Curtis Fairman bears down on issue when he says, "There's not an issue on the planet I'm interested in," but not so hard as to indicate a pointed hostility to issues—it's more of a ... disinterest. That's Fairman: Unassuming; not breaking bad on anyone. Just doing his thing.
His thing is art, and definitely not that issue-driven stuff. Rather, Fairman fashions curvy, shiny sculptures from plastic and metal bowls, lamp shades, vases and cups—the sort of anonymous household junk you buy at Wal-Mart. He fastens them together in numerous and inventive combinations, creating shapely pieces that resist easy reading; because they almost look like something you'd find on the shelves of designer homewares at Target, you may find them evoking a generalized consumer experience, but whoa, buddy, stop right there! That's deep enough! A formalist, Fairman isn't trying to make his constructions mean anything. They're all about catchy combinations of curves, lines and planes; pure form. Any deeper meaning—and, depressingly, viewers keep taking the pieces to be sly references to sex toys—is strictly bring-your-own.
At the moment, "formalist" isn't the word you'd immediately apply to the 33-year-old. Slouched in a chair in the otherwise empty Dust, the Main Street art gallery, he's the human equivalent of an untucked shirt, disheveled and uncombed in a green shirt, jeans and dirty Vans with a checkerboard design. (He's not showing at Dust, but the owners have let him spread out a sampling of his work on a backroom floor. He's part of Indulgences, a group exhibit of local artists at the Reed Whipple Center.) He's spent the day at his money gig, as production manager for the art-glass company Glassic Art. He's relaxed and easygoing, having just posed for the photo at left, probably assuming we wouldn't run it so big, or at all. ("Writers are always selling somebody out." —Joan Didion.) He talks quickly and in complete thoughts about his work, rarely backing up or stammering as he describes what it is and what it isn't.
"I don't want it to have a personal narrative," he says. To that end, he creates work with no story. These pieces exist outside of any narrative. Think about, oh, abstract painting: Even splatters, drips and stripes offer some autobiography of the creative process. Fairman's constructions suggest no more drama than what goes into assembling a toaster. There are no marks on them—nothing drawn, painted, etched or applied—that suggest they've been handled by an artist. "I don't see myself so much as a sculptor but more as an editor, editing out information I don't want." His objects also exist outside of time, in a way; they don't say "now" in the 2005 sense, yet they'll seem perpetually of-the-moment until humans stop using metal and injection-molded plastic kitchenware.
Because his pieces have a genetic relation to consumer items, it's tempting to view them as critiques of consumer society. You know, creating enigmatic objects of desire from artless cultural detritus, which, by employing advanced design strategies, stimulate the viewer's urge to acquire them, even though they serve no actual function. That old story. This would be wrong. "There's no irony in these pieces," Fairman says, working his cigarette. His art is utterly sincere. These things he makes his pieces from, the cups and vases and bowls, he doesn't consider them the worthless crap of mass production. They're the beautiful crap of mass production! "I love my materials," he says. So it's not a case of ennobling lowbrow items by turning them into art, thereby creating objects that highlight the emptiness of wanting and buying things. They're about the joy of wanting and buying. It's an idea he terms "immaculate consumption," the way his pieces plug back into that first moment you wanted to own something simply because it looked cool.
In the mid-'90s, as an art student at the University of Northern Texas, Fairman spent his class time trying to stay awake through the dry rustle of art history lessons. Beyond the classroom, his attention was drawn to a group of young underground artists who had developed their own typically youthful approach to being shut out of that history: Find a place to show some work and mark the occasion with a party. "I thought, Maybe I should go hang out with these kids and see what happens. If there was a commonality, it was that none of us ever thought we were going to sell any art. We were doing this to entertain ourselves."
Fairman wanted to be a sculptor but didn't want to chisel stone, cast bronze or dick around with wood. "I'm a formalist. I have rigorous ideas about how to design things. I just don't want to use traditional materials." OK, so he had something of an anti-authoritarian streak. He eventually turned to found-object assemblages. Any kind of junk you can imagine, he began transmuting it. "Once you turn to found art," he says, "everything under the sun becomes a medium you can use." Paper clips, rubber bands, engine parts.
In 1998, he came to Las Vegas, mostly to study with celebrated art critic Dave Hickey at UNLV. Hickey pushed an approach that went against the received notion that art emerges from the artist's struggle and torment; he favored an art rooted in the joy and frivolity of creating work from those elements you love, wherever they appear on the highbrow-lowbrow spectrum.
Fairman's early Las Vegas stuff retained its found-art vibe: carpet squares with crop circles cut into them; sculptures made from hair brushes. But soon enough, Las Vegas had its effect. He began to tighten up his technique and move away from organic elements and an over-reliance on brown. "The bright colors," he says, gesturing toward a bulbous piece, created from white Swiss lamp shades with a sparkling purple inset. "Vegas did that." After all, the thing about the Strip is its awesome refinement, the seamless way that casino imagineers heighten the artificiality in order to evoke genuine emotional responses. It's a city of sexy surfaces and gaudy colors, pretty cool to a formalist like Fairman.
"I started going out and reinvigorating [his love of shopping]. I'd go to stores and it's like, What can I do with $75? It was only a matter of time before I hit Tupperware and Ikea." On his frequent shopping benders, he ignores items that scream, Use me in your artwork, Curtis; he wants "unanimous, populist" objects. When he finds them, he buys as many as he can. Then he spreads them around the floor of his studio with everything else he's bought, perhaps sorting everything according to color, perhaps to shape, perhaps to texture. Then it's a long process of mix-and-match, does this round blue thing go with that oblong metal bowl ... ? It keeps his inner 6-year-old at play, he says. "One piece will go through about 200 permutations. The second they're built, they take on a persona to me." At that point, he titles each one after a science-fiction character, mostly as a personal joke (he's a sci-fi nut).
This notion of persona isn't beside the point. Fairman's pieces have a sociability possibly reflecting those art-party days in Texas or the easy, cosmopolitan coming-together of people in Las Vegas. They are not objects that ask you to stand still in front of them, silently wrestling with their meaning. They'd rather sit on your end table when you have some friends over. They don't seek for themselves the authority that goes with being "art," but they're ready to accept the responsibility of being cool, which, after all, requires only that you be yourself—so long as you're cool. Fairman's constructions keep their cool in part thanks to a general rise in design-consciousness in America. More and more everyday items are being given advanced design treatments. A time in which good taste has been mainstreamed into Target—"Everyone can have good taste now"—is an era ready-made for Fairman's work.
He's even come around to the idea of actually selling pieces, too. "If someone wants to spend $2,000 for what's essentially $20 worth of plastic, their relationship to the piece is much stronger than any I could have," he says. "I mean, they're all precious to me, but even I wouldn't do that."
If not a check, he'll accept a strong reaction. "I want viewers to be surprised," Fairman says. "When they look at it the first time, I want them to have that moment when they think, How beautiful, followed by a second moment [when they see what it's made of] when they say, 'How common.'"