Author: David Hall

Dying rednecks, Rebel flags, and off-road vehicles populate Colin McLain’s new batch of paintings, “Redneck Resume,” at David Lusk Gallery, while over at the Memphis College of Art, coinciding with Black History Month, the exhibit “Shadows & Silhouettes: The Dangerous Faces of Willie Cole and Juan Logan” explores identity, dignity, and oppression in the context of the African diaspora. And next I’m going to ask you to stick out your tongue and take your medicine. Not really, but that is often the perception of shows that adopt such grave and/or acerbic postures.

In the last few decades, there has been a prominent notion among artists, curators, art historians, etc., that art is a vehicle of social and political consequence, manifesting in dissections of gender, race, class, geopolitical issues, and almost anything else imaginable. There is, however, a flip side — a suspicion of art experiences that are supposed to be “good for you,” suggesting that such enterprises generally have a limited scope of cultural influence, remaining instead inside a privileged cocoon of the like-minded and self-congratulatory.

These two exhibits in particular couldn’t be more astringent to regional sensitivities and obsessions with race and class. McLain’s crudely drawn pickup trucks emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag and superimposed over fields of camouflage scream Deliverance. The use of the hotly disputed emblem by the artist is decisive, a recognition of its potency as “both a badge of Southern pride and an encapsulation of hate.” The work of Cole and Logan, referencing the systematic shuffling of African Americans into the lowest rungs of labor and society, is a heritage that many defenders of the Stars and Bars ironically wish could be left behind. “What is an inspiration for some,” intones McLain, “inspires fear and loathing in others.”

The attention showered upon “Shadows & Silhouettes” — including a swank dinner party for the artists, the purchase of Cole’s Man, Spirit, Mask by the Brooks Museum, and no less than three separate stories about the exhibit in the daily newspaper — is unprecedented in Memphis. The timing of the exhibit during Black History Month and the attendant fanfare perhaps hold more sway over the impact of the work of Cole and Logan than any single interpretation of its multifaceted content. Scholarship and reviews included in the press kit, plus coverage by the local media (“Two-man show reflects on racist vestiges”), seem to fixate on the exhibit’s sociopolitical signification above its other estimable qualities.

While there is no denying the identifying marks of ethnicity, the exhibit obviously weaves Western art values with African motifs, evident from the use of found objects, conceptual art, and a grab-bag approach to cultural appropriation that is positively postmodern. The exhibit, deftly curated by Cynthia Thompson, while not abandoning serious intellectual content, seems to follow a current in art that revels as much in visceral punch as refined craft. Logan’s Whose Song Shall I Sing? is a series of multiples, resin faces cast in soft, molten contours and coated with a velvety chocolate patina that resembles a delectable confection. The round jowls and puffy lips of this comical character, smiling in a gesture of appeasement and servitude, call to mind the archetypal Aunt Jemima or Step ‘n’ Fetchit, an identity created ultimately by ignoble white culture. However, the grid-like installation of dozens of masks is strictly modern, even clinical, transforming a benign, familiar caricature into a grinning menace.

Playfulness and a sense of humor characterize the work of Cole and Logan, taking the edge off of its serious content, an element that McLain also utilizes in his oil paintings to good effect. The artist is still making cartoons with bubblegum-color combos and comic-strip narratives, but we’re not talking Peanuts here. The inspiration for McLain’s slumping, lurching, and prone characters is Robert Capa’s photograph Death of a Loyalist Soldier, which captures a combatant at the moment he is shot during the Spanish Civil War, an image credited as being the first close-up photo of armed conflict. Similarly, Fugazi depicts an unfortunate redneck at the instant of his doom, his body seized by a bullet, leaving a trail of crimson.

As perplexing as the blending of rednecks, violent death, and the Sunday comics is, McLain continues to grow as a painter. Gone are the excessive drips and convoluted sloppiness of the earlier work; one might even suggest that the artist’s technique has become slick. Rather than the complementary and tertiary color relationships so characteristic of his prior work, the artist offers more complexity in his palette, even if it is still quite pungent. What hasn’t changed, thankfully, is his fresh approach to line, using the vernacular of the cartoonist to achieve deliciously painterly results à la Philip Guston.

Distilling what is essential about these two excellent shows is difficult in the shadow of their prickly or even incendiary themes. McLain’s convergence of incongruous motifs is enigmatic, perhaps purposely so, but, while one finds hot-button issues broached, no palpable stand can be discerned. Cole and Logan’s message is unequivocal, even while their symbolism is more poetic, but does it amount to preaching to the choir?

“Shadows & Silhouettes” through February 28th; “Redneck Resume” through February 23rd.

