Author: David Hall

One evening I sat Beauty on my knee and I found her bitter, and I injured her.

— Arthur Rimbaud

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, is scheduled to speak at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art Thursday, January 23rd. Schjeldahl is widely acknowledged for his contribution during the 1990s to a discourse fueled by the return of beauty to contemporary art,to which fellow critic Dave Hickey’s Invisible Dragon (1993)provided the clarion call. Beauty, with its epicurean flirtation with connoisseurship, graven images, and visceral indulgences, was a welcome respite from the art world’s long winter of oppositional hermeneutics and intellectual justifications for so much boring, nonretinal art. By the late ’90s, the art world’s love affair with beauty, or at least pretty surfaces, was in full bloom, the topic of academic conferences, shows and seminars, periodicals and books, including Uncontrollable Beauty, an anthology of essays by Schjeldahl, Hickey, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Donald Kuspit, etc. Mega-exhibits, including “Regarding Beauty” at the Hirshhorn Museum and 2001’s “Beau Monde” at the Santa Fe Biennial, exemplified the ascendancy of beauty into the mainstream. But then the movement was seemingly cut short by 9/11.

The slated subject of Schjeldahl’s talk at the Brooks is “What art is for now.” Given the extraordinarily fragile world picture at present, one might very well expect a plodding exegesis regarding a significant shift in themeaning and/or purpose of art. However, anyone familiar with the poet-cum-art critic should know better. In stark contrast to critics who draw an ideological line in the sand by the very choice of their diction — cloaked in jargon or sold as prepackaged reactionary postures — Schjeldahl is much too liberated by the idiosyncratic voice, too skeptical of authorities, canons, and institutions, to possibly endorse any blanket ideals for art.

It is precisely the independent perspective and pragmatic mode of Schjeldahl’s and Hickey’s arguments that placed them in the vanguard of the beauty discourse almost a decade ago. “The beauty thing seems to me a red herring in terms of being directly about art, as it had more to do with the approved and prestigious ways of talking about art,” Schjeldahl says. The new discourse of beauty introduced a critical lexis suited more to the subjective and passionate than that bequeathed by the purveyors of dry jargon. “Without a physiological, individual reaction to art, it’s all entirely disembodied and abstract,” says Schjeldahl. Yet, before the beauty-debate challenge, “the inclusion of individual or group emotional and hormonal uses of art had been factored out to the point where it became unclear who or what art could possibly be for, except the institutions and academies that were charged with being experts in it.”

Ironically, according to Schjeldahl, “The energy of the beauty debate came from the resistance to it.” The ensconced illuminati who had stakes in posts, neos, and -isms viewed the enthusiasm for aesthetic sovereignty as a withdrawal into a discredited bourgeois approach. In Schjeldahl’s estimation, the contest was ridiculous, “a low-stress entertaining debate.” Hickey’s method was simply one of waging “periodic rebellions of populist common sense against expert auteur.”

In fairness to the cynics, however, it wasn’t just the fluffy admiration of beauty that was considered suspect but rather its concomitant idea that culture is “dominated by the power of the consumer side,” to use Hickey’s idiom. Even for many of us who welcomed the return of the sublime in art, there was something dubious in the true-blue emphasis on commerce. Since time immemorial, the ephemeral, multidimensional capacities of cultural production, especially its spiritual and emotional corporeality,have foundthe leaden weights and measures of the marketplace an insufficient arbiter of art’s genuine efficacy. However, Schjeldahl still insists that “commerce is by far the healthier arena for art,” although he espouses “multiplicity,” a mixture of private and public funding for the arts at the local and state level that engenders a dynamic infrastructure: “Germany, since the war, has reverted culturally to somewhat of a Renaissance city-state model, where the individual regions and cities have a lot of initiative and are competitive with each other. You can see the generation after Beuys — Polke, Richter, and Kiefer — and the different scenes in Düsseldorf, Cologne, and Berlin as artists being able to chart various kinds of careers for themselves. Plainly, the strongest artists of the last 30 years have been German, and this is a possible explanation for that.”

While the beauty debate will likely shape the art world for years, one doesn’t witness the consumer side being celebrated too much these days. The scope of the world crisis and its repercussions on culture are as indisputable as the general anxiety that the other shoe may drop at any moment. When asked about the status of what was, up until September 2001, a cresting discourse about beauty, Schjeldahl replies that the issue referenced in the past tense “startled” him, because he “so enjoyed that particular change [and] had of late presumed that it was still current.” He then despondently concedes that “it has faded somewhat.”

Finally, with regard to “What art is for now,” one may anticipate the spirit of Schjeldahl’s talk by purely discerning his sly play on words.

Talk by Peter Schjeldahl at the Brooks Museum, Thursday, January 23rd, at 7 p.m. 20th Annual Juried Student Exhibit, Art Museum of the University of Memphis, opening January 31, 5-7:30 p.m. (jurored by Schjeldahl).

Untitled (Q-15) by Thomas Nozkowski

Some weeks ago at an art opening, artist and retired educator Larry Edwards, with trademark bluntness and comic panache, almost fell over when I casually esteemed a painter’s work as both confident and risk-taking. “Ah, c’mon,” Edwards groaned. The artist’s pictures, obvious cousins to Bay Area figurative and abstract expressionism, were “academic,” he said, insisting that there are so many wanna-be-Diebenkorns out there to have become a cliché.

