It's not like, during the reign of previous director Charlie Stainback, SITE Santa Fe left or lost its soul or failed to please-there was a highly compelling, if over-intellectualized, biennial curated by big-brained Robert Storr and Stainback didn't manage to fire all of SITE's hardworking and often overlooked, dedicated employees-but the current trio of exhibitions still somehow lends the sense that SITE Santa Fe is back.
It's the first effort wholly under the will of new director Laura Heon and, even though she's not taking risks in the sense that each artist is well-known to her, she is making an offering in the sense that the artists, Dana Schutz, Don Ritter and Charles Long, aren't well-known to New Mexico and each of them works in a manner near and dear to our collective hearts, which is to say with a palpable sense of earnest experimentation and a satisfying sense of self-purpose and individuality.
Schutz, the realization sets in as mind and emotion work together to try to absorb one of her large works like "Lovers" (2003, oil on canvas), is a very precise and thoughtful painter. It's an idea that may come slowly as the work is instantly heartbreaking with voyeuristic beauty and dizzying with physical sensation. Two people are tangled in embrace in a small clearing and the viewer sees them through foliage that may or may not contain other peepers. It's nothing close to realism, but the vibe of it is real and familiar, the breeze crawls across your skin as leaves twitch and glint in the light-it's an epic, messy onslaught of color, eerie in its secretly expert composition, its fluid mimicry of passions and its dappled, cartoon sunspots.
"Twin Parts" (2004, oil on canvas) is an intimate portrait, both amusing and spooky, of a kind of prehistoric science fiction featuring a smeary figure rummaging through possible spare body parts stored on a shelf that happens to sit in the jungle, a fleshy Eden of genetic interchangeability and also perhaps an unintended metaphor of the artist's painting process. Schutz relies largely on a few simple techniques-long blocky paint strokes, short jabs and flat, chunky washes-interchanging them ingeniously to create infinite, wholly different scenes throughout her imagined worlds, alternately using texture and color as much as form to delineate specific objects. In her painting "Surgery" (2004, oil on canvas, pictured) seven or eight little girls crowd around another who is splayed out on a sunny day's picnic cloth, the victim of an unfortunate, but intense and clearly educational, game of
Operation
as her friends dig into her brain and her torso. The subject of the surgery is painted in long stringy strokes, textured entirely differently from anything else in the painting; her body is not only being examined and dismembered by her playmates, but is altogether phasing out of existence. Like the many layers of paint on each of her works, Schutz works with many layers of meaning, interpretation, possibility and reference, impossibly balancing humor and horror, gravitas and perversity.
"Vox Populi," a 2004 video installation by Don Ritter, is hands down the most attention-demanding work in the show and is meant to be. Three projections of a crowd face a podium where a teleprompter awaits, encouraging viewers to address the hoi polloi. It's a clever piece, if a bit awkward in realization. If one weren't told that the crowd responds to the tone and pace of the speaker, alternating between jeering and cheering, the assumption would be that it was random, although, on a return visit over the weekend, I took, uh, my mom with me and I have to admit the crowd got pretty happy as she sang them a sweet little song about some socks or something. The best part is watching people hesitate at the podium, like monkeys around a mysterious obelisk.
Ritter also presents an installation from 1993 called "Installation." It takes place in an entirely darkened room, this time with sound elements representing traffic responding to the viewer's physical presence in the room. During the opening, it was crowded and making one's way through the pitch black and bumping into other discombobulated souls had a funhouse thrill. It's great to picture so many people clumsily and haltingly stumbling around each other in a dark room and I dearly hope there's a hidden night vision surveillance camera capturing every hesitant grope to be used for a later devious installation. But with the galleries largely quiet it was easy to spend time there. And as the initial funhouse thrill of speeding cars, screeching brakes and hair-raising pile-ups fades, a soothing, urban, John Cage-ish symphony takes over; opening throttle bodies, idling diesels and rubber chirping on asphalt, a music that's uncomfortable, engrossing and possibly illegal to find from the median of a busy intersection.
I'll save discussion of the altogether more difficult-to-define work of the third artist, Charles Long, for when a concurrent exhibition of his photographs at Dwight Hackett Projects (2879 All Trades Road, 474-4043) opens on Oct. 22. Long and Ritter's refreshing work at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199) is on view through Dec. 31. Schutz' clever and perfect paintings may be seen through Dec. 24.