A really delicious book, What Painting Is by James Elkins, parallels the methods and materials of painting with that of alchemy. It is a theme that is not adopted for the sake of mere poetry but as a vehicle to best articulate the inexact science of thinking through substances, the aim of both the artist and alchemist. The mixing of pigment and medium by the artist is likened to the alchemist’s concoctions from water and stone, and Elkins ventures into alchemy as a counter to the inadequacy with which art scholarship has treated the subject: “Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. All those meanings are intact in the paintings that hang in museums: they preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the paintings are about. Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought. That is an essential fact that art history misses .”

This little text came to mind while I was looking at the new work by Adam Shaw at Jay Etkin Gallery and Corey Crowder at Perry Nicole Fine Art. While the two are very different painters stylistically, both embody a certain kind of ascetic discipline, growth that is only attained by getting one’s hands dirty in the studio. This single-minded determination is palpable, for example, in Shaw’s chancing an impetuous slash of fleshy pigment in Summer Evening 2834, challenging his disposition toward precise and reasoned brushwork. For Crowder, pushing the envelope means painting on a heavy slab of concrete, as in Dramatic Symbols for Compound 3. They don’t teach you that in art school.

Crowder’s unusual choice of media is delightfully nasty, the surface tortured with pits, cracks, and crags and shards of Plexiglas painted in earthy grays, mustard, and grimy asphaltum. It’s this junkyard approach that makes Last Resting Place of Simon the Moth so enticing. Consisting of an old chunk of peeling and scorched wood combined with a moth theme and an insect carcass under amber glass, the work ventures into territory generally too close to angst for my taste, but I’ll make an exception here. The tactile appeal of Crowder’s surfaces is that they reflect the struggle with material substances and the rigors of process that define the act of painting.

While Shaw’s figurative paintings may be more traditional, they have no less benefited from the solitude of the studio. The artist is among the most technically gifted figurative painters in the region, combining a confident command of proportion and graceful contour of line with an equally sure alla prima painting style. A late development is the breaking down of form into facets, allowing Shaw to loosen up somewhat while maintaining the structural integrity of the compositions. The sweeps and chiseled brushwork of Sleepers exploit this device to good effect, depicting a late-night sprawl after an evening of partying.

The fragmentation pulls the pictures away from the realm of mere illustration, a possible pitfall of Shaw’s refined academic style and penchant for narrative. The charcoal drawings retain more traces of these elements than the paintings, depicting the antiseptic subject of posed nudes bathed in artificial light. While they strike one as art school-ish, the strongly cast shadow down the length of the reclining Nude Study #1, defining a drawn face and muscular physique, takes what would be a mundane scene from drawing class and transforms the figure into an ominous Frankenstein.

Shaw’s technical prowess is undeniable, both in drawing and in the use of color, but perhaps his maturity as an artist is best revealed in his willingness to let the finesse go and to plunge into the uncharted territory of the aforementioned Summer Evening 2834. Whereas even at his loosest Shaw has always calculated the angle and swipe of every perfect stroke, the distortion of figures in a swimming pool is handled with a frolicsome squiggle, a mishmash of juicy peach and brown intermingling on a turquoise ground. Discovery in art comes through risk-taking in the studio not by repeating old victories, and this realization above all is Shaw’s ace in the hole. I cannot wait to see the next development.

While finishing up this column, a young painter phoned to express his distress at having discovered that painting is in fact dead. After informing him that he is over 100 years late in getting the news, I asked if the revelation would have any bearing on whether or not he would continue to paint. It is Elkins’ contention that while art historians and critics may have relegated painting a diminished status in the art world, such news will fall on deaf ears among those possessed by its infinite mysteries.

Sentenced To San Diego

“Funding? I get no funding,” Barbara Kruger blurted to a troublesome inquisitor during the Q-and-A that followed her recent lecture at the University of Memphis. Kruger is an icon of the ’80s art world known for her photomontages appropriating images from magazines and newspapers combined with socially conscious slogans like “Your body is a battleground.” The artist’s streetwise chic — plain white sans serif type on proletariat red and black — is a trademark of that era’s feminist art and emphasis on text. Most of Kruger’s work dwells in the arena of public art as billboards, buscards, posters, Newsweek covers, etc.

Kruger had just gotten past fielding a question from a student daunted by articles suggesting that her anticipated MFA in art is a waste of time — “What should I do?” — and now somebody wanted to engage her regarding corporate philanthropy and ethics. Despite the tenacious young man’s best efforts to scrutinize her funding ethics, Kruger acerbically deflected every inquiry in an exchange that resembled a comedy routine: “When you’re hired ” he launched. “Hired? You mean like for a wedding?” Kruger croaked to audience giggles. She finally put the issue to rest by explaining that slim prospects had prompted her to assume a forthcoming professorship at balmy UC-San Diego.

Oh, to suffer the funding woes of ’80s art stars.

