Nick Tarr: The Universe Is His Palette
Nick Tarr saves stuff, and he always has. “I need things,” he said. “I don’t paint things.” The boxes he made for 20 years and with which he is perhaps most closely identified are jam-packed with objects and images he has accumulated. So, too, are his more recent scanographs and a series of spatially ambiguous photographs that testify to his compulsive and wide-ranging collecting.
A visit to his East Hampton basement studio brought to mind the French word bricolage, which refers to a construction made using available materials. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used the term to characterize patterns of mythological thought, which, unlike scientific thinking, attempt to reuse available materials to solve new problems.
One example is a jerry-built stage set in Mr. Tarr’s basement. Posters, photographs, record album covers, and other objects dangle in a circle from the ceiling, surrounding a blue glass sphere that sits on a table. His photographs capture both the distorted reflections of the objects on the surface of the sphere and the images visible through and behind it. The result is a visual collage that converts a random collection of objects into something dematerialized and difficult to decipher.
His scanographs utilize familiar technology to achieve surprising results. The photographs are taken with a scanner — “a very short depth-of-field, fixed-focus camera” — which is used to create an image of a collage of objects placed on it at the same time. Whether two or three-dimensional, the elements become flattened through the process. The works combine objects that have a clear and often personal meaning to Mr. Tarr with others he has collected without knowing why. “Anything is fair game. The universe is my palette.”
“I’ve been very involved with collage since I was a kid,” he said. “When color copiers first appeared, you had to go to a copy center, since the machine was so big. I’d convince the copy expert to let me work on my own. I’d open my bag of tricks and gewgaws and gimcracks and winking, blinking things and put them on the bed. Because the bar would pass three times, one for each color, you could move things around between each pass and get some interesting results.”
Similar objects populate his boxes, which are essentially dioramas into which you peer through a lens that creates the illusion of a deep three-dimensional space inside a cube less than a foot on each side. The literal three-dimensionality of objects in a small space is also something else, “a kind of virtual reality attained without using electronics. I’m not a high-tech guy.” The juxtapositions of objects and images in his work are often funny and invariably eccentric.
Mr. Tarr’s work deals with interiority, reflection, distortion, transparency, solidity, and a kind of magic or sleight of hand. He comes by both his career as an artist and his interest in magic honestly. His parents were Bill Tarr, an acclaimed sculptor, and Yvonne Young Tarr, an award-winning playwright and the author of more than 20 cookbooks.
“I took art classes, but as a child I grew up helping my father. We used to hang out in the studio and just play.” He recalls being at a Whitney Biennial in the early 1960s, “when I was in single digits,” and roughhousing with one of his father’s pieces on view there until a guard shooed him away.
Less known in the art world was that Bill Tarr was the prolific author of a number of best-selling books on magic, the most famous of which were “Now You See It, Now You Don’t! Lessons in Sleight of Hand” (1976) and its sequel, “The Second Now You See It.” He recalls prominent magicians of a younger generation thanking his father for getting them started on ca eers in magic.
Nick Tarr was born in New York City but raised in Scarsdale, N.Y., where the family moved when he was 5. At that time his father had a studio on Greene Street in SoHo, to which he commuted by motorcycle. The Tarrs moved to Springs in 1976 and lived there, on Fireplace Road, until they relocated to Sarasota, Fla., in 1997. For many years one of Bill Tarr’s steel sculptures, a 40-foot-tall, 63-ton memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., which had been installed at P.S.6 in New York City, resided on the property. He also created “Gates of Hell,” a monumental bronze casting for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He died in 2006, three years after his wife.
A former garage in Nick Tarr’s East Hampton house is filled with his father’s artwork, including steel sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and 16mm films. He is actively involved in preserving, documenting, and digitizing his father’s work. “When my dad passed away, I made every effort to save his work, because to me not only are they beautiful things, they represent work by somebody I think was a very brave man as an artist. He was my role model.”
Pointing out one of the steel sculptures, which are rather like massive collages of smaller elements, he said, “I worked with my father and learned a lot from him. I went on to do stuff that was very, very different. His pieces are all external surfaces, in a way, and I went on to do these boxes that are all interior spaces. I guess that’s how I could follow in my folks’ footsteps and still do something that was different.”
Mr. Tarr is also the curator of this summer’s Springs Invitational Exhibition, which will be held at Ashawagh Hall in in August. This year’s exhibition will honor four longtime members of the East End’s creative community, “not for shallow fame and ostentatious philanthropy but for a lifetime of achievement as artists diligently working to push the edges of the creative envelope,” he said. Those artists are Margie Kerr, Athos Zacharias, A.C. Mim, and Alex Russo. Mr. Tarr also made an effort to bring in younger artists not previously included in the exhibition.