afh blog

(Note: I was art beat and features writer for Nashville In Review [now defunct] for a year and a half [1998-2000 maybe{?}]… this is a collection of those essays and articles.)

“The Time is Now”

It ended like this: “THE TIME IS NOW” was superimposed on an aerial shot of downtown Nashville and projected on the screen before the dozen or so writers, presenters and Chamber of Commerce staff gathered at the City Club. The occasion was a presentation by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates and Webb Management Services, consultants hired by the Downtown Partnership to study the 5th Avenue corridor and formulate a plan for its transformation into Nashville’s arts district. On March 9 HHPA gave five presentations of their concept for 5th AOTA: one for Downtown Partnership staff, one for Mayor Purcell and his staff, one for media, another for the artsy public and one more for the Downtown Partnership Board of Directors. The presentations were the culmination of a roundtable investigative process, involving numerous facility tours and discussions with arts organization representatives, artists, art business owners, etc.

The program began with a look at the cultural indicators in Nashville, and the prognosis, according to the consultants, is great. The economy’s thriving, and the city’s experiencing an “extraordinary renaissance”. Nashville is already home to a variety of entertainment attractions and has significant projects in the works. HHPA also posited that the city’s leadership in the private and public sector is strong (… hmmm). What’s lacking, according to HHPA, are connectivity among pre-existing venues, businesses and organizations, an arts district identity, unifying programs and organizational leadership for 5th AOTA events and projects. Logistical problems cited included event parking (Central Parking’s gouging ways constitute a major obstacle) and project funding. ArtSynergy and ruby green were heaped with kudos by HHPA, for their successes as culturally diverse and dynamic art “incubators” already in place in the proposed district. The presenters used public art programs in other cities as examples (good and bad) of methods and means for creating urban cultural centers. The integration of art into the 5th AOTA cityscape HHPA viewed as vital to the success of the district. Public art, the maintenance of unique architectural features and the embellishment of the pedestrian experience along 5th AOTA (or the lack thereof) will make or break the district.

What’s at stake? According to the presenters the benefits to the city of Nashville, should an arts district be realized, are significant. A commitment to culture will yield enhanced economic development, more cultural tourism and development, and community growth. Nine million tourists a year are visiting the city. That means dollars for Nashville. A cultural program for the city means more dollars. It’s this simple. HHPA recommended that the Downtown Partnership serve as facilitator for the 5th AOTA program, which shouldn’t come as a surprise. The funds projected as necessary for implementation of the proposed plan are initially modest ($25000). First year operational expenditures include a banner program (like the one for 12th South) and startup money for streetscape designs and future fundraising initiatives. After the first year, however, the financial commitment required of the community to support the cultural transformation of the city center spirals upward. The real costs of physical improvements (read “public art”) and programs to attract visitors and improve their experience of the arts district are consequential.

Will the Downtown Partnership be able to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to implement the plan? The consultants’ recommendations were based on “new” funding.  Established art organizations expressed fears that their financial support would be diminished by these new initiatives. If the money required to morph 5th Avenue into an arts district doesn’t come from existing sources of revenue, then how will these programs be funded?

The Time is This Week

The Chamber of Commerce and the Downtown Partnership deserve credit for investing in the 5th AOTA concept. It’s a good idea, with real potential for upping the cultural ante for the city center. Although, the mayor’s office has been quiet on the issue of percent for art legislation, I’ve heard very recently that the obstacles in its way are very close to being cleared. Should the 5th AOTA plan be rolled over into a legitimate program for a centralized, citywide public art vision, we will have a new city. Nashville will finally reap the cultural and economic benefits that so many other urban centers have experienced, as a result of their concrete commitment to the integration of visual art into the community fabric.

If Metro does not institute a percent for art program, 5th AOTA will not ever be realized in a meaningful way. The success of a permanent arts district really does boil down to money. However, it’s not just a question of throwing money at projects or makeovers for certain areas of the city. A successful public art program must provide the various city agencies involved in PFTA implementation clear directives, meant to reduce friction between the artists and the city’s servants. The two must understand that they are partners, whose responsibilities are first to the community. What I’m talking about here is a cultural divide that must be bridged, if situations like the recent Music Row fountain fiasco are to be avoided.

The primary problem with artists and public servants working together is this: Artists, to be artists, must place their commitment to make the best art possible first - this is a phenomenon that does not involve any cost/benefit analysis, especially if the artist is working within a traditional context. Successful public servants have to consider the cost/benefit in everything they do. Unless the city servant first commits to protect the artists commitment to the quality of his/her art, to respect that commitment, to nurture and be educated by it, then the whole relationship will be jeopardized. On the other hand, the artists must be willing to work (at or above their potential) within a limited scale, for the formula to be successful. To vastly oversimplify, if the job requires cool manhole covers, the artist must design really cool manhole covers and not the Sistine Chapel. In the public art arena what must ultimately be overcome is fear. The artist must overcome his fear of limits and mediocrity and the city must overcome its fear of loss of primacy or control and its fear of culpability. While this all may sound very touchy-feely, in the real world the veracity of this argument is obvious.

Again, one only has to look at the Music Row fountain to validate this argument. It’s the perfect example of the kind of problems a PFTA program prevents. Had the city been able to commit $350,000 - 700,000 (1 - 2% of the capital project cost) up front for the art, Alan Lequire’s job of raising private funds to complete the fountain/sculpture would have been immensely more doable. A program for annual maintenance for the fountain could easily have been structured into the deal, and the ridiculous MDHA demand for $1+ Million cash up front for 30 years of upkeep of the artwork would have been a moot point. That demand is based on policy pertaining to metro departments with annual budgets, not on the reciprocal investment required by a public art project. The public artist is not a metro department, but the benefits of installing public art apply both to the city and the artist. Why should the artist and/or the private donor(s) be responsible for the entire burden of the art’s maintenance? It’s not right. Did Bud Adams have to resolve this issue before construction was started on Adelphia Coliseum?

That these issues are being resolved in a hurry (because of bid deadlines…possibly mutable, given goodwill renegotiations with a civic-minded contractor?) almost ensures that missteps will be made. If anyone in the project bails to cover his ass or gets pissed and say f*** it, a positive outcome is doomed. That would be tragic for the city and constitute a major loss of momentum in the city’s cultural renaissance. Once the road is graded, the cost of reinstalling plumbing for a fountain in the Music Row Roundabout guarantees that the artist’s/donor’s/city’s initial vision (a great one) will never be realized.

There’s still time for a good result for the fountain/sculpture. As I understand it, all the money (short of $200,000 - a sum that can easily be raised over the next three years) for construction of both the fountain and sculpture is in place. What’s missing is the maintenance money. That expenditure must be reevaluated, and another method of raising it developed. It’s worth it. If MDHA asked Nashville, “Are you willing to invest in this?”, the people of this community would answer in the affirmative. The Mayor’s election was in part based on his commitment to continuing to grow culture in this city. If you asked the 10 million or so people annually looking for cool stuff to do and see when they visit Nashville what they thought, I think they’d say it’s worth working out a deal so that the sculpture and fountain both get built at the foot of Music Row. This is not about plumbing. It’s about a vision for this city’s future.

The Time is Elsewhen

Finally, I want to encourage the Mayor and Metro and the Chamber of Commerce to look at these pictures of Roy “Futureman” Wooten, his PhiHarmonic Orchestra, from “Evolution D’Amour”. There’s a correlation. Artists are already functioning under the principles outlined above, and the result is wondrous. Innovation, excellence, spontaneity, multi-cultural harmony, miraculous moments of unexpected combinations of diverse elements, an enhanced awareness of what it is to be alive… That’s what can happen if you don’t give up on the process.

Mayor Purcell, you’re the conductor. There are a lot of players to choose from. Pick the best that you can to form a core group that holds it all together. Then don’t be afraid to bring the entire community on the stage. Focus on birth: bring to life the culture in this city. Give the people a place to perform, but give them room to perform at their highest potential. The stage may get crowded, and at times it may seem like a mess. But in the end, Nashville will have something uniquely its own, which will capture the world’s attention.

Go see Steve Bennyworth’s sculpture in Hillsboro Village. If you start the ball rolling, you’ll be amazed by how much the artists and the supporters in this community will be willing to give, in order to keep it rolling. The waters in the cultural fountain will keep circulating, and the music will keep playing, and people from all over will keep tossing coins into the water in the fountain.

Scene Notes

Cumberland Gallery celebrates its 20th year with what promises to be a spectacular show, featuring work made specifically for the event by many of the gallery’s artists (opening April … The award winning Temporary Contemporary Gallery at Cheekwood opens an exhibit of Sean Dudley’s amazing handmade books on April 7. Assistant curator Terri Smith announced in a recent mass e-mailing that Volkswagen will be sponsoring the next three shows at the Temp Contemp. She called for an artsy strength in numbers turnout from the community, to show the Beetle-makers the value of investing in art support. Turn out, artsies!

Nashville’s first ever studio tour, sponsored by the Visual Arts Alliance of Nashville is happening April 8 and 9, during the day. This promises to be an awesome event with dozens of artists (me, too) participating, all over Nashville. ArtSynergy is the hub for the tour, and you can score info on the tour there, including maps and listings. Studio tours like this one provide the community a window into the artist’s world, and give the artist an opportunity to make some sales and meet new artsies (and a reason to clean their filthy studios). Alan Lequire and many others have done a ridiculous amount of work to get this show on the road. Turn out, artsies!

The Percent for Public Art Ordinance was filed last Tuesday. The following Council members stepped forward to sign on to Nashville’s legislation for a cultural legacy: Eileen Beehan, Phil Ponder, Chris Ferrell, Leo Waters, David Briley, Ludye Wallace, Bettye Balthrop, Edward Whitmore, J.B. Loring, Tony Derryberry, Ronnie Greer, Feller Brown, Bob Bogen, Carolyn Baldwin Tucker, Brenda Gilmore, and Howard Gentry. Jane Alvis of the Mayor’s office told me that several more wanted to add their John Hancocks, but couldn’t make it to the office in time. As indicated in last week’s column, Melvin Black, James Bruce Stanley, Amanda McClendon, Ginger Hausser, Morris Haddox, Jason Alexander and Don Knoch were among those campaigning last year who promised to support PFTA legislation, if elected. Add the latter names to the former, and we have a done deal. These men and women are going to rightfully be able to claim that they were instrumental in effecting one of the most important pieces of cultural legislation Metro has ever passed. Kudos… Now, finish the job!

It’s Someone Else’s Turn…

Next week’s column for In Review will be my last. I’d like to express my gratitude for the hundreds of supportive e-mails sent by active Nashville artsies over the past year or so. Your input has greatly influenced my approach to covering the local scene. The task of choosing who and what to write about was made infinitely easier by those willing to contact me with good 411. To those of you whose events I failed to cover, in spite of your doing the right things (sending press kits, etc.), my apologies. My omissions should not be construed as a reflection on the quality of your efforts, but rather an indication of my own limitations.

I also want to thank the IR staff for the latitude they permitted me to develop Unframed as a review-based forum for arts issues and events, from an artist’s perspective. Without getting specific, Bill D. and Double William routinely tolerated (without overmuch bitching or reprobation) my idiosyncrasies, stubbornness and foibles. Smose and the lovely/talented Alison Vogler contributed quality visuals to the column, with only the sketchiest direction on my part. Of course, thanks also go to Boyer and Laura Lee, for their efforts to maintain a quality news weekly with a community - not corporate - voice, with more content than ads, with a staff consisting of characters, rather than caricatures, cud-chewers or climbers.

What I Witnessed, What We Need

Over the course of my stint at IR, I’ve been gifted with a great view of the blooming cultural landscape of Nashville. I’ve also had the good fortune to meet many outstanding artists during that time, from here and elsewhere. When I first started writing for Unframed, it was easy to cover what was happening. There were usually two or three openings a month, rarely more than one an evening. Lately, it’s been impossible to make every reception and see all the shows, many of which exhibit remarkable artistry by local, national and international artists. The momentum, especially now that Metro is set to pass its PFPA Ordinance, is palpable. The successes or planned successes of groups like ArtSynergy, ruby green, Fugitive, VAAN, and movements to establish arts districts like the 5th AOTA corridor will continue to be fuel the scene. Alternative spaces have sprouted up all over town, in cafes, salons and restaurants. Established galleries like Zeitgeist are committing to more edge-art. Hillsboro Village has emerged as a bonafide gem, with public art, galleries and even walk-through traffic. Most importantly, artsies are thinking of new ways to integrate art into Nashville’s daily life and cultural fabric. Art is no longer just grist for the charity auction mill.

The obstacles facing the art community now have more to do with building a retail presence than anything else. With the extant institutions mostly striding (and sometimes bumbling) forward towards relevance, the key to the future for Nashville’s art scene is the private sector. Without dedicated art spaces exhibiting the worthy recent work of local artmakers, the city will be all painted eggshell and no egg. The city is rich with culture-minded individuals who possess the means and vision to help build a healthy art economy here. These individuals will have to come forward and commit to Nashville’s artists, instead of Chicago’s, New York’s and Los Angeles’, if there is to be any hope of this happening. Real estate developers must play an important role in the future growth of the scene. Unused or underused retail, display and rental space has been handed over to artsies by enlightened landlords in other cities, to great effect. The same should happen here, especially along the 5th AOTA corridor.

Another piece of the Pi: Vanderbilt University must commit to a Masters of Fine Arts (studio) program. The graduate student is the crude oil of any major art scene, and the instructors are critical to a meaningful dialog on artistic merit and art history. The University must be willing to provide this fundamental service to the community, if it wishes to fulfill its obvious role as a cultural leader. A graduate fine arts program would also go a long way towards instilling respect for culture among its students, before they take over the world, I mean, embark on their journeys of discovery. As the vandalism of public art on the Vanderbilt campus last year indicated, this result alone would be worth the costs such a program would incur.

The music, digital, film, graphic and visual arts communities must find ways to integrate their mediums more effectively. “Nashville Sound”? Recent examples of rich multimedia collaborations (like Futureman’s “Evolution D’Amour”) are indicative of what a unique “Nashville Art” form might look like.

Finally, the scene needs reflectors. The Tennessean has reduced its visual arts coverage, and has no plans to do anything other than preview arts events. The Scene, which seldom ran art news until the beginning of 1999, has consistently offered a story in almost every issue since then. Neither of these media outlets provides anything like exhaustive artsy beat coverage, much less interpretive analysis on a regular basis. Sensored has developed into a terrific artsy ‘zine, but Nashville needs a periodical devoted specifically to the visual arts. Memphis has one. Why don’t we? Again, it all boils down to whether those who are capable of supporting such an enterprise within the community are willing to step forward and commit to art in Nashville.

Foundation

All the talk about the big picture, however, is predicated on the vitality of local artists and the artifacts they create. Unless this fact is acknowledged, any advances on the cultural front are doomed to be short-lived and rife with unnecessary conflict. Art is not always a polite conversation, and the practice of free speech is not inherently artistic. However, free speech is only useful as a tool for betterment, when it is coupled with a capacity in one to listen freely. The arts arena is, IMHO, a testing ground within a community, in which the community’s valuation of its freedoms is on display. The artist’s status in Nashville has got to evolve (a good start might be a return to the dictionary definition of “artist”).

The leaders within the community (business and political) often fail to see the value of investing in relationships with creative professionals on the basis of anything like parity. It’s a cultural bias arising from disparate notions of process, results and respect. However, if the artists and business leaders can work on a limited basis as equals on common ground, great things can be achieved in Nashville. The job of the artist, one would hope, begins with the making of the best art possible. The job of the community leader, again, one would hope, begins with a vision of the best community possible. In between is a common ground, in the home, office, media, gallery, and museum. It behooves both sides to work efficiently together on that common ground. We all are the beneficiaries, when this happens. Things change, when this happens.

DddD

That all sounds like high-minded rhetoric, but it’s not. My goal as a writer for IR has been to serve as an advocate for art and artists, not as a reporter and certainly not as a journalist. In the capacity of arts advocate, and as an artist, I have found that parity on common ground between artists and their non-artist peers in the community is not only possible, but preferable and doable. The collective I co-founded with Chip Cox in 1999, DddD, functions on this principle. Next week, in my final column, I’ll discuss a vision for the community artist, a community of artists and the artistic community. DddD, I believe, provides a working model for these paradigms.

In Defense of 4D: A Farewell in Two Parts

Parting Shots (Art Is not Necessarily Polite Conversation)

To Angela Wibking:

Regarding your review-ish coverage of DddD’s last exhibition at the Parthenon (http://archives.nashvillescene.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?article=February_24_2000/Art): You got it so wrong. “Inside>Outside” wasn’t installation art. The exhibit format we used in installing the show was your typical, garden-variety 2D/3D 20th C museum picture-hanging format cum sculptural elements, built around a midpoint of 57″ from the floor. I think you were confused by the use of New Media (although, let’s face it, digi-art, film and video in a gallery or museum context is a decades-old proposition - see Nam June Paik at guggenheim.org). Or perhaps you were just in a hurry (our music pulsed for only about 4 minutes). Be that as it may, your contention that we didn’t take into account the architecture of the Parthenon is simply incorrect. The very geometry of the Parthenon was incorporated into the 2D imagery of “Inside>Outside”. You just didn’t notice or inquire or explore beyond a superficial general impression into the details that fleshed out the show concept. The “unfathomable” cowboy and cowgirl, for instance, represented the married couple in America, wagons circled, guns a-blazing in an us-against-the-world vignette. Many of the elements in the exhibit had a literal subtext, like the American cowpoking babymakers defending against home invasion by hostile interlopers. Others functioned as reflective devices, or echoes, through use of imagery, color, light, etc., in order to establish a conceptual resonance among the diverse assemblage of artworks in the show. In previous DddD exhibits, we’ve utilized text and narrative extensively to create a bridge between the viewer and the fundamental ideas explored in the work. We intentionally abandoned this approach for “Inside>Outside” for a number of reasons. Most importantly, an explicit narrative was eschewed so as to prevent the visually literate from casually touring the exhibit, reading the wall text, and walking away with a false sense of comprehension of the exhibit and its dimensional resonances and layered conceptual complexity. Some artsies (surprisingly, given an assumption that the visually literate possess refined investigative tools for deciphering meaning from opti-facts) evidently were put off by our invitation for deeper study. At least Alan Bostick was able to respond to the challenge with a sense of humor. You, Angela, called it “filler” and walked away. IMHO, that’s your loss, though what can one expect from a viewer who’s a good journalist, like yourself? Interpretation, subjective response and assumption are viewed by the journalist as qualities of “self-indulgence” (see Nashville Scene, Matt Pulle’s “Mess Media”, June 24, ‘99). Unfortunately for the journalist reviewer, these viewer modes are as much prerequisites for a quality assessment of art as are historical knowledge, objective response and clarity. Maybe that’s why in the arts arena journalists are excellent at research and description and crap at communicating associative meaning or (better yet) wonder and inspiration from an experience with the artifact(s). While art is meant to inspire, journalism is meant to inform. This dichotomy of ends poses a conundrum that can undermine the viewing experience of the visually literate who require satisfaction on both points. Does the journalist require the artist to perform an aesthetic autopsy on his or her own work? Is the reader served when the reviewer presents this aesthetic autopsy as a factual summary of the viewer experience? Worse yet, how far will the artist go to create work that facilitates the job of the reporter, art retailer (or the complacent visually literate artsy)? The small abstract paintings in “Inside>Outside” were a commentary on these issues, as was the “Introduction Video”, which you read well, if not sympathetically. Perhaps you “got” the latter and not the former (or the layered images), because watching the TV is a passive viewing experience, and the paintings required one to invest in the dangerously un-Dieter act of squeezing a battery-less flashlight (metaphor for the investment of attention in the viewing process).

Ready-made interpretations of the individual elements in “Inside>Outside” were not supplied for another reason: we didn’t want to provide the young and/or less than visually literate viewer (the largest proportion of visitors at the Parthenon) an artspeak “off switch”. Interactivity is diminished by the over-intellectualization of the viewing process. DddD built “Inside>Outside” with the new museum paradigm in mind. We developed the exhibit to serve those who constitute the vast majority of the Parthenon’s viewer audience: kids and people with a lot of life experience (if not a lot of art experience). As a result of my commitment to be available each Saturday from 2-4 PM at the museum to answer questions and observe viewer response to the exhibit, I can say that the work generally succeeded with these portions of the viewing audience. The kids especially loved the flashlights, but also totally dug being on camera (DA Cox3) in an American flag and twirling a baton like the boy in Brent Stewart’s film - in a museum setting. By the way, I owe that idea (of being available to viewers to explain non-linear artwork) to conceptual artist Richard Tuttle. When he had a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Santa Fe in 1996, he showed up more or less once a week to answer questions about his far out art. My interpretation of his ethic: If you’re going to make stuff that people can’t “get” in 30 seconds - 4 minutes, at least have the courtesy to give the viewer an opportunity for interpretive interrogation. Angela, if you really wanted to know what any of the pieces (including “Growing Inside” - the piece featuring violins, violas and cellos by luthier Garrett Pate suspended between two columns) were “about”, you could have asked me on any Saturday afternoon during the show run. The same holds true for any confused viewer.The visual information contained in the 2D work and animations amounted to much more than “prints of children and dancers”, as you put it. The “Inside>Outside” images described a circular procreative sequence involving dance (SHE), feats of strength (HE), marriage, pregnancy, birth, nature and nurture (technology and family). The aesthetic discussion included riffs on the artist’s eye, craft, the mathematics and geometry of form, light as a factor in the experience of art and the Dimensionist method of holistic representation and sensory receptivity (Forget about me going there… it’s a word count issue). The bottom line, Angela: you just didn’t invest enough in viewing the work to get all, or really any, of that, and we didn’t force feed it to you.