Being someone who looks at way too many art-world retreads, I can appreciate Edwards’ criticisms and candor, and it is certainly difficult for a professor or critic not to become callous to the onslaught of second-rate Picassos, Duchamps, and Basquiats. Then again, if originality is the measure of an artist’s substance, what exactly in painting hasn’t been broached? Why paint at all? But whenever I find myself too dismissive of the familiar or conventional, invariably something comes along to catch me off guard. Thomas Nozkowski, whose work is on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, is breathing new life into a genre that is routinely pronounced spent by liberating it from the encumbrances of art history or any pretense to originality.

Nozkowski’s show consists of easel-size paintings that are seemingly in tune with old-school inclinations, where complex biomorphic shapes imply spatial ambiguities similar to Jean Arp’s reliefs, as in Untitled (Q-7), or affect a Philip Guston-ish cartoon, as in Untitled (Q-10). The work maintains an ease that is derived from the simple acknowledgment of painting’s past, particularly of modernism, while not really feeling the need to court it, to be ironic about it, or to otherwise be critical of it. But the pictures are not merely recursive either. The unceremonious and ambivalent attitude toward art history serves to dispense with the idea of originality straightaway so as to concentrate on the heuristic routine of resolving a painting. In this regard, Nozkowski swings from one familiar motif to the next, producing images that are both obstinately banal and consciously dispassionate.

During a 2001 interview with painter Gerhard Richter, whose entire oeuvre seems to be a meditation on the disputed validity of painting, Robert Storr asked about Richter’s decision to paint from photographs as a method to remain neutral, to avoid a singular style, and to maintain the freedom to paint disparate subjects. “It was the opposite of ideology,” said Richter, “and to be as objective as possible offered a legitimization for painting since you were being objective and doing what was necessary, enlightening, and so on.” Nozkowski (and curator Hamlett Dobbins) minimizes theory too in favor of the modest endeavor of painting one discrete picture after another, typified by his remark that “every painting is a way of learning to say one thing clearly.”

In an essay written for the exhibit, Dobbins sums up Nozkowski’s method by emphasizing his force of intention and the pursuit of pictorial “rightness.” “When an image isn’t realized, the slate is scraped or wiped down; there is a correcting and editing of what came before, and as time passes, more moments are realized. Elaborations are made and images are revealed,” writes Dobbins. The pictures retain ghosts of previous layers, murky stains, scars, and little imperfections from excessive handling and countless revisions, giving them the quality of a relic.

The first grievance anyone usually has with abstract painting these days is that plying such territory amounts to navel-gazing formalism — patently regressive and content to trifle with aesthetic arguments that have long been settled. Matters are, of course, not that cut-and-dried, and Dobbins, an abstract painter himself, is certainly attuned to the way that picture-making is first and foremost an idiosyncratic enterprise and that the subtle iterations in the studio are wedded to the fluctuations of daily life. “The artist’s view can give and sway, the same way recollections of a time or place can be altered by a heavy lunch, the rattle of the subway, the thickness of the hot Memphis air,” according to Dobbins. The more confessional Richter asserted that “the notion of neutrality and objectivity is an illusion” since “every painting includes my inability, my powerlessness things that are subjective.” Richter further maintained that it is precisely that subjective quotient which thus reckons the works “legitimate to be painted.”

If that remark is in diametric opposition to his prior quotation, it is only classic Richter to make contradictory statements to interviewers, to feign ignorance, or to just be reticent to articulate much at all, which ironically only foments the very intellectual and aesthetic suppositions about his work among the ideologues from whom he ostensibly cowers. A similar, if more subtle, paradox holds true for Nozkowski’s noncommittal swagger. In an art world that is widely characterized as being in a posthistorical condition — i.e., all genres of art are retreads, ultimately — brassy ambivalence is just another polemic.

Through December 11th.

At a recent soirée, a compliment for a review of mine was capped by the backhanded admonition to “keep writing — don’t get a day job.” Ouch, I sniveled silently. The sting of the remark was due in large measure to its truthfulness, given that the liberty I enjoy to pursue the speculative vocations of artist and writer is subsidized by the consistency and relative stability of my loving spouse’s profession. Like anyone in the arts, I labor under the anticipation (or grandiose illusion) of a value-added payoff, so the reality check was not at all appreciated. As I digested the aside with conflicted emotions and gathered my composure, the incident triggered thoughts of the wrathful beings who inhabit much of “Worlds Of Transformation” at the Brooks Museum, a collection of sacred paintings (tangkas) from Tibet.

The depictions of these ferocious deities — ablaze and billowing smoke, with bulging bloodshot eyes and gaping mouths, riding beasts or trampling enemies, wielding terrifying weapons, slurping blood from skull cups or engaged in seemingly volatile sexual couplings, often simultaneously — concentrate such symbolic force not as an embrace of violence and aggression but as an antidote to one’s own destructive self-grasping. The Indian saint Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Siddhartha Gautama), distinguished in many of the 30 tangkas on view by his saffron-colored robe and begging bowl, recognized that the afflictions of beings are spawned by hope and fear and that the path of equanimity and compassion is one’s salvation from suffering.

