Artist Visits Leather and Steel
by Scott Weaver

With the support of the Ellen Johnson Visiting Artist Fund, Nyland Blake, an artist from New York, gave a talk to a scattered crowd of students and faculty. Blake’s talk began with a selected retrospective of his career offering a view into the life and process of an artist. Beginning with his senior thesis at Bard College and ending with his most recent works, Blake’s work finds expression mostly in installation, video and more recently, in drawing.

Among other narratives, Blake’s works are loaded with sexual and racial imagery. For example, in a series of works he calls Workstations, he uses leather and steel to reproduce 19th century restraining techniques. Blake sees the idea of bondage as sculpture. “For me, bondage is about the eroticisation of the pose,” he said. This series, as with much of his work, is about the creation and activation of an object. One of the things he tries to do is to leave what he calls a “mental space” for the viewer, where the activation and meaning of an object occurs simultaneously in the viewers mind. The thought-process behind these methods lead Blake to experiment with the dynamic created by his actual presence in the gallery space.
From the activation and application of objects, Blake’s focus shifted to the use and meaning behind substances. Works such as “Water, Wine, Vinegar, Piss” and a work involving men’s handkerchiefs stained with various substances, then framed and hung on a gallery wall, were important for Blake as he understood the power held in the connotations of the medium alone. This was a very self-conscious move for his work; he began to dissect and find meaning in the elements of his work, making it clear that in certain respects the medium is more important than the object itself.

In an art world where artists are continually being asked to justify the merit of their work, artists often resort to rather standard and vague statements about the visibility or invisibility of race within our society, or about the images and words from mainstream culture. Blake did not actively avoid these tendencies. However, being forced to subscribe to a protocol, where art can easily fit under preexisting labels and definitions, is not what informs Blake’s work. His process is much more of a perpetual self-analysis in an attempt to move his own practice forward toward an expression of some aspect of his identity.
“By making a piece of art, you are manifesting your presence in the world” Blake said. It is, however, a daunting and perhaps even impossible task to express your essence on a daily basis. His physical person is often an integral part of his art, which shows the extent to which he personalizes his expression. In many of his performance and video installations, Blake is at once the subject and the object. In “Gorge,” a video piece, a shirtless black man stands over the seated and likewise shirtless Blake, hand-feeding him doughnuts for one-hour straight. This piece deals with a number of issues, but most importantly race and sexuality. As a gay artist from a biracial family, these issues are an integral part of Blake’s identity, yet he steers away from a definition that is purely “gay” or “race” oriented.
For Blake, the meaning of art comes from its context. This is the moment where an artist becomes aware of the audience and the public. “I believe very strongly that it is the artist’s job to be as fully present as possible,” he says, but admits that this is a process that the artist goes through in the studio. An attitude like this one allows the audience to approach the work as a source of inspiration and engagement. However, as Blake pointed out, a museum or gallery context provides for only certain forms of expression, and moreover, reaches only a limited audience. Over the years, like many artists, Blake has published a number of ’zines, which was a new way for him to interact with people and to engage in a community.
In this line of thought, Blake persues a holistic approach to his work. “I think it’s better to make and then examine and interrogate your work. Then you have something to start from instead of waiting around to find your little bit of truth, which you are then going to push out into the world,” Blake said. Blake’s art has become a self-conscious process which requires attention to both himself and his context. Blake sees the work he did as a graduate student at California Institute for the Arts as high in volume but without direction. “I began to see the limitations of finding an evocative object, adding a catch phrase and having that equal art,” he said. The process of reexamining the clichés into which his art repeatedly falls provides the remarkable forward momentum to his ever-changing body of work.