Gone Tropico

An Orchestrated Bore

“An Orchestrated Vision,” in the Saint Louis Art Museum Theater of Contemporary Photography features over 40 photographs exploring the tension between fact and fiction now until May 13th, 2012. The exhibit examines the rise of theatrics in photography and the technological advantage of today’s artists to fabricate, distort, and surprise.

1. Photography is inhabiting the new exhibition space at SLAM for the next few weeks as the show “An Orchestrated Vision,” winds down. Over forty photographs ranging over thematic concerns — the public stage, elusive narrative, constructed space, and portrait and performance. It is an exhibit designed to complicate our view of photography, of what constitutes a photograph as opposed to a painting; the exhibit asks who is the photographer and who is the viewer.

2. Each category in the exhibition creates a different headspace, as it were, a critical lens for ways of seeing the frame image on the wall and provides a space on the spectrum of subjectivity. In public spaces the objective world is not tinkered with as much as, say, constructed spaces. All photographs and their classifications ask for concentration and discernment.

3. It is evident the vision here is blurry in a sense that in almost every framed instanced the curator is asking the viewer to think again, look again, look harder, to worry at what is shown and in some cases, not shown. It’s a slippery slope because once asked to skew one tends to slouch. In other words, once the moral of the story is known its narrative threads are far less interesting.

4. I truly loathed this exhibition. It was so heavy-handed and frankly boring. Every single photograph yelled at you — I’M NOT WHAT I SEEM — that its monotony was enough to produce nausea. One photograph after another stood there smirking in self-congratulation all but denying edification of process. An hour of staged irony in a world drowning in simulation and simulacrum is not art; it’s banal redundancy. It’s a one-trick pony. Consider this: I ask you to lift a 10-lb dumbbell by curling your arm. Very shortly the muscles in that arm grows tired and exhausted. The brain is the muscle for lifting in art; should your brain be asked to complete the same processing over and over and over again, as if does every single day of its postmodern life, then surely this muscle will grow tired, taxed and spent. This show does nothing new. Redundancy in art is a trope that focuses the attention, yes, but when the redundancy is timeworn and dead, it’s useless. We get it. There’s a man behind the curtain, and the whale is white, and the killers are clowns, and grandmothers love to rap… Beautifully photographed all, to be sure, and great photographers and their works especially Andrew Moore’s “Palace Theater, Gary, Indiana” and Paul Graham’s “American Night.”

It’s unfortunate SLAM forgot art patrons are a pretty smart bunch.

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Found: Kate Chopin

It would be enough to be home/birthplace to one of the best poets (T.S. Eliot), but St. Louis is also home to one of the best American prose writers — Kate Chopin (1850-1904). This impressive bust can be seen at the corner of McPherson and Euclid, right as you go to enter the incredibly-hip eyewear establishment (with a perky little bichon frise as a greeter) The Eyebar. There’s a brass relief of Eliot in the Christ Church Cathedral, 13th and Locust Streets, but it’s not as well done as this bust of Chopin. Head over, pardon the pun, and read a little Bayou Folk or from her classic novel The Awakening. She was born with a silver spoon, in high society here in River City, raised by her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother after her father died when Kate was four. She attended the St. Louis Academy of Sacred Heart, still in St. Charles. Ms Chopin spent some time down south — hence the bayou stories – moving there with her husband. When her husband died in 1884, Kate Chopin returned to St. Louis where she wrote for the rest of her life. Oh, and she raised six children. Fine Catholic woman.

Read: “The Story of an Hour,” which begins: “Knowing that Mrs. Maitland was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.” (more at: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/)

Red

Google “Red.”

About 5,610,000,000 results (0.18 seconds), the engine that could tell us. Red the band. Red the movement. Red the action movie for Septuagenarians. For me, Red is a play about Mark Rothko by John Logan; Red is the color of Carl G. Jung’s famous book of visions of the unconscious called The Red Book — which I am reading and annotating on my other site: http://readingthereadbook.blogspot.com. Red it is the color of passion, for most, a shock of color in the eyeglasses the intelligentsia wear. Santa Claus suits. Lolita lips. Red is everywhere, a cultural hue rivaled by few other colors.

