Merwin Belin - School of Belin

A Mid-Career Survey

Ron Linden [curator’s statement]

Merwin Belin has been producing provocations in one form or another since the early 1970’s, embracing a strategy first described as detournement, by Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman in 1956, and later employed as a part of the Situationist International’s openly declared war on the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element - which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense - and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect. It is primarily in the form of collage that Belin has quietly - indeed too quietly - made his mark as an artist. From reconstructed newspaper front pages to text/image reassignments to impoverished original assemblages, his work is consistently witty, irreverent, spare, and often elegant.

An illustrated catalog with an essay by Peter Plagens will be available at the exhibition.

Lenders to the exhibition:

Mark and Lucia Dunham

Max Hendler

Katy Crowe and Doug Henry

Lou Rondone

Robert Leavitt

Catalog design by KD Studios, San Pedro, CA