ARTIST

December 2004

Candyman

Several years ago, NBC’s “48 Hours” ran a segment on a young germaphobe who locked himself in his family’s bathroom for months at a time, spending his days shouting chess moves at his father through the wall, and subsisting on flat food – the only kind his mother could get under the door. Tragic, yes, but anyone who has ever met with a virgin sheet of bubble-wrap or a sublimely pickable scab knows OCD can rock. Nervous habits endear us to our friends, celebrities to their fans (e.g. Billy Bob Thornton’s orange-food obsession), and fictional characters to their audiences (think Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall in As Good as it Gets, or Tony Shalhoub as the obsessive hand-washing detective on USA Networks’ “Monk”.)

For some, however, OCD behavior is neither disease nor pastime, but muse. Take Matt Nash, for instance. The 28-year-old Boston-based artist has made a name for himself by sorting thousands of candies by color, then using them as pixels to reconstruct iconic photographs. Eccentric as his process sounds, Nash is one of countless artists who have exhibited obsessive behavior in their themes and their process itself. Post-impressionist Edward Degas spent much of his career painting nothing but ballet dancers. Pablo Picasso obsessively collected his own hair and nail clippings in dated files. What might be considered an eccentric tic in the ordinary person, an unhealthy ritualistic compulsion, often enhances one’s reputation in the art world.

But Nash isn’t cultivating a myth of instability and weird behavior; his obsessions hit a little too close to home for that. Tedious as applying as many as 10,500 candies to a single canvas must be, the group exhibition Nash organized last spring at the Boston Center for the Arts, OCD, struck a democratic chord in viewers. Though it usually takes a crucifix immersed in urine or a Jesse Helms-style crusade for an art exhibition to make prime-time, the Obsessive Compulsive-Disorder attracted a mob of news crews: Fox, NPR, the Boston Globe and the AP, among others.

Perhaps it was because the compulsions on display – paper-cutting, bubble-wrap popping, Scantron bubble-filling, to name only a few examples – are familiar to so many of us. Or perhaps it was the timeliness of the work. Nash speculates that post-9/11 anxiety may have fueled at least some of the interest in the interest in the show.

“The art we’re seeing reflects how we respond to imminent Orange Alert threats we can’t do anything about,” says Nash, who was educated at Boston’s Museum School and Chicago’s Art Institute. “For someone to pay attention to one thing is somewhat threatening to society, because it’s saying, ‘I don’t care what happened on “Survivor” last night.’ People see a person locking themselves in their own world and excluding them.”

Many artists have taken on our culture’s obsession with trashy television, but Nash’s work goes further, suggesting that CNN has itself become a kind of reality TV show. Based on classic war imagery, his works could not be timelier: a group of soldiers stands at attention in “Infantry, June 5, 1944”; two soldiers rescue a fallen comrade in “Wounded Soldier, Dog White, Omaha Beach”, while artillery men are depicted in action in “Machine Gunner, Anzio, June 1, 1944”. The war imagery in Nash’s M&M mosaics contains a hidden irony. The candy he uses as his material was developed to give soldiers portable chocolate during the Spanish Civil War.

While referencing a lost age of war photography, before video siphoned away the resonance of individual images, the work is timed to address the contemporary conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Wounded Soldier, Dog White, Omaha Beach” reminds us that war images have become eye-candy. Nash’s candies are glued as obsessively to the canvas as our eyes are to the television. When we watch the twin towers vaporize over and over, courtesy of the media, aren’t we experiencing a mass-cultural form of OCD?

Nash says that his own artistic obsessions were born long before 9/11, however. The former graphic designer and print-maker fantasized obsessively growing up in Sodus, New York, trying to make sense of a sea of bewildering 1980’s pop culture. His earliest art, he says, was an attempt to make sense of what he saw on TV and heard on the radio.

“I spent twelve to thirteen hours a day at home in the summer alone. I’d take cardboard and make the Ghostbusters’ firehouse, or I’d watch the Oliver North trial and make a maquette of the courtroom,” he says. His first identifiable obsession, comic books, he speculates, was the product of his rural isolation as a child. “I used to get so excited when the mail came. To this day I freak out if it hasn’t come by 11. It’s just left over from being 10 years old and wanting contact.”

Reluctant to be pigeon-holed, Nash resists being identified as obsessive-compulsive in the clinical sense, although a doctor who viewed the OCD show suggested he might have an obsessive nature. “For a habit to be part of the condition, it has to interfere with social or occupational functioning, or take up at least an hour a day,” says OCD expert Wayne Brunell.

But such a distinction depends on one’s culture, according to Nash; a world with a longer attention span might not consider many OCD behaviors to be unusual. “In our ADHD society, is just spending five minutes paying attention to something OCD?” he asks. There may be proof in that fact that there is a little OCD in everyone: almost all of us jiggle our feet, doodle on Post-pads, order our silverware drawers.

Further, the desire for order that inspires the “disordered” artist has a way of infecting even the most “normal” viewer, Nash says. “It turned out that it wasn’t enough to just use the M&Ms to make the image,” he chuckles. “People wanted them all to be face up, going the right direction. With this kind of art, you’re inviting people to call you on your flaws.”

One flaw, for some viewers at least, may be the work’s obsession with repetition over formal originality. Using compulsivity as a metaphor for post-9/11 paranoia, Nash’s work relieves one anxiety while creating another: is it enough that art be about careful, hard work? What do we make, for instance, of Adolf Wolfi, the nineteenth century German who wrote a 25,000-page illustrated autobiography while institutionalized, or On Kawara’s “Date Paintings”, monochromatic canvases inscribed with the date that the artist has produced daily since the 1960’s? Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart’s pointillist paintings surely qualify as genius, but what about Mark Lombardi’s labyrinthine, hand-drawn conspiracy maps?

Nash’s work doesn’t answer these questions; its agenda, rather, is to provoke them. Rather than encourage a mystification of the artist as a crazy or obsessed genius, as biopics such as Pollock or Sylvia or Frida tend to do, Nash’s work reveals the artist’s mania to be the viewer’s. Our age has made nail-biters and hair-pullers of as all. Over three years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Nash’s work seems to pose the same dreadful question Jack Nicholson asks a roomful of his fellow psychotics, in the role of Melvin Udall: “What if this is as good as gets?”