Lucky Number

I can’t get too excited about the latest overhaul of Number: or its renewed funding by the Memphis Arts Council. The journal has been on its last leg for, what, its entire existence? Number: has squeezed by, ensuring funding year after year until the arts council finally pulled the plug last June. In light of the fact that Number: only managed to meet its quarterly publication schedule twice in the last 12 years (!), one has to wonder why it took so long for the arts council to notice. Just a scant six months later and, yes, Virginia, the funding is back.

If the irregular publication of Number: has undermined its influence in the community, then the content has likewise diminished its relevance. The overarching editorial direction has favored feminist ideological battles and tracts that read like boring doctoral theses, which certainly have their place but not in the conspicuous absence of wider coverage of the visual arts in the region. An unfortunate development in recent issues has been the shameless PR puff pieces profiling art professionals. As long as Number: is receiving arts council funding, these resources should not be used to prop business interests and academic hobbyhorses.

The issue of Number:‘s editorial direction reminds me of a recent article in the New Art Examiner by Mark Van Proyen titled “Art Criticism: Where’s the Beef,” which outlines this year’s College Art Association forum on the question of unsavory art writing shackled to myopic agendas. One lecturer, Robert Hobbs, offers handy advice for art writers that Number: might wish to observe: to be “constrained neither by ghettoization within the academy, nor by journalistic servitude to the whims of the market.”

The bylaws make it plain that Number:‘s board defines the editorial policy, so it can be assumed that the diversity of the journal’s content will be in direct correlation with the makeup of the board. The new board is composed of Leslie Luebbers, Carol Crown, Sheri Fleck-Reith, James Patterson, David Thompson, Cheryl Bader, Anthony Doyle, Mary Kay Van Geison, René Paul Barilleaux, and Hamlett Dobbins, all outstanding contributors to the visual arts but not a great improvement upon its editorial reach. Furthermore, this body replicates much of the old board and many of the same leaders of other organizations. The effect of this mind-numbing homogeneity — blurring AMUM, Delta Axis, Number:, etc. — is that it effectively limits the voices of dissent and the participation of the greater art community.

Jene “The Price Is Too” Highstein At AMUM

Long before the opening of “Two Rooms with 10 Doors,” rumors circulated that Jene Highstein was not going to do an installation as first intended because the projected costs exceeded $60,000. Highstein has been creating site-specific, minimalist installations since the early ’70s, and his most recent work consists of gargantuan columns, urns, and other simplified forms constructed from a wood-and-slat armature coated with stucco. Apparently, the price tag for Highstein’s intended project wasn’t discussed until so late in the game that it had to be scrapped completely in favor of a much humbler installation.

The consolation prize is an exhibit of mammoth drawings depicting the architectonic forms for which Highstein enjoys an international reputation. He is ever the sculptor, and the use of coal-black silhouetted forms on reams of snow-white paper reach to occupy the space. But in the context of the cavernous AMUM gallery, they don’t really get off the wall. In an effort to break up the miles of space between the drawings, a long narrow bench runs the length of the gallery, an apparent invitation to sit and contemplate. The irony is that it is probably little-used, as the exhibit can be taken in on one’s lunch break.

Hill-country Blues At AMUM

I was late getting to Barbara Kruger’s lecture because of an unexpected surprise at the opening for the MFA thesis show at the University of Memphis. As part of her offering, Yancy Allison’s Rhythms of the Land: A Photographic Journey through the Mississippi Hill Country, a video cycled still images of men, women, and children from Como, Mississippi, particularly a gathering of musicians and celebrants. There is one shot of Luther Dickinson laughing and playing guitar, another of a band playing African instruments including the kora, and another of Como resident Othar Turner playing the fife.

The soundtrack of Turner’s drum-and-fife band got unusually loud — only it was the genuine article marching through AMUM, past Highstein’s installation and into the adjacent gallery that houses the MFA thesis show. It was a heartwarming spectacle, not just to see the legendary Turner and company but also Allison’s beaming face.

Larry Giacoletti’s Stovetop at Art Farm.

The graffiti reads “Art Farm Kills Art.” Regardless of the circumstances that led to the tag on the street in front of Art Farm, one victim of this dust-up is the exhibit now showing at the artist-run gallery. The simple fact is that alternative spaces like Art Farm and other non-commercial venues fill the void that established museums and commercial galleries will not. Furthermore, short of endowments and capital, such enterprises have long depended on the pockets of independent artists and curators. One would think that there are more deserving targets for young revolutionaries.

“Inside Out: Images of Suburbia” is the most ambitious project to grace the Art Farm gallery in a long time. Curated by Allana Clarke, the exhibit examines the patent homogeneity of suburban life and the ultimate vacuity of the American dream. Clarke laments, “A suburban neighborhood in Seattle is indistinguishable from a street on the outskirts of Atlanta,” adding that “these communities have grids of streets with matching split-levels or perhaps cul-de-sacs emanating from every street like split ends. Suburbs are responsible for obliterating regional charm and creating instead a depressing redundancy that has swept the nation.”

