My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 75

The Temptation
of Space

Why would a sculptor abandon the third dimension?
What might that act of renunciation mean to him and
to his viewers?

74

Any answer, in the case of C. Michael
Norton, must acknowledge that the
purge is never complete: some vestige
of space always remains, endowing the
artist’s “flat” colorful paintings with
both formal and psychological depth.

Norton’s journey to the acrylic brightness
of his mature work has been a long
one, marked throughout by interaction
between conceptual binaries — in
short, a dialectical progress. Tellingly,
the artist was born and raised in North
Dakota, yet today lives in downtown
Manhattan. That relocation alone —
from provincial origins to dense urban
life, from simplicity and clarity on the
plains to cosmopolitan complexity and
flux in Tribeca — is enough to alert
us that his nature is divided. When
Norton left the Middle American

By

RICHARD VINE

q
C. Michael Norton

prairie for Humbolt State University
in Arcata, California, he first studied
bronze casting, a brute mineral-based
procedure, alien to any sensibility
formed by rapport with the land.
Understandably, he soon grew
dissatisfied with the semi-industrial
process and its cult of swaggering
machismo. After his ba (1977), Norton
switched to San Jose State, where,
earning both an ma (1978) and mfa
(1981), he set about making open,
sometimes latticework, assemblages of
wood, wire, paper, and plaster.