The contemplative traditions of Tibet have sought to cultivate the unique method of transforming the base material of afflictive thoughts and emotions into enlightenment gold. Perhaps the narrative behind the several tangkas depicting Yamantaka Vajrabhairava, one of the most fierce dharmapalas (protectors) of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon, will help elucidate:

The story goes that a yogi occupied a cave for an extended retreat and was so absorbed in his meditation that he was unperturbed even after poachers chased a water buffalo into the cave. The men cornered the animal then butchered and ate it. In the firelight, the poachers noticed the motionless form of the yogi still absorbed in his meditation and, for fear of being fingered by a witness to their criminal act, straightaway chopped off his head. The accomplished yogi, returning to his body to find it headless, groped about and inadvertently donned the decapitated head of the water buffalo, flying into a blind rage, devouring the poachers and terrorizing the countryside, annihilating everything in his path as an emanation of Yama, the lord of death.

After discovering his power too great to overcome, saints and lamas began to supplicate the deity Manjushri, the embodiment of wisdom, for protection against Yama. Manjushri, in his limitless compassion for beings, manifested as Yamantaka Vajrabhairava by assuming the very likeness of Yama but magnified exponentially, sporting nine faces, 34 arms brandishing weapons, and 16 legs, utterly subduing Yama and transforming him into a protector of the Dharma.

This story illustrates a recurring theme in Tibetan cosmologies — that of hideousness and intensity overcome by an even more devastating image of itself. Tibet, before the introduction of Buddhism in the 7th century, was a feared militaristic culture, and no doubt, the remnants of that legacy live on in the wrathful deities and the spiritual implements germane to the practice of Vajrayana Buddhism, taking the form of various maces, swords, daggers, axes, and lassos, as portrayed in the grisly Realm Of Yamantaka and the Dharma Protectors. The adaptation of the instruments of destruction and death to the purpose of spiritual practice mirrors the path of the tantrica, where the very poisons of self-grasping become the implements for the transformation of consciousness.

Robert Thurman, an author, educator, and respected Buddhist scholar who will lecture at the Brooks on Sunday, September 22nd, at 2 p.m., says that Yamantaka Vajrabhairava’s array of weapons and “universe-devouring ferocity [are] only for destroying the universe of self-addiction and self-obsession,” symbolically “reflecting evil beings’ horrific nature back to them magnified infinitely, petrifying them with terror, immobilizing them in the inescapable prison of infinite voidness, sustaining them and teaching them with inexhaustible patience, and finally transmuting them, their deepest hearts’ life energies, into the blissful world of altruistic goodness.”

Of course, the “infinite voidness” to which Thurman refers stems from the Buddhist notion that phenomena are devoid of any intrinsic identity but arise in relation to one another in an endless cycle of cause and effect. Ultimately, the no-nonsense bluntness of wrathful means, by putting everything on the table (including awkward social collisions), ruthlessly penetrates base emotions, cravings, aversions, habits, and qualities that would otherwise be regarded as anathema to a spiritual path, transforming them through the recognition that they are nothing more than vacillations of the mind.

“Worlds Of Transformation: Tibetan Art Of Wisdom and Compassion,” through October 27th.

At the end of the year, Mark Nowell is relinquishing the helm of ArtFarm Gallery of Fine Art and the arts publication Bluff, enterprises the metal sculptor initiated to focus attention on the artist community that has occupied the Marshall-Monroe neighborhood since the mid-’80s. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been so distracted by a cause, politics, [and] being the member of a community,” he says. “But now, I want to go back into the studio.” With the loss of Nowell’s persistent leadership and recent speculation regarding the area’s redevelopment by the city, the future of ArtFarm seems increasingly fragile.

The earliest motivation for ArtFarm, says Nowell, was simply to coordinate an arts festival and open house to encourage patronage in the neighborhood. Later, the effort was expanded to create an artists association when the area, dubbed the “Edge” in 2000, was targeted as part of the Center City Commission’s Memphis Medical District Master Plan. Following four ArtFarm festivals in the past several years, this summer’s “EdgeFest” on August 17th was the first organized by the Edge Community Association, a “big brother” to ArtFarm that encompasses the interests of not just artists but a variety of businesses and residents in the area, including bars and restaurants, a Baptist church, a tattoo parlor, and several garages. Mike Todd, president of the Edge Community Association, says the moniker better characterizes the neighborhood’s geographic orientation to downtown while also celebrating its “eclectic heritage and cutting-edge perspective.”

The attention generated by the neighborhood’s real estate has accelerated considerably as downtown redevelopment — the light-rail extension on Madison; the proximity of AutoZone Park; UT’s biomedical research facility slated for the site of the former Baptist Medical Center Campus — has effectively surrounded the area. The CCC’s plan for the Edge calls for the reconfiguration of the dizzy cluster of streets to enable increased storefronts on Madison, buildings designed for both retail and residential use, parking garages, and a 250-room hotel adjacent to historic Sun Studio.

The inevitable development of the Edge, hastened by Memphis’ emerging status as a hub for medical research, is ultimately beneficial to the once-blighted area and for Memphis at large, but it will require deliberate action by artists and the city to ensure the continued presence of an art community. As the Sohos and South Mains of the world can attest, the casualties of redevelopment are often the very occupants who gave the neighborhood its distinctiveness and charm. Gentrification is predictable, so enlightened municipalities have established decisive means of incubating artists’ activity and preserving cultural amenities as assets to redevelopment even while property values rise.

