|
02.01.04
drift:shift
Confirms a Change in Direction at Linda Schwartz Gallery
by Ruth K. Meyer, Artwhirled@iRhine.com
On view thru February at Linda Schwartz Gallery the exhibition drift:shift demonstrates the gallery's continuing movement away from conventional art and toward conceptual and process based pieces that are going to satisfy more advanced tastes. Curated by Todd Pavlisko, who showed his own work at the gallery last fall and has since become the gallery's Director of Programming, drift:shift features eleven artists from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York.
These artists share characteristics that are common among today's art making academics, art historians and critics. They share an alienation from the superficial qualities of popular culture without rejecting its useful technologies. They operate outside of and beyond "the studio," the former locus of art making. They don't make art that could be recognized as marketable managing instead to survive in academia and the arts business.
Beyond these characteristics these artists are also the inheritors of a common philosophy that has been identified by Matt Distel, Assistant Curator at the Cincinnati CAC, author of a catalogue essay for drift:shift. Distel directs us to the Situationist International a French intellectual movement in post-WWII Europe emanating from the earlier activities of the Dadaists and Surrealists in the'20s and '30s. The Internationale Situationniste, to render it in the French, was the artistic alternative to the Socialistes. It incorporated novelists, poets, and filmmakers, as well as visual artists including Magritte and deChirico as well as the post war COBRA group in Belgium. The chaotic postwar environment offered little encouragement to artists and in this nihilistic atmosphere a rejection of bourgeois conventions was not only appropriate but also inevitable. The highpoint of their activities was the Parisian student riots in 1968. The most well known survivor of their movement
would be Christo.
Many ask why contemporary artists, who have been privileged by their educations and comfortable lifestyles, can find no satisfaction in theories of beauty and a celebration of our abundance. Why can't they just paint? Instead, with a confident perversion they turn to politics, to ironic subject matter and to introspective documentation. They resurrect the Situationists' dilemma as formulated by Asgar Jorn: "The problem for the artist is not to know if the work of art should be considered as an object or as a subject, since the two are inseparable. The problem is to capture and to formulate the desired tension in the work between appearance and sign." This state of indecision produces the drift, the derive: the artist is between two banks (rives, fr.) followed by a shift in meaning.
By now you will have gathered that there's a lot to think about in this exhibition that features three installations using recorded sound and video. This sets up an insistent chatter in the gallery that has to be overcome when looking at the static pieces where you are required to read the texts (or ask the gallerist to adjust the volume.) Ayanah Moor (Pittsburgh) has installed a DVD, LCD player that runs two six minute loops. She is the videographer interviewing her subjects, one in Pittsburgh, one in Soweto, and involving them (and us) in conversation. The camerawork is artless, the miniature TV is gorgeous, and the random engagement with her subjects is memorable. At the other end of the gallery Joey Versoza uses an ancient looking speaker cabinet to broadcast voices relating ghost stories from depths of the Cincinnati Art Museum. The cabinet supports a scale model of a small town bank. The juxtaposition is amusing if somewhat pointless without considerable explanation from the gallerist: evidently the museum and the bank are institutions in which Versoza invests a lot of personal capital.
The ability to make useful linkages is a requirement for the viewer's participation in most of the pieces in the show. "Getting it" takes some work. In the gallery's front window sits a model mountain with a towered structure at its peak. This object (sculpture) appears to stare at a video monitor displaying a similar, but (apparently) real mountaintop castle. Is it really Dracula's Castle as the checklist tells us? The soundtrack to the DVD is an appropriately eerie windstorm. The installation was the result of collaboration between former Cincinnatian Jacob Dyrenforth and Halsey Rodman (both are now in New York).
Keith Benjamin shows regularly at Linda Schwartz Gallery and Pop Secret is one of his best efforts. We are in suburbia again, his favorite locus, trying to read the significance of a miniature highway billboard with nothing posted on it. This elegant little construction projects off the wall at eye level so by drifting around to the back of it you can see that the advertisement logos has been displaced to the rear. Benjamin's piece relates nicely to Matthew Weddington's photograph, Fayette County Home of Matthew Weddington Conceptual Artist. Matthew, many art lovers would prefer a world in which local artists achieved roadside recognition. The French do it in their provinces. Why can't we?
Eduardo Kac
Free Alba! (Ann Arbor News)
2001-2002
color photograph mounted on aluminum with plexiglass
Edition of 5
46 1/2" x 36"
|
In fact, shameless self-promotion seems to be one part of the drift:shift aesthetic. Eduardo Kac's experiment with gene-splicing a jellyfish and a rabbit to produce a fluorescent mutant bunny made front page headlines around the world in 2000-1. According to Matt Distel, "Kac has developed a working method that fluidly combines scientific and artistic exploration" and is the pioneer of transgenic art a term he coined in 1998. Dr. Kac has an impressive resume, published in this catalogue. Three photographs in this show support his international reputation by illustrating editions of papers worldwide.
Dr. Sean Bidic is another distinguished contributor to the exhibition. A medical doctor and MFA in Digital Media and New Genre, Bidic's work concerns the artistic intersection of technology and the body. Having studied patients with dysfunctions of the eye resulting in blindness, Bidic videotaped their eye movements and here presents the results through LCD screens inserted in mirrors. These two works titled In the Absence of Voyeurism were disconcerting for me, but by choice I am neither a narcissist nor a voyeur: others will find this opportunity fascinating.
I was much more intrigued by Beth Campbell who I was told is a rising star in the artworld. Her work was recently shown at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. More than the others, I was charmed by her free-floating consciousness as described in two works titled Part of Me and My Potential Future based on Present Circumstances. Both are hand drawn charts or diagrams where she plots the outcomes of her random choices. They read like a kind of poetry and the spider web design conveys an airy dreamlike quality that has a quiet beauty. This is work I really wanted to spend time with.
Kristin Bly-Rogers
Wide Open
2003
mixed media collage on masonite, epoxy
diptych 18" x 24"
|
Like most of the others Kristin Bly-Rogers makes work that requires investigation into both its making and its meaning. Bly-Rogers collects printed relics of popular culture such as comic books and magazines. From these he snips out fragments that are collaged into new backgrounds where they achieve new meanings. To stress their antiquity and preserve their meaning as relics Bly-Rogers gives his works a heavy coating of an acrylic.
Don't leave the gallery without taking a peek through Todd Pavlisko's peephole into the shop next door. The good folks next door at Premium Tickets consented to open their premises to view so that from the shrine of conceptualism you can catch a glimpse of a famous local sportsman.
Todd Pavlisko
Premium
2004
drywall, stainless steel
4" diameter
Edition of 6
--i--
Linda Schwartz Gallery
315 West Fourth Street Cincinnati Ohio 45202 2605
vox 513 241 4202 fax 513 241 4206
Linda Schwartz, Director
Todd Pavlisko, Director of Programming
Gallery Hours
10 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Friday
10 am to 4 pm Saturday
Ruth K. Meyer is the editor of iRhine.com and founder of the Artwhirled feature. She is a member of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics and the Senior Curator at Carl Solway Gallery on Findlay
Street in the West End.
About iRhine
iRhine is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that develops the focus of communication for the many diversified offerings in the historic Cincinnati neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine (OTR). Through the Web site, e-mails, educational meetings, events, and volunteering, iRhine has supported and encouraged socio-economic development for OTR and the Greater Cincinnati Region since 2000.
|
|
 |
Jul 31, 2010
|
