TYLER CUFLEY: TELL EVERYONE THAT YOU ARE SMILING
Essay by Marc LeBlanc

One of Dave Hickey’s more provocative essays, “The Heresy of Zone Defense,” describes the development of basketball rules to make a case for the statement for the ebb and flow of canons, administrations, and law-making bodies; he states in explicit reference to Thomas Jefferson that, “the liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow...“ Despite Hickey’s eloquent ability to connect basketball with politics, what he is saying can hardly be considered new. There has been innumerable similar statements throughout history. For example, early 20th century Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci recognized that the aims of even the most marginal political party is only to supplant one form of cultural hegemony for another. When discussing politics, many are likely to now consider statements like these as conventional wisdom, holding weight not just for political regimes, but also aesthetic ones.

There has been a distinct change in Seattle artist Tyler Cufley’s work over the past five years. Where once his sculptures and paintings were built on the aesthetics of a hippy’s defunct utopia, Cufley’s current body of work takes a more severe angle, exchanging tie-dye and color spectrums for a stricter formalism along with images from one of America’s most controversial radical political organizations, The Weatherman. Cufley addresses the role of revolution and radicalism for both aesthetics and politics by creating works that perform color field painting or geometric abstraction and are juxtaposed with meaningful subjects from America’s political history. A important conflation between modernist aesthetics and radical politics is now a central trope for Cufley’s practice.

In “Untitled (Weathermen)” (2009), blurred to the boundary of being almost unidentifiable, are Weatherman leaders Terry Robbins and John Jacobs as they march during Chicago’s Days of Rage. Donning dark aviator glasses and a football helmet, the pair persists in soft focus, obscured further by by a shade of lush color, their images are like their historical place -  hazy and unfixed. One of a number of well-known anarchist events in the city’s political history, the Days of Rage now beg a question about the value and efficacy of anarchist politics for yesterday and today. Although misaligned by the mainstream, the values of radical politics lay at the core of dozens of art modern art movements. Cufley strings this concept through his other pieces. Sculptures like “Untitled (Dumpster)” (2009) serve to further amplify the Days of Rage images. Usually an overlooked object, in the context of the exhibition, the dumpster is doubly loaded. It registers as the barricade, the makeshift bunker, and the container of ready kindle for a cocktail, but also as a stark object whose form can be compared to the minimal and industrial works of decades past.

Cufley’s work assumes a precarious position, at once it is critical of the perpetually resurging legacy of modern art and in the same move takes its aesthetic as its own. Each work appears carefully conflicted, but more importantly, as an apt representation of both contemporary art and politics. What Cufley’s work embodies is the historical challenges contemporary art and artists face today. It doesn’t provide any answers, and perhaps neither it could or should. What it does do so successfully, is make transparent why this discussion has urgency today. Like any sweeping political change, a new direction brings not just the hope for change, but the haunting acknowledgement that things may stay the same. As contemporary artists are burdened with negotiating a dredged past as well as the shadows of avant-gardism, the steepest challenge may be in creating change for art that doesn’t just balloon to become our future juggernaut academies, well-worn lectures, and tired practices.

Essay by Marc LeBlanc