Fill in the Blank

Charles Williams made a lot of these, circa 1983-1998:  pencil holders.  

They are still haunting me, after seeing them at the Intuit Art Center in Chicago a little over a month ago.  The functional capacity of these objects is what gets the whole aesthetic sensation going.  A concept so banal and delivered in such strange little packages, the whole thing feels almost not-art, which is kind of where I like to live aesthetically.  In the Land of Nod, I guess, the place where knickknacks and sculptures and pieces of litter and jewelry and pill bottle lids, etc. all combine into a sort of bracing nothingness.  All of that pseudo-philosophy right there makes Mr. William's whole project feel like a catatonic junk-drawer and a mesmerizing memoir combined.  

A lot of the holders are fashioned from the extruded plastic he took from his job at IBM, off the factory floor.  Foamy detritus like candy-colored tumors, like toys melted in a fire.  These castaway non-objects are often combined with other found objects and materials to form function:  pens and pencils shoved into strategic holes.  

This is Robert Rauschenberg territory, but also somehow out-Rauschenbergs Robert, because of the tidy, small ambition.  Pencil holders for Christ's sake.  I know I, for one, haven't really ever given a thought to them.  I use an old drinking glass or mug usually, or just throw them in a drawer.  But somehow the idea of a "pencil holder" takes on a cosmic uselessness here, a focus on purpose, and then futility fuels meaning.  Like Duchamp backwards.  

Mr. Williams manufactured these from manufacturing other things, and the echo of their creation makes for an eerie kind of meditation on why these things are even here on Earth.  But that is poetry for me, I guess, and a relief from the usual stacked-up sense of meaning, as in "social justice" or "identity politics" or  "fill in the blank."  

Mr. Williams made these things incessantly and sold some of them, but I think deep down he wanted to know they existed so he had to make them.  All the tragic boredom instilled in broken pencils, in used-up Bics, in dried-up Sharpees, all the magic deep inside them as they wait to be thrown away, all of that channeled into what school-kids might make, what is left behind at a garage-sale.  Or in other words:  Art.