1. It’s for this reason that Atrium Gallery’s latest exhibit “Red,” caught my attention. Carefully curated by gallery director/owner Carolyn Miles the show features a small array of red, but a number of pleasant surprises in its bid to explore this most prominent of colors. “Red” is a small, intimate show in a pleasant gallery in the tres hip Central West End Quarter at 4728 McPherson Avenue; a large wooden man acts as greeter and easy way to find the gallery amongst the other shops. If like me, you like to go through an exhibit in order, pay attention because “Red” begins the millisecond you step into the gallery (or perhaps it begins on the sidewalk). A small white pin on the wall to your left, near the window and a feature window wall, tells you it’s #1. So you begin with Willem de Looper’s “Color Music #1″ 19″x19” acrylic on board, mounted on panel; to #2 Frederick Nelson’s “Exodus,” 41″x61″ pastel on rag paper; #3 Steven Sorman “next to this” 27 1/8″x45 1/2″ etching, woodcut, aquatint, hand painting, chine collie on various papers; #4 Jeanine Coupe Ryding “Red Dream,” 74 1/2″x12″ woodcut print; #5 Kirk Pedersen “Red Wall, Dalian, China” 40″x60″ lambda digital C print; #6 Doug Salveson “Boxtop Bird II” 21 1/4″x17″ collage and acrylic on cardboard and his #7 “Brookside” 21 1/4″x17″ acrylic on paper with collage; #8 Karen Kunc “At the Shoreline” 36 9/16″x62 1/16″ woodcut, mixed media on artist-made paper of pigmented linen and kozo; #9 de Looper’s “Color Music #8″ 19″x19” acrylic on board (mounted on panel); #10 Katy Stone “Red Fall II (Chords)” 92″x23″x5″ acrylic on duralar; #11 de Looper’s “Untitled” 45″x65″ acrylic on paper; #12 Sorman’s “February 2″ 10″x8”.

In this way you wend around the perimeter of Miles’ space enraptured, listening to cool jazz, and surrounded by red.

2. Frederich Nietzsche writing in The Birth of Tragedy says there are two main creative impulses, divergence and convergence, or Dionysian and Apollonian. In other words, some artists and their art serves to embrace the goo of the unbridled unconscious, where other artists want to clean up all the mess and make it just so. The “Red” show is more of the former than the latter, for in only one piece does representation get its fully address. The others then are mostly abstract expressions or conceptualizations of emotions or engines of emotive opportunity. One could come away from the show cold as a stone, others still, burning a red-hot coal; it depends on the viewer. Save for two, maybe three pieces I was seeking more Apollo and less Dionysus.

3. It is a brave and interesting curator who is willing to choose a theme so open to interpretation twelve utterly different pieces could easily have been on display. Unfortunately, this might have been what was produced. Given the opportunity to evoke what “red” means surely some would have been chosen for more concrete illustrations. After all when we ask someone what they think of when we say “red” it hardly helps when they reply “the golden ratio.” An abstraction in answer to an abstraction simply obfuscates. What I mean is, a little less abstract expression would have rendered the conversation less insular. All of the pieces struck me, singly, and in a very good way; their grouping, while problematic still allowed for a few to stand out from the red fog.

4. Stand outs you should spend some time with are: #2 Frederick Nelson’s “Exodus,” 41″x61″ pastel on rag paper; #3 Steven Sorman “next to this” 27 1/8″x45 1/2″ etching, woodcut, aquatint, hand painting, chine collie on various papers; #5 Kirk Pedersen “Red Wall, Dalian, China” 40″x60″ lambda digital C print. But my favorite was #10 Katy Stone “Red Fall II (Chords)” 92″x23″x5″ acrylic on duralar. It strikes you right away, as soon as you step into the gallery proper, there on the right wall gushing, and hanging and dripping resplendently. Up close the acrylic shimmers, throws shadows on the floor, festooned with blood red teardrop impasto, one flowing translucent, imprinted ribbon in front of another, and another, and another; interspersed with filigree and flourishes of red. Beautiful, only marred by the presence of small white thumb tacks to secure the strips to its white ceiling box. But that’s nothing. This is beautiful, and red.

Google “Red” and see if anything this magical catches your eye.

Found: Walking Jackman

Corner of N. Brentwood and Maryland, spring blooms

<Ernest Trova “Walking Jackman”>

Ozymandias Is that You?

1. Behind the generic library in Chesterfield, MO (a fairly affluent suburb of St. Louis), near a parking lot and bucolic verdant park you’ll find struggling to break free of the loam a seventeen feet tall man. Seward Johnson’s “The Awakening,” is a 4,700 pound, five-part, cast-aluminum piece cast and installed in 2009, which has a progeny first cast into the soil of Washington, DC in 1980. The piece is some seventy feet long, and is dark against the grass and surrounding environs. The sculpture would bring to many minds the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

2. In the innocuous environments of American suburbia the landscape is often pierced in some kind of defiance against sameness with large sculptures, rarely abstract, almost always symbolic of the neighborhood’s tenor or hoped for élan. We see deer in mid jump or bronzes of fairy tale creatures, and outside libraries one is apt to come across founders reading to children or some other familial scene of literacy and love. The man outside the Chesterfield library — affectionately known as The Giant — is entitled “The Awakening,” and so in some regard breaks free of the standard suburban civic fare.

