This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 26, 2011 - The "work" of art is a subject that has occupied various artists throughout history. Among visual artists, Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers and Andy Warhol all, in their own way, dissected the ideas of work and making.
The writer William Burroughs did, too. In a short piece entitled "The Discipline of DE," Burroughs defines Do Easy as a strategy for streamlining actions so that no effort is wasted and results are optimized.
Now at Los Caminos, Cole Root has staged "Do Easy," bringing together artists who in their own way take up Burroughs' discipline by using found or repurposed materials, or generally reorganizing existing situations to produce new artistic conditions.
The works are by turns humorous, confounding, ingenious and deadpan, proposing an opening up of how we define both "making" and "seeing."
"Do Easy" includes Dani Kantrowitz, Glen Fogel, Gregg Louis, Mike Schuh, and Matthew Strauss (the director of White Flag Projects who rarely shows his own work these days; his pieces in this show are stunning).
Ivy Cooper is the Beacon visual arts reviewer and a professor of art at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.