The most egregious omissions in the review, however, involved the lack of any exploration of the community investment required to exhibit “Inside>Outside”, and the lack of any discussion of the DddD concept. DddD was initially created to challenge the notion of artistic attribution in Western art, and to facilitate a marriage between art and science. The premise for DddD’s investigations began with “the Fourth Dimension” (drawing from 4D theories developed by scientists and artists, as well as moralists). But what emerged after eighteen months of public experimentation along these lines, was a notion of community art founded on the idea that a group of individuals from diverse backgrounds and disciplines could apply themselves as individuals to the exploration of a set of ideas or concepts. The more universal (in terms of human experience) the idea or concept was, the more diverse and particular the artistic response turned out to be. We found the community was willing to participate in meaningful ways in our experiments. Businesses and individuals (like Ground Zero, Consolidated Media Systems, Earl Whittaker of All-Wood Cabinets and Woodland Studio owner Bob Solomon) contributed massively to our efforts. The investments made by DddD members Sharon Gilchrist, Eric Johnston, DA Cox3, Roger Walker, Nicole Koenig, Don Adams and Ellen Rudick, in formulating a finished, complex presentation worthy of any artspace anywhere have been remarkable. This list does not even begin to approach a comprehensive cataloging of creative input by local artsies, without whose contributions our work would have been diminished. Trey Mitchell, Rebecca Stout, Jim Harrington, Rebecca Walk, Scott Mele, Joe Sorci, Steve Bennyworth and many others facilitated the realization of these exhibits in some way. In my experience, Nashville’s art community is as cohesive as any, and an endeavor like DddD would not be possible anywhere else.

Often synchronistic interplay among the individual artists’ interpretations of the exhibit concepts created echo dynamics, which could not have been better if planned. The Deadlines Lifelines Trilogy is unequivocally the product of the ensemble methodology. As anyone who has worked with a team for creative purposes must be aware, the rarity of a productive collaboration in visual art is unarguable. Some critics of DddD have chosen to focus on my personality or profile and ignore the group dynamic of our projects. Angela, you have certainly done so. This phenomenon bears out our contention that attribution in the visual arts context continues to be a limiting factor, especially in terms of promoting a more community-based aesthetic. The reason this is significant has to do with the influence of marketing on artistic quality and exploration. Retail, institutional and academic artsies have established a circular argument for singularity of vision and execution, centered on a linear model of development. The artist’s growth is only important until he discovers a marketable methodology, which he is then expected to repeat with slight variations until he dies. This methodology only facilitates the jobs of the commentator, survey collector, critic, dealer, previewer and anthologist. It does not reflect the realities of the creative endeavor, nor does it necessarily feed the 4D relationship among artist, viewer, artifact and presenter/community. In the long term, the linear model only enriches a very few, reduces the aesthetic dialog to nitpicking artspeak semantics of interest to only a very few, and produces mediocre art by talented artists for whom security and equanimity are primary concerns. True advances happen in spite of those who promote the linear method. The non-artists attracted to this paradigm are generally unimaginative pretenders attached to the strong impression that quick-draw art analysis can make on the visually illiterate.

In the instances when you have reviewed the exhibits of DddD, Angela, you have patently failed to convey any evidence that you capable of providing your readers more than a rudimentary analysis of artists’ technical or expressive explorations. By default, you reinforce the notion that art is to be experienced in the same way that a television advertisement (or at best, docu-drama) impacts a viewer. Your contention that conformity of design is a necessary qualification of installation art, a contention you support by citing Terri Jones’ particularly bare Temporary Contemporary installation, is simply lazy. It also appears to potentially be the result of your own prejudice against ostentatious display of expensive technology (a deduction based on your affinity for Jones’ art and your admiration of Jones’ use of simple materials… you remember that she could not afford an alternative?). You describe “Inside>Outside” in rather derogatory terms when comparing Lanie Gannon’s excellent sculpture (which was exhibited simultaneously in the West Gallery). You describe our show as “sensory overload and frenzied fragmentation”. I submit that you failed to differentiate between your response to our exhibit and the exhibit itself.

Obviously, much of the work that has defined “installation art” does not adhere to your definition of design quality or aesthetic effectiveness. However, this is a moot point. The only installation DddD has exhibited was “Sirens & Conflagrations” at the Temp Contemp stables. The fact that you failed to recognize “Inside>Outside” as a “traditional” museum exhbition shouldn’t be commented upon too harshly. The Parthenon staff itself had difficulty differentiating between the two exhibition models. Nonetheless, your misconception could easily have been rectified by a phone call to the artists. Perhaps one of the things you find objectionable in our exhibits (and this is only conjecture), is that we as a collective have essentially taken it upon ourselves to complete the entire exhibit experience for the viewer. We handled the installation, lighting, construction, and the promotion for the exhibit. You failed to recognize these details, including the outstanding graphic design work by Ellen Rudick, who created for this show the most effective, elegant and powerful exhibit invites I’ve seen since moving to Nashville. We didn’t provide you a conceptual point of recession, a presentational slip, a point of vicarious ownership. Without such a handle, perhaps the effort require for you to seek conceptual threads (which were there) through the body of work (over 100 pieces), was too much for you. Your listing of elements out of context to start the article seems to bear this out.

This has been the case, since you first began writing about DddD. Your Nashville Scene coverage of the group has included a paragraph on the Temp Contemp Installation show, a paragraph in the November 4 issue covering Artrageous 1999 and the “Inside>Outside” review. Each attempt consisted of either cursory overview or flippant review lite, and included significant mistakes or omissions. In the November 4 article you called the exhibit a “conceptual show”, which you claimed was my “first commercial gallery show”. The latter statement was just bad research (I’ve had a couple dozen) and the former demonstrated a plain lack of involvement in or comprehension of the work we exhibited. Granted, you wrote this blurb without actually seeing the exhibit (and spelt my name wrong). That does not excuse your poor representation of DddD, made more puzzling by your end lines: “both Gannon’s show and the McLean/DddD installation are successful interactive art experiences well worth exploring (from your “Inside>Outside” review).” Do you really want to invite your reader to experience “sensory overload and frenzied fragmentation” created by installation artists who treat their installation space as a “nuetral backdrop”, rife with “unfathomable”…”visual filler”? Your response to the show seems conflicted. Which is it? Did the show suck, in your opinion, or was it “successful”? Therein lies the major problem with your writing. It is equivocal and devoid of a confident, informed interpretation of the art you review.

In the interests of professional exchange, as my final act as a paid reviewer for In Review, I would like to provide you an example of confident, informed interpretation, as it can be applied to your critical style. Almost uniformly, your art reviews suck. Further, the only “filler” in the Parthenon when you reviewed “Inside>Outside” was the filler between your ears.

Hope that helps.

Professionally yours,
Paul McLean
4/11/00

Dimensionism

What is a community artist? To what do people respond most deeply in art? How best can an artist present the human experience to viewers from diverse cultural backgrounds and varied levels of visual literacy? What is “Vision”? What is the optimal aesthetic means for representing meaning to an audience? What is the most effective blend of inspiration, experience and abstraction in an artifact-based language? In a society driven by technology and industry, what role does art play? In summation, what is art?”

The question of “What is Art?” (if not the answer) is a faceted one. The questions above constitute paths of discovery for any inquisitor compelled to pursue the artistic endeavor. The study of art is available to anyone. The results of such investigation can be of value to the art teacher, student, viewer, maker, collector and presenter. Art can be potentially a vehicle for inspiration or emotional catharsis, a catalyst for perceptual change, an expression of the spirit, a way to intellectual freedom, and a corporeal mirror. Why would art and the study of art not be valued socially, given these potential benefits?

If life is a dance, the artist must be a magical dancer within the context of the mundane. He or she must be adept at switching mindsets, capable of inspecting the artistic enterprise from the point of view of the teacher, student, viewer, etc.  For an artist, the reply to “What is art?” is ultimately to be found in his or her work. If one were to insert plusses (what + is + art) in the phrase, one begins to identify the basic components of aesthetic research and development. Since anyone can begin aesthetic pursuits at any time in her or his life, an understanding of aesthetic fundamentals is worthwhile for no other reason than as a hedge against potential future interest.

The “What” in art begins with the artist’s eye, seeing the world exactly as it is. The artist’s eye sees relationships as a progressive series of configurations, ordered (or not) by time, space (or dimension) and place. This peculiar, faceted vision of the world allows the artist to experience temporal cycles as both participant and observer. His experience hopefully will eventually compel the artist (or pursuer of art) to seek opportunities for witnessing immaculate moments - when the configurations transcend the progression that produced them. The artist surrenders to living (the “is” in “what is art?”), in order to become aware of the things that constitute (and surpass) his own vital limitations. The object is refining the equipment one needs to notice when the same phenomenon occurs in the artist’s environment. The artist, then, is a hunter of wonder. Art, through (and sometimes in spite of) craft and tradition, becomes a document of “what is”, an artifact of experience, a record of vision, a translator of experience, a fomenter of wonder. Placed in a designated artspace, the artifact transmutes, becoming an idea in an arena of ideas, a turn in a golden thread of revelation, a single revolution of a spiraling sphere of experience and memory. The artifact is to the human what Art is to humanity. Being human is where we begin. Being a member in good standing of the human race is the right use of ambition, IMHO. Art is an abstraction and chronicle of this expansion of consciousness. Lofty, complex thoughts? You bet.

Who’s to Say?

Art bears the influence of society, as does the artist. Every society, to paraphrase Lascussagne, gets the artists it deserves. Politics, commerce, technology, materials, history, narrative method or language, religion… all these factors are to a degree evident in the artifact, just as they are in the acculturated individual. Great art is not diminished by evidence of acculturation. In great art such defining “markings” remind one of the humanity of the maker and add value to the artifact for the purposes of exploring deductively site/time specificity as it relates to the creative act. Arbitrariness in execution or intent is reflective of the solidity of the cultural idiom - it is not an aesthetic of independence. To abstain from craft and precision is not a spontaneous action. It is an abnegation of one’s nature as a site/time specific creative being. Only the viewer or collector with interests other than art will respond to or support an artist for whom good making is low on the list of aesthetic priorities.

On the other hand, craft and tradition can be yokes. When appropriated stylization is used as a blunting tool or a corner-cutting device, the artistic vision is at risk. The artist must judiciously use the tools in his toolbox, choosing from the infinite to convey the specific. It is a constant dance between the exceptional and acceptable.

The choice to surrender to one’s artistic calling is a beautiful madness. We all experience the creative impulse on a daily basis. It is rooted in our will to survive. Those who determine to follow that impulse into the realm of the Muse are sometimes lost to the world of survival. Their turnings are oddly (sometimes tragically, fearsomely and profoundly) beautiful - like a perfect blossom in a bombed-out garden. To understand ourselves fully, our eyes must be keenly attentive to the few truly artistic moments that modern life generates. The artist is meant to be the guide, the vision channel device.

Ultimately, art is no less a part of life than breathing, for the artist and the aware. Society and its artists form a dimensional symbiosis, through which both are enriched.

DddD

The Fourth Dimension as aesthetic term has been applied to visual art in a variety of ways for much of this century. “4D” has been used to describe optical, spiritual environmental, philosophical and social influences and phenomena in art. As a defining term it has about as much verifiable mass as the phrase, “It has a genetic basis”. In science, “4D” is just as changeable, depending on the scientific context. Over the past eighteen months I’ve endeavored to explore 4D with a band of remarkable individuals from diverse backgrounds. We have in a trilogy of exhibits sought to build artifacts, which illuminate our individual and collective studies of life in 4D. We have attempted to convey in the visual art language a multi-faceted dialectic on all the aspects of artistry remarked upon above (and many more not recorded here).
Our “studies” would not have been possible without the contributions of many individuals, businesses and institutions. Our “investigations” and “experiments” would not have been worthwhile were it not for those who completed them by experiencing them. I believe that our endeavor could not have been successful anywhere in the world, except Nashville, Tennessee, USA. A great dance has to have music and the tension of the new.

DddD is Chip Cox (Science), Ellen Rudick (Graphic Design), Eric Johnston (Art, Craft, et. al), Sharon Gilchrist (Music), Megan Walborn (Art), Nicole Koenig (Dance, Drama), Brent Stewart (Film), Bob Solomon (Audio), Roger Walker (Illustration, Mechanics), Don Adams (Excellence in Elemental Details), Barbara Carter (Fiber Art), Earl Whittaker (Woodwork - also progenitor of blanket term “Artsy”) and our voice, Rebecca Stout. These individuals constitute a core group working and living in Nashville, who have in my estimation broken through to a new aesthetic form, not first seen in New York or LA, but right here in this city. It has been an honor to work with all of you.

The model for DddD is derived from the aesthetic above, and the bluegrass hoe down. Its success depends on the relevance of a chosen production concept, the ethic that those in the group contribute on the basis of their ability to achieve individual success within the group’s production, and the necessity of a leader who serves, an equal among equals. No two members of the group excels in the same discipline (facets). The model works, and our successes are reproducible by any collective, given that they first adopt these precepts. It’s what we have given away. Whether any choose to try it, are capable of discerning its value (see my letter to Angela Wibking at inreview.net attached to this column) or aware of the ramifications of our endeavor, is certainly not the point. The point is, this marriage of science and art, artists and community, commerce and gifts freely given has produced artifacts and aesthetics, respectively created and founded in Nashville, as a result of the generosity of Nashvillians. The DddD Deadlines + Lifelines trilogy did not happen, however through significant funding by any institutional entity, but through the auspices of individuals associated with the projects. Nor did it happen because members of the visual arts community wholeheartedly embraced the work or concept. Many hated our shows. The exhibits happened through the hard work and tenacity of DddD members and the support of those who dig, are inspired by, cool new artsy stuff and beautiful madness. Not to sound flip, we dedicated our work to veterans, kids and our loved ones (apple pie, too).

In closing, I’d like to add that in the final analysis, what we made was not art. It was a Dimensional experience set to music, just like Futureman’s glorious “Evolution D’Amour”. Right here in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for everything.

The Walls of Jericho Come Tumbling Down

On Thursday evening, March 23, John Bridges sent me the following note:

The Mayor will hold a press conference, announcing the filing of the Percent
for Public Art ordinance, tomorrow at 11 a.m. in his main conference room.

I thought you’d want to be there.

The atmosphere was backslap–ingly ostentatious feel-good. …Lots of jokes, smiles and congratulatory banter… On Friday, March 24, Mayor Purcell, Paulette Coleman, Tom Turk, Ronnie Steine, and Eileen Beehan stood before the gathered crowd of media, local politicians and artsies. The cameras ran, and short speeches were delivered in the rhetoric of promise:

On behalf of the members of the Metropolitan Nashville Arts Commission and the citizens of Davidson County, we are excited and deeply grateful that Mayor Purcell plans to introduce this long-awaited Percent for Public Art Ordinance.  The Metro Arts Commission appreciates the mayor’s leadership on this important cultural initiative.  Nashville and Davidson County residents will be enriched by the visual art that is created as a result of this legislation.  Mayor Purcell, we salute you and your staff.  We are ecstatic about the prospect for art in public places which celebrates community, commemorates history, inspires civic pride, responds to the local environment, invigorates public spaces, and stimulates the imagination and creative spirit within all of us.  What a wonderful legacy for future generations!

That was (Chair of the MNAC) Paulette Coleman’s two cents. I added the bold type. This is what it really is all about.

…More good news! In a brief Q & A session following the speeches, Mayor Purcell stated that (by the end of this year) an Urban Design Center and a Metro 5th AOTA plan would be on the table.

Brass Tacks

Here’s how the summary provided by the Mayor’s office reads:

•    The ordinance establishes a dedicated source of funding for public art projects.
•    One percent of any general obligation bonds issued to fund the construction or substantial renovation of any public building, public park or public parking facility will be set aside for public art projects.
•    Public art projects may also be financed by federal and state monies and by donations to the Public Art Fund.
•    The Arts Commission is charged with developing Public Art Guidelines - including criteria for accepting donations (either cash or actual works of art), for selecting artists and appropriate art projects, and for the placement of public art.
•    The Arts Commission may use monies from the Public Art Fund to purchase public art or to commission works of public art.
•    In planning the design, execution and placement of a work of public art associated with a public construction project, the Arts Commission must consult with the departments responsible for the construction project.
•    The Arts Commission must receive assurance from the Director of finance and the appropriate department head that money exists or will exist in the operating budget for operational and/or maintenance costs associated with the public art.
•    Monies in the Public Art Fund will be generated by public construction and renovation projects, but the expenditure of those monies need not, in every case, be linked to those same projects. When deemed appropriate by the Arts Commission and by the department head, a public art project may be incorporated into a public construction project, but public art projects may also be placed on other public properties, in compliance with the Commission’s Public Art Guidelines.
•    The ordinance is not retroactive. It does not include construction projects planned or agreements in existence prior to the effective date of the ordinance.

Impressions

As PFTA programs go, this is a conservative one (perhaps watering down the ordinance is a preemptive move to placate politico fears of being seen as frivolous in their spending in the current budget crunch?). Public works monies will not be tapped, which is a bit of a disappointment. Public works and infrastructure projects are the bread and butter of many successful PFTA programs around the country. As a result of Metro’s narrowed focus for the Percent for Public Art Ordinance, the monies generated by Metro for the purchase, placement and maintenance of public art will therefore be relatively modest. That said, this is a terrific first step in the process of integrating visual art into the fabric of Nashvillians’ daily life. If the people like what they get from this legislation in the coming years, they’ll ask for more.

In his comments Vice Mayor Steine pointed out that projects like the Carousel and Joe Sorci’s outdoor sculpture installation (sited on the greenway next to Adelphia) have helped the people of Nashville recognize the value of public art. Steine’s point - that people have to live with art in order for art to enhance their lives - is true. A lot of folks have contributed to the making of this legislation. You know who you are… To the artists, administrators and patrons who over the years have set the stage for Friday’s announcement: Kudos!

What Happens Next

All that remains to be done is for Council to sign off on the cultural legacy that this legislation represents.

Here’s the schedule for the Percent for Public Art Ordinance’s run through Council:

•    March 28: Eileen Beehan will sign the legislation and file it with the Metro Clerk’s office.
•    April 4: First reading, after which the ordinance is assigned to committees.
•    April 18: Second reading.
•    May 16: Third and final hearing. Paydirt.

In an e-mail sent to me, Beehan wrote, “This is a great investment and we are ready to support it.” (I added the bold.) Besides Beehan, the following council members promised as candidates in last year’s election to support a percent for art provision:

Leo Waters, Melvin Black, Bettye Balthrop, Phil Ponder, James Bruce Stanley, Amanda McClendon, Ginger Hausser, Morris Haddox, Bob Bogen, Jason Alexander and Don Knoch.

It’s time to ante up. These men and women represent a good core contingency for the ordinance’s passage. From what I’ve heard from advocates in Metro, however, there are only a few opponents to the provision on the Council.

To those on Council who are planning to grandstand as civic protectors of the budget, descrying what they see as extraneous spending: Please sit down. Culture-optional thinking will prevent Nashville from continuing to attract the sort of businesses that the city needs for sustained growth. The fact is any fiduciary opposition to the Percent for Public Art Ordinance will not be based on fiscal reality. The PFPAO structure ensures that no new monies will be required for public art. That’s why PFTA programs have survived and flourished around the world for decades. They evade the blades of cut-happy politicos looking for a photo op when times get tough on civic cash flow (as they inevitably will do). That’s because public art money is imbedded in building contracts. That’s because artists helped write PFTA ordinances, and artists know that when it comes to showing how responsible he is, there’s a certain type of pol who can’t wait to show his culture-optional prejudicial ass, as he makes like Freddy Krueger on his constituents’ quality of life initiatives. While he’s ranting against “frivolous” expenditures, look in this pol’s coat pocket for the alternative contingency pork he’s ready to push in another lowlit back room deal. …And you can be sure that deal will have nothing to do with making Nashville an attractive place to visit or live for John and Jane Q. Public.

Nashville’s age of cultural abstinence is long past. The city wants a Percent for Public Art, and Mayor Purcell is making good on his promise to give it to us. Call your council rep and let him know that you support this ordinance.

While You’re on the Phone with Metro…

…Call MDHA and encourage them to come up with a positive resolution for the Lequire sculpture/fountain (my bold) sited at the Music Row Roundabout. Arts writers Alan Bostick and Donna Dorian Wall have drawn a picture of this knotty situation over the past several weeks that raises a question: In light of Friday’s announcement, does cultural goodwill only apply to projects initiated after May 16? No matter what’s been said by the parties involved (the budget-crunch comments were especially obtuse), a good outcome is still doable. MDHA: Don’t throw the baby out with the fountain water…

By the Way…

It’s been a great run, but my stint as an arts writer for In Review is coming to a close. Last week I sent out an e-mail announcement to that effect and have received many kind well-wishes. They’re much appreciated. In my last couple of columns, I intend to discuss some issues that have emerged for me as an artist and arts writer over the course of the past year.

The IR staff is currently interviewing potential arts writers… Wes Sherman: Now’s your chance! Call Bill or William at 255-9792.

A Reply

In a letter to the editor published in last week’s IR, Greg Pond savaged my column “Art You Don’t Understand”, which dealt with the “disconnect” among artists, artwork and viewers in the visual arts arena. I consider correcting the “disconnect” of primary importance for the future of the visual arts at the community level. Therefore, I feel compelled to address Pond’s response, since he based his attack on an inaccurate reading of the text.

