Corny

Mr. Cornell

 

Joseph Cornell is one of those peripheral and yet totally important figures in contemporary art history who haunts and informs a lot of what is made and seen today.  He passed away in 1972, and yet his influence and the scope of his ghostliness illuminate a lot of what has happened artistically and aesthetically in the 20th and now 21st Centuries.  He was humble and yet ambitious, ingenuous yet sophisticated, "outsider" yet completely in sync with his contemporaries, including the Surrealists and everything after.  He lived in a small, unremarkable house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, taking care of his brother who had cerebral palsy, and working a lot of odd jobs to sustain his household that included both his brother and mother.  He basically spent his lifetime outside of those activities making intricate, oddly meaningful "things" out of materials he lifted from life:  postcards, fabric, toys, bottles, glasses, etc., all usually aligned poetically and ominously in shadow-boxes.  He also made movies, created hefty dossiers devoted to movie-stars and waitresses, wrote, and even collaborated with his brother on a series of delicate drawings/collages that merged fairy-tale wishes with a scratchy/gorgeous obsession.  In fact, most of what Cornell did seemed burnished by an overarching obsession to find meaning in what is already in front of you, as if a junk-drawer in your kitchen is a primal resource for reinvention and even transcendence, every little doodad and left-behind nothing a reason to daydream, to travel while remaining still.

 

Our next Thunder-Sky, Inc. exhibit, “Utopia Parkway Revisited: Contemporary Artists in Joseph Cornell’s Shadow" (opening February 26, 2016 with a reception 6 to 10 pm and closing April 9, 2016). features beautifully and incidentally Cornell-inspired works by Jeff Casto, Marc Lambert, Christian Schmit, Matthew Waldeck, and Matthew Waldeck Jr.  They all make art that both mimics Cornell’s approach (collage, sculpture, assemblage, and appropriation), as well as the spirit involved in his vision, creating and recreating an aesthetic universe based in nostalgia, obsession, and pop culture.  Casto's works are the closest in spirit and materials to Cornell's boxes, but he also has his own sense of deadpan whimsy and ache, as if he's taken in Cornell's need to make something out of nothing and pushed resources and dreaming to their limits.  Lambert's works featured in the show respond to Cornell's use of everyday materials (Lambert paints on ceiling tiles), and also to his starry-eyed sense of cinema and history.  Lambert meticulously recreates universes collaged from movie-scenes and folklore, juxtaposing Sasquatches with pyramids, pterodactyls with UFOs, a psychic boyhood embellished with a sense of sentimental ache and poetry.  Waldeck, Jr.'s drawings have that same sense of longing for Utopian context.  Executed in magic-marker on 8" X 11" sheets of paper, they function as a sort of illuminated manuscript informed by television, solitude, and a search for more than is there.  Waldeck, Sr. creates funky, frenetic dioramas (and other contraptions) made from machine parts and other junk.  They playfully reference space-travel, carnivals, and miniature civilizations, in a Cornellian flourish and flicker.  Schmit's one piece in the show is truly masterful, and acts as both a comment on, and a rapturous biographical portrait of, Cornell, constructed with a painstaking accuracy and ingenuity pretty much akin to everything Cornell accomplished.

 

It's going to be an incredible show.

 

A lot of times I argue on this blog that biography often handicaps the way we see and consume art, that knowing that the artist has a diagnosis or hardship or whatever shouldn't get in the way of feeling and understanding the art for what it is and can be.  You don't want to lose focus or respect by attaching charity and other kinds of condescension onto the whole shebang.  But Cornell's work and life intermingle in ways that go beyond "diagnosis" and "charity."  From limited means and a "small life," he forged an incredible body of work that somehow captures lightning in a bottle every time you witness it.  He dedicated his life to minutiae and what it means when you take the time to excavate it, to reinvent and reimagine it.  He discovered vast planets inside the smallest of boxes, and allows us today to take such endeavors completely seriously. 

 

 

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Sr.

Jeff Casto

A wall of Jeff Casto works

 

A wall of Marc Lambert works

Marc Lamber

Marc Lambert

Christian Schmit

Jeff Casto

 



Someone Left the Cake out in the Rain

I'm always on the lookout for artists who are "big" but whose work is stupid and weird and lovely, intelligent without having to try too hard, but also completely comfortable with the boundlessness of not being smart.  I hit the jackpot with Joyce Pensato.  She's been around for over 30 years, but recently her work has been getting attention all over the place, chiefly for her show last year at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC titled "Batman Returns," pictured above. 

