Brian Schneider’s ‘This/That/The Other Thing’

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Brian Schneider’s exhibition “This/That/The Other Thing” at Var Gallery on (through April 9) leads off with humor, but it’s a very specific kind of humor. It’s giddy and absurd, the kind that is funniest in basements, and deep inside a shared abstract language. As one maneuvers between his forest of visual non-sequiturs at Var, his art slowly begins to disarm the viewer, preparing them to dig deeper into the work. According to Schneider “Humor can dampen painful experiences. Nostalgia and humor also allow a person to let their guard down, allowing for harder to digest ideas to get through.” 

While Schneider’s work has a smile on its face, its body is wooden. Literally and figuratively. His piece Cock Fight is funny right from the title. Not that cock fights are necessarily great humor, but in the context of fine contemporary art they are. On its surface the construction features a loose array of anatomically accurately painted body parts from two roosters, on top of a gorgeous quatrefoil-like pattern of orange, yellow, and red. The geometric design is made from carefully milled and enameled interlocking wood blocks. The tessellated design elements and careful craftmanship are in a bizarre dialogue with the busted-up chickens, and clearly that’s the point. I’m laughing while I write it, imagine stumbling upon it in a gallery. That basic Mad Libs-ey incongruity guides all the work in the show, which doesn’t get old because each moment is so unique. But the first cuts are the deepest in his case. 

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Strangely enough there’s another work in the show whose impact and humor hinges on avian annihilation. Randy Johnson Fastball appears tame enough from a few feet away with its two bands of red tracing the perimeter of a robin’s egg blue Maltese cross shape. It’s only when you get near enough to see the baseball at its center and the loose feathers painted on its surface that one might recall that galactically random event two decades ago when a 97-mph heater vaporized a white bird in Arizona. The whole scene is too strange to process. It has no precedent. There are no neuropathways for the material to travel, and no emotional vessel to put it in if it could. One only laughs, then cries, and then starts thinking about Leibnitz and alternative universes. 

And Schneider’s work has a little of that in it, too: that unpredictable oddness that is the language of overtired teenagers watching infomercials at 3 a.m. in a basement. No one will ever make art as wrenching as that Randy Johnson fastball, but it’s not a bad target to aim for. And I dare say, tongue firmly in cheek, that Brian Schneider’s throwing some heat. Rest assured that no birds were hurt in the making of the work, and that he capped the gallows bird humor at two works. Though the other pieces will sting you as well. And you’ll keep laughing under your breath the whole time as you admire his craftmanship, labor, precision, materiality, and abstract design sensibilities at the heart of these works. If the first laugh goes to the overt comedy the last one goes to the fact that what might be gags are actually complex, well-made, unique constructions that would live fine on their own merit.