The four artists of “Inside Out” regard the subject of suburban life with the same sense of dread expressed in Clarke’s essay. Kim Beck’s Mall Parking Lot conveys the dull ubiquitousness of urban sprawl, depicting the expanse of uniform parking spaces as ultimately dehumanizing. The awesome power of Beck’s drawing is due both to her deft handling of atmospheric effects and to the work’s colossal scale, which mocks the inhospitable ambience of acres of hot blacktop. Several relief prints by Beck — of a tennis court, swimming pool, and dwellings — emphasize the blandness of suburban life.

If the depiction of such environments laments the encroaching homogeneity of American culture, Alison Oulette-Kerby’s ensemble of objects reveals the attendant alienation and the futility of living in such a world. Self Portrait (I Think About You All the Time) is a three-legged pedestal on wheels that, when pushed, activates a set of gears and cogs that spins a bust of the artist that Clarke says “introduces feelings of anomie, feeling alone in the crowd, just as the sculpture is trapped in a repetitious cycle of the same movement over and over.”

I didn’t think much of Delta Axis’ new exhibit, “Exit 23B: Young Artists from Jonesboro,” but I’m still damn glad they are willing to get out on a limb. The pitfall of this show is the same one that revisits many Delta Axis offerings: the proliferation of half-baked conceptual art.

For instance, Brian Wasson shoots for profundity with his suite of used aluminum painting pans (the kind used to charge latex to a roller) transformed into works of art by being boldly displayed on the wall like paintings. I always get the feeling that people who do this sort of thing think they are being transgressive or that I should be wowed by their Richard Tuttle-like slackness. The truth is, this kind of schtick is old, boring, and usually just slack.

Dusty Mitchell’s Suggestion Box appears to be quite ordinary in function and design, yet when the suggestion is placed into the slot, it is immediately shredded and falls to the floor below. Likewise, the joke is on the unwitting participant that peers into Mitchell’s See Yourself, a simple microscope that startlingly casts a reflection of one’s own eye. Such works challenge the passive role of the viewer by being confrontational. While such baiting might be initially potent, the novelty wanes quickly.

What do Sigmund Freud, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Mike Tyson, Satan, and Mark McGwire have in common? This I pondered while standing before Catherine Sullivan’s portraits of these men in her series titled “Vagina Envy,” in which every painting is cropped so as to include only the lower third of the face, particularly the mouth and chin of each subject. Perplexed and annoyed by the title, someone finally pointed out to me that every fellow represented sports a goatee, an obvious allusion to the pubis. Sullivan is a gifted painter technically, who obviously labored patiently over every solitary brushstroke but what a convoluted setup for a groaner of a punch line.

A block east of the burgeoning South Main Arts District is Second Street Studio, established by Charlie Agnew and Tom Delaney, who converted the ramshackle building into an exhibition space. The building’s owner has taken up where Agnew and Delaney left off and is now running the enterprise.

Currently at Second Street is an exciting new photography exhibit titled “Pieces of a Whole” by graduating students of the University of Memphis. Gray Clawson’s pictures capture the chaotic beauty of old-growth forests — the tangles of underbrush, the massive trunks of trees and of light passing through translucent foliage. Justin Fox Burks follows in the tradition of Cartier-Bresson, taking “quick, decisive” photos of people participating in myriad forms of worship at temples, mosques, synagogues, etc. Anastasia Laurenzi offers an installation in a darkened room, with film positives of self-portraits illuminated by light boxes that convey a sense of isolation and despair. The passing glimpses of people in Kelley J. White’s diminutive Polaroid transfers are charmingly mysterious the top of a head here, a pair of legs there.

My criticisms notwithstanding, the existence of alternative spaces and the artists and curators who operate them add much to the cultural life of Memphis. Support them.

“Inside Out: Images of Suburbia” through December 2nd.

“Exit 23B: Young Artists from Jonesboro” through December 15th.

“Pieces of a Whole” through December 17th.

Hamlett Dobbins has got to be the busiest guy and best juggler in the art community. He teaches at multiple institutions, paints avidly, exhibits his work, and serves as curator for both Delta Axis and the Clough-Hanson Gallery. On his plate now are two group shows and the opening of his own eye-popper at Second Floor Contemporary. Recently Dobbins found time to chat about the finer points of functioning as both artist and curator — and how the two vocations spill over into each another.

Days prior, a conversation I was having with a friend about Dobbins’ curatorial bent prompted a contrast between the visceral nature of Dobbins’ pictures — described as “pure painting” by my companion — and the often ironic and conceptually driven Delta Axis exhibits. The trio of Dobbins’ efforts now on view — “The Omaha Paintings” at Second Floor Contemporary, “Provenance” at Delta Axis, and “Almost Giddy” at Clough-Hanson — illustrates this polarity.