Claudio Perez-Leon, who worked for the formation of both an artist and community association in the neighborhood in 2000, holds the view that the artists’ only hope is to become property owners through tax incentives, tax freezes, or matching funds to purchase targeted renovations and infill development. Todd says a proposal for Tax Incremental Financing status, where all taxes generated by redevelopment remain in the district to foster further growth, might be useful for “providing down-payment assistance for artists purchasing buildings or rent buy-downs.”

Other means of retaining artists are rent control, subsidized studio spaces, or artist-relocation programs. Both Nowell and Perez-Leon cite case studies of such efforts throughout the country. The South Main Arts District’s response to gentrification, the much-touted “artist incubator,” is envisioned as a residency program that subsidizes artist’s living and working space for finite terms of occupancy, though, unfortunately, it still has no funding or location. Danita Beck, artist, independent curator, and project manager for the UrbanArt Commission, who recently returned to Memphis after living and working in Boston, witnessed that city’s South End District artists acting collectively to ensure rent control in designated studio spaces when the price of real estate ballooned.

“We need this. We need to keep this going,” Beck emphasizes. Her interest and involvement with ArtFarm began after she got back to town and discovered the limited venues for art exhibits, where “even restaurants and cafes had gone to more exclusive lists and galleries,” whereas the atmosphere at ArtFarm is accessible and open to experimentation and even risk. Beck believes that there is still a lot of potential for the continued presence of artists if they will organize and build some alliances, suggesting that perhaps even neighbor AutoZone Park and the Redbirds would be interested in the ArtFarm effort.

Beck is one of a team that will operate ArtFarm when Nowell takes his leave. The group, which also includes Melissa Barry, Teresa White, Monique Poussan, and Suzy Hendrix, has been working in the gallery for over a year and hopes to utilize the space as a cooperative gallery, according to Nowell. All have been instrumental in the coordination of several recent events at the gallery: the Summer Harvest exhibit, including two excellent and sorely underappreciated local painters, Frank D. Robinson and Corey Crowder, and the introduction of performance nights, the first of which featured Normal To Oily, a film by David Horan and Michael Schmidt, music and dance by Metal Velvet, and paintings by Wess Loudenslager. Nowell is confident that the gallery, where he will assume the curtailed duties of “maintenance man,” is in capable hands if it can just weather the redevelopment. He hopes that someone will step in to carry on Bluff.

To officially end his leadership of ArtFarm, Nowell has published a pamphlet which warns of possible gentrification in the Edge and is a final plea for recognition of the neighborhood as an official arts district to ensure that studios and working spaces remain safe and affordable. He believes that the fate of the artists’ community is at a crossroads, that the unique contributions artists have made to the area should be recognized and preserved as assets or they will be “squashed and dissolved because of rapid urban growth.”

“Are we going to have another bar district or do something to get artists to stay in Memphis?” crows Nowell, who insists that failing to nuture the “creative class” ensures a steady brain drain, as young artists leave the city for greener pastures. “Forget trying to get them to come here. Just get some of them to stay — the Carlos Villisantes and Robert Fordyces and countless others that have gone on, year after year, and move to Brooklyn, Miami, and San Francisco. People move. They don’t stay here, and it’s not being addressed! There’s no reason for them to stay. So let’s just start with an affordable studio district where you can be around other artists and start producing without having to worry about getting robbed.”

I have recently been corrupted by the collected writings of Joseph Kosuth. Introduced to me by painter Dick Knowles, whose work is prominent in the 20-year retrospective at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Kosuth was a writer and conceptual artist who insisted that the role of the artist in society is to question the nature and purpose of art. In his essay “Painting Versus Art Versus Culture,” Kosuth writes, “The point is that the creative work of the artist in art-making is not in making another object in a commodified world full of objects, but in having an effect as a maker on the meaning of art.” This, I considered while perusing “Twenty @ 20,” an undoubtedly handsome collection of professional artists’ work that, with a few exceptions, ultimately struck me as a flat and conservative affair.

Knowles has labeled himself a “Kosuthian,” which is peculiar, given Kosuth’s rhetoric regarding traditional painting’s demise and Knowles’ own dogged pursuit of abstract painting. About this apparent contradiction, Knowles is unfazed, indicating that he can appreciate the rigor of Kosuth’s argument for a broader definition of art and the limitations of formalism while continuing to benefit from a rich studio practice. What Knowles finds most appealing in Kosuth is the notion that the “validity of artistic propositions is not dependent on any empirical, much less any aesthetic, presupposition about the nature of things” but that the meaning of art is defined by its creator.

Consistent with the artist’s evolving art-making process, Knowles’ Aerial View #3 and Mississippi Valley, which are from 1981’s “Views,” are defiantly modern, painterly abstractions structured after maps and aerial photos. The artist’s most recent work, with its many drips, pours, and splatters, reflects an escalation of the intuitive component of his process. Knowles says, “Starting in the ’80s, I wanted to somehow avoid structuring, reducing, idealizing nature [in favor of] letting the means of the paint application reflect the seemingly chaotic — at least, highly complex — and unpredictable way that nature herself forms. From that perspective, these aerial views can be viewed as ‘objective,’ in that I attempted to remove my will to order and mimic nature’s ordering.”