Mr. Pond states in his letter that I claimed he, Dave Holland (see last week’s column), and the others mentioned make art that you don’t understand. In fact, I said that the artists to whom I referred invested “…resources, sweat and time into the creation of a piece of art that defies definition, with very little compensation”, in making “art that you don’t understand easily “ (my italics-PM). I stand by these statements. To use Pond and one of his “sculptures” (currently on display at Ruby Green) as an example: acquiring a motorcycle, stretching sinew-sewn rawhide over it, transporting the piece and suspending it from the ceiling of a gallery requires resources, sweat and time. As far as I know Pond made the piece to which I refer on speculation, and it remains unsold. Only a small fraction of Nashvillians would recognize it as art. If Mr. Pond believes otherwise, he is in denial. That is not to say that his work is bad (in fact, it’s cool as hell), only that it defies definition: Is it sculpture? It’s not on a pedestal. Rawhide and sinew aren’t traditional art mediums for Americans of European descent. Did he make the motorcycle? If not, then what of the question of craft? Is his concept enough to define the object as art?

It’s good for the growth of art as an expressive medium, when artwork raises questions like these. In the extreme, however, didactic art is marginal art that speaks only to a limited audience.  As Louise Bourgeouis said, “Art is not about art. Art is about life.” The artist who makes work (intentionally or not) only for those relatively few who take or teach art classes, regularly visit galleries, curate art shows or make art themselves does so at the risk of alienating further John Q. Public, who knows a toilet’s purpose.

Mr. Pond claims that I called Cheekwood viewers “dumb-ass pseudo-critics”. I did no such thing. “Artists often band together…insulating themselves from the dumb-ass pseudo-critic’s barbs,” is what I said. I thought of watering down that term. Then I remembered instances when a stranger, or worse, a loved one, belittled with a cutting phrase the artistic efforts of a student or artist friend. I left in “dumb-ass pseudo-critics”.

Pond, who loosely describes himself as a “college professor”, claims that I’m of the opinion that the art viewing “audience is incapable of understanding any artist’s work”, and that my column was written to “reinforce” this notion. He’s wrong. I’ve spent the past fifteen years in all facets of the art biz learning to look through the viewer’s eyes. That’s the key to “effective communication through visual art”: understanding and respecting one’s viewer, regardless of his level of art literacy. When it comes to exposure to “broad-based viewer response”, I’ll play dueling resumes with anybody. Mine is on file at IR for those interested.

Regarding Pond’s other complaints: I missed Holland’s opening, because FAC failed to tell me when it was happening, and I have seen Pond’s show at Ruby Green. To learn more about the “disconnect” between artists and Republicans/Moral Majority, Pond can start at www.cannylink.com/artcensorship.htm, or simply search for “art censorship” on the Internet. Mean artists and mean work? Start with Damien Hirst, the mean artist poster boy. Right now, he’s showing his trademark dismembered rotting pig & cow carcasses, suspended in formaldehyde-filled tanks, in NYC. The Turner Prizewinner is the “disconnect” hit of the season there. Want more? Write me. Only space constraints and propriety prevented me from delving further into this subject.

Finally, I never said that Mayor Phil “slighted the arts community by courting Dell…without requiring them to fund art projects.” What I pointed out was the disparity between Metro’s policy of effusive patronage for business and its policy of paltry (though improving) support for the arts. Non-profit arts organizations, according to a recent MNAC study, contribute nearly $100 Million to the city’s economy every year, providing hundreds of jobs, and more importantly, improving the quality of life here. Why are artists not provided the same incentives that the city is willing to give a multinational corporation?

Those who resist making the financial commitment required for Nashville’s cultural growth simply care more about profit margins than quality of life in the community where they do business. The “disconnect” is their best excuse for not giving back. Artists have a responsibility to take away that excuse. Heightening community awareness of the valuation of art is where we start.

A Master

On February 10 “Ron Adams, Master Printmaker: A Survey of Work, 1984-1999″ opened at Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. This exhibition is a tour de force. Kudos go to Joe Mella and the VFAG staff, and to James Rutherford of the Tennessee State Museum, who facilitated the exhibition. If you missed the reception (the Watkins Faculty show opened that night, too), make a point of visiting VFAG before the exhibit closes on March 19.

It’s really two shows in one. Half of the exhibit is devoted to Adams’ remarkable artwork, mostly lithographic prints of impeccable artistry and skill.  The other half consists of prints produced by Adams for mostly A-list artists Luis Jimenez, Charles White, Woody Gwyn, Tom Palmore, John Biggers, Phyllis Sloane, Mark Spencer and Mary Sundstrom. Wall text - in which Adams describes his relationships with the artists and/or narrates the making of the images on display - is priceless.

The Man

Ron Adams has paid dues. He took his first serious course in art almost a half century ago, a graphic arts class at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. Adams continued his studies over the next thirteen years at L.A.’s Manual Arts Adult Night School (Drafting), L.A. City College (Engineering), again at L.A.T.T.C. (Technical Illustration and Commercial Art - certified as trade proficient), Otis Art Institute (Drawing, Painting, Sculpture), U.C.L.A. (Advanced Drawing) and the University of New Mexico (Lithography and Metal Engraving).

Adams began his career at Hughes Aircraft, spending five years as a technical illustrator (1962-7). Can you say precision? After a year as a commercial designer for the Olympics (1968), he moved on to vaunted Gemini G.E.I. in Los Angeles (1969-73), during which period Adams progressed from assistant to master printmaker. After a year at Editions Press in San Francisco, he moved to Santa Fe and set up shop.

He named his printmaker’s studio Hand Graphics. Today Hand Graphics is one of the country’s most respected printmaking houses. Adams owned the business until 1987, working under the master printmaker’s aegis. His collaborative credits read like a “Who’s Who in 20th Century art”. He’s worked with Johns, Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Zuniga, Judy Chicago… the list goes on and on.

Adams has throughout his career been an involved community artist. As arts advocate, he helped create a program in Santa Fe to encourage developers to convert unused or underused real estate into artist’s studios (such a program would greatly benefit Nashville, yes?). He was the driving force behind the establishment of Monothon, a benefit for the College of Santa Fe. Monothon has since flourished and become a staple of the Santa Fe scene and a showcase for local artists, both established and emerging. He served on the New Mexico Arts Commission from 1985-88. Adams has also been active as a lecturer, instructor, curator, panelist, exhibit juror, and artist-in-residence.

Since the mid-Sixties Adams has cultivated a powerful reputation as a fine artist in his own right. His artwork has been exhibited across the country in numerous galleries and museums, and is included in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian’s. The prints and paintings on display at VFAG confirm Ron Adams’ status as one of America’s greatest living printmakers.

The Work

As an artist, Adams works by the square inch. Whatever the medium - lithograph, etching, engraving, drawing or painting - he brings the 2D surface to life, fashioning it with arduous craftsmanship. Unbelievably rich in texture, detail and subtle color, Adams’ work is a powerful amalgam of classical references and technique, African American cultural identity, amazing draftsmanship and Soul. Conceptually rich, each work packs a multi-layered narrative that never obliterates the emotional and expressive force driving the maker. The modulation of tone and hue is stunning. Adams’ textural/illusionist chops are nothing short of magnificent. Adams is a virtuoso printmaker, who responds to artistic challenges with precise, patient, and inspired execution.

The entry piece for the exhibit is “Profile in Blue”, Adams’ dramatic autobiographical study of a veteran printmaker reflecting on a hard day’s toil in his studio, (after/before is not clear). An interesting sidebar: the completion of “Profile” coincided with Adams’ selling of Hand Graphics to devote his energies to full time artmaking. The muted color in “Profile in Blue”, its articulate figurative stylings and (finally) its title compellingly evoke Picasso’s serial studies of poverty. The allusion to Picasso’s “Blue Series” adds aesthetic edge to what might have been a portrait of a working-class hero, a la the WPA.

Upon the representational bones of the portrait, Adams builds a living document of a life lived at the press. This document is developed through the exhibit, piece by piece. We learn through viewing the work of Adams’ temperament, sharp social consciousness, his breadth of vision, love affair with tradition, his commitment to culture, his passion for beauty, music, the human condition (as described in the figure), the creative endeavor and the dynamic narrative. His images are complexly crafted and full of layered meanings, condensing the scope of a novel, movie or epic poem into a visual moment of spellbinding clarity and emotional depth.  The scenes depicted in “Blackburn”, “Neptune Washington”, “All Things Are Possible”, “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words” and “Insufficient Funds” (variations), and “Endangered Species” (I and II) are as massive in thematic scale as any of Rivera’s murals. Viewed as a combinant summation, they comprise a momentous argument for the Way of the artist and a ferocious indictment of the forces that oppose artistic integrity. Whether the obstacle to excellence is within or without the artist himself is of little import to Adams. What does matter is the tenacity of the artist in his pursuit of the prize: another day of working, honing craft and artifice, rendering the best artifacts possible from the barest of life’s truths.

Back to “Profile in Blue”. Adams’ Printmaker King sits on a litho stone throne, grasping his roller with a mighty hand, the way an emperor would his scepter. Light streams through a window onto the scene, and everything it touches (or doesn’t touch) reveals something in the mind of the maker. The gizmos of expression - sponges, a brush, a bowl of water/solvent - are practically aglow. The open can of ink is blood red. All are catalogued in relief, with meticulousness bordering on artistic microscopy. The print within the print, the veiled hammer, the bending of the light on the floor, the contorted lower body of the printmaker: each element is a clue in the mystery of making. That mystery for Adams is never solved. It’s only resolved, temporarily, when the ink dries on the paper, and the master is satisfied - if that’s the word.

The Visions of Others

Finally, the VFAG exhibition speaks to the value of playing well with others. Ron Adams excels at capturing on paper the vision and process of other artists. The samples included in the show illustrate how the master printmaker approaches this daunting task with care and craft. Whether adding sparkles to a Woody Gwyn highway-scape for an effect of heightened realism; taking the printshop to the artist to ensure a graphic legacy (when the great Charles White’s age and ailments prevented him from working at Hand Graphics); dealing with the missteps of other printmakers to rescue an edition (Palmore’s); or passing the torch to another generation of printmakers (Sundstrom)… Adams has as master printmaker applied the same passion and rigorous standards to his work for others as he has to his own work. The result is that Adams has managed to make the play of those around him better. We as viewers owe him a debt at least as great as the debt of gratitude owed Adams by the artists with whom he has collaborated.

This show is a must-see.

Scene Notes

“Artists for Oasis” happened at Finer Things last weekend. What a crowd! What a sale! Artists represented included Charlie Cook, Samuel Dunson, Margaret Ellis, Russ Faxon, John Guider, Johan Hagaman, Jeff Hand, Kristi Hargrove, Jack Isenhour, Linda Marks, Michael Shane Neal, Joe Sorci, Butler Steltemeier, Rusty Wolfe and Lain York.

The third annual D.I.G. Through Art show hosted by the Downtown Presbyterian Church is slated for March 9. If you’re an artist with some new work that has something to do with suffering or hope and want to participate, contact Tom Wills at WillyWonkaIs@home.com, phone him at 298-1489 or write to The Downtown Presbyterian Church, c/o the DIG Art Show (254 Fifth Ave. N, 37212). They only have room for thirty artists, so be quick artsies!

Lanie Gannon opened a terrific show of her painted sculptures at the Parthenon’s West Gallery on February 12. Definitely worth a look! David Lefkowitz closed his (”Natural Curiosities”) run at Sarratt Gallery with an entertaining, informative and well attended lecture on February 13. Paul Harmon opened his major exhibit of works on paper at Zeitgeist on February 19. That same night Fugitive Art Center opened “Four Point Five Hours a Day”, an exhibit of new media works by students from the University of the South and Watkins. Belmont’s Leu Art Gallery is slated to open an exhibit of the late, great collagist Romare Bearden’s work on February 27. Lastly, O’More and Cheekwood instructor Tim Murphy will open an exhibit of paintings and drawings, titled “Chalk Circles”, at Destination Gallery (Paul McLean, director) on February 25.

A couple of things: sometimes it takes a gnarly personality to present an agenda that’s new. That doesn’t justify artists acting out, alienating potential arts supporters with arrogance. Cockiness is common in young artists – in my early twenties I was a rude know-it-all, but I got over it. Making art is a solitary enough occupation, fraught with financial insecurity and generally misunderstood, or worse, shunned by the people it’s meant to benefit. Eventually, I learned to not contribute to those negatives with belligerent rhetoric.

Lastly, John Reed, who works at the Parthenon, had a studio next door to mine at Chestnut, when I first moved to town. He’s a terrific painter trained at Chicago’s Art Institute. In his work he wrestles with the same technical issues that Maiofis does, but he paints pro wrestlers as well as art referential stuff. I’d love to see another show of his big canvases…

Beasts and Beauties

Sensational …Not

A strange thing happened on the way to the Parthenon last Wednesday. As I drove down Charlotte Avenue, the shrieky voice of Dr. Laura assailed me from my car radio with a diatribe on, of all things, modern art. “I hate modern art…It’s (pause) yucky. It’s cold… It’s about hate,” she ranted.

The talk radio shrink was taking a two-minute break from curtly fixing people’s lives over the phone (while millions of people listen in) to spray a dumbass pseudo-critic diatribe all over my dashboard. What could inspire an artless person like Dr. Laura to attempt a critique of an art show, albeit an important one, for a national audience?

It’s all because of elephant dung and animal carcasses. Yep, the art ”disconnect” is headline news again. The furor surrounding “Sensation” (an exhibition of artworks from the infamous Saatchi collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art) has mushroomed into a political burlesque and media feeding frenzy.

Recap: Brooklyn Museum of Art schedules mean artist highlight show, featuring Turner Prize winners Damien Hirst (carcass guy) and Chris Ofili (pachyderm poop guy), and others. New York Mayor and Senator-wannabe Rudy Giuliani pitches a public fit over Ofili’s crappy Virgin Mary “painting”, and threatens to pull funding for museum. Artworld goes into anti-censorship mode, Giuliani looks like an ogre, media has a field day and over 9,000 people show up for opening day at BMA. Postscript: NYC funding for museum yanked, federal funding in jeopardy, lawsuits in progress, and a sole protester goes to jail.

The losers in this deal are the artists of merit who will bear the consequences of others’ aesthetics, politics, ambition and disregard for the viewer. Personally, I think Rudy G is right in many of his concerns about “Sensation” and the role of the museum in the community. He should have held a press conference to vent spleen over offensive material and lambaste the museum administration. That’s within his purview as Big Apple citizen numero uno. However, when the Mayor threatened and later yanked funding for the museum, he crossed the line. That’s censorship. Rather than encouraging artsies to make their own decisions on “Sensation’s” aesthetic merits (or lack thereof), he attacked the institution and our right to see the artwork (check out artnet.com), which - like it or not – is on the worldwide “A” List.

Giuliani initially signed off on the show - next time he’ll hopefully pay more attention. Nonetheless, if Giuliani had not censored “Sensations”, then 500-1000 people show up for the opening, max. Subsequently, media would have covered vice, murder and mayhem, as usual, instead of covering artworld disconnect.

Does the terrific attendance for “Sensation’s” opening derive from the public’s chasing media-driven scandal like Homer chases donuts? No. Any art exhibit that received comparable media coverage, would draw bodies the way “Sensation” has. However, because Big Media generally ignores visual art, such pervasive press is mostly reserved for artworld-disconnect anomalies. Why? My theory is that art-aware people generally don’t make good passive consumers, so passive-consumer-driven news vehicles assiduously avoid pandering art awareness.

What do I think of the art in “Sensation”? It’s a heinous waste of resources, sick, a bad joke, etc., but what are the mean artists/curators making/showing that’s so shocking? The art subjects or materials in question inevitably involve or address death, birth, sex, food, blood, bodily waste and fluids, conflict, sickness, prayer, and social/environmental interaction - in other words, all the stuff that defines us as human beings. If these are the things we find culturally shocking, what does that reveal about our collective acceptance of our own humanity? That question’s about all that “Sensation” is good for.

Beautiful Art

If you’re not one of those people hopping the next flight to La Guardia to see “Sensations”, and your tastes run more towards the traditional/beautiful, several recent local shows have served up fare for you. Anna Jaap (closed yesterday at Zeitgeist), Diane Burko (at the Parthenon East Gallery) Cheryl Pfeiffer (Ruby Green), Carl Schuman (Destination Gallery At First Union Tower) and Carol Mode (at Cheekwood’s Temp Contemp) all make artwork that Dr. Laura will not be targeting for a morality rant anytime soon.

Jaap in “Again Begin Again” exhibited her staple decorative floral and domestic still lifes and landscapes with a dash of poetry, eye-tricky new materials, an almost-an-installation piece and Constructivist canvas assemblage thrown in for measure. Jaap’s work on close inspection reveals the artist’s proficiency in the modern idiom, a facility easily missed, since the artist’s aesthetics are European late 19th, early 20th pastoral/decorative. Technically, she owes a lot to the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso’s cut and paste compositions and the Pop artists’ hands-off visual ethic, a fact belied by her colors (think country club casual wear) and subject matter (think Martha Stewart).

In works like “The Gifting Song”, Jaap for a substrate stretched floral-design fabric, stained it brown and used it primarily as a framing element for her prints. In “Topography” she groups four canvases in a checkerboard pattern (brown-stained fabric pieces comprising the “dark-square” elements, two floral still lifes the “light-square”). As a result, it’s easier for the viewer to see how Jaap treats each object (flower, leaf, vase, bird, house, cake-on-a-plate) as an isolated, independent form, within the context of an abstract plane. The glue that holds her images together is the strong outline and color/image consistency. After 12 years repeating her subjects, Jaap’s defining strokes appear unconscious and sure.

The winner in the show is “passage march 6 – september 3, 1999”. Jaap at the beginning of the year began doing little paint sketches at the end of each print session. They’re simple, lyrical and quite beautiful, when grouped as they were in the exhibit, as a large grid.

Scene Notes

In the next couple of columns, we’ll cover more of the beautiful artists. In the meantime, don’t miss group shows “Position East” at Artsynergy and N4Art at TSU’s Hiram V. Gordon Gallery. Both are winding down.

Finally, I want to blurb “In Sickness & In Health” at In The Gallery, my next exhibit and DddD production. Come see if I walk the talk. The show opens October 15.

Art 2000/Nashville (1999)

The Year in Review

Frist

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts has been the most important art news story this year in Nashville. The ribbon-cutting for the retail post office on the ground floor of the FCVA provided a glimpse of the city’s cultural future. The big temporary sign on the stately building’s façade is a reminder that before long Nashville will have a sparkling showcase for A-list exhibits in the city center. The FCVA has already generated a ripple effect within the local scene, upping the ante for institutions like Cheekwood, Fisk and the Parthenon, which are hustling to stay relevant as visual arts venues.

In 1999 we met Chase Rynd, FCVA’s Executive Director at last spring’s “Rynd Chase” (which will hopefully become an annual event). A host of artsies descended upon Vanderbilt’s University Club to shake hands with el jefe, nosh and be seen. It was a defining moment for the scene, a glorious thing to see all those artists together, rubbing shoulders and aesthetics. The event was also memorable for the dance performed by the charming Rynd, who panached a roomful of expectant suitors as capably as a cinematic debutante.

Since then, FCVA announced its inaugural exhibit (”European Masterworks”), which promises to be a blockbuster premier for the Center and the show many Nashvillians have pined for. A big name dead artist survey is the perfect out-of-the-blocks exhibit for a regional art institution. The Frist Center named a curator (Candace Adelson), director of finance and operations (Ernest Duncan) and announced its first major corporate sponsor (AmSouth Bank, for the “European Masterworks” exhibit). As opening day approaches for FCVA in early 2001, its press releases will be as plentiful as Saturday Orange in Knoxville.

A reminder: In his mayoral capacity, Phil Bredesen was a friend of the arts. Without his help, the FCVA would not have happened. Another Bredesen legacy will be the New Main Library downtown, which has broken ground and is under construction. The list of artists chosen to contribute to the project is heavy with local talent, which is great. Some feel, however, that architect Stern minimized in his design the impact of visual art on future library patrons. Time will tell.

Other high notes for 1999 in local institutions:

1.    Cheekwood’s Sculpture Trail, Mansion renovation and Temporary Contemporary series.  The Sculpture Trail is an outstanding addition at Cheekwood, combining the dual missions of the institution (botanicals and art) in one attraction. Pieces by James Turrell, Eric Orr and Sophie Ryder are favorites of mine. The mansion makeover makes it possible for Cheekwood to offer exhibits like the ambitious “Art of William Edmundson” (opens January 28) and travelling shows like Beck and Al Hanson’s “Playing with Matches” (October 27). The Temp Contemp presented an outstanding selection of edgy art by locally, regionally and nationally recognized art makers last year.
2.    Vanderbilt Fine Art Gallery. Joseph Mella did a fine job in 1999 putting together some of the year’s most compelling exhibits. The Daumier and Wildner shows were the most memorable.
3.    Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk University. The guard changed this year when Kevin Grogan, at Fisk since 1992, departed for the top job at the Contemporary Arts Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach. Interim director Opal Baker replaced Grogan in October. In addition to the outstanding permanent collection at the Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk’s holiday offering of the David Driskell retrospective “Echoes” is hot - look for a review soon.
4.    The Parthenon and Centennial Arts Center. The Parthenon spruced up its gallery offerings in 1999 with some noteworthy shows like Gregori Maiofis’ and Diane Burko’s, finishing up with an excellent exhibit of four contemporary Southwest artists. Next year’s Winslow Homer show should put the Parthenon on the map. Joe Sorci’s outdoor sculpture exhibit and Charlotte Avant’s show of prints and paintings at Centennial were highlights at the CAC.
5.    The Tennessee State Museum. The State Museum brought several interesting shows to Nashville in 1999, like “Impressions of Normandy”, “The West in American Art” and A short-run exhibit of artwork by phenom Alexandra Nechita. The Museum is hampered by serious obstacles: an impossibly arduous parking situation, location in a bomb shelter, inadequate exhibit facilities, Jesse Helmsesque limitations on permissible artwork and endemic budgetary lack. In spite of these obstacles, there’s enough vision among the staff to keep Tennessee’s museum viable. However, the opening of the FCVA will most certainly marginalize the TSM. The latter needs a new home, and the planned relocation to Bicentennial Mall is the only thing that will ensure its viability as a cultural legacy.
6.    The Tennessee Arts Commission. The TAC monthly functions as a cultural nexus for contemporary artists from around the state. Standouts this year include Craig Nutt and Jairo Prado, though the exhibit roles of the TAC gallery demonstrate the variety and breadth of artistic expression throughout Tennessee.

