Exhibition essay
All the Things: Completist Riffs in Chuck Webster’s The Completist
by Paul D’Agostino
A completist is one compelled to compile all the things pertaining to a certain thing. All the types related to a certain type. All the sorts associated with a certain sort. And so on and so forth.
A completist wants, or rather needs, all of the albums a certain band ever recorded, and all of the live recordings, international editions, and extended cuts of all the same albums. A completist needs all of the books a certain author ever wrote, and all of the same books in all of their first editions and translated versions. A completist might have at least one unworn pair of every generation of Air Jordans ever released, and every limited edition colorway ever produced of each. A completist might have an impressively arrayed and gustatorily adventurous spice cabinet. Galangal, asafoetida, kokum, sumac: check.
A completist might even open several paragraphs in a row with the words ‘a completist’. Which is to say, it’s common enough to have at least mildly completist impulses in some way, and they might not always be matters of material possession or accumulative, collectorial consumerism. If you’ve had pizza from every pizzeria in Brooklyn, or a taco from every taco truck you’ve ever encountered, or been to every U.S. state at least once, then you can relate. Some completists stumble into completism by continuing to do certain things casually, then determining that they might find more enduring fulfillment in the same activities by pursuing them exhaustively: traveling, visiting museums, attending concerts, hiking trails, running marathons, tasting hot peppers, having breakfast at Waffle House locations throughout the south. Others find their completist pursuits of one sort tend to morph into parallel completisms: seeing all of a director’s films becomes collecting all of the related promotional posters.
A completist is thorough and meticulous, and generally obsessive – and maybe most fundamentally, deeply curious. While often tethered to notions of material consumption, completism is not inextricable from it. Just as often, a completist is driven by a desire to ‘own’ or ‘consume’ things by dint of seeing them, trying them, or knowing them. So it’s also a matter of broadening awarenesses and conducting research with the aim of consuming and, thereby, possessing information – a consumerism of experience, a consumerism of knowledge. In this sense, Chuck Webster is a completist through and through. His spice cabinet might not hold vanilla bean pods from Madagascar or buzhguctu from Turkmenistan, but many of the other conjecturally completist subjects mentioned here are well within in his wheelhouse. Webster’s appetite for information is insatiable, and his intellectual and creative enthusiasms are indiscriminately broad enough to encompass a wide range of interests, sensibilities, and pursuits related to mainstream, arcane, generationally ranging, and almost disciplinarily indifferent pop-cultural passions and historical frameworks – lowbrow, highbrow, and no-brow alike. Music? Definitely. Books? Yes. Sports? For sure. Movies? Certainly. Aesthetic traditions and material histories? Absolutely. Waffle Houses? Maybe. Webster isn’t necessarily an exhaustive collector of the physical objects or memorabilia that might be associated with all such interests, but his completist zeal makes him an avid internalizer of as much relevant knowledge as possible.
A completist of Webster’s stamp, of course – which is to say, of the artistic sort – is just as avid about internalizing as about externalizing. In terms of visual manifestations and physical trappings, Webster’s completist tendencies are expressed ultimately and predominantly as an externalizing force – a force most abundantly palpable and ceaselessly active in his artwork. In this dynamic, images reign supreme: so many images, images of images, images upon images, images within images, images shuffled and images layered, images virtually innumerable and images formally unclassifiable. And more specifically, images drawn. Multitudinous in number and multivalent in nature, Webster’s drawings attest to the artist’s formal range, rigorous attention to materials, and enduringly additive, ostensibly rambunctious mode of working – qualities that don’t distinguish his drawing practice from his practice of painting, but rather grant these practices equal footing. Such equivalence is evident even in the qualitative scope of his drawing surfaces and implements, ranging from whole-kit-and-caboodle to utmost preciousness. Regarding surfaces, his completist approach leads him to use, on the one hand, anything and everything, such as old stationary, discarded papers, resuscitated book pages, and repurposed prints. On the other hand, his completist curiosities have led him to develop a keen awareness of the period-specific characteristics, granular attributes, variably pulpy consistencies, and supply-chain realities of his beloved vintage and handmade papers – prime sheets of which he’ll select from his copious stashes to start new pieces with the same sense of casualness he has when grabbing lesser-grade scraps from haphazard paper stacks. Webster’s deployment of drawing materials is essentially the same: he’s just as likely to use whatever mark-making implements happen to be at hand as he is to tap into his ample holdings of rare, vintage, and premier-grade pencils, chalk pastels, oil sticks, wax crayons, inks, watercolors, and gouaches. A locus of perhaps lightly controlled hoarding, Webster’s studio is a maelstrom of toothsome, intriguingly marked surfaces, rows and arrays of colorful materials, racks and wrapped packs of works and works-in-process, and well-seasoned tables and tools. Webster’s maximalist playground is a minimalist’s nightmare – and a completist’s garden of creative delights.
