Charles Linder - Mudslinger

In "MUDSLINGER", artist Charles Linder draws upon his travels, friendships and business relations in a sprawling multimedia installation of the same title. For years, Linder has posited that his life is an active sculpture and that the events surrounding them are all objects which have happened in a timeline of action-based art. Having spent more than 20 years as a gallerist and artist himself, Linder felt a real affinity for Luis Ituarte's dual project in Tijuana when he read about it in the New York Times. A dialogue unfolded between the two and this show is the result. Beginning with Ghostang (Linder's bullet-riddled, car sculpture which Ituarte refers to as "el Auto del Hombre del Tunel", the now unofficial mascot of La Casa) and continuing with this event, Linder offers us an obscured window into his life and work. The viewer is asked to come inside and determine for themselves what to make of it all. Is this a work of dramatized fiction or is it an elaborate autobiography...or some of both? Linder is poker-faced. In the political arena, "mudslinging" refers to that malicious dragging up of events and data which are designed to malign or misrepresent opponents who are locked in electoral battle. In Linder's ontological arena,"mudslinging" refers to that furious wheel of energy which is his life and to the residual, earthen trail that has been spun up onto his shirt. The shirts themselves are humbly offered here to viewers as industrialized, serial multiple facsimiles. Effectively, Linder gives us his own "dirty laundry" in silk-screened reproductions of the muddy T-shirts off his back... his proof that it is not so much where he is going as it is the trail itself which has formed him and drawn him, literally. Charles likes to blur the lines between his art and life and let the viewer decide what's working. His past shows have often read like some kind of abstract daybook of his discoveries, adventures and small breakthroughs. Here, one could say the same, with each work in the show being like one word in a sentence, one chapter in a book, a few seconds from a movie...each of which contribute to and form, the whole work