Chad Sorg creates art from junk you might find under your washing machine, or perhaps in the basement of the decrepit house in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Lighters, glass vials, flayed socks, mangled forks, headless figurines, chrome blades, gaudy plastic beads, bullets, re-elect Carter/Mondale buttons, shot-up pieces of metal. The only things missing are the bones and feathers.
Sorg’s MeanJoeGreen is on display at River Gallery and features oil paintings and mixed media works from the past 10 years. Sorg, 30, is a graphic designer by trade and, until recently, would have said his art didn’t mean a thing.
He liked to disregard the notion that art had to be meaningful in favor of the idea that it could be purely aesthetic, that it could exist solely as something to entertain the eye. And his visually rich digital prints covered in resin often did just that. The resin, which he still uses, even though he’s been creating fewer digital pieces and more “found-object” pieces, adds heaviness and lushness to everything it covers—makes it into eye candy. It enhances the colors and adds a second and/or third dimension to the art.
“I just started working with found objects,” Sorg says. “I always want to have a change in my work, not a growth, but a transition. I want to see movement. I’ve been doing the same thing for a couple years. I think I got bored. I wanted to switch it up and explore a little.”
Sorg’s found-object works are grotesque. They are nasty conglomerations of goop and garbage. One piece in particular catches my attention: “Jack & Wood.” It’s a three-dimensional piece consisting of a car jack, slats of cheap wood, blue paint and the stem and leaves of a dying plant, all attached with resin to a piece of particle board. If it’s meant to attract gaping stares, it succeeds much in the same way a macabre freeway accident turns people’s heads. It’s dirty, filthy and uninviting. It asks to be touched, but threatens to sully you if you dare.
Sorg mentions Marcel Duchamp as a major recent artistic influence. Duchamp, as you may recall, did the infamous “Fountain” piece in 1917, which was simply a urinal turned on its side.
“I’ve been reading up on Duchamp, and I’ve been kind of addicted,” he says. “When he came along, he was into the separation of life and art, he wanted to bring them closer—have daily ideas and life in the art itself. I already have that sensibility, and I guess it filtered into my more recent stuff. In [Duchamp’s] time, cubism was coming up, and he complained that it was purely visual, just retinal art. He wanted ideas to come into art more, to make it conceptual.”
This might sound like a complete departure from the lack of concept Sorg propounded earlier, but he’s still toying with his newfound interest in Duchamp and deciding how much he’ll let meaningful themes intrude into his artistic psyche.
“I don’t want to completely flip sides and make it all conceptual now,” he says. “When it comes to meaningful interpretations, people want to psychoanalyze the artist, there’s so much bullshit in it. People just make stuff up.”
More than anything, Sorg says, he’d like to mimic Duchamp’s sense of humor.
“His whole thing about art was that it was humorous to confuse people,” Sorg says. “I want to have humor in my art too. I’m looking for that fine balance between meaning and no meaning.”
Sorg succeeds in translating Duchamp’s intentions into his own art. He takes things trivial and mundane and brings attention to them by using them in ways they would not normally be used. His hodgepodge pieces are often so random they become silly and laughable—both in ludicrous and humorous ways.
I wanted to avert my eyes from “Jack & Wood,” among others. I wondered why anybody would put such repulsively contrasting elements together. And before even talking to Sorg, I thought it couldn’t be anything but a joke. I was confused, and then I chuckled and shook my head.
Duchamp would be pleased.