Tony Moore and Hugh O’Donnell engage in a more postmodern-friendly version of abstraction, avoiding the hazard of navel-gazing formalism by basing their work on the body. Moore’s paintings from 1990 incorporate Celtic and medieval heraldry but also “[Barnett] Newman’s ratio for symbolizing the shape and presence of the human figure.” Similarly, O’Donnell encouraged the students who worked on the drawings for 1995’s “Body Echo” to introduce the natural movement of the body into the process. But if not for the wall texts conveying their pertinent social contexts, these scrawls, blobs, and doodles would pass as good, old-fashioned abstraction.

Wall texts are also significant in a series of photographs for “Czech Out Memphis” by Petr Lysacek and David Horan from 1994. Lysacek, collaborating with faculty and students, assumed the role of Elvis for staged copies of famous PR shots, like the one of the King shaking hands with Nixon or posing as Brando. Leslie Luebbers, the museum’s director, says that the subject of the enterprise was “Lysacek’s humorous confrontation between Eastern-European conceptions of America and his actual experience of it.” One must assume that the scant objects on view (the photos and humble T-shirts he wore for the pictures) are mere mementos rather than the essence of the art’s meaning.

Kosuth credits Marcel Duchamp as the artist responsible for the ideological shift in art’s meaning, writing that the introduction of the readymade “changed the nature of art from a question of morphology (mimesis) to a question of function.” Greely Myatt’s Monument, from 1990’s “de Nada for Terry,” is a pile of chairs and birdhouses that rise in a huge jumble, which, Luebbers points out, leaves the objects unusable, mirroring Duchamp’s readymades. What is unmistakable in Myatt’s work, built from seemingly useless scrap lumber and old signage, is the potency of his humorous commentary on art history, which mimicks and mocks the work of art-world big shots like Duchamp and Philip Guston. For Myatt, the appearance of the art, despite its ample craft, is subordinate to the idea intimated.

“Twenty @ 20” also includes work by Kiki Smith, William Eggleston, and Jene Highstein, among others. Dorothy Sturm’s From the Book of Solomon series from 1937, exquisitely rendered watercolors illustrating biblical themes, and a couple of drawings by Caroll Cloar are perhaps the most dated works on view, reflecting Memphis’ regionalist roots. The rising status of folk and outsider art during the ’80s is indicated by the inclusion of Memphian Joe Light. For the most part, however, the exhibit is a veritable time capsule of the last few decades — academic proclivities in art, once fresh, now petrified in amber.

Through September 7th.

Having grown up in Memphis during the 1970s, I have always associated Ted Faiers with his humorous work from that decade, figurative pictures that depict politicians, good ole boys, and the like as hapless boobs. The folkish paintings, from which 3-D pot bellies, limbs, and implements jut playfully and portraits stare doe-eyed, invite the perception of Faiers as strictly a regionalist. But the new exhibit of the artist’s work from the 1950s at the David Lusk Gallery suggests otherwise.

Faiers was born in England in 1908 and moved with his family to Canada as a teenager. It wasn’t until his early 40s that he began to pursue painting as a primary vocation. He studied first at the University of Alberta and then at the Art Students League in New York, where he met mentor Will Barnet and was introduced to “Indian Space,” a movement that bristled against abstract expressionism and sought to extrapolate from cubism. In a catalog essay for the Lusk exhibit, Bill Anthes, assistant professor of art history at the University of Memphis, says the Indian Space painters “found inspiration in indigenous sources: pre-Columbian Inca textiles from Peru and the paintings and carvings of the Northwest Coast.”

The paintings at Lusk are from a period just after Faiers’ arrival in Memphis in 1952 to the time he began teaching at the Memphis Academy of Art, and they bear the influence of Indian Space, characterized by what Anthes describes as “drum-tight, flat surfaces packed with ideographic patterns.” While vegetative or mechanical forms are often recognizable, narrative takes a back seat to the joys of bold form, brash color, and compositional equipoise.

In an artist statement from 1972, Faiers described this transition to the South as initially jarring, being designated “a damn Yankee” in his very first encounter with a Memphian: “My limited knowledge of the South indicated the Civil War was long over, but the roll of distant musketry had sounded behind me and I hastened my footsteps. I was in a land very new to me — I was alien, and this little incident underlined that fact. I had pulled up roots of long growth and was in the process of transplantation.”

Before coming to Memphis, Faiers’ paintings focused on landscape and the figure, but the “sense of detachment from an as-yet unfamiliar locale brought on a series of seemingly nonobjective works for which subject matter was drawn from the comfortable and familiar atmosphere of my current domestic environment — home and garden.”

The rendering in Faiers’ paintings, such as Concerning a Tree (1955), emphasizes what Barnet describes as a “love of purity and geometry in painting, the beauty of a flat surface, [and] a cohesive quality of structure and clear forms.” Bean pods and acorns, carpenters’ tools and aliens are skillfully delineated with serpentine ribbons of color. The distinct flavor of Faiers’ graphic mark as well as the palette of earthen olives, oxides, ochers, purples, and pinks are informed by the artist’s knowledge of the woodcut, a medium with which he was equally prolific during his career.