Her strategy and practice have a decidedly outsider-art smell and shimmer:  take what's out there and internalize it in an odd, festered, beautiful manner, then externalize what's been internalized obsessively through a variety of means.  Pensato does this by finding incredible shit at thrift-stores (toys, figurines, what have you), bringing the objects back to her studio, and then molesting them artistically.  The paintings are like Phillip Guston smashing into Franz Kline, all abstract-expressionist and dumb as hell, parodies and homilies simultaneously.  Someone left the cake out in the rain, so to speak.  The sumptuous apocalypse of her work is like a queen letting us in on the torture she provides to her subjects.  I love the crap in the center of the gallery too:  Mike Kelley (RIP) eat your heart out.  There's a feeling here of love lost and rediscovered somehow in the ashes after that trailer in Pink Flamingos goes up in flames.  It's poetic but also, as I said previously, completely and delightfully stupid.

Pensato has a big show opening at the Santa Monica Museum of Art soon.  I would love to go see it and get enraptured.  I think her work is another reason why we need to abandon the outsider/insider split for good.  I'm thinking of Judith Scott stealing people's car-keys and cocooning them as I look at Pensato's stuff, as well as Mose Tolliver and Thornton Dial paintings and assemblages.  I'm thinking of Robert Rauschenberg and Edward Keinholz as well.  The earned rawness of her style, the messiness taking over and persuading you it's all on purpose is a direct offshoot not just of expressionism and Pop, but outsider-art's propensity to aestheticize experience and biography while also burying the need to explain.  In other words, if you looked at Pensato's crazy-assed work you might think it's done by anybody with a need to explicate (without explaining anything) what's been bothering them for years and years.

 

We Don't Know What Else to Do

Toronto-based artist Leigh Cooney is curating Superunknown:  The Neo-Folk Impulse, featuring new works by The Cooney Brothers, Mike Egan, Andrea Heimer, Ben Kehoe, Marc Lambert, Bill Ross, and Matthew Waldeck.  This show that ends Thunder-Sky, Inc. 2013 season with a bang.  Here's a wonderful, insightful essay Leigh wrote to accompany the show.  We'll also be publishing a catalog in which this will appear.

I must begin by saying that I have a very limited knowledge of art history, contemporary practices, or terminology. I did not go to art college.  In fact I only failed one course in high school and it was visual arts which was a requirement for art college. This led me to give up on art for several years.  I own, yet have never read, an entire book on art history.  (Yeah okay I like the pictures.)   I do not claim to be an expert on the definitions of “outsider” “folk,” and/or “visionary art.”  I’m ignorant of what makes a piece of art “great,” and yet I do not live in a cave, (or for that matter a psychiatric facility).   I would never say I am completely removed from the art world.  And yes, because of my ADHD I can only write in a stream of consciousness format so you’re going to see a lot of parenthesis where thoughts are broken up by thoughts as well as run on sentences and phrases that are sometimes deliberate (for emphasis) and sometimes not. Deal with it.

However having said that, I don’t believe my ignorance gives me any less authority to speak on art within the parameters of these limitations. Why? Well as an art authority answer me this: I have no doubt that the great Henry Darger’s knowledge of the art world was extremely limited; however I think it would be inappropriate to assume he was completely unaware of at least some of the more famous works.  If you could bring Darger (one of his works above) back and ask his opinion on art within these parameters would you want to hear what he has to say?  Would you want him to explain his own work?  Would you like him to reflect on art in general in relation to his work?  Of course you would. Would you ridicule him or dismiss him because he didn’t have the right terminology or knowledge? Absolutely not, because unless you want to be the laughing stock of both the above and underground art worlds you have to recognize Darger’s genius... because those are the rules, and art world people like to follow the art world rules.

You would want to hear him out because he is an artist, and an artist doesn’t need to study the books, although it can be an advantage depending on what you would like to accomplish.  An artist simply needs to create viscerally and instinctually, and in doing so a self-taught artist will more than likely come to many of the same results as a classically trained artist in the end but will come to these conclusions organically and generally at a significantly slower pace. It is often inevitable during this process for an artist to create her own opinions and connections and sometimes she needs to trust herself in spite of feeling overwhelmed when faced with so-called “expert” opinions. This is after all art not science and there is room for subjectivity and opinion even from the lowliest and most “ignorant” of us.

So how did I, a mere self-taught artist come to curate Superunknown? Well firstly it must be said that much of the credit goes to Bill and Keith at Thunder-Sky, Inc. who are immersed in self-taught art daily and have no pretensions (that I can see) about who can have an opinion on art. It is galleries like Thundersky that give artists like myself who exist on the fringes of the art world the confidence to state their opinion and to state that they have an opinion at all! 