“The Omaha Paintings” are the result of Dobbins’ residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Nebraska last fall. Chunky outlines determine abstract or semi-figurative forms. This work is bold and brash, pigment laid on like cake frosting, even if the neutralized and earthy palette is downright solemn compared to his trademark sea of pink.

By comparison, the theme of the Dobbins-curated “Provenance,” at Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts, is place, with literal qualities emphasized above all others. For instance, Bill Rowe of Jonesboro seems to get a lot of joy out of appropriating the cheesy objects and attributes of blue-collar culture, as in Eat More Fish, a neon sign of the popular admonition during the Second World War. And the last time I saw the work of photographer Maxine Payne Caufield of Conway, Arkansas, it was an installation in the back of an antiquated King Biscuit flour truck she was driving across the country. Continuing in that cornpone vein, her large photographs of rural folk are crudely sewn to a background of yellowed checks from a bygone era. The distinction between the sardonic narratives displayed in works such as these against Dobbins’ intuitive approach to painting and its precognitive impact is what my perceptive friend was alluding to.

Of course, in Dobbins’ mind there is no conflict between his varied roles, suggesting that all is not as it first appears on the surface. While his paintings seem to focus on the formal relationships of form and color, they are in fact initiated by and memorialize personal experiences. Dobbins’ impressive Happier with Dreams is a case in point. It appears to ambiguously depict a curtain hanging from a rod, but who knows? What I find appealing is how it unapologetically embraces his long admiration for the paintings of Phillip Guston even as it asserts his own particular style. For Dobbins, however, making pictures is an attempt to hold a moment in time.

On the flip side, the artist balks at the suggestion that his curatorial efforts have been biased toward solely ideologically driven work. He mentions the sketchbook show, which was held earlier this year at Delta Axis, as truly relevant to the importance he himself places on keeping a journal of images and ideas, and in my opinion, one of his best efforts yet. Speaking of the sketchbook show, Gelsy Verna, who participated in that show with some Guston-esque drawings of her own, makes a return appearance in “Provenance.” Her caricatures carry none of the obvious narrative of other works in the show and might also reflect Dobbins’ attempt to balance form and content.

Perhaps the perception that Delta Axis shows have been dryly ideological stems from the very nature of group exhibits, in which themes are built around the most obviously shared characteristics of disparate artists’ works. Dobbins says that affairs like the sketchbook show are easy because the theme is so general. Otherwise, his organizing an exhibit involves the recognition of common traits among all the works he comes into contact with and from there determining salient themes. However, how a particular theme relates to the viewing public is of prime importance.

Dobbins’ second exhibit at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson is apparently the perfect marriage of his vocations. “Almost Giddy: Optimism in Contemporary Abstraction” is a theme nearer to his own painting and perhaps a breath of fresh air during these dark days. He states that, compared to the difficult and “angsty” work of the ’80s and early ’90s, abstraction is more celebratory these days, distinguished by stimulating palettes and the influence of Japanese anime. One artist that Dobbins is especially psyched about is Kellie Murphy, whom he met at the Bemis and who is exhibiting “goofy” paint spills fabricated from vinyl in “funky colors.” Sounds like light-hearted fun.

“Omaha Paintings” at Second Floor Contemporary through October 21st; “Provenance” at Marshall Arts through November 2nd; “Almost Giddy” at Clough-Hanson Gallery on the Rhodes College campus through October 25th.

On the way home from the AMUM Artlab after seeing Jan Hankins’ politically charged “Out of the Janitor’s Closet: A Quest for Universality,” I was listening to talk radio. While the national emergency has ended partisan bickering for now in Washington, one can count on right-wing spinners not to curb their dogma one iota. One caller wondered why the NBA has not offered the country an apology, given that so many of the players have adopted Muslim names, and earlier in the day Rush tagged some well-known liberals with Arabic pet names like Mustafa and Ahmed. At this writing, there have been over 40 attacks on Arab Americans and Muslim targets and one suspected death, but God forbid that these pious zealots should surrender to political correctness.

“No liberal softies on the radio,” says Hankins, who is as troubled as I am that much of the media has discarded even the aspiration to objectivity (a la talk radio) and is actively courting war. I was interviewing the artist in hopes of deciphering the symbols of his ambitious installation, which is about the strata of labor and the “widening gulf between the classes.” While the work was installed a couple of weeks before the terrible events of September 11th, Hankins has a heightened sense of unease, worried that his politics may not be welcomed in its aftermath.

We get the sense that the nationalistic fervor has reached such a fevered pitch that the social climate increasingly demands compliance to the prevailing bloodlust or, at the very least, quiet acquiescence. To be so bold as to speak out against war or to question authority is considered tantamount to treason. Hankins recalls wearing a black arm band on Moratorium Day during the Vietnam war, which incited some local jocks to flex in his face and taunt, “Chicken to die, chicken to die?”