A real oddball in the show is Throne of a Martian King (1956). Straying from the block-print mode, it is a decidedly more painterly effort — swaths of translucent orange woven over a simple underpainting, behaving as a tart scrim. Orange Flight (1958) is from Faiers’ experiments with calligraphic line, influenced by the similar inquiry of pal and fellow teacher Burton Callicott. Around 1960, Faiers returned to a more obvious use of the figure, and Oh Oh Mama from 1962 depicts the hourglass torso and draped tresses of a nude. Of this period, Faiers remarked, “There had been much said in the 1950s of the ‘end of figurative painting’ and in the putting down of ‘social comment.’ I found some satisfaction in attacking these taboos.”

Faiers is remembered by longtime friend and patron Don Bennett as “very droll and self-effacing,” that he would “never brag about what he was doing or give the impression that he had answers” but that he did love “making fun of the world.” Callicott has said that “like Hogarth and Daumier, he was a keen observer of contemporary life and mores — and like them he had a special awareness for the comic and false.”

Several of the articles I found relating to Faiers express regret that the artist has been slow to receive proper acclaim. In a 1979 article from The Commercial Appeal, Faiers said, “In terms of art, Memphis is passive. There’s only a small group which understands or pays attention. People who have money are basically conservative. For artists, Memphis is a $200 town.” But lest one get the impression that he was miserable, he added, “I’ve been happy working here. I think it’s always been true that situations which seem adverse can be a creative stimulus to an artist.”

Through July 6th.

As artists and critics gravitate toward conceptual, often arcane modes of

expression, what relevance does painting have in

contemporary art? In a review of the painting-sparse 2002 Whitney Biennial in the April

29th issue of The Nation, critic Arthur Danto observed

that “whether someone can paint or draw is no more

relevant than whether they can sew or cook,” but

that being an artist today “consists in having an idea

and then using whatever means are necessary to

realize it.” Younger artists increasingly shun traditional

painting and sculpture in favor of photography,

installation, performance, and every new advancement

in digital technology. Consequently, artists who are

still devoted to the incremental gains of the studio are

often looked upon as stubborn Luddites.

No doubt, much of the contempt arises from

the very notion of the individual artist’s solitary

pursuit of art. In a recent lecture at the Memphis College

of Art, author and critic Suzi Gablik reiterated the

conventional wisdom that governs surveys like the Whitney, championing “socially conscious and

participatory” forms of art and suggesting that the

studio arts have long since exhausted themselves,

even applying PC hubris to the purveyors of visual

aesthetics as the “hegemony of the eye.”

But not every artist or ideologue complies with

that line of thinking, and alongside the reemerging

dialogue regarding beauty, a corresponding esteem for painting

is evident. If the local art houses are any indication

of painting’s status, it certainly shows no sign of

endangerment. The following lists some of the high points:

Jason Story: I asked Story what he thought of

Gablik’s lecture. “Not much,” he grumbled. “But then, I’m

an artist.” Story’s “Reverie” series at the University of

Memphis MFA Thesis exhibit is typified by a palette of

narcotic pinks, peaches, and plums as well as a reeling

flotsam of images. The collision of bubblegum color

and arbitrary form casts a blurry-eyed wink at digital

media and raised-on-TV information overload.

Larry Edwards: Everyone says “Pink

Flamingos and Other Animals” at Jay Etkin Gallery is a

tame show by Edwards’ incendiary standards, and while

no trademark severed heads make an appearance,

dark sentiments do abound. The artist painted this

year’s Memphis In May poster, and considering

Argentina’s financial and political upheavals of late,

perhaps Edwards’ sinister narratives are all too apropos.

The scorching pink and yellow hues of Misstep in the

Flamingo Room raise the temperature of the abject

violence depicted, even as a gaggle of nearby

flamingos passively ignores the aggression. One can only

wonder what issues inspired Abandoned Baby, which

depicts a swaddled infant helplessly lying in the

high grass as a horde of crows descends upon it.

Kathleen Holder: The pictures by Holder

currently on view at David Lusk Gallery are intended to

invite contemplation. The “Temenos” series embodies

elements germane to spiritual symbolism and meditative

absorption: bifurcated symmetry, monochromatic surfaces, and

elusive, ghostlike apparitions. The crimson that glows at the

center of Temenos V is seemingly illumined from within, and

what appears as a navel or nipple that one would swear is

embossed upon the surface of the plane is in fact illusory.

Bruce Brainard: Also at David Lusk Gallery, Brainard’s

traditional brand of landscape painting also invites contemplation but focuses

on the beauty and majesty of God’s creation. The sun dramatically

pierces the clouds at dusk in Evergreen

Skyline, a painting which showcases Brainard’s deft handling of the oil medium, especially with regard to

the simple yet deliberate à la prima technique. The artist exhibits this

same confidence throughout, but the perched orb of the sun in the middle

of Recognition, milking that same bifurcated symmetry, aims for

sacred profundity that comes off more as corny sentiment.

