John Miller, Installation view

“Middle of the Day” is a long-term project.  John Miller has been taking pictures of the middle of the day since 1994.  They document Miller’s location between the hours of noon and two –wherever he may be as a typically nomadic professional artist.  These hours were apparently chosen as the “down time” of our contemporary existence, but casual conversation with random interlocutors seems to suggest that few people in New York at least experience this period as particularly inactive.  Never mind—we get the idea.  The photos, featuring people and buildings in urban and rural locations, have been made into a slide show for this exhibition and a new soundtrack of everyday ambient sounds has been added.

Also presented is a potato on a red rug.  Spotlit, the humble potato, a staple, seems equivalent to the quotidian, intentionally humdrum photos.  Moreover, it seems to evoke—in its shape and isolation—the glorious turd.  Other Miller objects—notably the found toys covered in thick brown acrylic paint—have flirted with the excremental.  Likewise, the gilded found objects might reference the transformation of the abject doo-doo into the glittering jewel, the gift to the parent of the child’s most prized production.  Some famous thinkers have equated this early gifting with the impulse to make art.  Here the potato and the red, imperial, glamorous carpet enact the same debased/glorified co-dependency.  Miller is possibly the most withholding contemporary artist out there.  There are many non-visual visual artists, of course, and their position has impressive intellectual backing.  But usually this kind of non-visuality is accompanied by a slightly raised linguistic temperature, centered as it is on a feud between the verbal and the visual.  But Miller always offers images—photos or objects—no language.  Could this gesture to which Miller has devoted his entire career—the presenting of the mundane, even the boring, as art, and its reference to an early childhood generosity—could this be his unwavering, endlessly emphasized “interpretation” of the “riddle” of creative impulse?  If so, how boring, how infuriating, how brave—in any order you like.  Perhaps there’s not a lot of pleasure to be had from a Miller project, but there is the satisfaction of and hard-worn admiration for the maintenance of a stubborn conviction, for an almost Calvinist plain speaking.

Howard Foster