PUSH AND PULL

PUSH AND PULL

60 second HD video with Stereo Sound, animation by Rachel Clarke, sound by Stephen Blumberg

"Push and Pull" is an homage to the slant step, an odd object discovered by William Wiley in 1965, and given to his then student at UC Davis, Bruce Nauman. "Its uselessness and abject quality embodied exactly the kind of neo-Dadaist ethos that Wiley was then propagating as an instructor at UC Davis, and for Nauman it served as a sort of muse, if not a fetish." (David Roth, Square Cylinder)

The apparently useless object, made with such care and attention, inspired underground art shows in San Francisco, Berkeley and Davis in the late 60s and decades since, and as a result it has acquired a cult status that remains to the present day.

For the fiftieth anniversary of the slant step, Renny Pritikin, then UC Davis Nelson Gallery Director, and Joy Bertinuson, guest curator, invited fifty artists to mark the occasion with new slant step work. The exhibition in July 2012 called Flatlanders on the Slant, was also the fourth version of Pritikin's biennial survey of regional art, Flatlanders.

"Push and Pull" channels the spirit of whimsy surrounding the object in the form of a post-photographic virtual slant step mirroring the real one. It morphs, shakes and stretches beyond the limits of physical reality, snapping back into shape just before its breaking point -- only to repeat the tortuous sequence over and over again, in a tragicomic metaphor for art and life itself.



The original Slant Step, discovered by William Wiley in 1965