Christopher Taggart show: Science, art duke it out
February 05, 2011
by Kenneth Baker

Bay Area artist Christopher Taggart has an undergraduate degree in physics, and it shows. We get whiffs of the madness of science and the madness of art in his exhibition at Baer Ridgway (now Eli Ridgway Gallery).

No single work can represent the zany variety of things here, but "Bananawar" (2008-11) indicates the level of Taggart's commitment to seeing an idea through.

On three aluminum panels measuring 5 by 10 feet all told, he has engraved by hand a colossal image that the title nudges us to see as a drifting Portuguese man-of-war. A bunch of bananas stands in for its "float," its tentacles formed of chains of combination box- and open-end wrenches.

Taggart has calibrated the profile of each of these elements with measurements and marked every calibration with a compass-traced circle corresponding in diameter to the unit of measure. The resulting welter of light-catching incised circles clothes the figure in an optical effervescence.

If this description sounds hard to follow, know that it barely suggests the storm of visual detail into which a viewer looks when gazing at "Bananawar."

Not surprisingly, the eye starts to dream when confronting this level of complexity. Prepare to see a skeletal human figure with a strange headdress emerge.

"Bananawar" evokes commitment to a project run amok, which we see more often in war making and big science than in art. Think "going bananas," "banana republic" - the old political slur, not the retail chain. What sort of war unmasks a banana republic? A bananawar, of course.

Taggart gestures toward institutionalized manias more effectively by skirting the overtly topical than he could by simple allusion.

With "Portrait of My Wife" (2010), he resumes a more personal orbit, but not without a comic wobble of paranoid vision.

Here the viewer finds scattered on three walls and the ceiling of a room irregular patches of black and brown adhesive paper. At first Russian Constructivism comes to mind.

A small, motorized apparatus on the floor intermittently jerks into various positions what looks like a crude model of a radar screen. By watching the pair of monitors on the opposite wall, a viewer discovers that the form being jerkily repositioned is a custom-faceted mirror.

The monitors display what the mirror "sees." Every so often, it gets thrown into the place where its facets gather all the scattered forms on walls and ceiling into rough images - the "portrait" - of Taggart's wife's eyes.