To fully understand my own interest in folk and outsider art we must go back four years to when I first picked up a paintbrush (outside of those doomed high school classes 7 years before) and decided I would create for the sake of creating with absolutely no expectations as to the results. Up until that point I was very limited in terms of what I considered great art. I could only fully appreciate art that showed a very high level of “craftsmanship” like Michelangelo, Salvador Dali, Mark Ryden, and Chuck Close. I hated so-called “modern” or “abstract” work.   (Here’s where my terminology shows its limitations… I’m pretty sure “abstract” as an all-embracing term is frowned upon, but I’m not sure what would be better suited?)   It was for this reason that I threw out my paintbrushes after high school upon realizing I couldn’t go to college. If I couldn’t go to college and learn to paint like a master, I didn’t want to paint at all. Oh youthful ignorance… but of course things eventually came around.

When I began I was inspired by two artists specifically. One was the late New Yorker Jean Michel Basquiat, and a little later came my introduction to Outsider artist Gerald “X” Thornton (Basquiat on top; Thornton bottom). I did not immediately warm to either of these artists, I had the usual misguided “my kid could paint that attitude” to both. But again and again I came back to Basquiat, and one day something clicked. I felt that here were artists who sat down in front of a canvas and (arguably in Basquiat’s case) weren’t for a second worried about image or perception or an audience. They painted purely to communicate and the sense of naiveté that I perceived seemed to me to reflect a certain raw edge in their very souls that screamed self-doubt and desperation, and that was something I understood. And when I realized I empathized with these artists it occurred to me that I was appreciating their work less for the sugary finish that I found in a Dali or a Ryden, and more for the underlying narrative they seemed to be struggling to convey as well their own inner struggle itself. I was hooked.

I wanted to paint fast and without hesitation. I went out later and bought the cheapest brushes, canvases, and paint I could find (I still work with the same materials) and I sat down one afternoon and promised myself that I would start and finish a painting that afternoon. I did and the result was a mediocre attempt at best but the fact that I had not stopped to reflect self-consciously during the process meant more to me than the finished work. That year I would create hundreds of new paintings and I would continue to discover Outsider artists I admired. I wasn’t overly interested in the history (psychological or otherwise) of the artists I discovered and I was even less interested in the squabbling over definitions that I soon discovered was such an integral part of the world of Outsider art; I was simply interested in their subject matter and the way in which they presented it. During this first year of painting I found I could connect with groups via the internet that appreciated Self-taught art as much as I did. This was wonderful as I was too far removed from the art world both psychologically as well as geographically to be able to connect in person.

The style, subject matter, and association with Outsider fans led me to be grouped into the Outsider label myself and I was more than happy with that. It wasn’t long however before I inevitably discovered the sensitivity of certain critics to the connotations inherent in the term “Outsider.” This squabbling as well as the fact that my work was inadvertently becoming more streamlined and less “naïve” in appearance led me to distance myself from the outsider label. It only seemed fair, and I learned fairly quickly that if you wanted to call yourself a self-taught artist you better “appear to be self-taught…” in other words you couldn’t allow your work to become more technically proficient. As my work became more proficient and less naive in appearance I began to start my own questioning of terms like “Outsider,” “Art Brut,” “Self-Taught,” “Visionary,” and so on. I began to become more interested in that blurred line that disconnects the aboveground art world, and the underground art world of which I was a part, and finally the subterranean Outsider world that I was overlapping with. Not because I wanted to attempt a grouping of myself into any of these, but because I started to think maybe art labels in general were arbitrary and often misleading and best left to people who are more interested in marketing and labeling than the art itself.

This leads me to why I decided to curate a show of artists that each exemplify some facet of my love of Folk and Outsider art, yet would not be considered “Outsider” artists by the restrictive traditional definitions. These are artists that exist in neither the mainstream art world nor the Outsider art world. Some of these artists are self-taught, some are classically trained, some have a body of work that is more naieve in appearance, and some have a look that is more classical in appearance, but all have some aspect to their work that I feel falls into both the categories of contemporary pop art, and folk art. I originally thought I’d call the show Pop-Folk but I settled on Neo-Folk as a nod to my British friend and art theorist Dr. Melissa Westbrook who coined the term Neo-Outsider to group together many of these same artists that exist on the fringes of the underground, aboveground, and Outsider art worlds.

Why these artists?

After I considered the attitudes of the potential artists and dismissed a couple I respected but didn’t like on a personal level, I considered the art itself. As I mentioned before each artist has some quality to their work either physically or spiritually that borrows, pays homage, or otherwise embodies in a natural way (with little forethought or deliberation) the work of Outsider and especially folk artists. To me these artists felt pure and unpretentious in their approach in the way that the best Outsider artists do. None of these artists appear to be creating art with the sole purpose of selling work in the way that the best Outsider artists do. Although the works of these artists vary widely in presentation, they each seem to be trying to express a frustration with, and discomfort inherent in living on the fringes of the fast-paced and impersonal modern world that none feel quite at home in… you got it, the way the best Outsider artists do.