Other 1999 Noteworthies: The Sarratt Outdoor Sculpture Series was an excellent attempt to introduce environmental art to Vandy and Midtown, but the vandalism fiasco stained the effort. Watkins is quietly being transformed into a fine post-grad educational facility (is a Masters program in the works?). Belmont’s new art building is beautiful. These two schools are currently dusting Vanderbilt with regards Fine Art studies, which is unfathomable. As has been stated often in this column, the absence of a Masters course of study in Nashville, the city’s arts dialog is much diminished. The Public Art Forum series of lectures at Vanderbilt is definitely the shining star of VU’s art offerings (though the program is the result of collaboration involving several local agencies).

Scene Notes

The quality of offerings by local galleries continues to improve, although the dearth of dedicated retail venues for art is a major issue for the scene. In the retail vacuum, new Additions like ArtSynergy, Fugitive Arts Center and Ruby Green have contributed massively to the depth of the scene. These organizations are labors of love, survival and idealism. The closing of the Ultimate Art Gallery is a grim reminder of how poorly the community contributes to sustaining cultural endeavors financially. The vitality of the Nashville art landscape depends on the maintenance (support) of such endeavors.

Hillsboro Village got an art infusion in 1999, with the opening of new locations there for Outside the Lines and Zeitgeist. Fido’s photography series (curated by Lain York and Rebecca Walk, a joint venture between Zeitgeist and Fido) was terrific. Some excellent alternative art venues have cropped up in Midtown around the nucleus of Local Color and Midtown Gallery. On Salon Row, Velvet and Salon F/X have followed Montana Streets’ lead and begun to show quality art in their businesses. JJ’s continues to put together strong exhibits.

Nashville’s core galleries (see a Nashville Association of Art Dealers brochure for a listing) broke little new ground, but still provide a solid foundation on which the scene here can grow. Finer Things produced its first invitational sculpture show, which will hopefully blossom into a major event in years to come. The 5th Avenue of the Arts Matinee (now the third Saturday of every month - was the third Sunday) is still simmering, though the few attractions on the route keep it from boiling. One expects that recent meetings with NYC consultants involving artsies of every stripe will generate some momentum for establishing Nashville’s downtown arts district. This will of course not happen without a percent for art provision and a concrete commitment from the city’s downtown businesses.

Lobe Awards

Did you miss it? The Pablo Bruto III Committee for Cultural Achievement dispensed Nashville’s “Van Gogh Memorial Lobe Awards” last week at Ireland’s. The awards (a brass door-knocker shaped like a bandaged ear) go to those artsies who have displayed artistic excellence in the visual arts arena in the past year. Here’s a listing of 1999 recipients.

1.    Best One-Person Exhibit (2D). The Lobe goes to Brad Thomas for “A Misinformed Clown Hands Crayons to the Hungry Children” (Temp Contemp). Honorable Mentions: Michael Nott (Ruby Green), Elliott Puckett (Temp Contemp), Dean Fisher (Bennett), Anton Weiss (Bennett), Charlotte Avant (CAC), Werner Wildner (VFAG), Todd Green “Salvage” (JJ’s), Eric Johnston (Destination*), Adrienne Outlaw (MTSu), Greg Maiofis (Parthenon).
2.    Best Photography Exhibit. Jack Spencer (Cumberland) gets the Lobe. Honorable Mentions: Diane Barrie (Destination*), William Eggleston (Temp Contemp), Chris Verene (Temp Contemp), Rebecca Walk (Fido), Mark Tucker (Bongo Java).
3.    Best Sculpture Exhibit. Lobe Awards (tie) to Joe Sorci (CAC) and Buddy Jackson (Zeitgeist). Honorable Mentions: Terry Glispin (FAC), Greg Pond (Ruby Green), Alvaro Garcia (Sarratt), Pidge Cash (Ruby Green).
4.    Best Two-Person Exhibit. Marilyn Murphy and Sean Dudley (Cumberland) win the Lobe. Honorable Mentions: Kit Ruether and Raine Bedsole (Cumberland), Glenn Goldberg and Will Berry (Zeitgeist), Ron Porter and Donald Earley (Cumberland).
5.    Best Group Show. Lobe winners: Buddy Jackson, Will Berry, Glenn Goldberg, Richard Painter (Zeitgeist). Honorable Mentions: “Impressions of Normandy”, “Small Packages 5″ (Cumberland), “artGenerator” (ArtSynergy).
6.    Best Digital Art Exhibit. Lobe: Jacques Barbey (Chromatics).
7.    Best “Happening”. Lobe: Richard Mitchell (FAC).
8.    Best Exhibit in Alternative Space. Lobe: Todd Green “Salvage” (JJ’s). Honorable Mentions: Tim Murphy and Janet Jarzynka (Velvet), Mark Tucker (Bongo Java), Dane Carder (Jody’s), Barbara Yontz (Café Lylla), Michael McBride (Mad Platter).
9.     Best Exhibit Series. Lobe: Temp Contemp (Cheekwood). Honorable Mentions: “Introductions III” (Zeitgeist), Outdoor Sculpture Series (Sarratt).
10.    Weirdest Artwork. Lobe: Sean Dudley’s “Specimen” (Cumberland).
11.    Best New Public Art. Lobe: Sharon Rusch Shaver (Broadway Post Office). Honorable Mention: Joe Sorci (Greenway at Adelphia Coliseum).
12.    Best Artwork Shown in Nashville in 1999. The Grand Lobe Winner is David Driskell, for “Gabriel” (Van Vechten Gallery).

(*Full disclosure: I curate Destination Gallery)

ART CHRONICLES
By Paul McLean

“My art can gorge itself here.”
Max Beckmann, the artist who first used the term “Fourth-dimensional Art”, from the trenches in WWI

As the 20th century clatters to a close, in a little over 350 days, let’s take a look at some of the events and people that have shaped Big “A” art notions over the past hundred years. Sounds like a task too big for a 700-900 word column, but when you’re in the trenches, big portions are better.

Speaking of big portions, why don’t we start with Jackson Pollack, rebellious student of WPA legend Thomas Hart Benton, and Destroyer of Worlds. I’m fresh off two visits to New York City, in the past month, and I got to see Action Jackson’s monumental show three times. The Big Apple is the world’s Art epicenter, more or less, and Jackson Pollack’s exhibit at MOMA eclipsed even Van Gogh’s awesome show at the National Gallery (now at LA County Museum), as the premier Art event of the year.

Jackson was my first Art hero. In college I idolized this son of the American West, who took the New York Art World by storm in the postwar Forties, and went on to establish himself as the first Rock’n’Roll tragedy in the nation’s Art iconography. His untimely death in a drunk-induced car accident with two girls in his car was a notorious end for a raging Art star – exciting stuff for a 19 year-old paint-covered kid, who thought he was Howard Roark (me, at the time).

Pollack’s work “opened the door” for the Abstract Expressionists, for de Kooning, Motherwell, Rothko, and the others. They collectively smashed the Object, Narrative, Subject, Representation… really, all the Conventions which - until the Ab-Ex guys arrived - had been assumed, by the Keepers of the Tradition, to be intrinsic to Art-making. The Ab-Ex painters worked big, eschewed elaborate frames, used materials like house paint, dirt, whatever was within reach, and loved color for color’s sake. Their brush strokes spoke of Action, bravura, fearlessness, and sometimes the pure expression of soul, evoking comparisons to Zen calligraphers. The Ab-Ex generation changed everything: from the way museums were designed (have to have walls big enough to hang those giant canvasses), to presentation (can you say “strip frame” or “no frame”), to methods and mediums (anything goes).

In other words, the Ab-Ex painters embodied the American Spirit, and some people loved it, some mocked it and some hated it. But today, no one can deny that the 20th century in Art hinges on the work of these men and women, the “Irascibles”. Jackson Pollack was their avatar, and the MOMA show answers, “Why?” (I’ll talk about that more in a later column.)

Another recent New York exhibit, - Rendez vous: Masterpieces from the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museums, which filled both the Guggenheim uptown venue, as well as the Gugg SOHO - served well as a backdrop for the Pollack exhibit. Rendez vous treated viewers to a stroll through all the Art “-isms” that gained prominence in the first half of the century. On view were wonderful examples of fauvism, cubism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism, by the European painters who made these movements famous (Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Miro, Leger…).

The exhibit started with a stunning array of Brancusi sculptures at the base of the Guggenheim’s long upwardly spiraling ramp, and finished with a comparatively lame collection of big-name installation pieces at the top. Rendez vous also included references to major, related movements in the design world, and examples of variations on all the major conceptual themes encompassed in the show.  But the meat of the exhibition is the painting survey that illustrates in chronological order the process of fragmentation that occurred in the European consciousness during five decades of cultural upheaval and two world wars. Ultimately, and this is addressed in Rendez vous, that fragmentation provided Pollack and the Ab-Ex gang across the Atlantic the fuel for their blast-off into abstraction. But it also contributed to the Americans the formal and gestural framework that placed their extreme aesthetic experiments soundly within the western painting tradition.

And that’s the story of how New York became the world’s art epicenter (wresting away that distinction from Paris). The exhibit at the Guggenheim SOHO (which is now closed, and may not reopen), Premises, and the exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, spotlighted installation, site specific work, and the new media (anything goes). The question for next week is: “Is this the legacy of Action Jackson?”, or “Where do we go from here?”

NASHVILLE ART BEAT

This week’s pick, for all of you who think art is for snobs:

When I was growing up, comic books were my first inspiration for sketching. I started with tracing my favorite characters (Conan, Sgt. Rock and Iron Fist), eventually graduating to freehand drawing, colored pencils, paints, then Gray’s anatomy and Michelangelo. Much of my figurative work as a pro refers to my first mentors, guys like Boris, Grell, Frazetta and Lee. I’m not alone.

In fact, the comics have influenced many of the prominent postwar, post Ab-Ex American artists. While Roy Lichtenstein is the obvious example of an American Art Star who got famous using techniques and imagery drawn directly from comics, there have been many “Fine Artists” since, smitten with the power of pencil, text, ink and wash - as they’ve been refined for the comics genre - to create visual drama.  Not to mention the crossover guys who got their start in comics, whose work has eventually garnered respect from the “serious” Art crowd (Crumb, for example, and Art Spiegelman, whose MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize).

If this sounds like your bag, too, then don’t miss “Rent’s Due Art Boy” (that gets my vote for exhibition title of the year), which opened on Friday, January 29th at JJ’s Market. Featuring the comic book art of Jason Alexander, Travis Ingram and Mike Norton, “Rent’s Due Art Boy” presents Nashville’s comix junkies with an opportunity to see a collection of original work by some young turks, whose credits in the comic book artworld are growing. Alexander self-published a series called Section 8, and is now working on a project called Empty Zone, for Sirius Entertainment. Ingram is also involved in the production of Empty Zone, as well as children’s book illustrations and a variety of small press projects. Norton broke into the comics industry with the Image Comics series Badger, and is working on upcoming series Doctor Goyle for Arrow Comics, and The Waiting Place from Slave Labor Graphics.

“The opening for Rent’s Due Art Boy” was not your typical artist’s reception. The crowd consisted almost entirely of neo-cyber punk/trybal twenty-somethings. Piercings, rad hair, and slacker chic were de riguer. The friendly, nervous, and weary artists (they hung the show themselves, over several long nights) were in attendance, sharing tales of caffeine-aided superhuman feats of sleep deprivation and comic book creation. The vibe was edgy and very outsider/cool.

In an interview with Travis and Jason on ArtRadio recently, I asked them if the professional life of a comic book artist really resembled the whacky lives of the characters portrayed in the movie Chasing Amy. “That movie’s pretty accurate”, commented Jason, with a snicker. Travis chimed in, “People think, aw, that’s just another movie. It’s a lot more like that than they want you to think.”

Comic book artists, especially ones who self-publish, actually comprise a pretty tight-knit community, who get to know each other on the road at shows and conventions, as well as through their work. “You’re in, like, a special little club,” Jason said. It’s more accurately a subculture, or a tribe, where respect for virtuosity is a tangible social commodity. It is also a genre the advocates and practitioners of which struggle to elevate above “kiddy book” status. “What we’re trying to do with this show, is to show (comic art) as a more legitimate form of art. There are so many books out there. There’s always going to be the impression of comics being Batman and Superman, and all that. But there are a lot of books, a lot of creators out there…who have done beautifully illustrated pieces, with adult, mature stories,” Alexander said, with passion.

“Rent’s Due Art Boy” consists primarily of original inked sketches (often still showing the hallmark light blue pencil marks through the india ink) by Alexander, Ingram and Norton, and a few paintings, which don’t have the same impact as the comic art. Their presented 2-D art pieces are, for the most part, pages from their comic books. Brimming with biceps, babes, action, and story snippets, these inked sketches are mounted on the red brick exhibition wall at JJ’s, without frames and behind glass. Also, available are copies of the first four issues of Empty Zone. It was awesome (gush) to compare the original sketches with the finished product. Though the artists have taken care to present their work well, it’s not an elegant gallery show, by any means, due more to the space than anything in the work (it’s a coffee shop, not an art gallery - that’s why it’s an alternative space).  Nonetheless, the comic art aficionado will love it, and the rest of you can judge for yourself if comic art is big “A” or little “a” art.

About JJ’s Market: JJ’s has emerged as one of Nashville’s best alternative artspaces, with exhibitions in the past year of local favorites like Todd Greene and Tom Wills, and the debut of homeless photographer Kevin Barbieux. JJ’s warm, friendly coffee lounge, where “Rent’s Due…” is hung, is a great place to art talk with a young bohemian, while smoking a cigar (after 6PM), and relaxing with a beverage. When you’re done looking at the art, you can play checkers, the piano, read a book, or vegg-out in one of their comfy couches.

“Rent’s Due Art Boy” opens Friday, January 29th at JJ’s Market. 1912 Broadway.

Also, check out “Stu Eichel: New Paintings” at the Tennessee Arts Commission gallery. It’s kind of like Forrest Gump meets “Where’s Waldo”, except Gunp/Waldo is a retired ad-man marathoner with a shock of white hair and a tee-shirt. Stu paints himself into momentous historical scenes, hanging out with cultural icons like Elvis, Einstein, and just about everybody who is somebody. These paintings are witty, technically strong and fun as hell. You can see the show during regular business hours.
401 Charlotte Ave.

Who You Gonna Call?

What do J.S. Bach and Albert Schweitzer have in common? The answer is Alan LaQuire. I visited his Germantown studio last week during a video shoot coordinated by Andy Van Roon. More on this later…

LaQuire made a name for himself shortly after finishing his Masters course at UNC in 1981. He won the commission to produce the “largest indoor sculpture in the Western world”: a monumental copy of Pheidias’ “Athena Parthenos”. LaQuire’s Athena was unveiled at Nashville’s Parthenon Museum in 1990 and has been a tourist magnet ever since.

Lately, LaQuire’s been in the news, because of another commission, endowed by an anonymous patron. The sculptor has been given the job of creating a 125′ wide fountain on Music Row, through which motorists will in fact motor. A paean to, yup, Music, LaQuire’s concept for the fountain involves sculpting six figurative allegories representing six musical forms. Which six will be represented has not yet been finalized. There are lot of details that still need to be worked out. The fountain is a logistically complex, long-term job for LaQuire, who fortunately seems to possess a temperament appropriate for the task.

LaQuire probably developed that steady demeanor through the dry years after the Athena was completed. For much of the past decade, the classically schooled sculptor has had lots of recognition and a dearth of big projects. During that time LaQuire has maintained a low profile, preferring the studio over the spotlight, while building and maintaining strong ties within the local art scene.

Nashville’s recent cultural upswing has been a boon for LaQuire, who did well at the recent Easter Seals benefit in Franklin (rumored to have raised $300,000 for the organization in a single evening - were you wondering where the buyers are?). He has two pieces in Finer Things’ Outdoor Sculpture juried show, one of which is a terrific portrait of Picasso in bronze. He’s working on the VAAN board, and is currently helping put together a Nashville studio tour (which is something that the city’s scene badly needs) for April of next year. The tour will be a fundraiser for VAAN and involve about fifty of the city’s artists.

…Back to the video shoot. Alan has been commissioned to do a coin and sculpture for next year’s Symposium 2000: World Peace through Reverence for Life. The event and LaQuire’s artwork will commemorate the 125th anniversary of Albert Schweitzer’s birth and 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. The symposium is slated for September of 2000 on the Vanderbilt campus. Tennessee Players, Inc. are producing the event (Executive Director Thurston Moore was present to provide narrative for the video). LaQuire’s sculpture will be installed permanently on the grounds of the Medical Center. The sculptor was filmed working on a maquette of the piece.

Schweitzer wrote definitively about Bach and performed the composer’s work for organ, according to Moore, and both men made great contributions to mankind. Of the commissioned sculpture, LaQuire says, “Few people associate (Bach and Schweitzer). The challenge for me was to create a reason for these two men, from entirely different eras, to be together. So I’m sculpting a sort of doorway, a large relief panel, between them (which unites them thematically and visually). The wall will also allow me to include a lot more visual information.”

When I asked Moore why LaQuire was chosen for the project, the colorful Moore replied, “Who Else?”

Speaking of…

Speaking of the Parthenon… Did you miss it? On the 12th of November, Spacecraft performed their trippy brand of Music of the Spheres upstairs, using Athena as a canvas for kaleidoscopic computer-generated graphics. Very cool stuff.

Speaking of VAAN… The local artist’s organization is one of the big three locally, along with untitled and N4Art. ArtSynergy will host an arts group group show, “artGENERATOR”, featuring work by members of these organizations. The exhibit will open December 3, and should provide some excellent opportunities for folks to acquire artsy holiday stocking stuffers. The invites for this show rock.

Speaking of the Parthenon and VAAN… VAAN is partnering with the Parthenon to exhibit five artists from Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico in the museum’s East Gallery. Opening December 4, “Infusion” will feature the work of Carolyn Farris, Irv and Jan Janeiro, Kenneth O’Neil and Enid Tidwell. This should provide Nashville another great artsy exchange from the “Land of Enchantment”.

A Real Art Stomp

Speaking of artsy holiday stocking stuffers… On December 2, fifteen local galleries are participating in a “Holiday Open House & Gallery Tour”. Most will be showcasing their artists in ensemble array. The event is sponsored by The Nashville Association of Art Dealers, which includes The American Artisan, Auld Alliance Gallery, The Arts Company, Collector’s Gallery, Cumberland Gallery, Finer Things, Helios Artglassworks, In the Gallery, Local Color, Midtown Gallery, Outside the Lines, Prestige Fine Art, Prism Glass, White Tiger and Zeitgeist.

I generally don’t review group shows, and many of the tour’s galleries exhibit multiple artists all the time. Many of these businesses rely on income from sources other than the sale of art (such as framing, the lease of wall space to artists and various other means) in order to survive. That said, these galleries and shoppes constitute the core of the retail art biz in Nashville. If you’re a dedicated artsy, you’ll stomp through the “Holiday Open House & Gallery Tour”, and view the work of a couple hundred local, regional, national and international artists and artisans.

Nashville’s most recent and celebrated art stomp, Artrageous, isn’t really about art anymore - it’s about fundraising and partying. If you complained about the art-as-backdrop state of affairs at Artrageous, or the ticket price, here’s your chance for redress. The “Open House” is free and the only distraction will be the refreshments. You’ll find artwork of every variety: landscapes, photographs, nudes, crafts, naïve art, Ab-Ex, sculpture, jewelry, floral still lifes, contemporary, prints… everything. Remember to bring your wallet - and don’t be a Scrooge. If you need to frame your new acquisition, take it to Ambiance by Parker.

If you prefer a more intimate art buying experience, call your favorite artist and arrange a studio visit. Most artists will be more than happy to accommodate your interest in their work.

Or…
Or, stop by Zeitgeist and check out “Monotypes”, which features the artwork of New York based artists Glen Goldberg and Will Berry. These two have been working on opposite sides of the same studio wall for the past seven years, in a building situated in the heart of Manhattan’s burgeoning Meat District. Until the past year, they’d had little contact.

After becoming acquainted, Goldberg and Berry realized that their respective painterly approaches were compatible. They subsequently embarked on an exercise in “proximity”, executing small monotypes on the press in Berry’s studio. The result is not a collaboration, due to the aesthetic independence these two have realized in their artistic endeavors. It’s an exercise in complements and clarity.

M.C. Lang’s excellent short essay included on the show’s invite provides insight into the intended effect that Goldberg and Berry hope their art has on the viewer. Lang writes, “Through these images, Goldberg and Berry seek to encourage introspection. They have attempted, one through reduction, the other by constructions, to present images with the presence to arrest thought and provide, if only for a moment, an opportunity to contemplate something outside the self-centered routine of everyday life.”

The monotypes are simply framed in wood painted white. Their abstractions are identifiably distinct. Berry’s consist of soft hues incised with swirling unconditioned lines. Goldberg is more of a materialist, rendering floral shapes and simple Ab-Ex geometrics with a more saturated palette. The works of Berry and Goldberg are grouped separately, creating a compelling rhythm and didactic subtext throughout the exhibit space. Above the gallery’s front desk, one of Berry’s large canvases presides over the monotypes, establishing scale and a connection between the sketches and these artists’ more expansive works.

