Rescue Me

Steven Rosen in the newsweekly Citybeat here in town wrote a smart little article on "The Goodwill Biennial," the show that's currently up at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  (Here's a link:  Citybeat.)  He took the serious joke we worked on quite seriously, which is totally appreciated, and found that we didn't really find the "good art" that he wanted to see pulled from the bins at Goodwill:

"Banner and Ross want you to ask questions about all the pieces’ provenance when looking at the art. Banner writes in a statement that he hopes we find 'some kind of meaning/redemption in them that goes beyond kitsch and into another realm.'  But The Goodwill Biennial doesn’t have enough good art to sustain that quest for deeper meaning.  Too often you wind up being amused by what’s bad. Sometimes good bad, mind you — I found myself laughing at one painting’s bifurcated perspective of the Cincinnati riverfront. It offered a credible perspective and rendering of the urban skyline, but made a tugboat plowing through the frozen river look like small toy on a table. And there seemed to be an ocean just behind downtown."

One thing I really did not want this gig to be is an Antique Roadshow kind of thing, all those Goodwill buried treasures found, rescued, curated, appreciated.  What we selected was what was there:  stuff people donated, wanted out of their lives.  We tried to find the most erratic, eerie, interesting pieces possible, but in the end we just went with it.  And I guess that's where the striving for meaning for me comes from -- not trying to find meaning because something is "good" or "bad," but finding meaning that somehow appreciates the painting/sculpture/drawing/whatever for what it is, and finding within that discovery something that jars you out of appreciation, out of the notion that art is "good" or "bad."

The concept for this show came from witnessing Mike Kelley's one-person retrospective at MOMA PS1 in New York City in 2014.  It was confoundingly great, every inch of PS1 spaces loaded with Kelley's oeuvre, from globular sculptures made from natty stuffed-animals and afghans to incantatory recreations of planets from Superman comics and so on, as well as a whole room dedicated to small movies and photographs inspired by photographs Kelley culled from high school yearbooks from thrift-stores.  The pictures he chose to riff on vary from the unintentionally camp to the intentionally hyper-sentimental, and yet what Kelley does with them in his interpretations does not alter what they are, but somehow expands the boundaries of how they are perceived, just by paying homage to them.  One in particular was both hilarious and very boring and sad, involving a recreation of a high school Halloween party (or play or something, who knows?) in all of its completely sad-assed glory:

It's kitsch reconstructed and redefined as meaning but the meaning is not there for you to enjoy or even understand -- it's just there, staring at you, telling you this is what it is. 

Kelley's whole career was about unmasking what's there and masking what isn't with a fiercely thrift-store/punk glee that often manifested in collecting and redistributing/redefining the crap people think they don't need anymore, whether it be high-school yearbooks, dirty blankets, or even, when he was first starting out as an artists in LA, birdhouses.  In an interview in Bomb Magazine from 1991, Mike Kelley discusses his 198 debut: 

John Miller Why don’t we start by going back to the birdhouse sculptures you made for your graduate show at Cal Arts in 1978. You ended up not only having a reductive object, but the normally “heroic” process of making art was reduced to craft. Even though there may not necessarily be much material difference between art and craft, I think the distinction turns on what an audience is led to invest in a certain set of objects or a certain set of practices; and those become adequate sublimatory vehicles. So in a way, you were confounding those expectations, parodying them.

Mike Kelley Yeah, I definitely was. At the time, people would generally talk about the birdhouses as formal jokes. People wouldn't consider sublimation as an aspect of art production except in some heady, Freudian way, like, “Oh, these bad impulses are being nicely put into this object.” Instead of saying maybe it’s not so nice that these impulses are put into these objects. Maybe it’s pitiful that all these energies are pumped into a birdhouse. That’s what I realized I was going for, not some one-line joke like, “Here’s a birdhouse that’s minimalism.” Rather, here’s a structure that’s loaded with pathos, and you still don’t like it, you don’t feel sorry for it, you want to kick it. That’s what I wanted out of the thing—an artwork that you couldn’t raise, there was no way that you could make it better than it was. Its function as art actually makes it more uncomfortable

JM It implies a kind of dysfunction.

MK:  Yes.

In psychology, "sublimation" is often defined as a type of defense mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior.  What Kelley is saying here is that he did not want that defense mechanism to get in the way of his intentions as an artist.  He wanted people to see the birdhouses he made as the birdhouses he made, and that's kind of the way I feel about the art we chose to be in the Goodwill Biennial:  we didn't want people to think the art in the show is "good" or "bad," just what it is, so that maybe the art in the show could replace (or confound) notions of preciousness, greatness, whatever.  To harness all that abandoned art to an old artworld standby like "biennial," in which tastemakers and curators and collectors and organizations come together to define what is "good" and "bad" in contemporary art is just another way to both parody culture, and also to pay homage to the fact that the thrift-store paintings and other objects we discovered couldn't be "raised," as Kelley puts it.  There's no way you could make the art we found better than it was.  "Its function as art actually makes it more uncomfortable."