3. Seward Johnson’s arising super-sized plebeian appears to be a symbol to all who carouse the park, its undulating hills, and the nearby library that you can rise up from the dregs or the shackles of your holding fast, you can rise from the dirt to do something beyond your inevitable return for the eternal dirt nap. Hand outstretched, fingers curled back; anguish etched on the awakening visage. Up up we go, work to be done, we will not be daunted.

4. My wife thinks the hand should be more open, as if reaching for the heavens above in exaltation. Prior to knowing the piece’s title, I disagreed with her thinking instead it was a hand cursing the fates (Charleston Heston’s fist-pumping the sand in Planet of the Apes comes to mind too), the ignobility of the human condition. It bugs her to no end, since we drive by the claw en route to the nearby mall. It should be open. And for a title such as “The Awakening,” I think I now agree with her. A nearly clenched fist hardly says — wow, hello morning! The face too, full of strum and drang, doesn’t say arousal of the kind I can only imagine the folks of Chesterfield were hankering for. I can only imagine Soccer Moms and Live Strong Armstrong Yellow Wrist Band Fathers telling their sprogs to get off the grouchy guy. Too Nietzsche. Too Shelley. Too much to explain. Too much thinking. This is the suburbs. Yet I like it. I like it because I think Seward Johnson knew exactly what he was doing when he placed it in the ground. Gotta plant seeds to have a garden.

Created Apparition

from an old notebook, some new thoughts

Beuys | Flannel Suit @ SLAM

Susanne Langer in The Problems of Art suggests that art, a painting, does not have meaning beyond its own presence. “In a work of art we have the direct presentation of a feeling, not a sign that points to it.” Art is rather than suggests. To put it another way: Timelessness is, it’s not suggested. God is; the art doesn’t suggest the possibility. “It formulates and objectifies experience from direct intellectual perception, or intuition, but it does not abstract a concept for discursive thought.” She goes on to say that the painting is a single entity, composed of materials that contribute, but do not in and of themselves constitute still more symbolism. It’s true that artists may use symbols in their art, but it is believed that these symbols lie on a different “semantic level,” (Langer) and that they are not a part of the larger works importance. In the end, a painting once nothing more than canvas, frame and paint is a new space, a “created apparition.” 

It is winter as I write this and in New York’s Central Park 7,500 gates have been installed with free-hanging saffron-colored fabric panels. The installation is called The Gates and it is the art work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude—individuals who were born in the same hour on the same day June 13, 1935. Christo was born Vladimirov Javacheff in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, of a Bulgarian industrialist family. Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon was born in Casablanca, Morocco, of a French military family. They would first meet one another in Paris, in 1958, while Christo was working on Packages and Wrapped Objects. Their only child, the poet Cyril Christo, was born May 11, 1960. In 1964, the artists moved to New York City. Since the sixties they have been producing art outside the walls of museums and frames. They have been very busy with the world at large.

For decades, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have inspired the world with their art, which has been displayed on four continents and seen by millions. Other works by the artists include Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95; The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1975-85; Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83; Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972-76; and Valley Curtain, Grand Hogback, Rifle, Colorado, 1970-72.

What is striking about this art latest installation, in a public place, is that it exists for only a short period of time, as did most, if not all, of the artist’s work. By the end of a few weeks The Gates will be gone. What remains? What exists now outside the installation itself that we could point to and say that is art? Is the art also the problems and hurdles placed before the artists in their attempt to have the installation come to fruition? They began their quest to have The Gates installed in the park in 1979. Is the art also the public discourse over the validity of The Gates as art? What does it say when a public place is infused with a private  moment—the realization one gets looking at the art, going through The Gates that they are partaking in something that has been created and that they are part of it? Is not in a park in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, 7,500 thresholds through which sojourners may enter the sacred? Since they are temporary erections, I wonder if years from now contemporaries will have to convince generations that The Gates were even there; or that Jeanne-Claude’s wispy bouffant was bottle-saffron; will we have to convince people that there was among us a man named Christo?