“In Celebration of Spring”:

The present show at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts is also built around the tradition of the

landscape but much more loosely than Brainard’s work. For

instance, Arista Alanis’ pictures, like Six Blocks

Away, explode with Technicolor brashness and painterly crudeness and could

otherwise fall into the category of Ab-Ex painting but what

gorgeous surfaces. Susan Maakestad, on the other hand,

exhibits intellectual and emotional coolness in the simplification of

the landscape into horizontal sectors divided by a horizon.

John Dilg is likewise cool in Wilderness, in which a fallen tree

and stump are rendered with clinical precision. n

U of M MFA Thesis Exhibit through June 8th; Larry

Edwards at Jay Etkin Gallery through June 7th; Kathleen Holder and

Bruce Brainard at David Lusk Gallery through June 1st; “In

Celebration of Spring” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts through June 18th.

Manus manum lavat. (One hand washes the other.) — Petronius

The obvious role of politics in the uneven “Side by Side” show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is so shameless it eclipses a serious discussion of the art. Any artist would, of course, be a fool not to accept an invitation to show at the Brooks, and the participants deserve no blame for accepting. Therefore, I apologize to them in advance for the following non-review.

“Side by Side” is predicated on “Departures,” which showed at the J. Paul Getty Museum in L.A. a couple of years ago. Regional artists were invited to create an artwork inspired by a piece in the Brooks’ permanent collection. The works were then installed alongside their inspirations, sprinkled throughout the museum, initiating a veritable Easter egg hunt that exposes viewers to the entire collection. But the invitational is stunted by the same old dull curatorial mandate to represent all constituencies, academic or otherwise. It begs the question: Has the committee that selects the annual Arts in the Park invitational found something to do in the off-season?

That’s harsh, you say? Back in 1998, a Fredric Koeppel review in The Commercial Appeal summed up Brooks’ 10-year retrospective of Arts in the Park under the subtitle “Dubious selection process degrades honorees.” Taking in the decade-long survey, Koeppel observed that, year after year, artists were not “chosen because they were essential, indispensable, and indisputedly talented, not because our community would be inconsolably diminished if they weren’t working in our midst, but because that year happened to be their turn.”

Little has changed about the prejudiced criteria Koeppel cited in his article; if anything, they are more firmly established. The regional artists selected for “Side by Side” are so boringly predictable, particularly in the deference paid to educational institutions. How not-so-ironic that, of the 32 artists invited to participate in “Side by Side,” Koeppel’s math in ’98 still applies perfectly today, in that “slightly more than half that number are (or were) teachers at Rhodes, U of M, the College of Art,” etc. Of course, the implication is that artist-teachers are ipso facto meritorious artists and that art institutions are the undisputed heart of the art community. If the world were just, it might be true, but the corollary between institutions and excellent art is circumstantial at best.

That fraction of “Side by Side” artists not typified by academic standing is conspicuously filled by one of several other categories equally irrelevant to compelling art. How about a shout out to the South Main Arts District? If Jay Etkin of Jay Etkin Gallery is in the first half of the exhibit, which he is, then, of course, the second half, opening this summer, must include Ephraim Urevbu, proprietor of Art Village Gallery across the trolley tracks from Etkin. Ironically, the calculated attempt in “Side by Side” to not leave anybody out uses up the opportunity for authentic diversity.

The cut-and-dried lineup of “Side by Side” is, with few exceptions, the easy choices, the obvious choices, and the same choices. Several contributors are veterans of the Brooks’ two other recent exhibits showcasing Mid-South artists — 2000’s “Do It,” in which an advisory panel of artist-managers enlisted artists to create work following the written instructions of famous artists like Yoko Ono, and last year’s excellent “Perspectives,” a juried survey of local art. “Perspectives” stands out because it benefited from the integrity of an outside curator and because persuasive art was what primarily motivated his selection process, as opposed to the unsuccessful outcome of “Do It”‘s trickle-down theory or the milquetoast boosterism of “Side by Side.”

The real casualty of the selection committee’s fixation with political correctness and inclusiveness is, as always, the art. That is not to imply that “Side by Side” doesn’t feature some estimable art, just that it is undermined by the equal regard paid to lesser efforts.High points like the stellar installation after Luca Giordano’s painting The Massacre of the Children of Niobe by Tom Lee of MCA or the exquisitely painted Café by U of M’s Jed Jackson are attended by a gnawing suspicion that their inclusion is founded on some pathetic notion of democracy rather than their individual contributions to the exhibit.

I wonder what works realists Kathryn Manzo, Marc Rouillard, or Adam Shaw would respond to in the museum if given the opportunity. Or whether the selection committee is familiar with Pam Cobb, Don Estes, Mark Gooch, Nancy Hall, Greg Haller, Jeri Ledbetter, Mark Nowell, Jonathan Postal, Frank D. Robinson, Brian Russell, and Johnny Taylor. Will Charlie Miller be recognized for his fabulous paintings in this lifetime? How about the young guns Bob Burdette, Brook Grant, Marci Brown-Frye, Jason Story, Emily Walls, and Tad Lauritzen-Wright? Is the best they can hope for is hocking their work at the Playhouse On the Square art auction?

Through June 9th.

Evening At the Improv

I recently found myself engaged in a mild argument following the slide lecture

and informal interview with renowned painter Lisa Yuskavage at the Brooks

Museum. The issue: Yuskavage’s refusal to engage in a discussion of gender

issues raised by the racy content of her paintings.

