Questions for my Father #4

Haendel is a young Los Angeles-based artist whose primary mode is drawing. His work is usually large in scale and done with a simple graphite pencil. Interested in American social history and popular culture his work is exceedingly legible in terms of subject matter. This drawing is one of a suite of 4 works entitled "Questions for My Father." Each drawing is a list of personal questions, the kind usually only asked by adult friends and lovers of one another, but here Haendel has presented these questions as if to his Father. They are disarming and strikingly intimate, exposing the still taboo nature of father-son intimacy and closeness, stretching the boundaries of propriety by mixing the so-called personal and political together. The questions speak to a kind of generational chasm, as well as to the profound unknowableness of the other, particularly those we assume are, or should be, most close to us. This tension between public and private is exacerbated by the intensely hand made quality of the drawing, up to and including the artist's own "copyediting" of the questions, and the typewriter style precision with which the words and text are laid out on the page, seemingly with no guiding lines or erasure. Like many artists of his generation, his work continues certain aspects of conceptual art-the use of language, a foregrounding of the artist's labor-but differs demonstrably from the arid or bureaucratic nature of conceptual art through its pursuit of emotional affect and handmade sensibility.