 |
Volume I
Issue 4
16 August 1999 |
|
|
|
The Year That Was: Marching Toward the Millennium by Therese Schwartz [Part Four of Four] Twenty-five years ago I wrote a series of articles for Art in America titled "The Politicization of the Avant Garde" which recorded the art and the activities of artists in the 1960's and early 70's. Although I am a working artist, not a critic or historian, I have an obsessive interest in what motivates us and what kind of art is produced in a particular time and place. I decided to take one year in these last 1990's and make a record of what I saw. I chose the season ending June 1998. I know that the present is not a time of "break-throughs," and that each of the last years of this century is very much like the one before it and the one following. Therefore, my record of any one of these last three years would be a reliable picture of the current art world. Part One of this article, in the Newsletter of 6 July 1999, described generally the motives and production of artists working in all media today, in particular the luxuriously enhanced trend in Installation Art and its probable source in the booming stock market. Part Two examined the overwhelming number of exhibiting painters and the extraordinary diversity of style. Part Three looked at art with a political agenda, including feminist work; sculptors in a variety of media; and recent exhibitions of work by internationally respected "icons" of the art world. Now Part Four surveys the film media and art about entertainment, introduces a thought-provoking reassessment of the artist's place in society, and concludes on an imaginative and hopeful note. Filmwork There are always predictions that the camera, the camcorder, and the computer will replace all usual materials of art - that the hand-held will take over the hand-made. Yes, and add that to the prophecies that the world will end on _________. Without resorting to questions of rank or preference, photography, video, and cinema are unquestionably the most important vehicles to record actual history. Some artists, but not many, have ventured into video, and the reason may be that a quality video requires equipment, assistants, and the high cost of editing and production. I did not see everything this season, but from listings I know that the number of photography shows was small compared to other media, and that there were even fewer video screenings. The Photographic Eye: Burhan Dogancay (Duggell) exhibited significant recordings of the Brooklyn Bridge, a piece of contemporary urban history, that could not be surpassed even by the most skillful realist painting. Another part of the city was captured by Luis Mallo (Ricco Maresca), who went into the subway and dehumanized the riders by shooting them from the neck down. They are anonymous and resigned - a cold and troubling comment on mass transportation. Christopher Williams's photographs (Luhring Augustine) extracted meaning with tightly controlled camera angles. This is a different use of the medium and what was available to the viewer was his reality, the places and objects seen through his eyes. Another departure from reality was in the large-scale tableaux of Xavier Veilhan (Sandra Gering), which were composed and then photographed to tell a story. Having stated this as the motive, the artist asked the viewer to insert meaning about life and the passage of time. Tommy Flynn (Walter Wickiser), a prize-winning commercial photographer, exhibited works that ventured into another field with partial shots of selected landscape. Dramatically lit, they did not aim at anything existent, but hovered on the borders of "art." Art history was in the work of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (Robert Miller), who died in 1939. This was the time of heavy Freudian influence, and these photographs tried to capture the soul of the sitter. There was close study of the eyes, which supposedly could be clues to character and psychological health or disease. This work was interesting because it was so dated. There was more history in the photos of Marion Post Wolcott (Yancy Richardson), made in 1938-41 for the Farm Security Administration of the New Deal, and [as] a part of their public relations. These pictured the victims of the Great Depression in the Appalachians. The Depression was also the subject of work by Helen Stummer (O K Harris), who recorded the same period with scenes of urban and rural poverty. Back to the present with Charles Hagen (Sarah Morthland), who showed homey photographs of his young daughter. These were small, intimate, and without pretension, by a former reviewer for the New York Times and Art Forum. Maciej Toporowicz (Lombard Freid) was the only show I saw which could possibly be considered pornographic, but it was not easy to read. Some of the ideas were cloaked in enigmatic postures, and although they may have been influenced by sexy cinema, they paled as