The artist presented images of work dating from the early ’90s to the present —

heaving bosoms and pursed lips of lounging seductresses cast in a soft-porn

afterglow, which inflamed lust, cynicism, or dry wit from those present. A

moderated interview that was supposed to follow the lecture never got off the

ground. Instead, Yuskavage drifted into a protracted shtick of self-deprecating

banter and intimate disclosures, punctuated by several well-timed gags from

giddy audience members. But for anyone desiring a full-frontal reckoning of her

use of negative stereotypes, the artist dismissed the subject with impunity.

The unapologetic explicitness of Yuskavage’s canvases follows a current in

culture and criticism that invokes the notion of women as libidinous, albeit

sovereign, beings. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, Tracey Emin’s

stained and disheveled My Bed, or the popular HBO series Sex In the City

present gendered themes which are perhaps antagonistic to patriarchy but are

more confessional than confrontational. Yuskavage’s stereotypical blond

bombshells, sporting baby-doll pouts and tan lines, are portrayed with tender

empathy or, more importantly, in the words of University of Memphis painting

professor Beth Edwards, “without irony.”

“She gets such impish joy from pushing your buttons,” says Darla Linerode-Henson

of Yuskavage, referring to the artist’s painted sexpots gazing banally into the

eyes of the viewer, her eye-popping primary-color schemes, and even the

artist’s public demeanor. Yuskavage gushed about how her “fancy” art dealers,

critics, etc. were obliged by their professions to repeat titles such as The

Asspicker and Motherfucking Foodeater “over and over and over.”

Likewise, she projected a Vermeer alongside pages from a ’70s-era Penthouse

to mumbles and nervous giggles, asking viewers to recognize the “Dutch light”

in Bob Guccione’s cheesecake photos.

Of course, subversive behavior is infectious, and one fellow, sensing slackened

mores, caught the artist off-guard with the compliment “Your tits have gotten a

lot better over the years.” Then a quavering voice behind me trumped that, to

riotous laughter, with “When you’re older, do you think you will still paint

such perfect breasts?” Such was the tenor of the evening.

But a young woman’s inquiry regarding pornography received a terse “I smell

theory in that question” from Yuskavage consistent with her attitude of leaving

ideology to the critics and not being pigeonholed by gender-rooted

interpretations of her provocative imagery. And her position is fundamentally

legitimate, barring one objection. The artist, brought to Memphis by the U of M

art department with the generous aid of Delta Axis’ Dr. James Patterson, asked

as a condition of her visit that Dr. Katy Siegel accompany her to conduct the

interview. Siegel, former faculty member at U of M, critic, and contributing

editor of Artforum, is one of Yuskavage’s ideological proponents and

wrote the essay “Local Color” for the artist’s monograph, which was

published concurrent with her retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary

Art in Philadelphia last year. For many, by not addressing the question she

dared the audience to pose (“Why are you so obnoxious?”) while courting her

critic, Yuskavage seemed to be denying the elephant in the room.

Gender-o-rama

Among the many attending the floor act at the Brooks was Allana Clarke, local

curator of “Venus Envy,” an event opening March 30th in both Memphis and St.

Louis featuring visual art and performance created exclusively by women. The

annual “celebration” began in 1999 in St Louis with a conviction that “women

are primarily responsible for perpetuating culture and strengthening the arts

in our world,” says “V.E.” founder and chairwoman Mallarie Zimmer. Memphis is

the first satellite city to observe the event, and organizers plan to expand

into other metropolises in the future. “V.E.” in Memphis promises to be a

treat, given the impressive lineup: Elizabeth Alley, Danita Beck, Brenda Fisk,

Jean Flint, Anastasia Laurenzi, the aforementioned Linerode-Henson, Carol

Harding McTyre, Annabelle Meacham, Leslie Snoke, Mel Spillman, Amanda Wood, and

Nanci Zimmer.

Clarke assures that, despite the “mature audiences” disclaimer in the

literature, the art in “V.E.” is “not as provocative as Yuskavage’s body of

work.” However, with the hoopla over the public art at the entrance to the new

library and the Memphis-Germantown Art League’s ridiculous hand-wringing over a

nude, Clarke, a recent graduate of Rhodes College, wouldn’t be surprised if

some were “offended by the tampon cross or bra-wearing feline.”

Linerode-Henson’s Emerge, exhibited at U of M’s juried student exhibit

earlier this year, is an anachronistic choice for the gender-conscious

theme: a writhing length of articulated pipe, tipped by an orange glass bulb,

dangling flaccidly from the wall.

Otherwise, says Zimmer, “V.E.” doesn’t have any axes to grind, insisting that

the enterprise cannot be reduced to any “political, religious, or sexual [huh?]

identity.” Clarke adds, “Some of the work has strong feminine content, some

work could be interpreted as sexual, and other pieces do not seem to relate to

women at all, except that a woman produced them.”

Such broad criteria beg the question: Does “Venus Envy” designate a theme so

ubiquitous as to dilute any urgency that the provocative moniker implies? Go

find out for yourself.

“Venus Envy,” 960 S. Cooper (at the corner of Cooper and Young), 7-9 p.m.

Saturday, March 30th.