Friday, 9 May 2008 | 7:51 AM
Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)
The photos accompanying this post have caused controversy. Not the art depicted in the photos, the photos themselves. After being posted as part of blogger Mark Barry's Flickr set, Mr. Barry received the following email (via Bloggy):
hello mark -It is undeniable that bloggers can be self-righteous in our demands to see all and record all with no credentials whatsoever, but that doesn't mean we're wrong. What bloggers do is a form of vernacular journalism. We are covering the artifacts and actions of our culture that the print-based media cannot do given the bluntness of their instruments. The indiscriminate paranoia of the "303 Policies" do nothing more than deny the general public an opportunity to be more involved in and better informed about art. When someone asks to take photos in a public art space, the answer should always be yes, yes, and yes.
this is s***** at 303 gallery. i noticed you had an image of Maureen
Gallace's work up on your flickr page - please be aware that 303 Gallery
owns the copyright to the work and all public display of images, including
web content. if you could kindly remove this image from your page, it would
be most appreciated.
best
s*****
Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)
On a related note, Brooklyn Rail critic James Kalm's pirate videos of The Whitney Biennial have been in heavy rotation on my internets.
Meanwhile, on an unrelated note, check out the recent discussion at ThoughtMarker on Atlanta's spate of themed group shows and the implied crisis of weak-ass curating. I grind my usual axe...
By the way, I am displaying the photos above in order to make political commentary on them (with a soupcon of satire). That use is what we call Fair.
UPDATE: used color corrected versions of photos from Chris Ashley
Thursday, 8 May 2008 | 12:42 PM
Hover, oil on canvas, 56" x 117", 2007
After last month's surprisingly tepid show, Gallery Stokes unleashes the terror with Deborah McClary's Nothing Seen. Knoxville-based McClary takes a page from the classic surrealist play book, using the language of traditional, representational painting to exorcise demons of the irrational subconscious. It's a terse and decent show that doesn't overreach, but instead faithfully delivers on the promise of a small-scale flash of insight.
Move, oil on canvas, 56" x 117", 2007
I was impressed by McClary's ability to capture a sense of absolute psychological terror and her willingness to come unhinged for a moment and let the terrifying irrationality that burbles underneath the surface of civilized society emerge into the half light of the gallery space.
Move (detail)
The artist's cast of characters included these grotesque dust-babies that seem to be mad and insatiable even in the face of exaggerated abundance.
untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 2008
They reappear here, fully grown, obese, engaged in a battle of id against id. Their bodies are fat while the spiritual beasts are hungry and emaciated.
untitled, oil on canvas, 60" x 72", 2008
untitled (detail)
I was reminded of Salvador Dali's take on the perversity of desire--how desire can deform and how too much is never enough for the endlessly needing psyche.
untitled, wood and paint, 32" x 62" x 38", 2008
McClary has said that part of her effort was to get past people's conditioned, intellectualized response to art, to provoke instead a strong visceral reaction. Similar examples of unrepentant terror art are rare in Atlanta. The quasi-terrifying stuff that sometimes shows up in the neo-pop world at places like Rabbit Hole Gallery has usually been adulterated by heavy doses of irony and/or pre-digested tropes from the worlds of pulp cinema, tattoo art, and graphic novels. In those cases, it's not so much naked psychological terror we're confronted with as a winking acknowledgment of our shared cultural glee over expressions of terror. Genuine terror does pop up occasionally in the work of Joe Tsambiras, and Kojo Griffin was trying to get at it for a while, though I don't think he ever did.
untitled
McClary, however, gets there. Show runs through 17 May.
Wednesday, 7 May 2008 | 1:25 PM
Marcus Kenney, An Untitled Girl, (detail), mixed media on canvas, 24" x 18", 2008
I suppose I can now out myself as having gone to the dark side, as I have inherited the vis. arts beat for Creative Loafing. My first article--a brief on the Marcus Kenney show at Marcia Wood--is due to appear May 14, if I've got the calendar right, so I'll be anxious to get feedback from any and all about what folks are looking for in arts coverage.
Being enmeshed as I already am in the Atlanta art world, my editor is looking over my range of prior art world obligations as we speak, combing the list for potential conflicts of interest (and maybe opportunities?). Can't be too careful given the current arts journalism climate. Still, I've been watching certain other blogger / artist / critic types, trying to get a sense of where the pot holes are.
