of Baltzer’s work are carnal: they have muscle; they have blood; they have bones; they are in flesh; they are struggling in their flesh. But they are floating. They are not anchored to their environments.
In many ways, these floating figures recall certain works by David Salle, whose aggressive, confrontational, juxtapositional paintings have directly inspired certain aspects of Baltzer’s work. However, the eroticism and voyeurism that characterizes Salle’s work (and Magritte’s before him) does not so insistently factor into Baltzer’s work. Baltzer’s human beings do not tend to invite erotic voyeurism. They are not posed vacantly and indifferently. Instead, they are often at a loss or are in pain or are moving toward joy. They are always acting — whether they are rolled into a protective gesture or spread out to strike. These figures are being tossed about and nearly pulled apart by the disintegrating forces around them, but they do not come apart.
In contrast to the joltingly unnatural colors of Basquiat’s or Picasso’s humanity, Baltzer’s humanity comes in more human, sensually muted color tones reminiscent of El Greco or of Théodore Géricault, whose studies of severed limbs are often quoted in Salle’s work. Baltzer’s figures are certainly caught inside the postmodern landscape, but they have not surrendered to it, in action or in form.
In fact, taken out of their mechanistic settings, these are human forms as they might be found in Leonardo DaVinci’s notebooks, the look and feel of which tend to captivate Baltzer’s imagination. Theough the DaVinci connection was perhaps most clear in some of Baltzer’s early experiments with physiognomy studies and poetry on strips of torn paper, even now Baltzer’ work features a flesh-and-blood vision of humanity struggling with metaphysics. It is a classical humanity. Baltzer’s trickster work, though, is to set these classical figures adrift in industrial junkyards and plexiglas alleys. In such settings, the meaning of their humanity is at stake, and they are in pain. Like the boy looking through glass shelves, they cannot get quite what they want — but they are still trying.
Fred Johnson
Ball State University
March 2000