I love the natural way that these artists present themselves. Too many artists are wrapped up in the potential viewer’s perception of their art and they begin unconsciously to create art that aims to please others rather than themselves and this often results in work that is very fine at a glance, but like white bread lacks that nutritional punch that keeps you going. But like brain candy for the intellectual sweet tooth, the works in this show contain the best of both worlds, they are fun and tasty at a glance, but they have substance and keep you coming back for more.

With Ben (pictured above) I appreciated his use of autumn weather, the outdoors, grassy knowles, farm animals, wild beasts, spirituality and scenes played out against that backdrop which I often associate with folky Southern U.S. art traditions, and which I thought invoked the spirit of those that came before him that were dismissed as mere “folk artists” because they weren’t painting what those collectors and critics in the big North-Eastern U.S cities thought was in vogue at the time and were looking to buy into.  

I felt the same way about Mike’s work (above), even though Mike was presenting himself in such a different way. His work invoked not only the spirit of the Southern U.S. folky (as well as folk artists from South America and Mexico,) but also the minimalist style of these artists. Much like the artists that existed long before there was such thing as an “art world” or even the word “artist” for that matter Mike’s work spoke to me of birth, death, rebirth, religion, and what is often referred to as the human spirit.

Most importantly, both Mike and Ben (who grew up together and remain friends to this day) took these Southern U.S traditions and blended them with just a hint of contemporary “Lowbrow” and Pop-Art sensibilities. And therein lays the definition of Pop-Folk or Neo-Folk. But again I don’t suggest these titles to limit or otherwise narrow the viewer’s interpretation of the work, but rather to guide the questions a visitor to this exhibit might ask so that we can reinterpret our narrow view of what it means to associated with the self-taught traditions.

 

My brother Roland (or rolo as he’s known,) and Andrea Heimer (rolo's work pictured on top; Andrea's under) display the naïve (or in this case “faux-naïve” characteristics that remind me of the purity of the greatest of Outsider “self-taught” artists. I love that the uninitiated might look at the work of these two artists and dismiss it out of hand simply because it doesn’t attempt to impress with flourishes of so-called “craftsmanship.” One need only stop and read the titles associated with each painting to see that there is so much more on display here than crudely rendered narrative illustration work (and I mean that in the best possible way because I am a huge admirer of this style and these two artists.) These paintings more than any of the others offer up the confessions of the artists themselves, and reveal their discomfort with the tension that bubbles just beneath the surface of contemporary suburban living. Andrea often fills her pictures with symbolism and stories where rolo strips his work of most of the available signals as to his intent leaving just the bare bones, but both question what results from our neighbours bottling up their emotions and desires, and how it feels to both belong to as well as be scraped, grinded, pushed, and shredded on the cheese grater of modern life. Rolo and I would like to take this opportunity to coin the phrase “The Norman Rockwell of the Suburban Underbelly" to describe Andrea Heimer.

As anyone who is familiar with Thunder-Sky, Inc. knows, Bill Ross is both the co-founder of the gallery and an artist in his own right. Bill’s work is the most pop influenced of all the artists involved in this show and I believe he really puts the Neo in Neo-Folk, but if we are really going to knock around arbitrary titles here I feel Bill’s work would fit right into a Los Angeles contemporary gallery with today’s top “Pop-Surrealists” or “Lowbrow” painters simply due to the fact that (more so than many of the PS and LB artists in today’s magazines) he actually embodies the definition of  PS and LB art by being down right funny, pop influenced, colorful, kitschy, and confessional all at once. Bill’s paintings have the natural dark humour of someone who has seen how differently people can be treated either in his own experiences or through the lives of those he has come into contact with during his years as a social worker for people with disabilities.

It was Bill and Keith at Thunder-Sky, Inc. that introduced me to the paintings of Marc Lambert and the sculpture of Matt Waldeck (above, with Marc's on top, Matt's beneath) and I was immediately impressed. We agreed these Cincinnatti artists would be a great fit, but I think I’ll leave it up to Bill or Keith to better explain in their own words what it was about Marc and Matt that sparked his interest in their work.  Keith here:  Marc's sci-fi exuberance, and Matt's intricate, sweetly steam-punk daydreams so fit with Leigh's overall thesis:  they take pop-culture and channel it through a very self-made network of "not knowing what else to do," thus merging kitsch with seriousness, fanboy-ness with technique and style that supersedes pretentiousness while paying homage to invention.  