Some of Richard Painter’s “Heavy Metal” pieces hang in the rear area of the gallery, affording the viewer a stark contrast for “Monotypes”. By comparison the latter is positively airy.

Romare Bearden at Belmont

The Leu Gallery at Belmont University is hosting a modest exhibit of prints by celebrated African-American collagist Romare Bearden. The show opened February 27 and will continue through the end of March. The artwork on display is on loan from the Jerald Melberg Gallery, located in Charlotte, North Carolina (”Before Dawn”, a mural honoring the artist hangs in the public library there). The images chosen for the exhibition provide a good sampling of Bearden’s later work, though one can deduce the signature works of social conscience that made the artist famous from the offerings in the Belmont show.

Background

Bearden was born to a railroad worker and politically active editor in Mecklenburg County, near Charlotte in 1912 or -14. His grandparents were also Duke Ellington’s grandparents. Bearden was himself a fine musician, and not surprisingly, jazz appears as a motif throughout Bearden’s ouvre. Although he spent most of his childhood growing up in Harlem, Bearden’s fond memories of rural life in North Carolina in the early 1900’s deeply influenced his art. His sense of social consciousness is borne out in Bearden’s early occupational forays, which may have provided a foundation for the artist’s later edge-work on the Black experience. In 1938 he took a job with New York’s Social Services Department and served in the Army (in the all-Black 372nd Regiment) during the Second World War. A member of the Art Students League, Bearden studied with George Grosz, the German expatriate famous for his depictions of the decadent class at leisure. Bearden also received a B.S. degree in Mathematics (!) from Columbia University. After the war he attended art history and philosophy classes at the Sorbonne in Paris. Bearden received very little formal instruction in artmaking but developed important relationships with artists (painter Stuart Davis, for example, with whom Bearden shared a common love of jazz) early in his career.

Friendships and alliances with other artists were integral to Bearden’s artistic process and progress. Maybe this communal sense derived from Bearden’s early experiences in Harlem. Throughout his childhood, Bearden’s father regularly invited artists and musicians into the family home, a gathering place for artsies. This sort of casual creative/social exchange became a staple in Bearden’s own domestic life later. In the 1930’s Bearden became involved with the Social Realist movement. Through this association he achieved some recognition, placing a painting in the Whitney Biennial. His career as an artist took off in the 1960’s, activated by the Civil Rights movement. Text accompanying a 1997 exhibition at the Madison (Wisconsin) Art Center describes what happened:

…Bearden was part of a group of fifteen African-American artists who formed the organization Spiral. Inspired by the aims of the contemporary civil rights movement, the group sought to create a socially engaged aesthetic that reflected black culture and experience. For Spiral’s first group exhibition, entitled Black and White, Bearden proposed a collaborative collage made from magazine clippings.

Although the group project never took place, Bearden, who had previously worked as a painter, adapted the technique to his own work. He began creating small collages and then photographically enlarging them, creating black-and-white images he called “photomontage projections.”

Seeking to conceive archetypal images that reflected the continuity of his culture, Bearden chose subjects ranging from baptisms, burials, and the cotton fields of the South to jazz sessions, Harlem street life, and ritual figures such as the Conjur Woman. Rich in social meaning and compositional inventiveness, these photomontages represented a stylistic breakthrough that Bearden continued to refine until his death.

After years of working as a painter in the modern idiom, Bearden had found the best vehicle for his vision: collage combined with printmaking. The relevance of his early pieces using this technique brought the artist considerable attention, eventually resulting in major museum shows across the country (including exhibits at MOMA, the Corcoran, and the Smithsonian). Bearden’s signature pieces like “Black Manhattan” and “The Dove” were viewed critically as penultimate expressions of the urban experience for many African Americans. Bearden used his successes as a means for raising general awareness of Black artists and Black social and cultural concerns. To this end, he authored a number of books, including A history of African-American artists: from 1792 to the present (co-written with Harry Henderson). Bearden passed away in 1988, a year after he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan.

The Work

The Leu Gallery exhibit provides a nice overview of this important artist’s career, touching upon most of his major aesthetic themes, surveyed in a couple of dozen 2D artworks. Bearden hit the A-List with his urban-edge material. His early photomontages captured the energy of the teeming neighborhood and the massive presence of the architecture and machinery of the city. “Memories (12 Trains)” and “Trains” are prints derived from Bearden’s 1964 photomontage “Mysteries”, and demonstrate the artist’s facility at creating visual impact with a compressed, frenetic narrative. He combines elements like masks, machines, fabrics, textures and painted areas with a uniquely live fervor that activates viewer memories and identification. This phenomenon is rooted in Bearden’s clarity of vision and attentiveness to detail. He stuffs visual information into the image area, without abandoning perspective or interpretation for the effect, or for the chaos of immediate gratification. His manipulation of appropriated materials is always precise and firmly rooted in what the artist has seen.

Bearden’s art clearly consists of more than social commentary and technical concerns. The breadth of subject matter in his images reflects the artist’s varied interests and experiences, as well as his willingness to explore both internal and external universes with the adamant curiosity of an inspired maker, preoccupied with life itself. “The Open Door” brilliantly describes this aspect of the artist’s nature.

Throughout his body of work, Bearden depicted domestic scenes of great sensitivity, often set against the rural backdrop of his youth (”The Reunion” for instance). The significance of family, especially the power of the matron in the familial mix, pervades Bearden’s images. The artist rendered with powerful immediacy the little rituals (often involving or supervised by the matriarch) that bind together the family. Bearden possessed a keen sense for how these rituals served as building blocks for tradition and meaning. Works like  “The Conversation” and “Morning” showcase this sensibility.

Bearden’s most dreamy combinations reflect his love of island living (he kept a home in the Caribbean for many years). “Tropical Leaves” and “Caribbean Mermaid” stand out as obvious references to the artist’s getaway, but a study of Bearden’s work reveals how the light of his island home affected the coloration of his art. The intensity of the blue background of “Maternal Family” is a case in point. Bearden’s fascination with the ocean and his broad aesthetic horizons came together in a series inspired by The Odyssey. Although none of these works are in the Belmont show, Bearden’s epic aesthetic aspirations are. He applied the scope of the epic to his cataloging of the black American experience. From the lost Eden of “Dreams of Exile” to the powerful New World ceremony depicted in “The Baptism”, Bearden’s Gilgamesh is his ancestors’, his people’s and his own American experience. It is a tale awash with familial adoration and pictured with a focus that blurs time-based reality. And, as indicated by pieces like “Tenor Sermon”, the soundtrack is all jazz.

My favorite print in the show is “The Lantern”, which I fancy as an autobiographical piece. Shining light in one hand, a bouquet of flowers and firewood in the other, the figure stands in a country paradise wearing overalls and a van Gogh hat. The nearby “Mother and Child”, “Girl in the Garden” and “Quilting Time” build a vision of one man/artist’s dreams of happiness and peace, in a beautiful place. Definitely a must-see.

Art Schoolin’
I visited my friend David Ribar last week at his office in the Leu Center for Visual Arts, on the Belmont University campus. Belmont has a strong art program (www.belmont.edu/Humanities/ArtDept/ArtHome.html), and this stunning new facility is as good as any in the region. The equipment and appointments in the studios, lecture halls and offices are top-of-the-line and paint-splatter free - for now. If I were looking for a local BFA program, this concrete commitment to art would convince me to go to Belmont (If I were looking for a local Masters program, I’d still be SOL).

Carved in stone on the façade by the entrance is this quote from Tolstoy: “The aim of an artist is not to resolve a question irrefutably, but to compel one to love life in all its manifestations, and these are inexhaustible.” As aesthetics go, it doesn’t get much better than that. I think I’m going to FAX this to all the artists represented in “Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum… and every artist I know.

During our conversation Ribar pointed out something I failed to mention when I reviewed Carol Mode’s “Blue” series a couple of weeks ago: the sheer physicality of her work. As Ribar put it, “I could feel the blue as soon as I walked into the gallery.” He’s right. One of the defining qualities of Ab-Ex painting is its power to impact the viewer on a purely corporal level. The body is affected by intense hues - ask any designer or ad guy. Artists like Sol Lewitt (www.artseensoho.com/Art/PACE/lewitt98/lewitt.html) have made a science of popping the viewer’s sense of wonder by saturating him with color.

Where non-narrative/non-representational (using those terms in the broadest sense) work comes up short is in its capacity for evocation with definition. Certainly, good abstract painting like Mode’s heightens the viewer’s awareness of the physicality of color, relative movement within the picture plane, depth of field, the geometry of perception and formal visual structure. But in simple human terms, to inspire Tolstoy’s “love of life in all its manifestations”, the artist must render life in its particulars for the viewer to establish a meaningful connection with both the artist and the aesthetic “question” posed in the artwork. Subsequent to that connection being made - through the particulars - the artist is “inexhaustibly” free to use whatever tools best convey, communicate and present “questions” to the viewer.

One assumes this particular brand of artistic freedom (a phrase over- and misused until it has as much resonance as Kraft Mac & Cheese) is both the foundation for and the supreme definer of the artistic endeavor. Developing an appreciation of quality in art (as viewer and maker) has everything to do with one’s ability, which gets better with practice, to discern how the artist responds to artistic freedom: What limits does he or she self-impose on the artistic medium, the parameters for “questioning” and vision? This response to freedom is inevitably evidenced by the work the artist chooses to create or the viewer chooses to embrace.

Perhaps more important than “what limits” is the question of “why limit”? There are good and bad reasons to creatively cull. It’s not necessarily a question of censorship by Big Brother or societal trends and foibles of comfortability/decadence. It’s a question of one’s willingness as an artist to seek the transcendent in expression. Art is created through the filter of the singular perspective of one who is alive and in this world, seeing it just as it is. Great art approaches the transcendent through the details of life, in “all its manifestations”.

A Couple of Examples

If you have any doubt about the viability of the computer as a fine artist’s tool, check out Jacques Barbey’s impressive exhibit at Chromatics. Entitled “The Poet’s Heart”, the show is immaculately presented, allowing almost every piece to read well, despite the limitations of the exhibition space. Barbey’s digitally produced images are conceptually rich, aesthetically mature and visually sumptuous.

The show’s big pieces, like “Her Lambent Fiction… in 31 Movements” and “The Lover’s Translations… in Flutterby Gravity”, are stunning in their layered formal complexity, grand scale and intensity of hue. Barbey performs a tenuous optical dance, simultaneously with multiple partners. He at turns incorporates the romantic and decorative for earnest effect and ironic affect. He uses the anaesthetic crispness of graphic design to conjure the arcane and mythic. He builds shockingly in-your-face manipulations of the familiar, which he twists into the stuff of nightmares and dreams.

The exhibit is held together by the Barbey’s thorough attentiveness to both the macro- and microscopic. His obsessive-compulsive efforts to present his conceptual text entirely is balanced by his fervent - if at times overwrought [”Untitled Allegory (Maze Head)] or oblique (”Orpheus’ Nod) in the execution - willingness to tackle the consequential and momentous in human experience. It’s the apple’s relativity to physics, technology’s to tears.

This is a great show, but especially notable are “A Letter for Eugene Onegin”, “The Masque”, “The Nefarious Hand”, “Poet’s Heart” and “Her Gift to Newton, Her Gift to Me.” The digital medium is gaining acceptance in museums and retail galleries, because of excellent efforts like Barbey’s. Must-see.

Got Mail?

Sharon Rusch Shaver, a Sumner County-based artist, won the commission to create a large canvas for the new retail Post Office on the ground floor of the Frist Center. The completed piece was on view at the gala ribbon-cutting last Tuesday, and Shaver’s painting is outstanding. It’s a black and white image, referencing the large-format photographs at either end of the lobby. Shaver also incorporates Deco elements as decorative features within the painting, linking it to the fabulous, distinctive Deco features throughout the retail center, and the rest of the building.

What’s terrific about Shaver’s painting though is the poetic counterbalance she creates between representational realism and pictorial fragmentation, a formal device of the modern idiom. Her subject is the wartime goodbyes of the dislocated millions of Americans, whose separations (some permanently so) the Post Office helped to bridge. Shaver divides the canvas into sections, magnifying and reducing elements for effect. She thereby manages to make History fathomable for the viewer, by reducing the emotional drama to a more intimate scale.

Chase Zen

About 500 people attended the event on November 2, celebrating the opening of the retail Post Office and previewing the 1st Floor Galleries of the Frist Center. It was a grand affair, with lots of hoopla, artsies and power in the mix. Nashville is going to have one of the most gorgeous regional exhibition spaces in the country.

I interviewed Chase Rynd a couple of months ago, right after FCVA announced the European Masterworks show. Since then the Frist Center staff has expanded, on its way to a full contingent, which will include exhibitions curator Candace Adelson.

Rynd spoke during our talk of the difference between elitism and discernment, and what makes the best artists in history the best. The Frist Center CEO called attention to the need for differentiation between the creative impulse and Fine Art, expressing reverence for tradition and craftsmanship. He indicated that the FCVA exhibition schedule would address the concerns of some in the community who believe the Center must be culturally diverse in show choices. Rynd emphasized the long view for the FCVA, stressing the obvious fact that no one exhibit can encompass the totality of art, in all its inexhaustible permutations. He gleefully at times, proudly at others, described the quality of the facility, its ability to showcase New Media, its spaciousness and varied environments for art teaching, exhibiting and learning. Rynd firmly conveyed the FCVA’s dedication to being an inclusive, family-oriented community institution, doubling as a terrific showcase for great art.

At the end of the conversation, I gave Rynd eight strands of purple and pink Mardi Gras beads, which I’d been carrying around in my briefcase. He meticulously untangled them, one by one, and with the help of PR Guru Ellen Pryor, laid them out on the conference table, according to color. Upon completing that task, Chase Rynd said, “You have to untangle them, so that you can rearrange them. If you don’t untangle them, they express themselves. Once you untangle them, you can play with them, and they will express you.”

Sketchy Connections

The Temp Contemp at Cheekwood (www.cheekwood.org/contemporary/temporary/temporary.html) has produced another interesting exhibit, featuring the sketchbooks and paintings of Tennessee native Brady Haston. Haston, who shows locally with Zeitgeist, is a 2D artist whose artwork is brut naïve in the execution.  The only thing elegant or finessed in Haston’s work is the artist’s dimensional staging of forms in space. The flip pop arrangements are actually studied maps documenting the artist’s streams of consciousness. Allusions to decorative patterning, comix, classical artifice and artifacts - really, anything that stimulates Haston’s visual mojo - permeate the sketchbooks and ultimately the wall pieces.

Haston appropriates visual source material and then transforms it into formal components. These components are then combined and composed into a layered text of signs and symbols in the picture plane. Haston’s signature stylization standardizes the diversely derived elements that appear (often repetitively) in the sketches and paintings. The work owes much to twentieth century abstraction, cartoons, and cutout collage, but it is Haston’s peculiar vision that animates the arrangements. His democracy of focus, childlike rendering and sensitivity to medium infuse the images with a cool innocence that’s as appealing as it is bizarre. Sarcasm lurks on the psychological borders of his aesthetic, as does a tension born of the inexplicable attractions the artist evidences to things like one-piece bathing suits. However, it’s obvious from the sketchbooks that Haston is a relentless hunter for visual stimulants and explorer of pictorial permutations along a theme.

What the viewer eventually develops after perusing the ouvre exhibited at the Temp Contemp is a sense of Haston’s visual inflection, elucidating the artist’s concerns. He loves to build structure using blobular shapes, op patterns and brush turns and the negative space/color fields that house them within the flat paper or board rectangle of the painting surface. It’s a push/pull in the placement that gives the images their zing, with color and tone functioning as the foil.

If the artist’s visual language has meaning, it’s only readable with an undisclosed code, which leaves this reviewer craving a decoder. In “Memories” a cartoon girl brandishes a Popsicle beneath looming forms floating in white (sky, black cloud, sunlight?) enclosed by a red border and a black wall. Whose memory does the painting describe, Haston’s or Popsicle Girl’s? Is color a signifier in the visual text? Or was the title meant to describe the artist’s reaction to the spontaneous combination he’d created? Just curious. Without clarification the piece is just visual trippy fun, which certainly is ok for lots of viewers, especially post-outsider culturati.

It’s definitely a treat, though, to check out the drawings and paintings in the same room, to cross-reference them, to play spectator to the creative process. That’s the opportunity sketchbooks provide the viewer. We get to look through a window into the guts of the artist’s conception machine. The more freedom the artist allows himself  - for experimentation, the refinement of raw data and the assimilation of visual info in the confines of the sketchbook - the more likely his success when working on a larger scale for higher stakes. Sketchbooks are to artmaking what rehearsals are to a band. They can hone the vision of the artist, make his artistic pronouncement legible and get rid of the kinks in presentation. …And the sketchbook is where chops happen.

Haston’s exhibit will continue through February. While you’re visiting the Frist Learning Center at Cheekwood, check out Peggy Snow’s paintings hung in the building’s lower level. They look terrific. The same works she exhibited last year on the Tin Angel’s dimly lit brick walls jump on the beige drywall of the FLC.

Chops Galore

Speaking of chops, the Stanley Boxer/Carol Mode exhibition at Cumberland Gallery is full of them. This is my favorite showing of Mode’s work to date. Last year’s Temp Contemp show of blue paintings on paper seems to have exorcised her of some color constriction. The new paintings are more robustly hued and more tightly drawn than previous works I’ve seen. The basic structure of her images hasn’t changed, but these pieces strike a more even balance between the explicit and abstract. Mode has achieved a condition of stasis in the surface that allows the viewer a more meditative participation in the painted realm she depicts. The result is a comfortable enjoyment of technique and concept in the viewing, as the eye bounces from resting place to active area. Good stuff.

Stanley Boxer’s artistic career can be whittled down to thirty pages of resume (www.salander-oreilly.com/represented/boxer.html). He’s shown 3D and 2D work all over the world, through decades of artmaking. As a painter, the guy’s a stud, pure and simple. The images shown at CG have a concrete pictorial impact equal parts texture and color. He uses everything and anything to attain cool effects on the surface of his canvasses: crayons, sand, iridescents, potsherds, collaged paper, fat strokes, layered glazing and water effects, rocks, chunks of paint, sawdust, wood shavings, charcoal, pencil… whatever will do the job. Boxer is a virtuoso Ab-Ex guy, whose chops are voluminous but never frivolously applied. The work is held together by the master’s facile hand at applying the formal device and visual construct on the picture’s surface through a great variety of means. The paintings approach representation in their palpable and vivid organic ebullience. They function as both microcosm and macrocosm, evoking the universal.

Even though a couple of the pieces look like potato chips on the wall (the stretching and framing is that bad), overall the work is dazzling and the show a must-see. If you love abstract painting, this exhibit’s for you. Boxer and Mode go great together.

Scene Notes

Bennett Galleries is showing French painters Jean-Pierre Dubard, Lucien Gondret, Christian Fournier and Daniel Girault through February 18. The exhibit is purely decorative landscape/cityscape/seascape stuff. If this is your bag, this show’s for you.

The best, nicest surprise of the week is Kristi Durham’s exhibit at JJ’s Market. The show consists of seven large paintings that derive from the artist’s store of family photos. Durham’s skill as a painter is tremendous. Her “Dance” is an early contender for the 2001 Brass Lobe Award for best painting. All but one of the pieces shown are outstanding, featuring dynamic turns from colorful representation to gorgeous abstraction. Look out for this one. She is burning it up!

Art Magazines: Do They Matter?

This month’s ArtNews asks on its cover, “Does Beauty Matter? The Question That Won’t Go Away”. There’s nothing inside the magazine – except for a short opinion piece – that would pass as a serious effort to answer that question. Maybe that’s why it won’t go away – Beauty, like Art, is a language few can speak, but everybody loves to hear it. It’s also easy to bring up as a topic, but leads to some very tough artistic issues. An examination of the aesthetics of beauty, however, is something that every artist must address, since the pursuit of (and repulsion from) the beautiful is fundamental to Western Art.

“Beauty” in art is a function of art’s purpose. Therefore, Odd Nerdrum’s must-read, 8-page-long paid advertisement in that same issue of ArtNews is probably more relevant as a response than anything else to be found therein. Is art entertainment? Is it for escape? Does it serve a social function, whether to control, humor, shock, tantalize, placate or numb the viewer? If your artistic goal is to shock, for example, then a self-portrait carved out of the artist’s own frozen blood can be seen as beautifully effective (see Marc Quinn in “Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art). In much of modern art, irony and invention are the tonal and technical norms.

If art is meant to evoke emotion from the viewer, then it must have the capacity to elevate or distress. Some artists seeking to elevate – Nerdrum, for instance - tend towards Terrible Beauty, and the images they fashion eschew the comfortable signs of our collective Now for a perilous Hyper-vision of the essentially human experience. Others, less inclined to the archetypal, work within the accepted decorative Western traditions and focus their efforts on developing images that create stillness within the viewer. The momentary stoppage of internal modern strain in the viewer provides a metaphysical aperture into which these artists endeavor to instill a flashing instant of beautiful reflection. This does not endear them to the acolytes of angst, who knee-jerk label such art insipid and obsolete.

As Diane Burko (currently showing at the Parthenon) says, “You do have to transcend the trite… Can you still deal with something as romantic as a landscape, knowing about pollution and the horrors of the world? My answer is that now, more than ever before, we need beauty.” Her landscapes, some monumental in scale, acknowledge the post-Ab-Ex freedom of gesture, while clinging to a kinder, gentler naturist aesthetic. Her paintings refer to nature, give one the sense of being in nature, but without the bugs. Why? To hopefully generate an “Immaculate Moment” in the viewer, in an art context.

