Category: Art Feature

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.

MAYOR JIM ROUT’S OFFICE. LOBBY, 160 N. Main Building. Showing through January: “Black and White and Read All Over,” work by Bob Burdette, Hamlett Dobbins, Kathleen Kondilas Franks, Clayton Marsh, Richard Napier, and Jonathan Postal.

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.