One thing's for certain, and that's that as far as ethics goes people agree on pretty much nothing. The NAJP released its report The Visual Art Critic in 2002, and although it is neither evaluative nor prescriptive it does at least give a decent overview of what people who write about art are actually doing. (It should be noted that the report only deals with printed media since the art blogosphere in 2001-2002 was basically a cultural backwater populated by a few obsessive cranks in major coastal cities--oh wait a minute, it still is.)
I was surprised to find out that I am in the 1 or 2 percent minority that thinks it's okay for critics to talk to artists about their art in an advisory sort of way--a practice roundly condemned by pretty much everyone. I'm obviously odd man out here, but who else is going to have a broader view of art making in the current moment than those paid (barely) to look at an awful lot of it, think about it, and figure out why it does or doesn't work (yet not be motivated by the narrow concerns of sales, attendance figures, or career advancement)? I'm guessing this reluctance has to do with the idea, promulgated by critics themselves, that they are so all powerful that lowly artists don't stand a chance against the weight of their opinions. Who knows? Clement Greenberg was known to be a tyrant in just this way and it may be no one wants to be seen going around clemming the art world into submission.
Monday, 5 May 2008 | 12:20 PM
"Olympia," mixed media on wood, 36" x 45"
Lately, any time I speak in public about art in Atlanta, I include at least one allusion to my belief that we don't have an art scene here, but rather various scenes, plural. This pluralism is not inherently bad; in fact it's to be expected in a city of any size. Only provincial burgs can be expected to have a single art scene, and we're not that, right? Right?
I dropped into another orbit last Friday night for Cooper Sanchez's Flagship Mark at Function, a Decatur PR firm whose fairly spacious lobby had been cleared out for the one-night event. Sanchez is a graduate of SVA and has been living in Clarkston (Dekalb County) since 1999. I was told that his audience comprised a mix of indie crafters, gardening aficionados, and personal friends, which was a nice change of pace from the usual Atlanta gallery cabals.
The work was mostly small-to-medium scale mixed media work on wood, drawing from a suite of art historical vocabularies of abstract expressionism's emotive marks, pop appropriations, and high modern gridded planar surfaces, all in a potent cocktail of postmodern pseudocollage.
The unifying motif was that of the flag, which appeared throughout the work, either as literal banners:
"Weathervane Swallow," mixed media on wood, 72" x 60"
or as abject little strips of remnant fabric stitched together in a way that pointed to, without necessarily constituting, improvisation.
"Rabbit Flag 2," mixed media on wood, 30" x 22"
"Rabbit Flag 2" (detail)
Few male artists have the balls to work with textiles, and fewer still with the gauzy, sheer, white bridal-looking stuff that Sanchez often favors. Though, to be sure, the fabric was being used in a nervously masculine way with intentionally shoddy stitching and willful rough edges that referenced carpentry as much as fiber arts.
A large accumulation of flags that were the result of a "project among friends" was displayed on one wall. These I presume were the flags sewn by what the artist called the "awesome sewing circle" of the Betsy Ross Society. They were being sold for $100 a pop to benefit the National Association for Down Syndrome.
"Betsy Ross Society Flags," fabric remnants, variable dimensions
"Betsy Ross Society Flags" (detail)
Flags mark territory, but are also always mythmaking instruments. They are the symbols by which a certain place (a fiction of geography) comes to belong to a certain set of people (a fiction of social organization). They are almost always planted as the result of violence, and carry with them an inexhaustible emotional charge of bloodshed, struggle, and death.
"Betsy Ross Society Flags" (detail)
Sanchez's images referenced struggle throughout the work, appropriating the Nike of Samothrace (the Hellenistic sculpture most likely in honor of Rhodes kicking Syria's ass at sea in the early 2nd century B.C.) and pictures of the artist himself sporting a black eye, but having recovered enough to enjoy a drink.
"Black Eye," mixed media on wood, 39" x 46"
"Black Eye" (detail)
In the final calculation, though, the bits and pieces--the swatches of paint, the passages of thick gel medium, the sorta pop repeated images quoting Manet and the Nike--often fell just short of a convincing whole. The works all had a somewhat careful feel; a heavy splotch of paint, which might reasonably be expected to drip, doesn't, and for all their claims of looseness and abandon, the ragged fabric swatches are actually fairly well behaved and defer to the four edges of the support. Radcliffe Bailey circa mid-90s used a similar vocabulary of marks though with much greater audacity and layered historical resonance. And Sigmar Polke's paintings of any era sort of takes these paintings to school (I mean, the man used arsenic in his paintings--arsenic for crying out loud!)