As for myself, I see some obvious and not-so-obvious but still very real parallels between my work and the work of everyone in this show (hence the gathering of these particular artists.) Some of this is due to the fact that I am influenced by every one of the artists daily, and some of it is due to the fact that I believe I draw from the same creative well as each of these individuals. I don’t have to speculate as to my influences or the signals and symbolism in my paintings because I know exactly what drives me. I like naieve and faux naieve work more than any contemporary art style, I am hugely influenced by the physical stiffness of the characters found in Outsider and medieval art, I am fascinated by the desires we hide away and the masks we wear during the day and hang from our bed posts at night. I like Kitsch and bright colours. I like pop culture, pop art, and pop music. I like to express and confess. I want to be part of the popular clique at the school of life, while I simultaneously despise them for putting me so firmly outside the circle.

I suffer from anxiety and I fear most of the artists in this show do as well, and most of my work involves the struggles we face with anxiety and in my case the overlapping ADHD problem. My work also asks questions that are related involving what I perceive as the absurdities of religion and the difficulties of the day to day interactions with folks that many people take for granted. My work is very confessional but in some cases it is buried so deeply below a layer of stripped down symbolism the intentions thankfully aren’t very clear.

These artists and I are not inside and we are not outside, but we are creating because much like the Outsiders, Folkies, Visionaries, and cast-offs before us we don’t know what else to do. 

Careless Whispers

At the Contemporary Art Center, downtown Cincinnati, Patti Smith's "The Choral Sea" seems both cozy and distant, kind of like she is shellacking her memories into deep meaning, but also losing something in the process.  Just Kids is an incredible book, and in it Smith's voice is lyrical and inventive, but also friendly and chatty, celebratory, simple.  I guess I thought her visual art would be the same.  But the exhibit, based on a book of poems she wrote about Robert Mapplethorpse, is almost the opposite to me, overly poeticized and fussy, a little too shabby-chic.  Upstairs on a couple floors is a hot mess called "ON!  Handcrafted Digital Playgrounds."  Billed as "an interactive exhibition celebrating our innate attraction to play," it's basically what's left after the innate celebration and play are over:  a sort of art-school apocalypse with chalk and smeary pastel scribbles all over the walls and a feeling of abandonment in the aftermath of a really good pillow-fight that is no longer in session.  It's like wandering around a closed-down amusement park.  The thrill I guess is of witnessing the poetry of closed-down amusement parks, but I don't think that was the intention.

The intention of "The Living Room" (right across the way from "The Choral Sea") is about deconstructing living space and then getting all kinky with it.  The "Living Room" itself, pieced together by several artists (Paul Coors, Guy Michael Davis, Terence Hammonds, Katie Parker, and design collective Such + Such), reads like a setting in a Ke$ha music video, maybe if she did slow-jams -- romantic and kitschy and luxe, with solid gold bears in chains and an old-school fireplace doctored up with artistic intent.  Such + Such contribute a really excellent hard-wood bear-rug.  All of it is fun and odd in the best way possible.  But the highlight of "The Living Room" and of what's up at the CAC right now, is a video installation.  To the right of the actual living room are video images covering two walls and meeting in the corner.  There's a giant Barbra Kruger horizontal word crawl featuring non-sequiturs you want to hang onto and put into practice, and genuinely sweet and endearing visuals of people hanging out self-consciously while songs like "Careless Whisper" are put through a sort of ear-worm redux that makes them sound like the poetry of the gods.  Paul Coors is the artist credited for this.  And at the start of the video the camera follows his back out of the CAC and down the street toward places he seems to call home.  The whole thing blurs into a sort of revery, a cable-access stream-of-consciousness riff.  The technique is sumptuous and home-made, a mix of glamor and yearning for its opposite.  The big ring on Alicia Keys' finger (in an interstitial moment that stretches out almost into infinity) is the sun the whole world orbits.  An adjunct renegade spotlight creeps outside the video through the gallery space like the gestapo or the light Emmet Kelly tries to sweep up during a clown/hobo performance.  One of the most perfect moments for me was watching that video and seeing a Jenny Hulzer quote in big red letters:  "Private property creates crime," and then looking down and seeing the spotlight shining on the "U S Bank Gallery" emblazoned on the gallery floor.

