The Brooklyn Rail

David Kettner’s retrospective exhibition is a lost opportunity to present a remarkable body of work for lack of a meaningful edit. It is claimed in the accompanying literature that Kettner made more than two-thousand collages since 2013. The best are those in which there is a standoff taking place between the found images from coloring books crayoned by children and the artist’s cutting and affixing.

In the catalogue that was produced at the time of the exhibition there is a small reproduction of an image of a work entitled Canary (2022), which includes two pages from what was presumably the same book. Both have linear borders with rounded edges and two different pages from them overlap at a diagonal. The upper area is a linear rendition of two jars, one scribbled, mostly within its linear boundaries in purple crayon, the other in yellow, as the lower half abuts it with the same style of representation of the bottom half of a bird in a cage, scribbled, again within its boundaries. This one juxtaposition by the artist, this one intercut, is enough to further isolate for inspection that essential quality we all find in all children’s markings: their enigmatic quasi-articulate expressiveness.

What is special about Kettner’s choices is they enable a look at what is an essentially opaque phenomenon: ultimately mysterious messages isolated from scraps of long-extinguished childhood reveries. The content remains elusive, as it must be. When Kettner limited his interventions to the specific coloring book fragments of a certain period, these were of interest not only for their passé reinforcement of conventional gender roles and their underlying problematic depiction of innocence, but for the materiality of the aged, slightly yellowed paper and the inked, linear machine press renderings of the figures of children or animals or objects as they intermingled or contrasted with the impositions of colored scribbles. These slight works enfolded as they questioned an enormous amount of modernist and postmodernist pictorial history: gestural abstraction, appropriation, social critique, “death of the author,” and challenged the efficacy of making a conventional painting.

Kettner's gestures of cutting and juxtaposing in these works are often deft and gentle, as much a curation as an intervention. If works of this type were isolated for display, this project would have been nothing short of profound. The violence that is discussed in the catalogue essay and in the gallery and online discussion one evening of cutting into his children’s drawings or of the general violence of images, never addressed the most necessary violence of all: the artist’s decision, sometimes with the help of others, to throw out what he doesn’t need in order that the most necessary element comes to the fore. Ellsworth Kelly once said, “I was deciding what I didn't want in a painting, and just kept throwing things out—like marks, lines and the painted edge.” Ivan Karp came to Warhol’s studio and saw his early Pop paintings and told him to get rid of the drips and scribbles and just paint the images.

In another medium, the editor Gordon Lish drastically cut and revised Raymond Carver’s best-known stories. Similarly, this show, a retrospective, is largely a collection of disjecta membra with no center, as a good amount of the late work that has been selected is an intellectual referendum on his initial discovery: there are Victorian prints of children cut up and juxtaposed, pieces of old wallpaper introduced onto the coloring book material, fragments of Japanese prints, etc., all irrelevant and quite simply red herrings in relation to the child-colored juxtapositions. When Kettner holds back and doesn’t try too hard to force a narrative upon them, or to “practice collage,” the results are quietly extraordinary, but too often he doesn’t seem to think that there is enough there, resulting in work that suffers from an overabundance of the artist’s presence, his excessive titling and his editorializing upon the history of collage. What has been lost in this exploration of the various meanings of it and that of Blakean innocence that should never have been shown is the meek yet powerful presence of the original authors of this ephemera carefully combined with the artist’s witty rebuttal to grand gestures.