Ah, the Railyard Galleries building may be all new, but Jim Kelly is back. In a characteristically stylish space-a derivation of previous digs-James Kelly Contemporary (1601 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1601) is presenting
Sculptures, Drawings and Photographs
by Roni Horn, mostly work from the '90s with pigment drawings from the late '80s. It might be nice to have what Horn's been up to lately considering how popular the PBS program
Art:21, Art in the Twenty-First Century
, which has featured Horn, has been in Santa Fe, but hey, we'll take what we can get. And it is interesting to consider these pieces, from bodies of work that Horn rose to prominence on. Scratch that. Sometimes you've got to remind yourself in print what a loser of a word "interesting" is. Considering this grouping of Horn's work is a full-body workout, from mind to muscles.
A month ago, I had been standing at the back of Kelly's gallery, talking to eccentric genius and mad artist Thomas Ashcraft. I was relaying to Ashcraft how photographer Peter Johnson and I were praising him for making it clear that a successful work of art is a visible
source of energy-it's heat on the wall. It's true-walk into a gallery or a museum and if you can't feel the heat, odds are good that the art blows. So, standing in the same room, a few weeks later, Horn's work was pulsating with such rhythmic blasts of energy that I was sweaty, itchy, uncomfortable, happy, wishing I'd brought my sunscreen.
From the simplest drawings to more complicated, text-based sculptures, Horn's work sits with eerily adept dualistic balance between passion and reason. How can "Pair Object VI," a sculpture consisting of two dense, machined cones-outwardly as cerebral and plain as objects can be-make me crazy with electric, twitchy emotions? I want to roll around with them like a fleshy dog-human, their perfect conical weight an undefeatable toy. It's the equivalent of that sturdy rubber dog distraction called a "kong," but for fancy intellectual art folks-you can paw at it all you want, but you'll never get out all the treats it has to offer, you'll never fully comprehend its secrets. I want to lie down with the floor hard against my back and set a conical point on my chest and let it simmer and bore down through my body, through the floor, through the earth. I'm convinced it can do this, if I can give this hyper-dimensional drill bit a soft, buttery start in my flesh; then, by the time it hits concrete or bedrock or diamond or truth, it will be primed by the sacrifice of my silly, rubbery man-body. Whoa. This is the point when art gets really, really fucking cool. Because not just every object that one stumbles across lays that kind of heat out for interaction. Not every pointy thing folds up your chakras, mocks your education, laughs at your brain and takes you for a wild ride.
Horn's ride is so wild because-even when there's humor, even when there's formalism, even when there's overt drama (as there is in some of her photography)-there is palpable, unstoppable sincerity. Each work urges that we pay attention. "Don't dick around with what's important," Horn's work whispers. "The world is full of meaning."
When art is able to speak up in so potent and vigorous a fashion, it's often time to go home. One doesn't want to follow good experience with bad. One doesn't want to go from Roni Horn to tourist-friendly landscapes and fake folk art. One doesn't want to be depressed by galleries that are peddling style more than brokering meaning. You'd think, at least etymologically speaking, that gallerists would have more gall. Fortunately, there's Linda Durham Contemporary Art (1101 Paseo de Peralta, 466-6600), currently showing Tasha Ostrander's
Deer Self, I Hurt the Urth
. If there's another gallery owner with the sheer, um, stones to post something like this on their Web site, I don't know about it:
Is there no stopping the rampant and...indiscriminate expansion of art "stuff"? I think there looms a slight danger of becoming myopic, consuming vessels adrift in the motley morass that is today's art world. How can we make sense out of all the images that bombard our eyes and minds? Art for Dummies. Art for the cognoscenti. Art for people who don't know much about art but know (or profess to know) what they like. Art for the emotionally (or spiritually) impaired. Art for people who find that they have extra cash but nothing over their couch. We've heard it all. But just like pandemics, road rage, super store chains and other world/cultural phenomena that appear and proliferate unchecked...we seem unequipped to challenge the juggernaut that is the art world status quo.
This is a woman who is in the business because she loves art and artists and not for any other reason. Consequently, the gallery is a space where Ostrander can push herself. She's going in a few directions with large scale digital prints, a little bit saccharine, a little bit introspective and most successful when toying with history and iconic imagery.
"Combines Series #2," using collected, ancient images more as an exercise in juxtaposition than in a Rauschenbergian sense of combines, is a startling rumination on death, acceptance and cultural memory. A lamb (a wolfish lamb, even) is impaled atop a symmetrical, stylized tree. Rather than violence, however, it's a blazing imprimatur of origin and future, an elegy to our simple, earthen roots.
Finally, to complete a troika of challenging, energy-filled exhibitions, Andrew Gellatly has hung chrome drawings at Phil Space (1410 Second St., 983-7945). It ain't the easiest art to walk in and love, but it's curiously adroit work in the midst of our culture of wealth and aestheticism. Gellatly's thin "drawings," hanging from one or two nails, dipped in chrome and casually finished, are bare-bones bling. If you'll spend 1,500 bucks to put it on the wheels of your car, why not just hang it on the wall? What's the nature of desire? Of value? Of form? In another age it would have been a sheet of gold, unworked, uncast, just blatantly, ridiculously hanging on the wall: Pure Value, Pure Lust. The fact that today, these spur-of-the-moment shapes, cut with eager immediacy, are chrome-plated, low-brow gems, is yet another way of considering our collective sincerity.
