Substance is masked by style at CCA.
This is the thing about art: It needs to justify its own existence. Too frequently, the insular, self-reflecting nature of visual art forgets that it is not enough to bounce off of history, either in the broad sense or in terms of what the artist may have made last week or last year. The world is populated with***image1*** items that fail to justify a physical and psychic presence-Hummers, hot-dog toasters, Dick Cheney-but art, stemming from the province of creativity and composition, should aspire to more.
It is saddening, in particular, to enter the cavernous and beautiful Muñoz Waxman Gallery at the Center for Contemporary Arts and consider Polly Apfelbaum's "Red Light Special." A "floor installation," it consists of red fabric cut-outs laid out at various points of intersection and non-intersection throughout the course of the gallery, which is otherwise populated with work that hangs, leans or beams (in the case of video) on the walls. Apfelbaum has done these works before and to greater effect.
This work moves away from a certain comprehensive grace that the artist previously achieved and toward a Richard Tuttle-style of enforced illogic. Tuttle though, would never have done something so, well, dusty. It's dusty because the work fails to consider the space it is in, which is nearly as great a conceit as assuming that what is a conceptually sensible progression in the artist's brain will magically translate to successful, justifiable work.
Apfelbaum's previous floor works have been said to "exist in a contentious, ambivalent space between painting, sculpture, and installation." Who wrote those words imagining such a description to be an asset, we can only guess; it is the root of the problem. It is not a problem necessarily specific to Apfelbaum.
The exhibition
Hair of the Dog
intends to provoke a discussion of work that is related to painting, yet relies primarily on other materials and techniques. There's no particular problem with proposing this idea, but nor is there a particular advantage. The idea struggles to lend justification to works that don't deserve it and actually masks the singular identity of works that don't need justification to begin with.
Ann Gaziano, a College of Santa Fe graduate and AD Collective founder, may be most legitimately in proximity to the concept. Her capable needlepoint portraits offer a contentious, but certainly not ambivalent, argument between obsessive craft, representational tradition and a kind of pop-baroque opulence, all the while exploring color, texture and illusion as mainstays of fabrication.
Bookending the exhibition space with Gaziano, Brandon Soder, a senior at CSF, displays photographs that correspond to the Stations of the Cross and the nativity scene. That his work covers territory that has been the domain of fine painting for centuries is, in fact, less provocative than his deep instinct for structuring space, balancing color and perverting the pat narrative. There are gimmicky elements-which one hopes Soder will eventually leave behind-but then the art world loves a gimmick.
Case in point: AES + F, the Russian collaborative foursome that is simply all the rage, processes the perils of painting with "The Last Riot," a video that people seem to be compelled to like despite the fact that it basically sucks. ***image2***The work is technically delightful and endlessly bizarre, but its continent-spanning, techno-fetish, pedo-violence, multi-culti, cut 'n' paste, balletic, goofball, rat-sex, videogame aesthetic wears thin before the thing mercifully ends with a slow-motion train wreck.
Oddly, that's how Kim Russo's solo-exhibition begins. Also at CCA, Russo's exhibition,
The Beauty of It All
, is in the Spector Ripps Project Space, adjacent to the Cinematheque. One of two large-scale works in the exhibition, "A Terrible Wreck (and a field of fat horses)" depicts just that-the aftermath of a train wreck and some nearby horses grazing contentedly. Throughout the exhibition, Russo takes careful aim at a frozen moment when the audience knows a violent action has occurred, but is in suspense about how inertia, gravity and motive will respond in the next frame. The artist leaves us hanging, not only in concept, but with a careful mélange of watercolor and graphite that modulates a balance between intimate and universal symbologies.
Using a lexicon of cartoon monumentalism and relics of political, personal and industrial disaster, Russo dissects perceptions of experience to that singular moment, after action and before judgment, when all scenarios are possible and morality has yet to settle. Her compositions are sometimes frustratingly literal, and her use of objects so intimate as to be in-jokes can be confounding. In the end it is Russo's refusal to pander that compels the viewer. She leaves this car looking like a ridiculous cartoon; she makes a succession of clumsy images like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; she offers no clue as to why there is a pretty purse next to a dead goat and she is entirely justified.