"Winged Victory II," mixed media on wood, 34" x 46"
I liked it best when Sanchez abandoned the glib pop strivings and instead let his own hand tell the story: he uses charcoal (or maybe conte crayon) to render plant life and sacred hearts as febrile little icons. He makes a skeleton dance mechanically--and convincingly. The birds are beautiful.
"Battle Worn," mixed media on wood, 34" x 46"
"Battle Worn" (detail)
This is Sanchez's strength: he's good at manipulating symbols of mythic importance, and when the artist's hand is most obvious, the struggle he alludes to is most believable.
Sunday, 4 May 2008 | 5:23 PM
Jerry Cullum has posted a shout out and modest proposal to Atlanta art bloggers over at Counterforces, buried at the bottom of his somewhat belated Canogar musings. What say we? Having no passport to the Blogspot-o-verse, I can't leave comments there, so I'll react here.
Cullum is essentially proposing a collective art re-blog since "few outside the blogging community have the time to read ALL those blogs on all those different blog host sites." Although I'd argue that even within the blogging community few have that kind of time, I do like the idea of compilation as a sort of community service.
I believe Portland has a collective art blog similar to the one Cullum describes. If I'm not mistaken Port started out as a blog of re-posted posts cobbled together by folks who were otherwise blogging elsewhere. So a similar model has proven at least provisionally successful.
I'm not clear on why a blogger could not contribute his or her own posts, as long as it's a closed group we're talking about here. And if we're talking about an open group, then I'm not sure what the value of that is; Atlanta already has one open network blog, which serves the democratic purpose it was designed to serve. A closed blog system looks undemocratic perhaps. And that's because... well, it is. But blogs are free, which means if you don't like someone else's rules you are free to start your own.
Wednesday, 30 Apr 2008 | 8:48 PM
An early life drawing, the likes of which I have not done in a few blue moons
Aliza Shvarts's ludicrous (and possibly fictional) abortion art is already beginning to fade into the compost heap of yesterday's scandal. Shvarts's work came nowhere near "sparking conversation and debate" on the relationship between the body and art as the artist claims to have hoped for. Instead predictable outrage was followed by predictable character assassinations followed by predictable questioning of Yale's undergraduate art curriculum.
In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Michael J. Lewis launches a restrained, but heartfelt plea for retuning to a focus on craft in general, and on life drawing skills in particular. He says:
A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity -- and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make "real art," but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.So we're back at that old question--the one that had Ingres throwing mud at Delacroix 200 years ago--is drawing the basis of all art or not?
Here's what drawing gave me:
Learning to draw taught me how to see the world, internalize it and render it in a way that engages all the senses. Nicolaides will tell you that drawing is not only about sight--in fact it's not even mainly about sight, but about touch and feeling. These skills translate into everything else, whether as an artist you end up drawing, making videos, or doing installations with the fuselage of a 747. Drawing taught me how clunky the hand can be and how tentatively a work can hang between the sublime and the disastrous based on tiny, tiny manipulations of space, form, and content.
I'm not sure that drawing is the only way into that sensitivity of sight, but for my money it's the fastest.
Tuesday, 29 Apr 2008 | 10:29 AM
Allison Rentz in "Truebador" (installation view)
Last Friday's Castleberry Hill Art Stroll was an improvement over last month's stroll by about a factor of ten. If March's shows appeared to be organized by safety-minded accountants at CNN, April's shows are by in large gutsier and riskier with bigger payoffs and grander, more exhilarating flops.
Which side of the fence Allison Rentz's "Truebador" at Garage Projects fell on is a matter of debate, but I for one won't quibble with her willingness to take a broadminded risky leap.
The installation consisted of her usual materials--plastic sheeting, recycled plastic waste products, rope, tape, sharpie marker, and chains--in a minimal palette of black, grays, white, and red. This is the palette of death metal album covers and Tim Burton flicks. Rentz also seems to allude to heavy metal tropes in the spiky gothic imagery of her ink drawings and in her personal calligraphy, which I always imagine has an Iron Maiden soundtrack playing behind it.
Throughout the performance Rentz engaged in a self-absorbed monologue of gestures, including wrapping, tying, excavating, and rearranging of pieces that recalled imagery of birth, loss (breakdown), and recovery. Periodically, the artist would stop all other activities and intone some speech into a resonating container of some kind (a water bottle?) using long, distended syllables. I wish I could have made out more of the speech, but the noise from the street and the jazz band at Noir competed sonically for attention. Nor did the speech seem particularly intended for me, or for anyone other than Rentz herself and that water bottle or whatever it was.