Another artist currently showing in Nashville provides an even clearer example of this aesthetic of “Being Here Now (…in a gallery)”. His idea is to quiet himself and the viewer will follow.

“4 & Twenty Talismans”

The work of Santa Fe artist Carl Schuman (currently on view at Destination Gallery At First Union Tower) is a transportational device for consciousness – a thought-car. Schuman is pursuing beauty through the metaphysical and, more specifically, internal silence.

In “4 & Twenty Talismans”, Schuman depicts the stuff of dreams and vision, emerging from the quiet inside that’s a requisite for meditation (which the artist has practiced for nearly twenty years). Schuman constructs multi-dimensional blueprints of the internal spiritual experience, using unlikely materials like museum board, prismacolor pencils, fishing line and watercolor.

The meticulously crafted shapes (which function as the substrate for his imagery) present a visual conundrum to the viewer. They exhibit the fragility one would expect from assemblages made of paper, but – due to Schuman’s intuitive engineering skills and tenacity – they have the same mysterious gravity that M.C. Escher’s visual puzzles have. Schuman’s artwork magically incorporates air, the ether, negative space – absence - as visual elements with a perception-bending power every bit as convincing as, say, shading to produce the illusion of depth (another tool he uses). This is one of Schuman’s artistic gifts: to fill the void without erasing it.

Another facet of his work worth noting is Schuman’s marvelous sense of color. Santa Fe has always attracted artists who seek to be transformed by hue and artists whose colorist tendencies make more sense in the crystalline light of the high desert Southwest. Schuman is of the latter variety. His painstakingly applied and blended layers of brilliant color push the limits of his medium. The luminous surfaces are achieved through the process, directly related to classical painting techniques, of assiduously overlaying “glazes” of color from dark to light. The result is the lustrous jewel-like depth of hue that the viewer sees in Schuman’s finished works. This formula for beauty is consistent with the artist’s metaphysical aesthetic, an apt metaphor for the process of enlightenment.

The imagery found in the artwork of Carl Schuman is likewise drawn from ancient tradition. However, the artist’s pictorial language is more closely related to spiritual traditions than those of modern secular art (though of course there is some crossover). Feathers, candles, pyramids, stars, crosses, dwellings, celestial bodies and light – these are the immediately familiar visual icons, recurring in Schuman’s images. They float above or within otherworldly landscapes that inevitably contains windows to a vaster “beyond”. It is an effect that mimics what one sees when looking at a mirror reflected in a mirror, revealing part of a grand hall. Much of the interest visually is in the fractal repetition of the room’s contents, but (depending on how curious one is by nature) more interest may be kindled by what is not revealed.

The abstract decorative patterning, found throughout the body of work, both contains and frees the more literal imagery. Schuman’s assemblages evoke mandalas and other kaleidoscopic spiritual/visual meditation tools, designed to both absorb the viewer’s attention and liberate his senses. This effect is accentuated by the 3D quality of Schuman’s constructions. Whether they are freestanding, suspended from the ceiling or hung on the wall, his pieces seem to float within their environment.

“4 & Twenty Talismans” visually presents a distinct invitation for the viewer to stop, rest and experience the artwork in a conscious way. Carl Schuman’s work is about a harmonious exchange between the artist and his audience, designed to encourage the viewer to establish a similar exchange within himself.

Exhibit: Nashville

The dust is settling on the 1999 Metro election, and it’s time for promises to generate action. The new mayor, vice mayor and many of those elected to the city council committed during their campaigns to support a public art provision for Nashville. In Review has done more than any other city news source to raise public awareness on this issue. Not a peep has been heard from the Scene, Nashville’s “Arts and Entertainment Weekly” on the Percent for Art initiative. The fact remains that Metro’s concrete commitment to funding public art is crucial if the city is to become a cultural destination.

Nashville cares about arts and culture. The mayoral candidates’ forum on the arts, held at Cheekwood on July 13, attracted a larger turnout than any other such event during this year’s campaign. During Phil Bredesen’s administration, the value of public art and arts education and the willingness of the city’s residents to embrace culture-enriching projects became front-page news. On September 17, in one of his last appearances as mayor, Bredesen announced the donation of $2 Million by an anonymous patron towards the commission of a sculpture/fountain by local artist Alan LeQuire.

Now, the city must decide whether or not to build on the progress made over the past eight years. The draft for a Percent for Art provision is sitting on Bill Purcell’s desk. Ronnie Steine, an avid arts advocate, is strategically positioned to greatly influence the fate of a public art provision. The city council is as progressive as it perhaps has ever been. The question is “Who will step forward to sponsor the bill that guarantees a cultural legacy for generations of future Nashvillians?”

Before the city makes concrete its commitment to art in public places, other concerns must be addressed. Where will the money come from to commission public art? Why spend money on public art? Who chooses what art Nashville should have, and by what criteria? What is public art good for anyway? Should the private sector contribute to public art? What happens when a piece of public art creates controversy?

In the following article we’ll explore public art in general and what it can mean for Nashville in particular. The bottom line is this: the Percent for Art provision is a quality of life issue. Since our city is decades behind other American urban centers with regards public art, we have the luxury of culling the good from the bad choices others have made when attempting to integrate culture/art into the community fabric. It’s a long-term job that’s waiting for a groundbreaking ceremony.

Philly Art Stake

In 1959 – that’s forty years ago - Philadelphia instituted the Redevelopment Authority Fine Arts Program, the first Percent for the Arts (PFTA) program in America. The Redevelopment Authority’s (RDA) mission has been to use site-specific art to promote and invigorate the urban renewal process in “The City of Brotherly Love”. The program’s requirement mandates that one percent of all construction costs on land assembled by the RDA be budgeted for the commissioning of public artwork created specifically for the project. RDA has since become a model or inspiration for over one hundred US cities’ public art programs.

Diane Burko - whose exhibition of lush landscape paintings opened last Saturday at the Parthenon - has been (at different times) both appointed to the board of RDA’s Fine Arts Committee and the recipient of a major RDA commission. In the mid-‘90’s, Burko received $200,000 to create “Wissahickon Reflections”, a massive painting on over 1500 square feet of canvas, which was installed at the Philadelphia Marriott through the auspices of the RDA.

According to Burko, Philadelphia has benefited measurably from its public arts initiative. Philly boasts more murals than any other American municipality and over three hundred public sculptures, fountains and memorials (check out www.libertynet.org/artguide for a comprehensive inventory). The list includes such urban icons as Claes Oldenburg’s “Clothespin” and “Split Button”, a monumental Robert Indiana “Love” sculpture, and significant public art by Noguchi, Nevelsen, Pfaff, Beverly Pepper (who’ll give a Public Art Forum lecture at Vanderbilt on October 16) and many others. The RDA acquisitions and commissions complement Philadelphia’s catalogue of more traditional offerings, accumulated throughout the city’s history.

The culture-friendly environment established by RDA has contributed greatly to Philly’s thriving art scene, stimulating private contributions for artistic endeavors. For instance, Burko cited an artist-initiated movement to provide other artists with low/no-rent housing/studio space. She also described creative initiatives like one that compensates artists for temporarily installing their work in unoccupied storefronts. Burko characterized Philadelphia’s gallery scene as “great”, and she and partner Richard Ryan were able to name a dozen examples of public art that regularly cultivated, exhilarated and inspired them.

Burko also indicated the importance of Philly’s several Masters of Fine Arts programs to the city’s vital art scene. “The Masters programs perpetuate the artists living in the city,” Burko said (Nashville, it should be noted here, has no Masters of Fine Arts curriculum currently). She herself holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and instructs at the Community College of Philadelphia.

Although there have been issues to be resolved in applying the PFA program in Philly (one of the most recent involves determining whether the artist or city should be responsible for liability insurance for public artwork) and some unfortunate miscues (inevitable when bureaucracies get entangled), generally the RDA endeavor has made Philadelphia more livable. “(Public art) humanizes the city, makes it a more civilized environment. To have civilization, you must have culture. (Public art) sensitizes people. It makes them more aware of the their surroundings. There’s always more to look at than buildings.”

One of the significant factors contributing to the success of RDA is the composition of its Fine Arts Committee. It consists of two artists (originally one painter and one sculptor), an arts administrator, architect, landscape architect, design professional, business representative, philanthropist and an arts educator. The cross-pollination of aesthetic principles with practical applications embodied in this distribution of responsibility among diversely qualified individuals is requisite to a well-structured public art program.

Ryan, who collaborated with Burko on her “Wissahickon” project, is an artist-turned-compuwhiz presently employed as a “visualizer” for an architectural firm. He illustrated the value of creative/practical exchange, saying “Artists today often don’t create work with an understanding of how to make it so it will last. It helps to have someone with an engineering background available to assist.”

As an aside, it’s relevant to note something Burko said about the financial benefits of public art projects for public artists. “The artist doesn’t usually make money on these projects,” she revealed. Fabrication, installation and maintenance costs can erode any profits the artist might realize for the potentially enormous time commitment required to produce a monumental work.

The Aussies Got It

Since 1959, the concept of funding public art through capital projects has spread throughout the US, from New York City to Los Angeles. It has even been exported well beyond the edges of America. Australia’s Queensland State’s 2% for art provision is a great example (check out www.arts.qld.gov.au/publicartagency).
Their program is called Art Built-in. The opening line in the Art Built-in brochure reads, “Our public buildings and spaces send powerful messages about who we are and what we value as Queenslanders.”  If they can get it, shouldn’t we in Nashville be able to?

Nashville’s Turn

Tom Turk is the director of the Metro Nashville Arts Commission. He’s also presiding jefe of the US Urban Arts Federation. Under Turk’s meticulous intendance, MNAC has been building the foundation for a public art program for the city. These PFA cornerstones include an artist’s directory, supporting surveys, a library of PFA data, a stellar lecture series on public art (coordinated with the help of Vanderbilt, concerned arts advocates like Dan and Connie Lembark and others), the passage of enabling legislation at the State level, and a monthly bulletin providing arts updates and information.

Over the past decade the funding for MNAC has increased dramatically, reflecting the economic upswing enjoyed by Nashville. The diverse economy here has been underwritten by the monstrous growth of locally based medical, publishing, insurance and music industries, (not to mention the tremendously rejuvenated Vanderbilt U.). The sustained boom - made sweeter by a relatively low cost of living here - continues to make Nashville attractive to  residents, corporations and ancillary businesses looking to relocate . Transplanted artists and art lovers moving to Nashville from cities with evolved PFA programs have responded to the dearth of art in public places with a hue and cry for viable arts initiatives for the Music City. This atmosphere justified the mayor and council upping the Arts Commission’s ante.

Increased funding for MNAC has not yielded any direct benefits for individual visual artists, however. MNAC only administers funds (about $1.5 Million last year) to not-for-profit entities. These entities in turn contribute, according to a recent Frist-sponsored study, about $100 Million to the local economy. Thanks, though, to the Conservative penchant for throwing the Crucifix out with the piss, no individual grants are available for Nashville artists through Metro. That’s one of the reasons the need for the PFA is felt so acutely here. The lack of government support for visual art hasn’t precluded Nashville’s visual art scene from sprouting, but without a PFA, the scene will hit a ceiling (along with the economy) and wither. The only way visual art will become a permanent and stable part of Nashville’s community fabric is through the commitment that a public art provision represents to artists and the community.

Reinstating the Draft

Earlier this year MNAC prepared a draft of a PFA provision, which had the misfortune of landing on then-Mayor Bredesen’s desk three days prior to the appearance of the Dell deal, which subsequently consumed the city’s political discourse. The draft is based on Seattle’s highly successful PFA initiative.

It begins:

WHEREAS, public art enables people in all societies to better understand their communities and enriches the lives of the citizens of Nashville and Davidson County; and

WHEREAS, the Metropolitan Council believes that the citizens of Nashville and Davidson County will benefit from an increase in the amount of visual public art in and around publicly owned facilities and structures; and

WHEREAS, artists capable of creating art for public spaces should be encouraged and Nashville’s standing as a regional leader in public art enhanced by creating a stable source of funding for such public art…

In the body of the bill, the method of obtaining the percentage for art (which ultimately could be as little as .05% or as much as 2%) is outlined. Contrary to a common misconception, the percent does not equal a percentage of the entire Metro budget. The PFA constitutes a small portion of the budgets allocated “capital projects, approved in the Capital Improvements Budget paid for wholly or in part by the Metropolitan Government involving the construction or remodeling of any building, structure, park, utility, street, sidewalk or parking facility”, set aside for the commissioning or acquisition of appropriate public art. The rest of the bill deals with the details of creating a slush fund from PFA projects that don’t amount to much, and piling the pennies until they are sufficient to purchase quality public art; how the fund rolls over fiscally, and other such details.

Remember, though, it’s now just a draft of a bill left over from the previous administration. Nothing’s been finalized. There is no done deal.

Why Does Nashville Need a PFA program?

According to a special report called Public Art for Nashville, provided in November of ’96 to Bredesen, the confirming opinions on the value of a PFA program are compelling. The report reads, “A missing ingredient in Nashville’s arts mix is public art, as the Committee for Art in Public Places pointed out in its study. Two Nashville Arts Summit committees, Arts as a Civic Asset and Continuing Professional Education, recommended separately in February 1996 that an art in public places program be established…” The paper also stated unequivocally that “no matter what goals (are settled upon for the PFA program)… it will be imperative to include visual artists from the beginning, at every step of the process”.

The report goes on to list “the typical goals other cities have identified” for their PFA programs. Three sets of goals are broken down according to beneficiary: the city, people and economy. The last set outlines “goals to foster change”. These goals, potential cultural gains, might be thought of as an omnibus on municipal wellness. …To give the city identity, to enhance its prestige, to enliven the visual landscape, to transform utilitarian spaces, to make the city more inviting, to enhance Nashville’s cultural standing, to provide quality art accessible to all people, to strengthen the city’s cultural and social life, to offer citizens a means for dialog and access to artists, inspiration and creative thinking, to enhance cultural tourism, to contribute to the quality of life elements that attract new businesses and the people they employ, to invigorate local urban design, and most importantly, to involve the public as participants in ordering the city’s visual environment…

Finally, the report lists enough specifics on what installing public artworks involves, so that the reader will make no mistake. Public art is a tricky, expensive business. If due caution is not exercised administratively, the cost to the community can be sizable.

Update

In Review contacted the Mayor’s Office for this article on Wednesday, September 22, the day after Purcell was sworn in. He (understandably) was swamped and his staff a-bustle, transitioning into their new digs. We didn’t get to speak with the Mayor himself, but did speak several times with newly appointed Press Secretary Dana Coleman and arts czar John Bridges. Questions for the Mayor and Bridges were faxed that Friday. The Mayor, through Coleman, assured us he stands by his campaign promises, which include creating an Urban Design Center, supporting passage of a PFA bill and establishing a provision mandating that businesses participate in some way in the public art program. The Mayor needed more time to develop answers to questions asking how and when the PFA provision would be passed and the UDC established.

We tried to get to know John Bridges - who identifies himself as a strong layman and qualified amateur with regards visual arts – a little better. Bridges has a background primarily in music, dance and theatre. He worked at the Tennessee Arts Commission in the ‘70’s, where he helped established the individual artist’s grants program. Bridges was a managing editor at the Nashville Scene for almost a decade, and has also worked at the Tennessean, writing about dance and theatre.

His appointment caused a furor in the local film community, which has since quieted. However, the handling of the film commission transition between the last administration and this one will likely be remembered warily. It’s tough to recommend him as a qualified advocate for the visual arts at this point. However, Bridges is a local guy and relatively known quantity. Time will tell if the visual arts community has a friend in the Mayor’s office.

Bridges responded to a question on the value of public art (which he considers under-funded) with a list of several community benefits. According to Bridges, public art provides visual artists a means to make a livelihood; public art gives the viewer great training for thinking; stimulates dialog; and is a pleasure. Bridges believes that a place that has a strong visual arts community is going to be a more civil place to live. All his favorite artists show at Cumberland Gallery and Bridges says he regularly attends artists’ openings.

Vice Mayor Ronnie Steine did not respond, though there is little doubt as to his sincerity as a visual arts advocate. Of the council members elected, the following said during their campaigns that they would support a PFA provision: Leo Waters, Melvin Black, Eileen Beehan, Bettye Balthrop, Phil Ponder, James Bruce Stanley, Amanda McClendon, Ginger Hausser, Morris Haddox, Bob Bogen, Jason Alexander and Don Knoch. Tom Turk indicated after his orientation meetings with our freshly elected officials that he was pleasantly surprised at how many were already knowledgeable about PFA. The Question is “What’s our timeline on the passage of a public art bill?”  Don’t be afraid to call your duly elected official and ask her or him.

The Bottom Line

Public art in an urban setting may in fact service a basic human need. Art in a public place, or the “Urban Icon” as Richard Haas calls it, functions as a focal point for social meeting or gathering, as a landmark, as a means for establishing a cultural identity, as a psychological reflector, as a meditation tool or intellectual point of departure. It can be a source of inspiration or a resource for the initiation of dialogue on cultural standards, expectations and practices. Great public art does all these things.

When one enters the city, and no longer recognizes the memory/mimetic activators that signify and designate meaning in the small-scale human environment, the dehumanization process of the individual in the masses begins. Therefore, if public art can do all the things listed in the previous paragraph, it is the urban democracy’s forge of the citizenry, its most overt –or representationally symbolic - expression of free speech and all those other treasured “inalienables”. We neglect it at our peril in a free society.

Whether or not you agree with these ideas, the truth is that municipal public art programs are a known quantity. They’ve been proven to make city living more civilized, or, at the least, more interesting, even fun. But there’s only one way to discover the value of public art: commit to it, make it, install it and live with it.

Echoes

David Driskell’s mini-retrospective, “Echoes”, is traveling around the country through 2001. It will be on view at the Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk University through February 15. “Echoes” is a sister exhibit to “Narratives of African American Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection”. The latter is a major survey of African American artists, drawn from Driskell’s own art collection, and will exhibit in major venues, such as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the High Museum of Art (June 20, 2000 - September 10, 2000) and the Cincinnati Art Museum.

Describing Driskell’s career can be summed up like this: he is a giant among African American artists. As a scholar, lecturer, educator, curator, filmmaker and author, Driskell has done as much as anyone living today to raise awareness of the valuable contributions made by Black artists in the U.S. He has received numerous awards, citations, prizes, scholarships, fellowships, honorary degrees and grants (including the President’s Medal), circled the globe on Research and Travel endowments, and served on dozens of advisory boards. All these achievements are symptoms of Driskell’s joyous passion for the creative endeavor in general, but especially for creative work that reflects and strengthens his own cultural identity. It permeates his paintings. In essence, his artworks are artifacts of the artist’s adoration of beautiful expression as influenced, shaped, repelled or propelled by tradition.

In her excellent essay in the “Echoes” catalog, Adrienne Childs writes, “Although Driskell is a world renowned scholar and educator, he considers himself first and foremost an artist. Perhaps it is the authenticity of his spirit as an artist that enables him to fulfill his many roles as professor of art, art historian, curator, and art collector with such great intuition and sensitivity.” In other words, Driskell is a master painter, who has been awfully busy in his off-hours. It is significant that Driskell views his internal hierarchy this way. It reveals much about how valuable prioritizing is to the creative endeavor, and how fertile a life can be when so ordered.

Driskell’s “Echoes” presents (as any good retrospective will) a condensed visible record of artistic evolution, evidenced in this distinguished artist’s life work. Spanning forty-five years of Driskell’s art-making, “Echoes” presents his ouvre resonantly, following signature thematic strands through decades of applications, each theme and application a facet of the artist’s vision.

These thematic strands represent periodic homecomings in the artist’s aesthetic wanderings. The procession of images over time is enriched by the return of the artist to an idea, emblem, form, palette, medium or construct, which serves as a sustainable resource for artistic growth.
When he does a variation, the artist creates an echo of earlier attempts to manifest a moment. It is a metaphor for the creative cycle.

This pattern of re-exploring familiar territory - when it involves an attentive audience - builds meaning and reinforces it in the shared memory or consciousness within the artist/viewer relationship. The re-visitation can establish and nurture trust between the symbiotically connected parties to the creative act. The phenomenon is like a singer/songwriter returning to a favorite standard from time to time to his fans’ delight, or like one’s calling on a dear but rarely seen friend, with whom the gulf of absence instantly dissolves. The familiar image (almost a template) becomes neutral territory within which the artist can abandon burdensome aesthetic baggage from previous pursuits, be freed of invention, and just play.

Driskell’s exhibit at the Van Vechten Gallery begins with the title painting for the exhibit. “Echoes: Let the Church Roll On”. Using watercolor and crayon Driskell introduces several of the themes that are evident throughout his work. The image is ecstatically rendered, recalling Chagall’s pictorial defiance of gravity and plastic convention, when he was filled with spiritual exuberance. The painting is airy, a fantastical layered scene that depicts Driskell’s Minister father’s idyllic Appalachian church, tilting humorously to the right, above which a sparsely, naively drawn angel hovers, both blessing and protecting. A self-portrait peaks quizzically from behind stylized branches of fertile green/yellow/white leaves. The entire scene is enveloped in clouds, a symbolic reference to heavenly bliss.