Coors' video is where your mind goes when it wants to find meaning, but your mind often can't find meaning in the world even inside your head.  It can only make what your feeling crawl closer to meaning.  Slowing down pop songs to match your mood, walking on sidewalks to places you've been a thousand times, friends and family posing like they are characters on a sitcom during the beginning credits -- all of this is about someone finding a way to be happy, I think.  The title of the video, if I remember correctly, is something like "How I stopped worrying and started loving y'all."  There's bliss in this thing, pure and clever.  As I watched, I kept thinking of everything I'd done that day before seeing the show (buying a washing machine at Home Depot, driving on 1-75, trying to find a parking space because of Taste of Cincinnati patrons taking up the Fountain Square parking garage), and I felt completely vindicated somehow, as if all the shit you do and have to go through really is just a secret path to at least partial wisdom, maybe even happiness for real.

Size Matters

"Put any of MoMA’s art in that building and it will die. And certainly contemporary art does not work there. Even granting that the Williams-Tsien facade is singular (I once compared it to a Kleenex box), the proponents of this building love it as an abstract ideal of a space for art, a platonic thing apart, a fetish," Jerry Saltz has written about the razing of the American Folk Art Museum. 

Originally unveiled in 2001, the architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien designed the American Folk Museum as a sort of paean to folk art.  That's probably what is killing it now.  Although there is a lot of debate and hand-wringing happening about the whole incident,  Saltz seems to be the spokesperson here for institutional truth: the reason the building needs to go is because it kills contemporary art.  The backstory is pretty simple:  MoMA bought the building in 2011, around the time the AFAM was running into major trouble as an institution.  AFAM almost folded last year, but is now back to where it started in a lobby somewhere.  And now MoMA wants to demolish the building in favor of more "big" space.

It's almost like a comeuppance, this tragedy, for any of us who ever had the unmitigated gall of taking something so small and insignificant as "folk art" seriously.  After all, Saltz is letting us know in his piece that "folk art" is not "contemporary art."  Saltz loathes Williams and Tsien's creation because it evokes the strange smallness and unnerving disjuncture that a lot of folk/outsider/visionary/whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it art elicits.  He does not know how to categorize something unless it is categorical, defined by tradition, and I guess great big.

Comparing the bronze, beaten, carefully obtuse facade to a "Kleenex box" and then the whole building to a "fetish" is probably the way he sees most of the art that used to be, and would have been, showcased inside the thing.  Something is missing, Saltz is letting us know:  size.  Bigness rules.  Saltz, and the MoMA and its legions, are doing Gordon-Gecko drag here.  Those big MoMA works of art ("big" both literally and figuratively and historically) can't be housed within that itty-bitty Joseph-Cornell shitbox called a "folk art museum."

It's really kind of sad the disrespect not only the arcitecture is getting in this whole weird battle to destroy a "Kleenox box," but also the art that once was celebrated within it.  A lot of folk artists work small, with weird, inarchivable materials, in strange and platonic ways that look dinky and silly, I'm sure, to Saltz' eye, especially when compared to actual "contemporary art." 

If folk art is the Rodney Dangerfield of the artworld, then Saltz' "contemporary art" is the Donald Trump, and the Donald right now is saying, "You're fired" to art that doesn't take up a lot of space literally but that can expand in your head if you give it half a chance.  Same goes for Williams and Tsien's intricate, origami-lush little building. 

"You're fired, Mr. Kleenex Box."

Welcome to the Hotel Synesthesia

I'm going to write a lot more about the 21C, the new art-museum/hotel that just opened here in Cincinnati for Aeqai, the online art journal I do some stuff for, but I wanted to just bask in the glow of the initial experience of going there.  We went last Friday night, and the place felt haunted and yet brand new simultaneously, packed with artsy middle aged married couples, many wearing the funky, stylized eye wear of Brooklyn hipsters and/or the funky, stylized scarves of ladies who lunch.  It was like a quiet, orderly carnival, with art everywhere, just everywhere, and people drinking in a plush bar, and the whole universe encapsulated by this European wonderfulness:  a classy hotel. 

Most of the art though is a little too rigidly contemporary and chalky and corporate for my taste.  Still I went through and it was a synesthesic experience:   your senses get overloaded not because there's so much to see, but because someone has taken the time to curate and structure so much art and art-like objects you feel like an art orphan trapped in a beautiful art orphanage.

Or Alice wandering room to room, floor to floor. No Mad Hatters though.  Just those whispering artsy middle aged married couples.

My favorite surprise:  a little boardroom on the second floor, claustrophobic and blond-wood-bureaucratic, with several Kara Walker cutouts beautifully framed and installed on all four walls.  Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back?  The one where Lando Calrissian fucks over Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO, escorting them to a conference room on Cloud City, and there sits Darth Vader at the breakfast nook?  That's the feeling I got:  a sweet, ironic little shock, Walker's silhouettes providing both respite and a weird, innocent terror.