An impolite sociopolitical bite has always made Hankins’ paintings offbeat, but this installation, with that trademark conspiratorial bias intact, offers something extra in the autobiographical. The paintings on the wall are not discrete rectangles but fragments of pictures and objects accumulated over the years. Jumbled together on the floors and walls, each is a little masterpiece in its own right, and the amalgam is a kind of twisted mixture of Dali and Rauschenberg. Mops and rollers are bolted to the paintings, and sections of planks cover the floor and wall, spelling out “Labor” and “Money do.” The individually painted planks actually spiral off the wall, unfurling as a red flag. It is a bold statement for labor solidarity and quite provocative in this political climate.

But why the janitor’s closet? “Because I spend a lot of time in janitors’ closets,” says Hankins, whose day job is repairing and refinishing gymnasium floors. This work is derived from the artist “reconciling the different parts of my life. I have to work to survive and I likewise have to do art.” Hankins is all too aware of the worth ascribed to various kinds of labor and finds it humorous that when he is on his hands and knees refinishing a gymnasium floor or painting a mascot he is treated with more dignity than when doing his own art. Despite the pro-labor rhetoric, the artist generally works alone and is unsure if he could function in a union. Thus, yet another quest for universality: “to unify my ideals with practice.”

Perhaps the apprehensiveness that both Hankins and I feel in regard to his pro-labor message derives from its bitter timing, considering the injured economy and an expected 100,000 layoffs in the airline industry alone. The magnitude of suffering wrought by the violence of September 11th demonstrates the fragile interdependence of humanity.

Recently, the threat of war prompted a friend to issue an appeal against the shedding of more innocent blood, but its sentiments are applicable to the scope of human affairs. He said, “We cannot afford the god-like perspective of looking at others as a group of anonymous beings subject to our will, whose individual fates are irrelevant to the larger purpose. From my perspective as an embodied individual consciousness, my continued survival, health, happiness, and freedom are of primary importance. I believe this is true of all the other individual embodied consciousnesses living in this world. It is not too big a leap to suggest that maximizing the potential for everyone to accomplish these goals maximizes my own hopes for achieving them.”

Through October 4th.

I was recently scolded under the broiling stage lights of Playhouse on the Square — and had it coming, to be sure. Invited as a Flyer critic, I was to sit with a panel of art professionals, after a matinee performance of the delightful Art, and participate in a discussion concerning who and what in culture determines the value of art. Someone in the audience broached the subject of a certain regional exhibit, and I unfortunately uttered my summation of its merit with an indelicate quip. One of the artists in the show in question was present and rightfully pissed off by the acerbic tone and dismissive brevity of my remark. Using not-so-delicate terms of her own, she lit into me with the kind of loathing with which any self-respecting artist views critics.

“You can’t just hurl a Molotov cocktail and not expect a reaction,” instructs Marina Pacini. I had run into her at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art’s new survey exhibit “Perspectives.” Pacini, curator of education at the Brooks, knows the consequences of words, as she was studying the exhibit for the purpose of preparing docents to talk about the varied works. How interesting, I thought, since, gun-shy after my latest snafu, my hope was to curb the vitriol and to innocuously draw some parallels between what the curator and artists said about the work and the objects themselves. We both clearly have our work cut out for us.

Sam Gappmayer, director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and curator of the exhibit, chose 13 artists working within a 250-mile radius of Memphis, resulting in work by artists from Nashville, Little Rock, Jonesboro, and, of course, Memphis being included. From this relatively diminutive scope is a show that puts a limit on new faces to the Memphis art scene and covers a few beaten paths. Otherwise, the curator handled what he describes as the contradictory nature of putting together a regional survey — determining the value of an artist’s individual contribution while keeping in mind a desire for “holistic” cohesiveness — with abundant grace.

“More than any other criteria, the artists included in this exhibition were selected based on the quality of their work,” says Gappmayer, and one cannot argue with that. The artists bring a certain level of rigor to their art, as in the technical expertise in the paintings of Beth Edwards and the drawings of Ed Rainey. Then one finds refinement of narrative, which is the foremost feature in the cleverly convoluted devices of Val Valgardson, some of which prune and water plants by way of robotic gadgetry and electronic surveillance.

Valgardson provides his artist’s statement, “As the World Turns,” in a convenient booklet the visitor can take home. In it, the artist explains that he has “been drawing from the suburban landscape to create metaphors that prod questions about the social behaviors of ourselves, the environment we create and how we choose to live.” Valgardson’s objects seem to be commentary about the way human ingenuity is often parasitic upon nature. The rest of the document reveals, step by step, the nuts and bolts of how his high-tech greenhouse was built.

