Amerika, the recent show of work by Shalom Neuman at the Ilon Gallery on West 123rd, was gleefully demanding, image by image.
And these images were utterly unalike, each being a wholly separate presence, except that the focal point of almost every one was headlike, indeed in your face, a conglomerate image that Shalom Neuman has put together by using a variety of raw materials, such as elements of workable tech, bits and pieces of material that he has handmade himself and stuff that he has spotted on the street, such as a luminous hubcap picked up while we were out walking.
I found the effect of the walls upon which these full frontal faces end up was at once playful and unnerving, a masked parade of obsessively staring features.
These presences are the product of Shalom Neuman’s very own Ism: Fusionism. Further collections of his work are on public view in his two museums, one in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives, the other in Hostka, the Czech Republic, where he was born, raised and where he still has a home. They are called IF Museums, the IF standing for International Fusionism. Also, right now Shalom Neuman is working on a major Fusionist event which is to be held in the near future in New York.
So Fusionism is just what? Well, for one thing, it’s the opposite of Minimalism, so let’s just call it Maximalism. It’s a way of making art which ignores and/or abolishes the distinctions which are generally observed by artists working in specific forms. I’ll quote a Fusionist text here: Its goal is to make the individual disciplines indecipherable from one another, fusing them together rather than separating them.
So when making a painting, a Fusionist can also use drawing, sculpture, photography. Likewise, music, indeed sounds generally, also lights and the tech devices used to control sound and light, such as video and dimming systems. And Performance too. The following short list of some artworks on display at his museum in the Czech Republic will indicate how Shalom Neuman puts projects together. It includes:
Shalom Neuman is outspokenly confident about the future of Fusionism, indeed has joyously said “For sixty or so years I have been watching artists break away and desert pure painting on a canvas. History will prove that pure painting on a stretched canvas is DEAD!” Take that, Mega galleries!
Does Fusionism have artist forbears? Well, of course. Jackson Pollock went nuts when he felt he was becoming a performance artist but Yves Klein had musicians playing while he painted and he used naked women as “human paintbrushes”. Not wishing to see Klein posthumously me-tooed I’ll add that he is said to have treated them “respectfully”.
Shalom Neuman salutes two further predecessors. One is Nam June Paik, the Korean artist who moved first to Berlin, then New York, joined Fluxus, who was a friend of John Cage and who is considered a key figure in both the development of video and the birth of Performance art. Also Jean Tinguely, the Swiss sculptor, whose work derided automation and tech merch, and who made quite an impact with Homage to New York, a sculpture which both built and destroyed itself on March 17, 1960, in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden.
So what does the future hold for Fusionist art? Well, there is, of course, that Shalom Neuman’s not-yet-fully-planned major event. See you there.