What of two paintings recently discovered beneath two paintings by Picasso. One was found beneath Rue de Montmartre and another was found beneath La Gommeuse. It is called underpainting, when an artist too poor to purchase a canvas will paint over an earlier, perhaps inferior work. The underpainting isn’t discovered until a collector or curator x-rays the painting or when a painting is rematted—on the reverse side of La Gommeuse a new Picasso was discovered.

… Alexander The Great is buried there. In Siwa, Egypt the ephemeral nature of art is explored. Recently, in late November, for five days the desert surrounding this oasis was abloom with color—in the sky. Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang had children fly 300 kites he produced, which while in the sky ignited in an explosive blaze. This place is for this kind of exploration: Desert, temporary, wandering. Richard Long, another artist, fulfills this rather nicely recently when he walked into the desert alone to install his work: the wind blew the piece away before anyone else could see it.

Red Carpet, Red Crosses and Rose

A trip to the Contemporary Art Museum on Washington is always an enjoyable one. The gallery is housed in a most magnificent building and its interior duly contemporary in endless concrete. While enjoyable, I frequently come away wanting more from CAM; there so much space for art, and seemingly so little on exhibition. It’s probably just me. Before launching into this week’s notes I would advise those with smart phones to download CAM’s app, which contains information and videos of the exhibitions. As I was going through first Christodoulous Panayiotou: One Thousand and One Days (CP) and then Figure Studies: Recent Representational Works on Paper (FS) videos purred in the palm of my iHand. 

1. Two exhibits are on display at CAN now through until April offering up an enjoyable hour or two of viewing and endless weeks of speculation and theorizing. CP is a display mostly of photographs taken on the island nation of Cyprus, the artist’s homeland and features its Greek Orthodox leader, coastal vistas, urban-scapes and displays of traditional holiday foliage. In the vast canyon of the front exhibit space rolls of red carpet are scattered hither and yon. In the back is FS featuring six artists Tom Reed, Jennifer Bornstein, Ida Applebroog, John Bankston, Alejandro Cardenas, and Djordje Ozbolt. Each artist has a space on the wall to showcase a series of drawings most of which are designed to make the viewer rethrink perspective and point of view.

2. What we see in the works of CP is one akin to the traditions and views of his homeland, Cyprus. Some of the photographs served to examine the pomp and circumstance of Cypriote celebrations, which fits rather loosely with the rolls of red carpet strewn about the exhibition floor, seemingly random, authentic carpets we are told from award ceremonies, like the Screen Actors’ Guild, the American Music Association and the Oscars. Some carpets were redder than others. Behind this, the FS drawings awaited as if in their own well-lit cave. Startlingly curated, the space is filled with diversity both in content and in style. Aliens reside with Greek gods; alongside the emaciated, the hustling African-American men. A small bench allows the dizzy to rest awhile. The figures all dance around and around, still.

3.  Red Carpets, even those said to be from actual ceremony, are an artifact of contemporary life, making their way into our vernacular, as a short cut for opulence. Rolled up, their threaded-glue backs exposed, their take on a slight reptilian feel. Cut into cords they look, here, like trash, when once kings and queens of the entertainment industry once trod. The photographs here show ceremony too, but miles from these carpets, emotionally so. The drawings in the back, especially of Cardenas aliens (I could not take any worthy pictures of them) and Rose, in twenty-six iterations, take you through the metamorphosis of the body, the figure as the ceremony of the self and its culture.

4. Back to those carpets. It’s too easy, and yet it works. I was sucked into their dumb magic, rolled like squashed straw bales, fibers of red loose on the concrete, which I so badly wanted to pick up because I’m such an anal retention goof, but also because perhaps this fiber touched the sole of Chloe Moretz or Steven Bushemi, Esperanza Spaulding? Taken out of context — yes that safe trope — the rugs were odd ephemera from our performative culture. Next door, alien ships and bodies. A bright red perfect crucifix stark against a Bible-black environment, which Cardenas says in his bid for us to see anew is an alien craft having landed. The cross glows. Daring you. Nearby, you’ll find Rose. Ida Applebroog has drawn the figure Rose twenty-six times as if across a spectrum, and each time discernible to the adjudicating eye, slight changes. The paper, Japanese gampi lays like rice paper, wavy and vunerable. Rose has no arms. Rose has three breasts. Rose has a green fuse in her foot. Rose has a green foot. Her body undulates in and out in mylar flourish. Stunning. Red Carpet, Red Crosses, and Rose. Alien, so familiar, fleeting.

 feldman is Wm. Anthony Connolly

Orchid Show

Ineffable art tended by humans created by the unknown; weird and wonderfully alive at the Missouri Botanical Garden until March 25. More at www.http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/things-to-do/events/signature-events/orchid-show.aspx

 

 

Spirit and History

1. “Spirit and History” is an exhibit of two artists examining the African-American experience from the turn of the century to present day, chronicling in oil and acrylic the realism of its history and the aspirations of its consciousness. Over sixty paintings in the bifurcated exhibit shows works by St. Louisan writer and artist Judge Nathan B. Young and Fr. James W. Hasse, S.J., (both deceased) covering the historical and spiritual of the show’s title. The exhibition runs until March 3, on the main floor of the museum, 3663 Lindell Blvd, which also holds permanent contemporary and Jesuit art on its upper floors.