Cynthia Thompson is also driven by a social conscience. “My work focuses on the body, the denial of the body, and repressing of the body,” says Thompson. Very similar to the work she included in the exhibit “Blemish” at the Memphis College of Art earlier this year, Heirlooms is a series of cameos cast in paper pulp of a dirty pink hue, which apparently represents the color of flesh. Each is marked by a stain, scar, or stitch. The tortured symbolism of the blemished cameos is painfully elucidated by Thompson’s remark, “I am interested in the idea of the mark, a metaphor for time, something that contains a history and cannot be simply ‘wiped away.'” This kind of preachy narrative and the reliance on multiple objects seem to be the last vapors of ’80s agenda-driven myopia.

After not being overly excited about Christine Conley’s spiral of paint chips at the Max 2001 exhibit earlier this summer at the University of Memphis, she totally threw me off guard with her series of drawings for “Perspectives.” In fairness, Conley says the Max work inspired this latest permutation of the theme, in which tiny palette scraps serve as models for some very academic renderings. The minutely detailed and crosshatched drawings could almost pass as anatomical illustrations. The pulls, plops, and twists of liquid paint are akin to illustrations of muscle tissue. Her interest in the subject reflects her belief that “every moment counts, that even the smallest detail matters, and that leftovers are more than garbage.” Her Taxonomy of Leftovers places paint chips in a display cabinet, imparting the notion of scientific artifacts, and it is a special treat to discover a paint chip in the case that matches one from the wall.

I was recently haggling with a circle of art fiends about the finer points of the Brooks show, when someone at the table expressed a particular affinity for the work of John Salvest but, without a trace of irony, inadvertently called him “John Salvage.” For those of us familiar with his renowned cataloging of mundane objects, from cigarette butts to fingernail clippings, the misnomer incited a prolonged bout of hysterical laughter.

All joking aside, it becomes indelibly clear when looking at Salvest’s suite of assemblages that his use of common objects to poetic ends becomes ever more concise. Pincushion is a simple dress mannequin, the surface of which is completely covered in straight pins. Perched in its clinical display case, the light gleams off the heads of the straight pins like the soft halo of a goddess. Perhaps some remark on the adversarial state of partisan politics, Salvest’s Strike Anywhere is a shallow leather case open to reveal an outline of the United States on match heads. I don’t know if it implies anything about his political persuasion, but Salvest used red matches.

Speaking of politics, Jan Hankins’ written sentiments suggest left-leaning propaganda, except that the language is so cryptic that’s about all that can be discerned. Consider the explanation of the painting Faith Based Space Race: “We will find the cost of a new arms race far beyond the high frontier. But would the fig-leafed Pinocchio of trickle-down puddle a brick if today’s rope-a-dope shipment was examined to a T?” Hmm. Wow. Luckily, this nonsense doesn’t hurt the efficacy of the paintings one iota. Hankins has long been one of the city’s finest painters, and it is refreshing to see him get the respect he has long deserved, even if his message is buried beneath many delicious layers.

Pacini, when she discovered my particular thesis for this article, volunteered that the idea of artist’s statements began for the purpose of supplying the docents with some idea of how to explain the work, and making it part of the exhibit was a late addition. Perhaps this might explain the various degrees of ambiguity and bad grammar. It also might shed some light on Greely Myatt’s provocative compliance: putting a box with a button on the wall and instructions to press it for the artist’s statement. Doing so activates a recording of birds tweeting. One has to wonder if this is some kind of protest, a little sarcasm concerning the high priority that discursiveness has in the art world.

Tweet, tweet.

Through October 21st.

After much anticipation, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis and Delta Axis have unveiled “Max 2001: All About Paint,” an extravaganza of big, bold, slick, and sexy art that packs quite a visual wallop. No heavy agendas here; instead, one might say the emphasis is on fun and lightheartedness. Fuzzy textures, hard-edged graphics, and plenty of ooey-gooey lumps all appeal to the sensual, especially apparent in the abundance of eye-scorching pink. The show’s title may be a little misleading. Several hardcore painters are certainly featured, but curator Holly Block defines the subject of paint rather loosely to encompass sculpture, video, photography, performance, installation, and even conceptual art.

Block, the executive director of Art in General in Manhattan, has upped the ante with this Max, the third manifestation of the exhibit. “Max 1998” and “Max 1999,” curated by Kim Levin and Buzz Spector respectively, were exclusively regional affairs relying on slide images and studio visits to select artists — a course of action that resulted more or less in survey exhibits. Although she used a similar method of recruitment, Block brings to her theme of paint the works of artists from all over the nation and beyond, and these mix quite comfortably with regional offerings. Certainly this international roster of artists adds an air of prestige to the exhibit, especially when several have accumulated impressive résumés. More importantly, this fusion presents an opportunity to relate the art issues and practices of the region to a wider cultural context.

