Untitled (Double Spiral) 1988

Curator: This is Al Taylor’s “Untitled (Double Spiral),” created in 1988. It’s an ink drawing or print. Editor: My immediate thought is—balance. Precarious, playful balance. Those looping lines, one wild at the top, the other more grounded below. There's a real tension, an almost industrial sensibility to the use of simple form. Curator: I see the industrial angle too. Taylor's work often engages with everyday materials and observations, filtered through the lens of post-minimalism. One could say this work addresses notions of containment and the spiraling nature of information in the modern age. Are we chasing our tails, lost in loops of data? Editor: Interesting. It’s funny that you say ‘containment’. Look at how raw and process-driven this work is. It is on paper, yes? The material suggests to me a relationship to mass reproducibility, the ease and quickness by which something like this can be churned out. But then, we have a unique work—the hand of the artist visible. Curator: Precisely! And think about his broader oeuvre. Taylor challenged distinctions of “high” art and craft. We must consider what the loops signify in the face of the commercial machine. Are these objects resisting, perhaps hinting at a kind of endlessness beyond capitalist consumption? Editor: Or perhaps it’s an acknowledgement of it, right? By working with easily accessible material like ink and paper, by creating repetitive gestures… doesn't it become an echo of industrial modes of creation? Are we simply caught in an ouroboros, continuously feeding the machine with aesthetic experiences? Curator: Perhaps we are both right. Its very ambivalence becomes potent. Considering its production, we must also explore what this signifies in a culture deeply ingrained with ideals of endless economic growth and societal repetition. What statements were made, or attempted by Taylor and what do we project into it today. Editor: That said, these crude, unrefined markings and loops hold our gaze to what making or creating can be at a raw level, as an essential material-based undertaking. Curator: I find myself seeing Taylor’s double spiral as a reminder of our own potential for agency within these larger systems. The beauty lies in its layered possibilities of social interpretation. Editor: Well, those endless loops definitely encourage viewers to find themselves going down rabbit holes of aesthetic consideration and artistic intention.