A completist in terms of cultural influences and material predilections might also have, as an artist, completist leanings with regard to compositional forms, pastiched formalities, and art historically resourceful formalisms. Webster demonstrates such traits most openly and expansively in his drawings. From his surface treatments and freewheeling marks to his vivid colors, playful forms, careful yet nonchalant linework, and all manner of compositional miscellany that might feature geometric abstractions and anomalous visual references alongside implied figures, interloping logos, and loosely logical usages of text, Webster’s aesthetic is generous and effusive, exuberant and syncretic, often humorous and occasionally euphoric – and it seems to have much to do with musically-inspired modes of synthesizing, sampling, and remixing. The artist’s drawings, especially those of more recent production, are bountiful mappings of his creative self, impulsive admixtures of his sources of inspiration and abstractly filtered glimpses of the world around him: think airs of Arshile Gorky and Jean Dubuffet with hints of George Widener, Philip Guston, and Paul Klee, all of whose notional presences mingle and merge in bizarre spheres of cartoonish styling, pop-cultural footnotes, design-savvy flair, advertisement-like signage, and classic video-game energies. Despite their insouciant charms and undeniable vim, Webster’s completist cartographies, subtly referential and delightfully imaginative, are anything but immediate – for the artist and viewers alike. Webster tends to work on dozens of drawings at a time, and at times over long periods of time, adding to and changing them gradually and impetuously, instinctively and experimentally, letting entire series of variably interrelated surfaces stew together until they begin to individuate in one way or another, or until that elusive moment when certain pieces seem done – although the notion of a drawing as something that needs to be ‘finished’ is, for him, at least mildly suspicious. And yet, as much as Webster’s drawings register as, and indeed are, motley patchworks of aesthetic mixed bags, they resolve compositionally in ways that seem to make perfect sense, even if that sense is one of relative strangeness. A number of works suggest peculiar topographies, mycorrhizal networks, otherworldly foliage, and varicolored fossils, while others display subjects of greater specificity: a Jovian outpost of satellites and tents held together by Thor’s hammer; a Martian village embellished with mosaics and deific totems; a multi-tiered pyramid emblazoned with liner-note-like references to bands, albums, and lyrics; page-spreads of humorously illogical, geometrically abstract op-ed infographics. Webster’s diverting drawings are a savory gumbo made not from a recipe, but from much received knowledge and decades of focus, devotion, and practice. In the artist’s own words: “I like my drawings to have the look of old tools you find in your grandfather’s shed. Things that carry the touch of a thousand hands.”
A completist as a curious individual and as a visual artist, Chuck Webster is also, by way of this show of drawings, The Completist, the avid creator of so much generously inspired, inspiring imagery. In this, he’s an externalizer of internalized information, an artist ceaselessly working through and riffing on decades of experimentation and reprocessed aesthetics. Through his manifold and multifarious renderings, Webster endeavors to register, on some level, all the things – all the things that interest him, that he engages with, that he wants to capture and examine, that he seeks to record and proliferate. His zestful drawings are a trove of confluent treasures to reckon with, read, indulge in, and behold.
A completist, incidentally, would be remiss not to note, by way of conclusion, that no text about an exhibit called The Completist would be complete without opening one final sentence with the words ‘a completist’. A completist would then add that sentence accordingly – for the sake of completion.
– Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D. is an artist, writer, educator, curator, and translator. He is Writing and Thesis Advisor for the MFA program at The New York Studio School, and a regular visiting critic and instructor for several other institutions and residency programs. D’Agostino teaches writing workshops, is a translator and editor working in various languages, and writes about art, books, and film on a freelance basis.