JOHN SALVEST
While working on Meditation 7.21, John Salvest was thinking about Monet’s Waterlilies. But you would probably never guess. Consisting of some 9,000 different business cards stretching more than 80 feet wide, this vast work of art spells out what at first glance seems to be an inspirational message: “Soon you will have forgotten the world and soon the world will have forgotten you.” This sober reminder of our fate addresses a futility that is echoed by the multitude of standard-format business cards: thumbtacked neatly into place, no two alike, each represents someone’s worldly status and achievements. What could be more literal, pragmatic, and accessible?
Salvest’s work speaks plainly. It is composed of perfectly ordinary objects and simple language. It has to do with signage, inventory, and quotation. It carries echoes of folk art, tramp art, craftwork, and busywork. But it’s not as simple as it seems. The business-card text is not some New Age or biblical platitude, but an obscure quotation from Book Seven, Section 21, of the Meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. And the more you ponder the possibilities, the more Monet’s Waterlilies—with their touchy horizontality, enveloping space, and dissolving surfaces—seem relevant to Salvest’s piece. Even the quotation might well be addressed to those fluid images of ephemerality created by an aged master who was running out of eyesight and out of time.
Time is a crucial element in Salvest’s work. His time-consuming process involves accumulating, sorting, counting, numbering, labeling, and categorizing the most ordinary things. Like many other recent artists who do concept-driven work, his art involves repetition and sequencing, sameness and difference, particularity and communality, collection and chronology. In the most obvious sense, Salvest’s work is about putting things in order, and about the daily personal rituals with which one tries to make sense of things. And, as he once stated, it is about “the half-forgotten objects which fill our lives,” objects we normally ignore or discard. On another level, his art is about the persistence of memory and the residues of existence: it speaks of the human condition, which now comes complete with obsessive, compulsive, and other psychological components. It addresses not only age-old feelings of futility and mortality, but existence in a world that during the past decades has been stripped, one by one, of comforting modern illusions.
Born in New Jersey, Salvest studied English literature and then art during his university years. Since then he has lived, taught, and worked on his art in Jonesboro, Arkansas (“out here in the middle of nowhere, working on faith”). It is no wonder that whether his text-based works borrow their words from Marcus Aurelius or from Kafka, Camus, W. H. Auden, Santayana, or Goethe’s Faust, the quotations about aspirations, disenchantment, redemption — somehow acquire intonations of the vernacular. His work is full of such contradictions. It is not only profoundly pessimistic, but playful and brimming with generosity. His calendrical repetitions deny the modern illusion of progress. And yet, against all odds, they hold out the barest hope of salvation.
-Kim Levin
(excerpted from the exhibition catalog John Salvest: Time On His Hands,
Phoenix Art Museum)