One of Those Things

Ms. Apple

An Anthony Luensman neon ladder.

Saturday night I saw Fiona Apple at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, downtown Cincinnati.  Her performance conjured many images, many reactions inside my skull:

• Carrie right after the bucket of pig's blood gets dumped all over her head.
• This bit from "Lady Lazarus":  Herr God, Herr Lucifer/Beware/Beware.  Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.
• That movie where the teenaged girl gets all mean and nuts with her mom, Thirteen.
• Edward Munch's The Scream.
• Holden Caulfield after a beautiful sex-change.

But beneath all that floated something I had seen next door to the Aronoff, at the art gallery, in a one-man show called "Taint."  Anthony Luensman is the artist.  The show itself is kind of creepy and old-school-contemporary.  Like Jeffrey Daumer went on a shopping spree at Ikea, or Andy Warhol's ghost is thinking way too much about "desire."  But the one object/image that stood out from the show -- and that kind of fused with Ms. Apple's demonic/angelic/bipolar/mercuric/girl-pissed-off-because-you-did-not-call-her-back voice -- was a white neon ladder in the basement gallery there.  It shoots up off the floor and crashes through the ceiling tiles, and its eerie, funky glow shines inside and across the ceiling so that wires and insulation and pipes become a secret that is being told.  Ms. Apple's voice and that ladder intertwined while I listened, and I could almost close my eyes and start to climb up the artificial light bars into a metaphysical ceiling, like that voice and that ladder merged into both a way to escape fury and to somehow blend into its heavenly glow.

None of what I felt or heard or saw in my head was meant to be connected.  It was total serendipity.  But somehow Luensman's ladder and Ms. Apple's voice were meant to be combined into that one moment when there's perfection that was never intended.  That's when art works the best for me.  When it is unintentional, stupidly intertwined, momentary, and oddly blissful. 

"Nothing Would Sleep in That Cellar"

I went to the opening of a show at Museum Gallery/Gallery Museum last night, in its new space in Brighton here in Cincinnati, and as soon as I walked in I felt like I was in the middle of nowhere.  Which is a good thing.  "Buy an Hour," a two-person gig starring artists Jacob Isenhour and Will Tucker, comes complete with a one-page Xerox explanation about the genealogy and purpose of hedge-apples, the credentials of the artists, and some abstract notions about "discipline, regimented labor, and deterministic time systems."  But all that is truly just hokum when you experience this show in the flesh.  Words spin and melt away like your dead grandpa's pills tossed into the commode, and you are at once confronted with a feeling of awe, comfort and nausea.  The gallery space has been transformed into what happens when boredom meets ambition, when all the crap left behind at construction sites intermingles with nature's dross and the desire of a couple of really serious artists to grapple with re-imagining what "country living" actually means, and can do to you. 

The art on the walls and floor is beautifully curated and oneirically off-kilter.  All of it is lit in a mishmash of lighting reminiscent both of a barn in a horror movie and a one-act play about loneliness in a small town.   A strand of gangrene-colored hedge-apples are tossed onto the floor like a giant's horrible, tacky jewelry.  Hybrids of potted concrete and rotting hedge-apples with sticks sprouting from the top anchor the whole gorgeous mess, and catercorner to the hedge-apple necklace are two spinning pickle-buckets, making a noise kind of like hamsters on amphetamines.  On the walls are blond-wood framed detritus, beautifully unfinished yet completely "there" paintings/collages/whatever captured from demolished rooms. 

Serendipity transforms into perception in this show.  Both Isenhour and Tucker re-purpose to the point of no return, and beyond even that -- conjuring a backwoods laboratory where hedge-apples morph into heroin-tumors, and "crystal-meth" is just another word for nothing left to lose.  The gallery space is a limbo of objects and waste, a place between Heaven and Hell where you go to wait for bad news, and the only solace is that you are indoors.  Industrial, sleek, bluesy, creepy, working-class, and very distinct, "Buy an Hour" is one of the best shows I've seen around here in a while. 

I kept hearing Theodore Roethke in my head as I walked through.  One of the greatest 20th Century American poets, Roethke's works often celebrate the dank and dark place where man tries to find peace in nature, and nature doesn't actually ever return the favor.  His poems about ditches and graves and journeys into the wild represent a dangerous world of objects and emotions preserved in a silence you can only hear when you're not there.  I'll end with one of my favorite Roethke poems, which for me is a replacement for the perfunctory "Buy an Hour" Xerox:

Root Cellar

Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

  

"2 + 2 = 5" News Release

For Immediate Release

“2 + 2 = 5” Features Collaboration as a Way to Transcend

Cincinnati, OH – March 23, 2011 – "2 + 2 = 5: Collaborations" opens April 29, 2011 with a reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc. Gallery in Northside. The show features variations on the theme of "collaboration," and how getting rid of "one author" can open up new vistas and territories to investigate. “Those Who Want War Warring against Themselves,” a large-scale collaboration done by Antonio Adams and the late Brian Joiner in 2008, is the center-piece of the exhibit. (Photos below.)