Paul Henry Ramirez of Mexico sets the festive tone of this exhibit with a goliath scroll painting. Spread II perches majestically above the ensemble of art objects in the main gallery, unfurling down the wall into a heap on the floor — a pretty brash way to mount a painting. The imagery is even more indelicate: A fractured diagram of flesh, hair, and squirting bodily fluids is rendered with a taut graphic style that seems to revel in lavish ornament, while large pools of flat color outlined by svelte ribbons of black heighten the architectonic qualities of the picture. Ramirez is enjoying a growing reputation for his art; one of his paintings even graces the cover of the current issue of Art Papers, reflecting the art world’s love affair these days with all things beautiful. “Max 2001,” as a whole, is likewise tinged with this pervasive sentiment.

If any paintings in this exhibit can hold their own next to Ramirez’s extroverted image, they are Hamlett Dobbins’ two luscious offerings nearby. It is paint that is Dobbins’ passion, and looking at the striped Glimpse, one is swept up in the excitement of his piquant palette of neutral pinks, yellows, and beige. The artist has never been one to scrimp on paint, and he likewise lays it on thick here, but do I dare detect a newfound deliberateness in its application that borders on the slick? For HH (the stillness of skin) is a delightful pink-on-pink affair — not rose, not mauve but the pinks of pink Cadillacs, Double-Bubble, and Pepto-Bismol. Pink Panther pink. This painting looks delicious enough to eat.

A bead or two of dribbled paint greets one at the entrance to the building and then follows a path to the museum inside, terminating with a leaky can of paint stuck to the gallery wall. A label beside the affixed can and runny trickle says that this is a work of art from the oeuvre of Francis Alÿs. Titled The Leak, it undoubtedly springs from the artist’s past performances in which he took short treks carrying an upturned, punctured can of paint, marking a path that concludes where it begins. Alÿs could not come to Memphis to do the piece himself, so Block was the stand-in for a proxy performance. The notion of purposely spilling pigment from a ruptured vessel while following someone else’s prescribed scheme, no matter how meaningful the intent, seems both ludicrous and pretentious, especially when its most enduring consequence will likely be what’s left on the carpet after the show is over. Besides that, speaking as an aspiring Pollock myself, not just anybody can drip paint.

It might seem unusual to include photographs in an exhibit about paint but not when you’re talking about the work of Phillip Andrew Lewis and Martina Shenal, two artists who utilize the medium with a painter’s perspective. Shenal exhibits images from her recent show with Lewis at the Second Floor Contemporary Gallery, but it’s never too soon to once again admire these beautifully austere images of objects veiled by scrim. Lewis breaks out a new triad of images of the Mississippi River floodplain, transforming the horizontal bands of the landscape into a sensuous gradient of azure, in which form is dissipated into pure radiant color.

When I heard that Roxy Paine was going to be in “Max 2001,” my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. I had seen his contribution to “010101: Art in Technological Times” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) just a few weeks prior. Paine’s Scumak seems well-suited to that exhibit’s theme of exploring the integration of art and technology, because one literally walks into a computer-operated sculpture factory. A high-tech machine slowly oozes a viscous mass into a lazy lump on a conveyor belt then sends it down the line to an accumulating stockpile of similar soft sculptures, with the production’s limited set of variables all handled by a lil’ laptop computer. Ironically, the only humans necessary are the ones guarding the merchandise and fancy hardware.

It is something of an anticlimax to see Paine’s lumps at “Max 2001” sans the spectacle of the SFMOMA installation. Scumak (4) is a nice enough set of specimens from the production, with that characteristic shape somewhat akin to a lava flow or soft-serve ice cream. Perhaps part of the disappointment lies in the objects themselves. Because in the context of witnessing their origin, one’s attention is fixed upon the manner of production, while the objects themselves are ephemeral, a remnant, one as valid (or not) as the next. As art objects, they’re delightfully indulgent, tactually inviting yet mind-numbingly arbitrary.

Gee, there is so much other remarkable work and so little space left. Arturo Herrera’s stunning Say Seven is a bolt of brown felt meticulously cut into a shape that resembles a splash of chocolate syrup dripping off the wall. Les Christensen, who was in the last Max, offers her 100 Maidens (Nuptial Shield) and 100 Widows (Death Shield), funky spirals constructed from the heels of women’s shoes. Meikle Gardner unleashes his Ab-Ex tendencies with a couple of his slash-and-drip paintings. And there’s even more.

Get out the Kool-Aid and lemon cookies. Although a happenstance, Emily Walls’ installation in the adjacent Artlab gallery fits right in with the insouciant revelry of “Max 2001,” as it is a twisted re-creation of prepubescent art-making. The artist has painted murals throughout the gallery with cheerful colors and anamorphic forms of preschool life. Populating the room are all manner of mutated doll, in every conceivable color, texture, and form, shoved into corners and dangling from the ceiling. Kitsch is Walls’ ongoing obsession, and the inventiveness and industriousness of this effort is impressive. But ultimately, the installation offers a pastiche of the Playskool experience that is not too dissimilar from the original.

Through July 21st.