And to be in a little gallery filled with such uncomfortable oddness is what the show is about, purely and simply.  The title of Rosen's piece in Citybeat is, "Thunder-Sky Rescues Art from Goodwill Box."  Even the title kind of gets it wrong, to be honest.  Thunder-Sky, Inc. is not a tastemaker, God knows.  It's just a little outsider art gallery in Cincinnati that tries hard to ask questions, to find meaning in ideas, people and things that often don't get the time of day.  We're not out to celebrate what is good or bad or whatever, but just what is there, like those birdhouses, untransformed and spectacular reminders that art has a ghostly and unfathomable weirdness about it that can't be categorized, "biennial-ized," or even "rescued."  We didn't go into the whole thing as an exercise in finding greatness.  We're not about "taste," as much as we're about establishing an "atmosphere."  We went into the Goodwill looking for strangeness and an assortment of art that could not have been found anywhere else.  We found what was there, and then selected the pieces that seemed to fit together in a creepy and lovely little dance of diptychs and tableau.

And that's about it.

Ghostliness

 

 

Monday night, we started with this little ensemble when looking at how to curate "The Goodwill Biennial," the next gig on deck for Thunder-Sky, Inc.  It's a parody of contemporary art-survey biennials across the world, using donated paintings, sculptures, whatever given to the Ohio Valley Goodwill here in Cincinnati as the starting point of a jurying process that includes me, Bill Ross, Matt Distel, Merry Hoefle, Melanie Derrick, Emily Brandehoff, and Antonio Adams.   Parodying something as pretentious and serious as a "biennial" is kind of a silly prospect of course, close to shooting million-dollar fish in a million-dollar barrel:  those who pursue the biennial lifestyle of course don't give a crap, and those who don't give a crap really don't care.  But still satirizing something so contrived and so integral to the way serious art business often gets done (or doesn't get done) gives us a chance to worship at the altar of Pure and Gorgeous Serendipity, as well as the sad and blurry cathedral of Musty-Smelling Ghostliness. 

 

That's definitely the vibe when unpacking donated art:  that mildew-enflamed fume, that sad sweet grandma-doesn't-live-here-anymore vapor.  In fact, those delicate, precise, dreamy watercolors of 1960s suburban homes surrounded in trees and sunshine had to be unpacked from a mysterious blue suitcase filled with old sketches and photos and prints someone had stuffed into it and locked up tight and sent on its merry way.  That blue suitcase mustiness was an entrance into memory, kind of like the marmalade on the cracker moment Proust went on and on and on about.  Those drawings have such a tenderness, such a nostalgia, and then Matt located the centrifuge of this whole vortex by grabbing the portrait in the center from off the floor, and there she was:  Nancy Kincaide, a name we all brainstormed into being.  She was a realtor, a murderess, a vindictive socialite and so on.  The painting itself is green and heavy and small, and Nancy's countenance both regal and also beautifully come-hither.  By juxtaposing the houses with her circumspect portrait Matt intentionally created a tableau that is easily understood but vast with mystery, story after story spilling out of those dark windows, those water-color driveways.

 

And that's kind of what the whole show is about, dislocating kitsch from all those tossed-aside, handmade objects and finding a way to take seriously what was recently in a canvas bin inside a large warehouse in Woodlawn.  Thankfully all the Goodwill staff were game, and thankfully we have some likeminded souls helping us find our way through.  But the sentiment is serious, and as we juxtaposed and figured out where things went on Monday night it all became a little emotional, in the way maybe you might feel helping people escape from a prison-camp:  there's an odd and kind of exhilarating freedom to reconfiguring what destiny has tried to create and sustain.  This stuff was supposed to be either thrown away or tagged and put on a shelf, and here we were thinking about it, playing with it, introducing ourselves to it in a way that wasn't about anything other than making some kind of moment, or series of moments, happen.  That's the ecstasy of pure aesthetics right there, taking what's trashed and forgotten and un-trashing it and remembering it in such a way that poetry and a little bliss coalesce, appear and then disappear. 

 

Nancy Kincaide wholeheartedly agrees.  Just ask her.

  

Sorted Product

When I was a thirteen, my mom used to work at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, downtown Anderson, Indiana.  Some days I would ride with her to work, and spend the day downtown, usually riding a bus back to the K-Mart near where we lived and walking home from there, or waiting around and riding back with my mom after her shift.  The main reason I wanted to go downtown was that across the street from the KFC where she worked was a huge Goodwill store. And especially that summer when I was thirteen, the Goodwill was an oasis.  I had a weekend job at a little restaurant called the Irish Point and I'd save whatever money I made there (the elderly couple who owned Irish Point and lived above it in a small apartment paid me out of the drawer because I was too young to go on payroll) so I could spend it at the Goodwill on stuff that caught my eye.  I wasn't into clothes or anything, but there were records, toys, books, knickknacks, and other crap, all of it of course used and kind of ghostly, and it was that mystery of past usage and continued afterlife that somehow made whatever I came across glow. 