titillation. Sharon Lockhart (Frederick Petzel) showed documentary photos of a Japanese girl's basketball team. These shots were straight information and were based on her film, which was shown in the New Directors Films series at the Museum of Modern Art. Video In The Galleries: Sigrid Hackenberg's 28-minute video (Marianne Boesky) was screened continuously. The subject was a horse race run backward. Its mesmeric quality was intentional, and was described as exploring the complex relationship between humans and animals. Matt Mullican's video (Brooke Alexander) was part of his installation but was shown separately. In contrast to the major theme of the exhibit, which involved books and encyclopedias, the video played like an old-fashioned home-made amateur movie, featuring him, his family, a visit to the local hamburger stop, and other non-academic information. Gillian Wearing (Jay Gorney) used the words of children, spoken by adults. It was strange, if not particularly amusing, to hear naÔve childish opinions and impressions spoken hesitantly by middle-aged men and women. Possibly it meant to say that sometimes grown-ups do not sound quite so. Cameron Jamies's feature (Spencer Brownstone) was real "bad boy" stuff. Men and women wrestlers (Jamie was one of the combatants) groaned and grunted in staged "play fighting." The sounds were a little more effective than the action, and possibly the production was meant to imitate certain kinds of cable television entertainment. Entertainment Entertainment is the national hobby of contemporary life and the artists I list here have used it as a theme. In the past, humor with a satirical bite was used to express dissent with something social or political, but the humor in the work I saw was more comic. Horror sometimes resembled consciously scary movies, while memoirs were designed to amuse rather than expose. Humor: Jack Earl (Nancy Margolis) sculpted brightly painted, vaguely human figures, possibly personages in comic strips, or in cartoon films. They were also a little reminiscent of Jeff Koons, but more good-natured than sarcastic. Dennis Oppenheim (Joseph Helman), in a long career, has ranged around many profound ideas, but in this large sculpture-assemblage show, a kind of jokey humor was let loose. It included large animal-like pieces, one being a Peter Rabbit sort of fellow, and other ha-ha stuff. Sophie Ryder (O'Hara) showed a group of large sculpted figures that were an interesting combination of humor presented very seriously. There were large rabbits sitting side by side with unselfconscious exposures of huge frontal genitals. They were innocent, erotic and appealing. Sean Landers (Andrea Rosen), in his own words, wanted to reveal his most private thoughts to the world: "Now if that happens to be a space chimp on Mars, then so be it." The man-monkey images in the paintings were somewhat like clowns, funny but sad, and touched with adolescent bravado. Daniel Oates (3 0 3) presented a collection of beautifully carved pieces of strange black humor - a head with ears but no face, a human hand reaching out of a turtle. They could be seen as advanced Disney Imaginations, and appropriate for sophisticated private places. Horrors! Karen Thompson, (Steinbaum Krauss) in a style which reminded me of Old Master paintings, presented work surrealist in genre, with subjects of present-day terror. Grotesque happenings mixed with myth and a latent feminism - one painting was titled "Women Goddess Mad Dog." Bryan Crockett's assemblage (Fotouhi Cramer), in a nearly dark room in which the objects were only just visible, was called "Necrophilia." There were bloated and distended body parts floating freely; they were programmed to expire eventually and to suggest human metabolism, with changes in heart rate and other quickened sexual stimulation. Michael Kvium (DCA) had made paintings of staged sadistic actions involving two or more men. Expertly done in the manner of commercial illustration, they were not particularly convincing, because the motive to shock was so clearly evident. Memory: Among the memoirs, Tony Tasset (Feigen) combined ambiguous naÔvetÈ with elaborate props and enlarged self-portrait photographs. He furnished details of himself and his family, and also included room-long glass cases of natural material. As an event of self-celebration, the collection was effective. Keith Edmier (Metro Pictures), in a striking arrangement of items which began with a show of snowflakes falling on the plate glass window of the gallery faÁade, was giving the world a glimpse of his childhood fascinations and fixations. In the interior, a large space was given to a nine-foot long piece of plastic plants. In another equally large gallery was a giant plastic figure of an adolescent girl with a "Farrah Fawcett" hairstyle made of natural blonde hairs. Written material said that she personifies "Öintangible desires and awkward sexual innocenceÖ." Rose Marasco's