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 the neo-Dadaist ethos Wiley was propagating as an instructor at UC Davis; for Nauman it served as a kind of muse or fetish.
The apparently useless object, made with care and attention, inspired underground art shows in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Davis from the late 1960s onward. As a result, it acquired a cult status that remains to the present.
For the fiftieth anniversary of the slant step, Renny Pritikin, then UC Davis Nelson Gallery Director, and guest curator Joy Bertinuson invited fifty artists to mark the occasion with new work. The July 2012 exhibition, 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 physical reality, snapping back into shape just before its breaking point, only to repeat the sequence in a tragicomic metaphor for art and life.