 

I discovered Velvet Underground there, as well as Joni Mitchell and an 8-track tape of a Richard Pryor concert that I played over and over.  Don't forget Emerson Lake and Palmer, ELO, and Frank Zappa.  In the book section, there was a dog-eared paperback by Hubert Selby Jr. called Last Exit to Brooklyn, the short stories of Tennessee Williams, all those trashy-great novels by Jacqueline Susann (starting with Valley of the Dolls and ending with The Love Machine I think), as well as John Knowles' A Separate Peace, Agatha Christie novels, and multiple copies of Catcher in the Rye.  It was a random assortment of hothouse configurations:  I was getting at culture by digging up buried treasures I had no idea were treasures, but just wanted to soak in whatever I could.  And somehow as I listened and read I found a way to incorporate all of that stuff into my dreams and desires and the way I thought about things.  It was kind of like a self-acquired education that didn't make any sense, pulled together from scraps and non-sequiturs that somehow snowballed into a sensibility, even a taste.   

 

I was total white-trash, so I didn't have a lot of access to what culture meant, or even what ambition was.  But there was a mildew elegance in those long odd mornings at Goodwill.  And everything was so cheap in there I could buy a bagful of books and records and tapes for almost nothing and spend days absorbing it all.

 

So now I'm fifty, and flash-forward to this:     

 

Bins of set-aside home-made art people have donated to the Cincinnati Goodwill.  I came up with this idea last year:   partnering with Goodwill so at Thunder-Sky, Inc. we could sponsor a parody/appropriation of the Whitney (and all those other contemporary art) Biennials.  It's called of course The Goodwill Biennial, and it opens final Friday in August at the gallery.  As with almost everything I try to do creatively, it's a joke and it's not. 

By that I mean, the whole purpose of working with Goodwill on this project was not to take any of it seriously, and yet to completely take everything (all these hand-made paintings, sculptures, whatever else people deem not worthy of keeping) seriously, in order to find some kind of meaning/redemption in the works that goes beyond kitsch and into another realm I don't know a word or phrase for.  Dreamy incoherence?  The brutal glamor of art people don't want anymore?  You strip away biography from the whole enterprise when you do something like this as well; suddenly these works have a blank disconnection from the planet we're living on, as if they've been beamed into this world from a place that no longer exists.

Vanessa Cornett, the very kind Goodwill rep we worked with, initially set aside the works from the mountains and mountains of donations Goodwill received daily.  The only direction we gave Vanessa was that whatever she pulled should be "hand-made," not a print of color-by-number set, no shellacked jigsaw puzzles, etc.  Just art.  Whatever that means.  Vanessa did a great job.  But still we wanted to not react to the sad-sack nature inherent in each piece (Poor thing, look at you, totally forgotten, who made you? and so on), but to each pieces' strangeness.   By "strangeness," I guess I mean "worth."  For example this painting below Bill's holding.  I'm not really sure if it will make it into the final stretch to be accepted into the Biennial (Matt Distel and Melanie Derrick, two wonderful curators in town, are helping us with the final selections in a couple weeks), but when we came across it I just knew it needed to be in contention.  It has an awkwardness to it, a delicacy that seems somehow ironically ham-fisted and emotionally raw, kind of like if DeChirico got sick of taking his time.  "Sick" is another adjective that might work to describe what we were looking for as well -- a fevered impatience helping the picture snap into itself.  This one below truly seems finished.  Every part of the picture-plane has been contended with, formulated, turned creepy.  And that grayish blob that kind of looks like rope completes it all somehow, like a David Salle affectation bled of affectation.      

I could go on.  But that's the reason for all of this, to kick your imagination's ass by showing it something so off-kilter, not acquainted with rules and aspirations, but just some weird object hand-made and kept around the house for a little while until it has worn out its welcome.

This thing below.  Cookie-Monster/amputation/shiny-frog.  It's a ceramic haiku.

More ceramic haikus below.  On the clay pieces we cheated a little by including this skull-mold in the mix, but come on:  hearts and flowers stamped willy-nilly across a skull is just something you need in your life.  And the lion holding the lamb right next to it.  And there in the middle that 3-D Philip Guston gig, some cartoon but sinister janitor watching TV after work.

This painting below I don't need to go into.  You get it.  Instant nostalgia, the blonde hair from some early 60s daydream, the eyes staring right at you, the plush anonymous green backdrop....

And her here below:  enough said.

And this basket of Martian flowers from the hospital gift-shop.

This is Vanessa Cornett from Goodwill, along with Bill.

The sign taped to the bins of art Vanessa rescued from all the other stuff donated:

The final selections Bill and I chose, over 125 pieces in three canvas pins, covered in funereal cloth. 

I guess, to me, art has always been an odd connection with posterity and anonymity, a cross-section of ambition and the knowledge that whatever you do creatively isn't going to stop you from disappearing.  But here are works that appear to us (in the Goodwill warehouse) without any clue as to how they were produced, who did it, why.  It's just stuff to look at, dream about.  Which is maybe what art is supposed to be most of the time.