“Echoes” is not just a painting. It is a blessing and invocation of the artist’s memory, of remembrance in general, of the past living in the living. This investiture of painting with a higher purpose prevails throughout Driskell’s work. It reflects the artist’s better self and draws upon culturally grounded sacred art in its variegated manifestations, for weight and profundity. “Memories of a Distant Past”, for instance, evokes the African traditions of figural representation and decorative patterning in a lyric on embracing. The picture functions as a symbolic narrative (boys & girls - an old story), translated through stylized, layered forms and formal structures. But it also describes a metaphysical embrace by the artist of ancient and new. Driskell incorporates cut-outs from print sources to add texture and pop to the image surface, in exactly the same way notorious Chris Ofili did for his depiction of Christ’s Mother. Driskell’s way works where Ofili’s fails: Driskell’s combination illustrates the value of merging aesthetic methods (worlds) to highlight the value of each element’s contribution to the whole. Ofili’s combination devalues each element, the medium and the artist himself.

Other examples of the affirming combinant image in the show include, “Ancestral Icon”, a tiny gemlike encaustic/collage piece, which abstracts and reinvents the Madonna and Child marvelously. Two big canvases, the show’s centerpieces, depict angels manifested solely through Driskell’s peculiar vision (unlike anyone else’s I’ve seen), while simultaneously celebrating with Ab-Ex pyrotechnics. “Gabriel” got my nod for best painting shown in Nashville last year, but “Dancing Angel” is just as strong. These are Must-See.

Driskell applies the same approach to art-referential imagery, as in the tiny, gorgeous “Odalisque” and “Gate Leg Table”, the latter being probably the most overtly experimental piece in the show. The artist’s lack of cynicism towards Western pictorial convention results in some of the most sound works in “Echoes”, including “Still Life with Pears”, his early “Self Portrait” and the lovely landscapes (both painted and sketched) that appear throughout. “Falmouth Window” is my favorite, for the unbridled joy with which the artist applies each mark, without losing any readability of the subject.

The natural world is a garden of delights for Driskell, and trees (a reference to the Tree of Life?) are for him muses. “Pines of Falmouth” is a stunning painting, displaying a masterful conjoining of Ab-Ex and representational principles. It’s magical. The show includes many abstract paintings, which are almost uniformly rooted in the material or expressive worlds. The verticality present in many of the compositions resonates with the tree motif, though Yoruba posts or Brazilian windows inspire Driskell similarly. These references are not exclusive - they echo each other. Pictorial problems have lots of solutions, when the artist possesses a visual vocabulary as huge and diverse as Driskell’s.

Finally, the works inspired by Africa and African cultural traditions are integral to the artist’s body of work.  Throughout the exhibit, Driskell using the tribal to revitalize the conventional, to give it a vibrancy that would otherwise be muted and possibly dull. This is obvious when one compares the more recent self-portrait with the earlier.

The artist becomes a vessel for universality, a medium through which the power of spirit and vision illuminate the mundane. Driskell portrays “Spirits Watching” and “Eve and the Apple” with equal sympathy and reverence. The spirits, Eve, they look like us. Driskell has a gift for humanizing and making present the world of myth, dreaming and worship on the 2D surface, using traditional and non-traditional artist’s tools. This is a secret to his longevity as an artist, the strength of his vision and the admiration it inspires in the many who have been touched by his work in the past half-century.”Echoes” is an incredible show.

For more info on “Echoes” and “Narratives”, check out: (http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Colleges/ARHU/Depts/ArtGal/.WWW/exhibit/98-99/driskell/index.htm)

One on One

Arts in the Airport, Metro Nashville Arts Commission and Parks and Rec. are collaborating on a mentoring project involving several local African American artists. All have “been matched to a group of youth or senior art students” at area community centers.

“One on One” is an exhibit of these artists’ work, on view at BNA in the ticketing and dining areas through February. The artists include Ludie Amos, R. Lafayette Mitchell, Marvin Posey, Jr., and Marvin Stewart. Mike Smith, photography professor at ETSU, is also exhibiting in the A Concourse.

Posey’s colorful jazz-inspired oils and oil pastels hang opposite Stewart’s Ab-Ex painted tubes in the ticketing area. Both artists use brilliant color and their work pops across the massive space between the two walls. Stewart’s installation is an interesting horizontal array of vertical forms, centered on a tubal representation of Nashville under fireworks. Posey’s images glow with energy. If “Vibe” is something that can be painted, this is a great example of how it’s done.

Amos does portraits in “soft sculpture”(foam and fabric built on an armature) that document the Black experience, though their emotional poignancy has a much broader appeal. Mitchell is a 21st century Futurist who paints a world where music, dance and dressing up never stop, and everyone’s beautiful, if fractured (by a vibrating picture plane).

All of the work in the show is excellent. Take a little time to soak up some art the next time you’re flying out of- or picking someone up at the airport. It’ll take your mind of the horrifying experience you just had parking your car.

Art from God

“The Art of William Edmondson” opened January 28 at the Cheekwood Museum of Art (www.cheekwood.org). It was a gala reception with jaw-dropping attendance (hundreds of artsies). The opening marks the beginning of an eighteen-month journey for Edmondson’s sculpture, with stops at the Museum of American Folk Art (NYC), Memorial Art Gallery (University of Rochester, NY), the High Museum and the Mennello Museum of Folk Art (Orlando). “The Art of William Edmonson” is the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work to tour the country. A catalog is available from the University Press of Mississippi (www.upress.state.ms.us).

Edmondson was a Nashville-born and -raised, and his sculpture was crafted from the very fabric of the city: limestone from its streets. It’s satisfying to know that through the efforts of Cheekwood’s curatorial staff, especially Rusty Freeman, “The Art of William Edmonson” will renew interest nationwide in this unique local artist, who in 1937 became the first African American to show at MOMA. Like David Driskell’s retrospective exhibited at Fisk, the Edmondson show features an internationally acclaimed artist with strong Nashville ties.

The exhibit is nattily dressed in Cheekwood’s newly renovated facility. The show includes plenty of wall text, a slide show, kid’s video, a documentary film and photographs, providing lots of contextual info for the viewer interested in Edmondson’s remarkable story. …In other words, all the gloss and focus New Media can furnish artwork displayed in a museum setting. Toss in a dash of material authenticity - a reproduction of the sculptor’s porch, complete with signage (”TOMBSTONES FOR SALE, GARDEN ORNAMENTS, STONEWORK”), constitutes one of walls in the exhibit’s central gallery - and you’ve got a perfectly packaged artist’s vision.

Details such as Edmondson’s porch and reminiscences of his relatives on video are intended to lend intimacy and historical perspective to the show (and they do). They also establish an interesting dynamic between the art and the exhibit environment. The clean, graphic- and media-intensive display seems a tad overwrought when juxtaposed with the simplicity and humble power of the artwork presented. It’s an almost unavoidable quandary for curators trying to document and elucidate an aesthetic phenomenon: the fervent self-taught artist, whose artmaking is fueled by a “calling” to create. Howard Finster comes to mind immediately. The ardent (even ecstatic) naïve artist is anathema to black-uniform gallery cool. Cheekwood subtly manages to present Edmondson’s work well, without cauterizing it. The layout of the exhibition space aids the presentation greatly. Cheekwood, after all, still feels like a domicile, albeit a grand one.

“The Art of William Edmonson” is cogently divided into sections/rooms, emphasizing aspects of the artist’s life and work. The main gallery provides a social context to the sculptor’s life and work, illustrating how events and people shaped his art and providing an overview of his short but productive career. Two galleries are devoted to photographs taken of Edmondson during his lifetime by admirers Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Consuelo Kanaga. His fanciful “critters”, constituting a veritable bestiary in one gallery, are definite crowd pleasers. Another room is dedicated to the sculptor’s women, passionate renditions of the feminine form in Edmondson’s blocky visual vernacular. Finally, a collection of anomalies in the artist’s ouvre is grouped in the last room of the exhibit.

In all, nearly sixty of Edmondson’s sculptures are exhibited. This reviewer craved more, especially after seeing photos of the artist’s backyard when he was at his most productive. Nonetheless, “The Art of William Edmonson” contains enough wonders to make viewers’ return visits worthwhile. I had many favorites, and found new ones each time I walked through the exhibition (even on the fourth and fifth trips).

“Bess and Joe” is amazingly resonant, a simple study of a seated man and woman that serves (with the viewer’s experiential and emotional investment) as an implacable homage to the romantic attachment. …Or a comfortable hometown date set in stone. …Or a cold monument to the impossibility of intimacy. You fill in the blanks. “Bess and Joe” has a multiplicity of readings, as well as raw and undeniable visual impact.

This is the power of Edmondson’s sculpture: he provides just enough visual information to activate the viewer’s imagination and ability to develop a scenario based on the image presented. As is often the case with self-taught artists, the limitations of stylization can create tension in the art (”Reclining Man” is a good example). In Edmondson’s case however, the simplicity of the stylization and his passionate, universal message (gifted to him by God, according to Edmondson) saturates the work with an almost regal power. Though it was almost certainly unintentional, Edmondson created carvings that evoke tribal art (in the “Imagination” room there’s a “Critter” that’s a dead ringer for a Zuni buffalo fetish) and the stone work of civilizations past.

This is partly due to the nature of the medium. Artists have to solve design problems (gravity, positive/negative space, support) when creating in a reductive medium like stone. Similar intuitive solutions are likely to have been intuited by equally innovative artists, in other temporal or cultural circumstances, if they’re using the same materials to create. These innovations may eventually be incorporated into a culture’s general visual language. Hence, the unintended similarities between Edmondson’s work and the work of varied artists and cultures (created in specific historical periods) to which Edmondson was likely never exposed.

Withal its universality, it is the thematic particulars that define his work and place it in the contemporary idiom. Inspired by popular heroes and heroines of his day (like Eleanor Roosevelt) and reflecting subjects pertinent to his African American identity, Edmondson became a chronicler of his own time and culture. By creating expressions of his inner life, especially his spirituality, he invited the viewer to deduce the maker of the art from the art. Edmondson opened up his soul, his social world, his time and place to us with an infectious, joyous innocence.

I loved “Mother and Child”, “Preacher”, “Three Bears”, “Po’ch Ladies”, “Girl with Crossed Legs” and “Standing Woman”. I thought “Noah’s Arc” and the “Mermaid” were stunning. But my fave fave was probably the portrait of boxer Jack Johnson. Each viewer will inevitably have his/her own darling. The attendant at Cheekwood’s gatehouse preferred the “Squirrel”. “The Art of William Edmondson” inspires in the viewer identification, affinity, and gratitude that William Edmondson listened when his God told him to carve his visions in stone.

Scene Notes

On January 29th Cumberland Gallery opened a terrific show of abstract paintings, featuring work by Carol Mode and Stanley Boxer. This is an excellent exhibit and a must-see (look for an upcoming review). Zeitgeist had an awesome turnout for its annual Elephant Sanctuary benefit. The show contains millions of artworks by zillions of artists (famous and not, young and old, great and awful…). It’s on view at Fido, too. Brady Haston’s show of sketchbooks and paintings is slated to open February 4 at the Temp Contemp and should be an awesome show. The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is opening a show of master printmaker Ron Adam’s work on February 10. This will absolutely be must-see. The Watkins Faculty Show opens the same night and will include over fifty works by twenty Watkins instructors.

Megan Walborn Reaps

Congratulations are in order for local ceramic sculptor Megan Walborn. Her first solo exhibit opened in Rochester, New York, at The Gallery Upstairs. Walborn works out of a Chestnut Square studio. Most recently on the local scene, her distinctive wall sculptures appeared in Cumberland’s Small Packages 5 and in a two woman show with Marty Spence at Cheekwood’s Pineapple Room. She has also contributed work to two DddD installations.

Walborn attended the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), receiving a B.A. in Fine Art in 1996. During her stint at RIT, she worked as a framer for Jeff Ureles at Gallery Picture Framing, which also shows art in The Gallery Upstairs. A fan of her early work, Ureles offered Walborn an exhibit whenever she felt she was ready. After graduating from university, Walborn relocated to Nashville, one of the many talented young artists to migrate to our city in the past several years.

Once ensconced in her Chestnut digs, Walborn began work on a series of wall pieces, which reference “primitive” implements of destruction (”based on blade and scythe shapes”, according to the artist) and the contemporary fetishism they inspire. Her sculpture evidences Walborn’s attentiveness to organic structure, as it is revealed in microscopy and the poetics of living or once-live natural form. She also demonstrates a strong foundation in the modern sculptural vernacular, culling cleverly from a variety of sources to establish what is essentially her own aesthetic, a vision based on distillation.

There is an ambiguity to this convergence of style, study and means, however. Walborn distresses, disguises and decorates her clay pieces with paint, metal leaf and most recently images. The results can be surprising, as when her finishes mimic bronze patinas, for instance. These efforts seem designed to add ballast to her ceramics, both conceptually and visually.

Walborn’s attraction to clay, one of the most fragile yet enduring of the traditional artist’s mediums, points to what’s ultimately intriguing about this artist’s work. The history of clay as an expressive vehicle is intricately intertwined with its utility (as vessel or surface). Potsherds survive millennia, serving as documents of cultural identity, though a clay pot’s value as a vehicle for the stuff of daily life disappears the instant it hits the floor.

Walborn’s first body of work addresses this dichotomy, in a provocative way: “They are my protective weapons, yet these objects are useless in the true terms of defense,” she says. Their appearance evokes potential violence. Like massive insect mandibles, they seem capable of rending flesh. Ultimately, though, Walborn’s “Scarificators”, “Reapers”, “Abraders” and “Implementations” are metaphors for wounding and the surviving of wounds, symbolic scars and emblems of the things that scar us. The sculptures are as much a chronicle of emotional endurance, as they are a paean to the inflicting of pain. They pay homage to the beauty to be discovered in the brutal/liberating fact that we live in a dangerous world, that none of us escapes unscathed.

After developing the series for two years, Walborn contacted Ureles and planned an exhibit, which opened January 14. “It was like going home. For my first solo show, going back to somewhere familiar made it much easier. I tried to have no expectations.” The gallery placed a big ad in the city’s paper, and the artist was anxious before the opening. “Nobody had seen this work before. I was extremely nervous. My mentors were there, and I didn’t know how people would react to the work.”

The show was a success. Friends and teachers from RIT attended, and Walborn sold several pieces. Now, she’s back in Nashville ready to start a new body of work and preparing for an exhibit later this year at the Tennessee Arts Commission Gallery. Walborn is definitely one of the Nashville artists to watch in the coming years.

It takes export shows like Walborn’s to bring recognition to local artists, and by extension, the local scene. If you know of or are having an exhibit elsewhere, let us know.

Egg on the Face of the Scene

In 1999, The National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) at Columbia University released a comprehensive study of arts coverage across the nation. The report, titled “Reporting the Arts: News Coverage of Arts and Culture in America”,  “analyzes 15 dailies in 10 cities across the country, the three national papers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today — as well as the Associated Press and network television.” You can download the document from the NAJP web site (www.najp.org/research.htm).

The conclusions of “Reporting the Arts” are compelling. Although the popularity and support of the arts have increased dramatically across the nation, local and national coverage of the arts has diminished. Movies, business and sports have become the media’s cultural focus. According to a subsequent New York Times article, “(The report) cited coverage by The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina, where ‘despite phenomenal growth in almost every area of the arts, as well as surveys that show readers spend as much money on arts and entertainment offerings as sports, the arts staff has not increased, ‘ although new positions were created in sports to cover new professional sports teams.”

Sound familiar? Love him or hate him, Alan Bostick brings more bodies to visual arts events in Nashville than anyone. However, since late last year he’s been editorially hamstrung by a Tennessean decision to move the two-page color spread from the Arts & Entertainment Sunday section to another part of the paper. This feature played a vital role in local visual arts coverage, colorfully highlighting a big Nashville exhibit or arts story weekly. One hopes that this decision is only temporary, but it appears as though the Gannett paper doesn’t consider area culture a priority. This in spite of the arts rebirth Nashville’s currently experiencing… Artsies, get out your pens and paper.

Egg on TV

The above report also cited figures demonstrating that evening network news programs devoted less than a percent of their on air time to arts coverage. If you want art on TV, check out “Egg” (www.thirteen.org/egg), a new program premiering on WDCN February 6 at 9:30 PM. It’s produced by Channel 13 out of NYC. Executive Producer Jeff Folmsbee and Series Producer Mark Mannucci are best known for their award-winning series “City Arts”, one of the best television arts programs in the country. They also list the PBS broadcast of the Tony Awards on their credits.

I screened the first three shows in the series last week and was thoroughly impressed. The first addresses public art (”Art - Who Needs It?”), something we haven’t heard much about in Nashville recently. The second focuses on working dancers and the third gets edgy with a program dedicated to the body as vehicle for culture (”The Body”, February 27). Other episodes in Egg’s inaugural season include, “Who’s the Art Boss”, “Theater on the Edge” and “Machismo” (dates to be determined). If they’re as good as the first three are, then Nashville’s artsies will be couch potato-ing’ it on Sunday nights (right after the Sopranos).

Egg does an excellent job sampling the spectrum of artistic expression, garnering input from artspeaking experts, established and obscure artists and the artistically disinclined. The show injects the voices, images and reactions of its subjects with empathetic democracy, providing the audience with a lucid picture of the state of the arts across the country. Egg’s web site is cool, too, and the producers hope it will become a nexus for art seekers, looking for events and organizations in their own neighborhoods.

The goal of Egg’s producers is to make the artist and the artistic process accessible, and to provide a forum in which the artist’s “truth”, whether bizarre or profound or both, can be revealed. The show doesn’t seem to judge art qualitatively, nor does it attempt to define it literally (although it certainly allows the artsies to do so). Neither does Egg gloss over the sacrifices made by creative people in pursuit of their visions. A critical moment in the second episode (”Working Dancers”, airing Feb 13) shows Oregon Ballet’s Tracy Taylor discussing the toll a dancing career has taken on her body. The scenes involving this beautiful performer’s nursing her disfigured feet tell it all.

Says Executive Producer Jeff Folmsbee, “By looking at the arts through personal, provocative and emotional stories, we want to show people that the arts are for everyone. They’re rooted in the things we all care about. First an foremost we’d like to entertain, but we also hope Egg will inspire public television viewers to action - to go out and explore on their own or to take a stand on arts policy. Ultimately, our goal is to push the arts into a more prominent place in the national popular discourse.” Hear! Here!

Adios, ArtRadio

Finally, I’m sorry to announce that ArtRadio will no longer air on WRVU. I was unable to attend a mandatory organizational meeting, and after two and a half years of narrowcasting on the student radio station, we were bumped without so much as an adios. Thanks to all those artsies who came on the showgram or listened. It was an honor to serve you. And thanks to Vanderbilt, that art-loving University, for the opportunity to talk about art on the radio.

Heating Up

I overheard an exasperated artsy (at the opening for Bennett Galleries’ current show of Russian painters, continuing through March 25) complain that there was too much going on in Nashville’s art scene lately. She was having trouble attending all the receptions for the cool exhibits happening around town and so advocated for better communication among the city’s arts venues. “Couldn’t they just spread them out through the month?” she wailed. Truth is, the quality and diversity of art offerings in Nashville is spiraling up and out, as the momentum of the city’s cultural rebirth (the apex for which will be the opening of the Frist Center in 2001 - just a year away, now) grows. The culturati are going to have to accustom themselves to “Too Much”, because from now on that’s how it’s gonna be.

Scene Notes

Let’s take a look at what’s happening now (and some of what’s been missed, cuz there’s “Too Much”). The Sarratt Gallery is “Exploring Family: Myth and Memory”, in a show featuring the work of Robin Adsit and Ashley Cameron Waldvogel. In celebration of Women’s History Month, Sarratt and the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center are hosting a lunchtime lecture by Waldvogel and Adsit (a closing for the exhibition). The event will be held in room 189 at Sarratt, between noon and 1 PM on St. Patrick’s Day. …It’s been dogging me…I missed writing about the previous show at Sarratt: David Lefkowitz’s gorgeous paintings riffing on the intercourse among man, nature and technology. Lefkowitz also gave an entertaining and lucid slide presentation at the closing of his show. Sarratt’s exhibit/lecture combo is terrific for artsies looking for the 411 on the exhibiting artists’ headsets. Navigate the crap parking situation and the debris from the building’s renovation and check it out. N4Art is also feting the feminine with a showcase of its women artists. “Boundless Expression: Renewal of Spirit”, the 2nd Annual Celebration Women in Art was held at ArtSynergy on March 11. It’s quick run, so make it over this week.

Nearby, Hillsboro Village is getting a double dose of quality public art (without the help of a Metro Percent for Art program, unfortunately). At the corner of 21st and Blakemore, Bernar Venet’s outdoor abstract sculpture “Indeterminate line” has been recently installed under the aegis of the VU Medical Center’s Department of Cultural Enrichment (Go Donna Glasford!). Steve Bennyworth’s much anticipated unveiling of “WEB” is slated for March 12 from 2-5 PM. The under-wraps sculpture has been the object of conjecture for Tracers, Iguanites, and Sunset Grillers for weeks. Speaking of privately funded public art, upper Demonbreun has been blocked off and the ground’s been broken. Alan LaQuire’s Music Row fountain circle is on its way. Meanwhile, LaQuire’s been laboring feverishly to put together Nashville’s first major artist’s studio tour. “Make Space for Art”, slated for April 8 from 10 AM - 5 PM, will be sponsored by VAAN, Jack Daniel’s and Bank of America. A preview/group show will open at ArtSynergy on March 18. More public art: Arts in the Airport last month announced the winner of its commission for a sculpture sited in the BNA short-term parking garage. Michael Hayden, whose work with fiber optics and light has been collected and exhibited internationally since the mid-Sixties, is planning to install a spiral sequence, illuminating the transitional area between the garage and the airport proper. The project is to be completed in June. Currently “Flying Solo” at the airport are University of the South art professor Edward Carlos and retired University of Memphis art professor Richard Knowles. Their work will be on display through the end of May in the ticketing area. On Fridays between noon and 2 PM you can check out the airport’s art offerings with a musical backdrop. For more info on this stuff go to www.nashintl.com.