memories (Sarah Morthland) were shown in a modest assortment of souvenirs. There were cards of old unused buttons, sewing materials such as quaint thimbles and scissors, framed quotations from an early diary about domestic chores, and other bits of nostalgia. This small show was a slice of feminist history and well suited to the intimate space of this gallery. And In Conclusion It would be impossible to look at so much art and not come out with opinions, conclusions and some ideas for the future. If the individual artist is the universal source of creativity in all art, then the individual must maintain an important place in the new century. Cyberspace, the Internet, and whatever follows all have dominant roles in our future, but they are no place for the artist. Television, video, and websites are moving vehicles and must be turned on to be seen. A tangible art object, however, is permanent, or at least until some disaster destroys everything. Painting is done by more people, takes up more space in galleries, represents a wider cross-section of ideas and occurs more spontaneously than almost any other medium. It produces a remarkable abundance of talent, today follows no leaders, and altogether demonstrates a kind of glorious anarchy. And yet at this time, the anarchy is quiet, marking time, not sure of its future place. Shock is not an appropriate theme for painting any more: that is being done very efficiently now in cinema, TV, cable, and the Internet. Artists don't like to see themselves as the Center, but these days that's where they are. This may be the time to rethink the place of painting for the future. With its advantage of permanence, it could again be important in the daily life of a city. It might be time to abandon a role of voluntary alienation and again be a necessary part of life. Think of so many bare walls which could carry the possibility of expanding imagination, offering solace and even altering despair. In the 2000's a way should be found to change the pattern of three-week gallery exposure as the only way to bring work out of the studio and into the world. Skill, energy, and philosophy are being transformed into art objects more than ever before, producing an enormous, growing treasury of sculpture, drawing, and prints. There can never be enough galleries to take everyone; today the cost of running even the smallest gallery is surprisingly high, and the enthusiastic cooperatives of the 60's and 70's have had their day. Yet, an abundance of spaces cry for color, for life, for ideas - and a public hungers to experience them. Why can't artists use some of the business practices of their own time, bringing their work out of the studios and into the world? A small group of artists not bound by aesthetics or style could hire an experienced public relations-sales person who would present their works for suitable projects, spaces and walls. The artists in such a group would only pay for this experienced agent, who would manage all presentations, printed matter, and other such things. For those who work on a scale more suitable for private residences the agent would organize occasional well-publicized shows in more public spaces. No accommodation of style would have to be made by anyone, and no dumbing down of the buyers' taste would be required. I do not suggest that work should be designed "for the masses," or that any art should be made to please public taste (which should never be underestimated in any case). What I propose, simply, is this: The art made by an individual does not need a mass audience, but it must have an audience. About the author: Therese Schwartz, an esteemed artist known for her geometrically based panoramic collages, has had numerous solo exhibitions, both domestically and internationally, including: Humphrey Fine Art in New York City; Bucknell University; The Salt Lake City Art Center; Barbara Friedler Gallery and Howard University in Washington, D.C.; Galerie Fabian Walter, Basel, Switzerland; Galeria Casa Negret, Bogota, Colombia; Rutgers University; and at the ARCO International Art Fair in Madrid. Her highly regarded works can be found in museums, corporations, and private art collections, among them: The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Corcoran Gallery of Art; Syracuse University Art Collection; Herbert F. Johnson Museum; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum; Ciba-Geigy Corporation; Barnet Arden Collection; Phillips Memorial Gallery; Women's Interart Center Museum; Advanced Elastomer Systems; Pepsico Corporation; Monroe Geller Foundation; and the Huntington Museum. An accomplished essayist, Ms. Schwartz has written feature articles in such publications as: Art News, Arts Magazine, Women Artists' News, and Art In America, where she contributed a four-part series entitled "The Politicization of the Avante-Garde," which continues to be widely used as a research tool for art historians. |
|
|
|
|