“The interrogation of the interplay between artist and viewer continues in Can Control, an enormous graffiti-covered canvas with a white spiral of architectural contours swirling into the center. Schoenstadt has asked the staff and faculty of the university to email her instructions as to what she should do to the canvas. Before she executed any of the instructions, she taped off a spiral-shaped drawing of architectural forms, with line quality similar to that of the buildings on the Discussion Wall. The spiral is seen as a fundamental form in nature, but it is also emblematic of that which is infinite and entropic. It has a plurality of references in (art) history – from the golden mean, to da Vinci, Bentham, Spiral Jetty, and George Crumb. In this piece one could also think of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1920 which was, appropriately, designed to be the quintessential utopian monument….

The Can of the title refers to the can of spray paint, but also offers permission, enabling the artist and viewer alike to ‘do’. Control redirects us to the public’s sense of intervention or imperative, but also to the artist’s own ultimate control in the decision to make the work in this manner in the first place. The viewer can control the artist, while the artist has literal control of the spray can. 

The canvas in Can Control serves as an indexical record of each e-mailed command, and with each instruction that is enacted upon the canvas the previous marks are obliterated or obscured. The participants who offer commands hold their position as author of the piece only until someone else gives another command and Schoenstadt executes that one on top of the last. The decision to ‘end’ the piece comes when Schoenstadt stops obliging the viewers’ directives, and pulls off the masking tape that she had laid down before any spray paint was applied. The tape is removed to reveal a sort of inverse graffiti and white lines emerge through and on top of the myriad layers of spray paint, like the Spiral Jetty emerging from the fog. “ -Excerpt from Micol Hebron’s essay “And, not Or: Kim Schoenstadt’s Composition for a Large Room in Three Parts”

The project traveled to the following locations

• San Francisco- New Langton Arts Project Documentation

• Eindhoven, The Netherlands - VanAbbemuseum Project documentation

• LaVerne California- University of LaVerne, CA Project Documentation , Catalogue Essay

• Hartford, CT- Wadsworth Atheneum / MiCasa

Press

BT Magazine Tokyo Japan

Spike Art Quarterly Vienna Austria

Knack Brussels Belgium

Catlin, Roger, “A Melding of Architectural Lines in Matrix Gallery at Atheneum”, Hartford Courant, Hartford, CT