Drawing from "Truebador," ink on paper in plastic sheet
Rentz's performance was an exercise in public vulnerability. The artist seemed to be trying to figure things out as she went along in an intuitive and naive sort of way. This stands to reason since Allison Rentz has been living more or less in public for the last several years. She begs on the internet for money to help pay her credit card bills. She appears at public lectures and forums and makes loopy announcements about her art empire. For Rentz, there appears to be no distinction between the public and the private. Her performance then took on the feeling of watching a teenager playing with things in her room, refusing to clean it up, while the volume in her earbuds is pumped up to 10.
The whole death metal thing enjoyed a brief, black explosion in the art world a few years ago. Banks Violette and Sue de Beer were displaying their adolescent melancholy to an art world that seemed happy to revel in public teen angst. Is Rentz's work an extension of that aesthetic? Maybe. It certainly shares the same sense of a teenager's personal world of dark forces that require signing a pact of irreversible damnation before being admitted. Her work, too, is adolescent in that way; that is, awkward and looking at itself as a dark imponderable. It is always occupying a space where the world is a terrifying carnival ride of disequilibrium.
But if it is gothic, it's gothic as filtered through a southern sensibility of layered age, rot, history, and decay. Where Violette is shiny and slick, Rentz is worn and broken. She is Southern Gothic. This brokenness in the face of great dark forces brings to mind the southern gothic of Michi Meko's latest gambit at Eyedrum or Brian Parks's lonely music in lost spaces.
These artists are all cringe-inducingly vulnerable. They let their flaws direct their work toward what always feels like a demise or endless struggling of some sort. They are all William Faulkner characters, producing "horror as well as amazement." Succeed or fail, I'm enjoying the experience as they take us down this long, dark slide to oblivion.
Wednesday, 23 Apr 2008 | 8:02 AM
Gregor Schneider, Mann mit Schwanz/man with cock, Rheydt, cast, mixed media [silicon, trousers, shirt, garbage bag], 21 x 186 x 70
Other projects continue to keep me occupied, but in the meantime I notice the obvious profusion of death in the art world. If the artist is not inflicting death, then s/he is documenting it, threatening to let it happen, or simulating it. And in most of these cases, it is a flatly-imagined brand of death; death as it emerges from the autoclave, with neither fervor nor nuance. Academically inclined artists have already become an undifferentiated pastiche of gray resignation, but it may be that we've now entered a nihilist neverland of suicidal death wishes as well.
I don't mind contemplating death, but at the moment I'll be seeking an antidote; with any luck I'll go back again to fight in Eyedrum's small gallery, even though I've already seen it once. My advice: go before it's too late. (Show closes April 26).
Thursday, 17 Apr 2008 | 4:32 PM
Above, Alex Da Corte. Hasn't every career artist secretly wanted to make this piece at one time or another?
In other news, Photo Awesome, the photo and art club-slash-blog begun by SCAD photography grad students, seems to have been saved. Last I heard their ISP was threatening to commandeer the domain over some flap about overuse fees. Anyway, there they are.
It seems that every blogger in North Georgia was at the Art Papers Daniel Canogar event Wednesday night. It was a spectacular talk, and the ART BaBeL round table at Solomon Projects was even more stimulating, if that's possible. Canogar's lecture at Tech was all about the evolution of the work, while the round table was all about Canogar as art activist and working artist. Pimpin', it would seem, ain't easy.
I'm all into Ezra Johnson's commissioned project for Dia Art Foundation; a series of paintings that are animated into screen savers. I got four. (left, still from Shapeshifter)
I just became aware of Jon Ciliberto's Slow Web movement.
Via The Art Section I was hooked for a minute on Jason Freeman's iTSM software, which creates a aural signature of your musical tastes by analyzing and compiling your iTunes playlist. Here are mine: one based on most recently played (40 seconds) and the other based on most frequently played (40 seconds). Yeah, that's me all right.
According to Miss Darrow, MOCA GA's new space shows great promise for great new programming. And word has it they may have designs on acquiring even more land mass. That news makes my day. Seriously. And speaking of Miss Darrow, we are waiting for girlfriend to allow comments on her blog from non Blogger members. [taps foot expectantly]