(cropped) Stackolee and John Henry. Young | Mixed Media

2. Walking in “Spirit and History,” it is best to go right and experience first the works of local newspaper legend Judge Nathan B. Young. His works are the cruder of the two, meaning the artistry is less refined, but this does not impact their beauty nor their potency. Young’s work can be classified as “outsider art,” meaning that it retains a flatness, and lack of texture say as can be found in an artist who has not worked through an art school education. This is not to devalue the work or the artist, please understand. Technique has not been taught here, it has been developed outside of instruction. The paintings here are social realist in tone seeking to explore the ugly past of racism entrenched in American institutions. Here, Young explores the “all-American stereotype” that helped to dehumanize and render subservient the black race through political, cultural, and social means. Many of the works include several depictions or paintings encased in a single frame. The paintings, mixed media, often carry a script or narrative. “The Demolition of St. Paul’s Church,” carries the local story of faith and failure in great detail. Young gives us Booker T. Washington, Satchel Paige, John Brown (God’s Angry Man); Stackolee and John Henry stand side-by-side for a dissection of contrasting

Wonderfully Made. Hasse | Acrylic on Canvas

moral and physical superiority. The other side of the gallery, the second-half of the exhibit “Spirit and History,” contains the religious paintings of Fr. James W. Hasse, S.J. Here, while Young kept our feet on the scorched earth, Hasse gives us permission to leave our bodies. His paintings always contain an element of high religious adoration and/or pain including several with crucifixions and skeletons. Almost all place the black soul of women and men in the midst of annunciation, salvation, revelry. Hasse went to art school, and it shows. The flatness of Young’s compositions is all but rounded out, shadowed, and given texture here. Young captures moments, Hasse records movement.

3. At a nearby coffeehouse on West Pine I wrote down these notes in an attempt to process what I’d seen, for it was truly remarkable. We have a black historian and journalist who gave voice to many in St. Louis; he wrote fiction and poetry and produced over 400 paintings in his lifetime. We have a white priest trained in law, in art, and theology. He chose to serve in the urban, African-American communities of the Ohio River Valley. To engage his parishioners he fastened his paintings to the churchyard fence where he was told they’d be vandalized — of course, they weren’t. Both men are telling stories, one of terrible history, the other, presumably, of beatific transcendence. One was dark, but painting in pale yellows, and greys; the other was light, and composed darkness, liquid and illuminated by hoary tendrils of frisson. Together, perhaps an illustration of W.E.B. Dubois’ “double consciousness,” that affliction black souls encounter and endure on this mortal coil, they assail our morality and stead. This is the birth of a tragic nation, and the coming of salvation. It is gospel, rough-hewn, iconic, stripped-skeletal, and ironic. Angry men, weeping women, consoled men, women in ecstasy. It is a newspaper in oil. A record of ink-stained rage. A displacement of racism. An alignment of hope and faith. Earth and sky. History and spirit, indeed. Judge and Jesuit.

4. This is a rare show in that the duality of the African-American experience and transcendence can be felt in some way, it can be viewed in this way. As a white Canadian, it struck me as horrifying and so honorable; the wince-inducing racism, embarrassment and outrage at the whiteness of Christian iconography. The dirty dichotomy: Song of hatred, song of praise. Very bitter and sweet. Very historical, spiritual. Pictured here with this post are my favorites of Young and Hasse. Young serving a social goal, Hasse the spiritual one. Paintings of historical moments in the narrative of black oppression, and paintings of religious and spectral visions seeking an eternity. Extraordinary gifts from two very talented

The Cross brings the Dead to Life. Hasse | Acrylic and Canvas

men. My only criticism, and it’s a tiny one because it doesn’t involve the art, is that the exhibit is poorly lit. Standing in front of most paintings means casting your shadow upon them (if intended as some kind of engagement, bravo, if not, shame on you).

feldman is Wm. Anthony Connolly