Based on Picasso’s "Guernica,” the work is a triptych that re-imagines not only the work of a great Modern Art Master, but also reconfigures and re-conjures that visual feast into a sort of parody and homage simultaneously. Antonio was an “outsider artist” whom Brian met when Antonio was still in high school; Brian was more than a generous mentor to Antonio – he was a classy example of how to make art and to live the life of an artist.

The Antonio Adams/Brian Joiner collaobration as it first appeared at Country Club Gallery in Cincinnati in March 2009, in an exhibit along with Antonio's solo works...

When Brian passed away last year, he left behind not just a beautifully prolific suite of works, but a huge backlog of art supplies. Antonio has taken a small portion of those supplies and created Brian-inspired works.

Elsewhere in the exhibit are other examples of how collaboration in visual art can sometimes help artists transcend circumstance and pedigree.

Large prints were made of some of Raymond Thunder-Sky's unfinished works, and David Mack, Antonio Adams (one of his Thunder-Sky collaborations is pictured below), Cedric Michael Cox, and Aaron Olive Wood have reworked Raymond’s uncompleted drawings into finished collaborations that have lives all their own. Thunder-Sky, Inc. co-founder Bill Ross has several collaborations in the show, including pieces he did with the late Donald Henry. Katie Brenner, as well, has collaborated on works with the late DJ Maes. Thunder-Sky, Inc. is also publishing a catalog that chronicles the exhibit, with an essay by Pamela Rhodes Myricks concerning her collaborative relationship with Joiner. As well, a book of writings based on Dale Jackson’s text-based works will be published. Titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This, the book will feature color reproductions of Jackson's text-based works side by side with the writings done by local and national poets and writers.

Contact:
Keith Banner, (513) 823-8914
Thunder-Sky, Inc.
4573 Hamilton Avenue
Cincinnati, OH 45223
thunderskyinc@gmail.com

Kevin

This is one of my favorite pictures from the opening of "Out of Order: Paintings & Other Creations by David Jarred & Kevin White" Friday February 26, 2010. The show closes April 12, 2010. Kevin took a time-out from drawing that night to explore David Jarred's sculptures... The evening was packed with people, poetry, food, and the debut of Milan DelVecchio's short animated film based on the works. This photo is totally my favorite example of 2 + 2 = 5.

Unnerving Joy

"Out of Order," the first exhibit in the Thunder-Sky, Inc. not by and/or about Raymond Thunder-Sky, features the works of two artists who, biographically at least, don't have a lot in common.

Kevin White (his work is the top photo)is an artist who spent much of his working artistic life in a sheltered workshop for people with developmental disabilities. Labeled with "Down syndrome," Kevin would draw all the time, with and on anything he could find, and many times he was told not to. But he persisted, and in 2002 Bill Ross, a cofounder of both Visionaries & Voices (a studio for artists with disabilities here in Cincinnati) and Thunder-Sky, Inc., was introduced to him. Kevin, along with Raymond and several other artists, were in fact the inspiration for Visionaries & Voices. Kevin still attends the V&V studio in Northside regularly.

David Jarred is an artist who has a degree in visual art and who writes about visual art regularly. He is just beginning his career, and Bill and I discovered his work late last summer in a gallery in Over-the-Rhine here in Cincinnati, 1305. His work seemed to be both provocatively simple and inherently strange. A lot like Kevin's.

When you put Kevin and David's work together, it completely pops -- as if one of David's objects has been pulled from one of Kevin's large paintings, or as if one of Kevin's paintings is a billboard on David's planet. There is a mutual and eerie happiness in their work, a sort of ethereal and somehow unnerving joy in the oddness and authority both artists share.

The main reason we curated this show is art, not biography, not resumes, and yet knowing upfront that these different people might not have ever met unless they made art really is inspiring. And also it is another example of the 2 + 2 = 5 thesis: pulling together the two bodies of work embellishes both beyond just showing them side by side. Knowing the back story also intensifies the experience of getting to know the art.

By juxtaposing David and Kevin's works, Thunder-Sky, Inc. offers viewers the chance to witness art as an equalizer and the gallery space as a site for new insights into what makes an artist “an artist,” and what makes art “art.”

Show opens February 26, 2010, with a reception 6 to 10 pm.