Occasionally, during the uncrowded hours between 8:30 and 10:30 a.m., Tom Fruin goes collecting. He combs parks and housing projects throughout the five boroughs for discarded drug bags. As he does this, he keeps the spoils from each collection site—small sacks, meant for everything from hash to heroin, some with rocks, seeds, or residue remaining—separate from one another. Thus, Fruin tries to trace the history of a given patch of grass or street corner in all its specificity. He builds narratives out of what is "already there," unacknowledged, soon forgotten, and—incidentally—free. And he aims to accomplish all of this simply by sewing his newly acquired square bags together, straightforwardly and more or less arbitrarily, in a sort of unanchored appliqué. Sometimes he groups them according to logo or color, sometimes not.

What results are surprisingly luminous patchwork curtains—vast, exhilarating, unconventional textiles. Fruin unpretentiously refers to his artworks, two-dimensional but unmistakably tactile, as "objects," situating them somewhere within the compass of sculpture although they are also painterly. When I asked him about early influences on his work, he laconically cited graffiti. Graffiti in general. Once hung (at the top by large pins, which leave several inches between the plastic and the wall), his pieces startlingly reveal the diversity of their facets, their organizational supports—that is, the bags themselves in all their chromatic and decorative variety. Stars and polka dots meet Batman emblems that hang alongside clowns that cling to swatches of yellow, clear, and pale blue. Transparency encounters opacity, and the level stitch levels the entire surface.

Fruin presented many such works at the Stux Gallery in Chelsea last spring, in a highly successful show called "Cultural Narcotics: The Straight Dope." Currently, he works at GAle GAtes in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where his art can be seen in its stages of development, from gathering to sewing. The artist has followed his present procedure almost since he first moved to New York, from his native Los Angeles, seven years ago, after studying art and psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Which makes sense, for Fruin's output is not merely another instance of aestheticized trash or elevated detritus or what the artist himself calls "the objectionable" not-quite-shockingly made "metaphorical." Undoubtedly, above and beyond the novelty of his medium, Tom Fruin is on to something—a something that is hard to pinpoint, that marries craft and concept, that engages and outshines the grid and that evokes the quilt. An American beauty still unmined and not yet banalized by cinema.

It has been more than twenty years since Rosalind Krauss first famously theorized the modernist grid, effectively declaring it old hat." It is not just the sheer number of careers that have been devoted to the exploration of the grid that is impressive," she writes, "but the fact that never could exploration have chosen less fertile ground."ⁱ And still the structure seems unregenerate; even today, grids abound.

Lorna Simpson, for one, has increasingly employed the grid as the organizing principle of her layered interrogations of memory, media, identity, prejudice, and perception. Her two most recent video installations, Easy to Remember (shown unforgettably at the 2002 Whitney Biennial) and 31 (which was on display from October through January, also at the Whitney Museum of American Art), are both variants of the grid. In the former piece, mouths humming a Coltrane tune in imperfect harmony are arranged grid-wise, held at once together and apart by the crisscross. In 31, Simpson recasts the grid as calendar, thereby making it the signifier of routine, and routine confinement. Clearly, then, her grid speaks to more than "the conventional nature of art itself."i

Likewise, Fruin's grids function as jumping-off points, as it were, and not as ends in themselves. They are not, as in Krauss, modernist means of self-reflection (in painting, structures that reproduce and reenact the warp and woof of the canvas) or "mythic" ways to "paper over" the irreconcilable opposition between the material and the spiritual. That said, the author's notes on the dual nature of the grid—on its tendency toward both centripetal and centrifugal motion—sheds light on Fruin's works. The bag-curtains are self-contained, bounded and squared off even if not literally framed, but the network formation of the bags suggest outward movement and endlessness. Their repetition indicates the ongoing proliferation not only of their geometric surfaces but also of their meanings—of drugs and drug deals.

In Fruin's "objects," the regularity of the lattice quickly gives way to varieties of cartography and alchemy. The first of these fields—the originary site of the utilitarian grid—perfectly suits the artist's procedure. For at issue are maps, both literal and metaphorical. Fruin himself observes that his arbitrary placement of the bags edge-to-edge mimics their serial and haphazard arrangement at the place of collection. Moreover, the assembled bags amount to a quintessentially urban medium and call to mind the architectural layout of the streets on which Fruin finds them.

But it is the second, alchemical property that is most fascinating about Fruin's work: the use (or abuse) of "substance" that turns it into gold, this elevation of the drug packet from the level of trash to the level of Art that is also a Lacanian gesture of showing-the-gift-to-be-shit. One movement, one elegant transference seems to govern Fruin's production, and it is the removal of the object from the world of one dealer and its relocation to the world of another. This shift serves ultimately to reveal the similar natures of drug dealing and art dealing. Literary critic Avital Ronell asks, "What if 'drugs' named a special mode of addiction É or the structure that is philosophically and metaphysically at the basis of our culture?"ⁱⁱ And Fruin's oeuvre seems to hint at some similar question. Hence "Cultural Narcotics."

Meanwhile, back at the Whitney, even while Simpson's 31 ran continuously, an unprecedented exhibition called The Quilts of Gee's Bend drew crowds. (It has since been covered on a recent episode of 60 Minutes.) The show featured an array of breathtaking covers made by the women of Gee's Bend, a poor, rural town in Southwestern Louisiana, almost all derived from original and/or impromptu patterns. (Never mind, for now, the somewhat distressing racial politics of the documentary video catalogue accompanying the exhibition and the catalog's attempt to legitimate the quilters' artistry by means of modernist and minimalist parallels, inevitably white precedents.) At the same time, on the first floor, a piece by the Chicago-based conceptual artist Helen Mirra called Elm Dropcover 2002 married quilting practice and modernist preoccupation: Mirra sewed "leaf-sized" segments of army blankets together and laid the resulting field of fatigue on the gallery floor.

In addition to revisiting the old, die-hard grid, Fruin treats (or, before the fact, has been treating) this new art world interest in quilting and the quilt. Fruin's pieces recall quilts first and foremost by their means of construction. Above and beyond the painter, the quilter uses materials—the old blankets, bandannas, and overalls of the deceased—that are already in and of themselves significant, sated in memories. Here, then, however unwittingly, Fruin finds his model, for his curtains derive their significance largely from the drug bags that already have histories of their own. In place of Mirra's army blankets, Fruin works with debris from the battlefields of the war on drugs. In place of grandmotherly warmth and coziness, he deals in addiction, cold and encrusted. But he also deals in the high, the altered state, that momentary sublime for which we often live. In short, Fruin lays bare "the structure that is at the base of our culture" and dares his viewers to face it.

I remember every work in "Cultural Narcotics: The Straight Dope" as an experience of absorption; I remember each quilt as a study in variegated and unabashedly visual beauty. But I remember, too, that I spotted my own complicity now and again, somewhere among his seams.

i. Rosalind Krauss. "Grids." The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985. 9-22.
ii. Avital Ronell. Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.