D.I.G. Through Art 3 opened March 12 at the Downtown Presbyterian Church. The annual exploration of Suffering and Hope (the inimitable Tom Wills doing the lions’ share of suffering and hoping to put together the event) will feature about thirty local artists. This year’s roster includes Seth Conley, Barbara Yontz, Kevin Barbieux, Andrew Harding, Jimmy Abegg, Todd Greene, Langford Barksdale, Emily Leonard, Tom Byl, Irene Wills, Steve Bennyworth, Erika Wollam Nichols, Kurt Lightner, Julie Lee, Jennifer Quigley, Wendy Leonard, Kimberly Goodson, Herb Williams, Whitney Ferre, Caroline Hagan, Andrew Schwartz and others, including myself. The exhibit continues through April 16.

Nashville’s currently popping with plenty of terrific gallery exhibits (”Too Much”), featuring local, regional, national and international artists in solo and group configurations. Finer Things is presenting “On Trees”, a collection of 2D work by Kristi Hargrove, Mary Williamson and gallery owner Rusty Wolfe. Hargrove’s virtuoso graphite drawings can also be seen at the Watkins faculty show, the best exhibit of its kind I’ve seen in Nashville. Twenty-one of Watkin’s instructors, including Terry Glispin, Anton Weiss, Barbara Yontz, Michele Lambert Herbert, Kathryn Garcia Smith, Joy McKenzie, Madeline Reed, Janet Brooks, Carlton Wilkinson, Lisa Weiss, Doug Schatz, Robert Neitzke, Elizabeth Sanford, Kathy Carter, Meredith Green, Michael McBride, Bonnie O’Hara, Robin Paris, Steve Reed, and Brad Roberts. The presentation is excellent, emphasizing the diversity of vision and technique on display in the exhibit, while avoiding the “group show cramps”. The quality of craftsmanship in the work is uniform throughout. The show continues through March 23.

In the Gallery is featuring mostly small paintings by Jairo Prado. Prado’s expressive abstracts are luscious, emphatic studies - all gesture and dance. If you’re in Franklin, stop by the Factory and pay a visit to Third Coast Clay. TCC is showing the whimsical paintings of Barbara Coon. The Hiram V. Gordon Gallery at TSU is showcasing the paintings of R.Lafayette Mitchell through March 17. Mitchell’s “Motion of Life” combines jazz, Futurism and brilliant color to create a 2D night on the town. The Temporary Contemporary at Cheekwood is currently exhibiting the paintings of Rocio Rodriquez. It’s an absolutely gorgeous show! Rodriquez mastery of Ab-Ex push-pull, marvelous brushwork and beautiful color sense make this show a definite must-see. The Tennessee State Museum opened “Russian Realism: Paintings From Behind the Iron Curtain”. Look for a review later this month. The Fugitive Art Center is presenting edge-work by Heidi Steinke and Michael Merrill through April 8. Ruby Green is hosting the Handweavers Guild’s Biennial Show through March.
Finally, at Cumberland Gallery the far out and phenomenal woodcuts of Thomas Huck are coupled with the painting constructions of Virginia Derryberry. This is to date the best two-person show of Y2K.

Evolution D’Amour: Transmissions from Elsewhen

It’s not just the volume/quality of art, events and artists pushing the city’s aesthetic mojo towards critical mass. Something special’s happening in Nashville, something that’s unique and wondrous.

On Thursday, March 2, Roy-El “Futureman” Wooten (of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones) gathered a host of accomplished musicians and artsies together for a one-night-only performance of “Evolution D’Amour” at the Belcourt Theater. The Roy-El compositions featured in the performance are based on the tonal scale of the Table of Elements. The other facets of the performance (including dance, film, art, poetry, storytelling and surreal drama) explored “Birth” through a variety of cultural filters. The PhiHarmonic Orchestra (Roy-El’s merry band of co-creators) and the other performers opened an aesthetic window, a moment of Enlightened Creative Motion on the crowded Belcourt stage. The movement was inspired by the Spiral, based on the Golden Ratio and it looked a lot like 4D Art.

Two stupendous musical performances followed “Evolution D’Amour”. One happened March 3 at Café 123, and featured virtuoso jazz violinist Mark Feldman. The second showcased Flecktone Jeff Coffin’s all-star ensemble at Café Milano. The musicians in town for “Evolution” played in or hung out at the 123 and Milano shows. …Why are we talking about great music in a visual arts column? Nashville’s musical tradition is influencing the visual arts here in a way that is perhaps unique in American art history. Artists like William Edmundson (currently at Cheekwood Museum of Art) and art like the Carousel, for example - the artists and art, in other words that embrace a Nashvillian identity - have the mark of the music on them. Many of the visual artists listed above in the first part of the column use the visual vernacular of the music world in their imagery. There’s a communion of Vision that happenings like “Evolution” and DddD’s “Inside>Outside” are engendering in a burgeoning art scene. What’s it all about?

For myself, “Evolution” weekend was life-altering. The performances filled me with a sense of wonder and community and beauty and… We’ll dig a little deeper into this in next week’s column, when we talk about the 5th AOTA findings presented to Nashville’s artsies on March 10.

FANTASTIC VISIONS

Jairo Prado’s exhibit at the Tennessee Arts Commission gallery is an exercise in cultural transmutations and transmissions. The show’s called “One Man Journey”. Normally any usage of the word “journey” in an exhibit title is hackneyed (e.g., “The Journey Within”). In Prado’s case, “journey” is literally and metaphysically descriptive. His work chronicles the transportation of the vision the artist developed in Colombia to his new home in Nashville. Furthermore, “One Man Journey” provides the viewer a glimpse of a mystical coupling: Prado combines ancient indigenous visual schematics (evidenced in applied arts like weaving and carving) with the intellectualism of Euro-based 2D representation. Throw in a dose straight-from-the-tube intensity of hue and you’ve got all the makings for an aesthetic metamorphosis.

Contemporary artists who emerge from cultures with strong pictographic and fiber-based craft traditions tend to echo those influences in their painting and sculpture. Prado’s artwork is revelatory in this manner. His abstractions refer directly at times to the brilliantly colored patterns of native textiles, as in “Untitled”, which is actually executed on fabric. Even when he paints “realistically” these patterns are woven into the visual representation.

Prado demonstrates a strong foundation in the Western figurative tradition, and builds perspective and formal arrangements classically. However, in the 2D work, the Western sensibility collides with the layered translucence of indigenous vision. In “Metamorphosis (I & II)” Prado transforms the landscape into a vessel for that vision, (neither of which is distinct from the maker). In these paintings the symbolic visual language Prado uses (butterflies, grids, hearts, directional patterns and Ab-Ex brushstrokes) implode a linear reading of the image. Do these images convey his experience of the land or do they constitute an autobiographical/symbolic 2D collage? The use of layered elements in these paintings makes a reductive narrative - the separation of self from environment, mind from emotion, dream from waking reality - impossible. It is a holistic way of painting, which allows the artist to embrace both the Euro and Colombian traditions emphatically. In much of the 2D work, Prado’s use of paint is restrained, as if the fragility of the aesthetic combination requires him to hush the palette. One has the impression he does so regretfully. Perhaps the paint-as-veil technique is a means of moderating his influences with an eye to the decorative?

Half of the show, however, reveals a rupture in this weaving, a conflict of internal nature versus external bindings. “Plead”, “Let Them Eat Cake” and “Struggle Series 3″ (really, all of the plaster sculptures) communicate a raw emotional disharmony. Whether these pieces derive from the artist’s witnessing of tragedy or strife, or from his own problematic grappling with medium or experience is unclear.

The most refined works in “One Man Journey” are the wood sculptures: “Door of the Darado”, “Ancestral Fish” and “Tusk”. These exhibit Prado’s definitive grasp of both the modern idiom and sense of his cultural roots. “Door” is a stunning assemblage painted stark white - sharp-edged aggressive and mesmerizing simultaneously. “Fish” only lacks animation and breath to qualify as an organism. “Tusk” works as an impressive fetish.

Prado’s vision is not medium-specific. His work is about painting the shimmering scales of the serpent, documenting a living history of his people, and creating objects which advocate aesthetic and social multiplicity while still showing the hand and heart of the maker.

Another Facet

Michael McBride is one of Nashville’s most active community artists. He’s a TSU instructor and curator of the Hiram V. Gordon Gallery. He’s member of N4Art and has served as lead artist at the Edgehill and Bethlehem Community Art Centers and with Arts in the Airport… The list goes on. McBride’s paintings are on view currently at the Mad Platter in an exhibit called “New Horizons”, some of the proceeds from which will benefit the YWCA’s Sisterhood and Domestic Violence Programs.

McBride’s painting is very similar formally to Prado’s. Both use the representational sketch as a framework for abstraction. In Prado’s “Departure” and McBride’s “I am”, both reveal their process by leaving portions of the girding sketch visible. Like Prado, McBride fills his canvases with riotous bursts of color, though the latter favors a technique that refers to early 20th Century Euro abstractions and reads like stained glass. McBride’s colorist bent is, like Prado’s, a reinterpretation of the traditional cultural expression of his ancestors, made contemporary by the artist’s crossover aesthetic and content.

His subject matter is rooted in the artist’s African American identity, but its appeal and veracity is universal. McBride infuses his images with his love of music, dance, ceremony, and appreciation of tradition and the value of familial and social relations. His paintings are an exuberant celebration of life and color.

The price tags for the artwork collectively provide the viewer McBride’s artist statement, and are worth reading. My favorite paintings in the exhibit include “Kaleidoscope Kid”, “Camouflage”, and the invite cover piece. The presentation at the Mad Platter, as is often the case in a restaurant setting, is generally poor. Lights interfere with viewing, and don’t adequately illuminate the paintings. Some, like McBride’s collagraphs, are unreadable, unlit and set high on shelf-tops. Navigating the eatery to look at the art is a chore. Still, the Mad Platter has done much to showcase local artists, and “New Horizons” is definitely worth a look.

Scene Notes

Myles Maillie may have moved to Atlanta, but most local artsies still remember him as an unflappably prolific artist, shirtless eccentric and proprietor of the Museum of Maillie. On November 19, he opened an exhibit at In the Gallery, featuring assemblages fashioned of foam core, glue and lots of color. Maillie’s abstract wall reliefs work surprisingly well, given their scattershot artiness. The artist practices a sort of visual stream of consciousness, a creative fanaticism. The only thing consistent in Maillie’s work is his solid formal intuition, over-the-top palette and firm commitment to making the creative endeavor look like fun. The work is priced for gift-giving.

Terri Jones’ “Printkabinet” at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary Gallery is diametrically opposed to Maillie’s exhibit, in look and feel. In “Printkabinet”, Jones uses the aesthetics of reduction and an obvious attentiveness to materials, presentation and placement to instill the space with an air of reverence to conceptual process. Jones presents minimal sketches on semi-translucent vellum and juxtaposes the results against other materials (like steel and plaster). The result is a layered effect, implying multiple readings of the images (are they anatomical, biological or metaphysical references?). The draping of drawings, their framing or placement under glass also implies meaning. The drawings are tiny notations, which constitute symbolic shorthand for the artist. In her statement, Jones says, “My aim is to sharpen the viewer’s power of observation by the use of simple givens.”

Three of the pieces deal specifically with the gallery’s windows. “Printkabinet’s Window, Looking East, 1999″ and “…Looking North, 1999″ are framed drawings and “Ray, 1999″ is a floor sculpture, consisting of graphite powder under glass. These works constitute the artist’s designating the room to be a meta-space, at once a gallery, a metaphor, a symbol and a canvas.

Some of the pieces create interesting conceptual thought-pops. “Ray” gives light and shadow volume and mass, for example. “Detour” bends and deconstructs the solidity of the bricks in the architecture. “Case” is a window into the artist’s mind of making.

Questions raised by such an installation: Is the pared-down presentation a function of economy of means or clarity of vision? Is the analysis/interpretation of space presented in “Printkabinet” more of value to the architect, interior designer, poet or artist? And finally, is it the viewer’s role in an exhibition to experience art or receive a lesson in how to experience art?

Painted Walls

I received a package last week from graffiti writer Rex2 from the Nashville-based Thoughts Manifested crew. It was a real eye-opener. The enclosed letter was a slow response to “More Vandy-lism”, the Unframed column of last year covering the attacks on outdoor installations on the Vanderbilt University campus. In the piece I wrote, “To the vandal/graffiti hack that sprayed this on the lawn, degrading the artists who generously offered you a piece of themselves and their artwork: “THE ONLY DIFFERENCE b/w art & graffiti is permission”… The only difference between an artist and you (a dumbass psuedo-critic, faux-pundit, censor-disguised-as-hipster, sin huevos worm), is the courage/commitment required to create a relevant, resonant artifact, present it to the community and put your real name on it.” Below is Rex2’s thought-provoking reply.

Mr. McLean,

I really enjoyed reading your article about the destruction of public art works on the Vanderbilt campus. The fact my non-responding ass is writing you this proves it. Everything you wrote, along with everything the artists said, was true. The sad thing is that same truth lives within the statement left by the vandals. I must quickly insert that I do not agree with what was done. *I know how the artists feel, and I know a different meaning to the phrase the “dumbass psuedo-critic, censor-disguised-as-hipster, sin huevos worm” left. I know this because I am a graffiti writer (I hate labels).

I write Rex2, from Thoughts Manifested (my crew). My theory on what happened to the art involves drunken, rich frat boys, not “campus visitors”. My points about the statement I wrote above* are as follows. First, I know how the artists feel, because hardly any of my works are permanent. When you wrote, “Fortunately the trio photographed the work before the vandals got to it,” I thought Welcome to my world. Documenting my work is as important as doing the work. You have to be ready to have your art messed with, if you’re just putting it out there for the general public to view. Second, the point the vandals made was also true. What if someone without permission installed or painted that statement on the Vanderbilt campus. I doubt the same controversy would arise. In fact, many who demand action must be taken now (to protect public art), would probably demand the same action for the removal of the objects/art/whatever.

My overall feeling is vandalizing/destroying public works of art is despicable. But artists that choose to do public, outdoor work should know there’s always that chance. If they don’t like it, they should stick to the galleries. Besides, I hear the pay’s better.

Sincerely,
(Signed) REX2, Thoughts Manifested

P.S. Thanks again for being a champion for art. Enclosed is a sample of some the murals my crew has done around town. If you would like to contact me, you may at the address below. I would also like to invite you, in great advance, to my art show, which opens July 17th and runs through September 2nd at Ruby Green, located at 514 5th Avenue South.

Show & Prove Magazine
PO Box 280600
Nashville, TN 37228

A Phenomenon

The note (and five minutes at a railroad crossing, watching painted freight cars pass) got me digging. I found a host of web sites devoted to graffiti, the people who create it, the tools they use and the culture of which graffiti writing is a part. Hip hop, B-boying, the fashion, the identifying language, the history - graffiti is an important aspect of a bonafide international subcultural phenomenon that’s been evolving for decades.

Basquiat brought graffiti into the artsy mainstream twenty years ago, and, since then, this true “outsider” medium has been accepted in the art world as a viable form of expression. Graffiti writers have, however, not met with the same sort of acceptance on the street. A turf war between property managers, police and (mostly) young people with spray cans is being waged today all over the world. Graffiti culture is truly an international phenomenon.

Rex2 included a Show & Prove Magazine in his package, and I really enjoyed the interviews, images and graffiti-heavy graphics therein. Show & Prove is one of a bunch of zines devoted to the medium, published across the globe (see www.cd.chalmers.se/~peterk/grafmags.htm - I don’t know how up-to-date these links are, but this is a good place to start)

If you’re interested in learning/seeing more about graffiti and its writers, check out the following online resources: www.graffiti.org; www.cetus.net/concrete/links.html; www.cd.chalmers.se/~peterk/graflink.htm. At graffiti.org, you’ll be able to check out some of Rex2’s work. Look under “Nashville”. Kudos to Ruby Green for providing a venue for this alterna-art form. Should be an interesting exhibit.

Paul Harmon at Zeitgeist

Paul Harmon’s exhibit, titled “An Intimate Journey”, opened February 19 at Zeitgeist. The show consists of over 300 watercolor and ink sketches on paper, shrink-wrapped and mounted on white foam core, and it actually works as an installation. The images are hung salon-style, floor to ceiling, in uniform rows on one side of the gallery. Some are stacked on a small shelf at eye level, leaning against the wall. Others lean against the wall, stacked on the floor. Still others are grouped on a couple of mobile wall sections at the front of the narrow gallery. Seven large, brightly hued canvases - featuring Harmon’s trademark cutout/sprayed outline style - face the sketch array on the opposite wall. It’s Harmons, Harmons everywhere.

Harmon is one of Nashville’s most commercially successful artists, represented internationally in a plethora of galleries, museums and collections. His work tends to elicit a spectrum of responses, positive and negative, from artsies and viewers. Many are obviously taken with the traditional romantic and decorative motifs that Harmon explores in his work. His signature technique and formal clarity in the modern idiom certainly works as an effective, readable visual language that yields wonderful op/pop-moments.

After decades of refinement, Harmon’s method appears effortless in the execution. The grumblings I’ve heard mostly come from edge-artists who view Harmon’s work as cookie-cutter stuff devoid of soul or innovation. His subject matter certainly has a nostalgic air, obvious in Harmon’s many references to the impressionist artists and romantic writers who inspire him. One comment I overheard at the opening, meant to be derogatory, was that the sketches had the resonance of holiday postcards from a European getaway. I don’t think that’s off-base, or necessarily a bad thing. Whatever your take on the validity of his work, what’s undeniable is Harmon’s will to create. He is prolific, a consistent maker, with a vision that is unmistakably his own.

The sketches of “Intimate Journey” cover a lot of ground, as regards subject matter. Here’s a list: Lots of nudes; portraits (society portraits, portraits of dead artists and writers, a portrait of David Lynch [!], etc.); landscapes; architectural studies; interiors; metapaintings (painted paintings of paintings in paintings); paintings representing poetic/metaphysical states of being; studies of teapots, musical instruments, couples (dancing and kissing), boats, ships, chairs, houses, roosters, potted flowers, running and walking people, dogs, stairs, fruit arrangements, goldfish, castles and chateaux, villages, trees, hanged people, monkeys, bridges, bugs, cats, pies, poolside scenes, a piggy bank, a baby carriage, nudes, half-nudes, and more nudes (female). Phew. There are thematic patterns and variations, which emerge after a couple of hundred Harmon images. The sketches inspiring the series exhibited at Zeitgeist are drawn from four decades of Harmon’s filling up sketchbooks. The consistency of his interests and process is amazing.

The manual facility of the artist and his yummy use of color are pervasive throughout this massive body of work. Harmon has a terrific knowledge of formal/compositional permutations. The sheer volume of paintings on display tends to overshadow the quality of the artist’s arrangement of elements in most of the sketches. The exhibit’s big canvases, several of which are outstanding, showcase Harmon’s skill at arranging and layering/collaging decorative patterns and representational elements. Especially excellent are “Citta Alta” (you’ll find a study amongst the sketches), “A Passion for Shadows”, “Rites and Melodies”, “Music on Earth” and “Sir Walter to the Passionate Shepherd”. The canvases pop, and one can see in them how Harmon has achieved success as a painter. They have a vibrancy that is visually vital and arresting.

Harmon uses the figure as a template for stylistic experimentation. When one understands this about his work, the proliferation of nude and semi-nude girls makes more aesthetic sense. The many studio scenes Harmon paints describe a working painter’s life, focused on an appreciation and representation of beauty as he sees it. When one understands this, questioning how prolific Harmon is seems petty.

If you’re a Harmon glutton, and the exhibit didn’t satisfy your Harmon hankering, check out his equally massive web site (www.bookpage.com/paulharmon/). “An Intimate Journey” continues at Zeitgeist through March.

Ho Ho Ho

The ho-ho-holidays are here and Nashville’s visual art scene is ho-ho-hopping. The exhibit offerings for artsies are a tremendous improvement from just a twelve months ago. As the New Year rolls closer, a quick review of the year will be in order. For now, though, let’s take a look at what’s happening in area galleries. As indicated in last week’s column, most are having group shows.

Buzz

Several of the artspaces I visited last week were preparing for what promise to be excellent exhibitions. By the time you read this column, the artwork will be hung and tagged, the reception wine and brie scarfed, and the guest books filled with slurred signatures. …And hopefully the red dots will abound, because that’s how you feed a scene. I apologize in advance to any of the many worthy artists unmentioned below, but that’s the nature of group show overviews, and the reason I rarely do them.

According to Nashville Chamber of Commerce’s Beth Morrow, the 5th Avenue of the Arts is due to pop soon. She e-mailed me recently with news of developments in the thinly art-sited arts district. According to Morrow, “As far as the Avenue of the Arts goes, we have been given funds to hire consultants from New York who are working on a masterplan for the Avenue. One of the biggest thoughts for infill is affordable space for artists’ lofts/studios/galleries and many, many other opportunities for creating an original atmosphere along the avenue.” Without such a commitment, the status on 5th AOTA will not change. Here’s what’s up now.

“artGENERATOR” at ArtSynergy is a show of force by the local artist organizations VAAN, untitled and N4Art. ArtSynergy is making a play to become a nexus and incubator for visual arts and artists in Nashville - an invaluable service for the community that Metro Nashville Arts Commission cannot provide without dedicated exhibition space. Sensored Magazine is slated for the next exhibit at ArtSynergy, which will open in mid-January.

“artGENERATOR” is the best show of its kind this reviewer has seen in Nashville. Michael Nott’s massive entry piece is simply outstanding (with a neck-snapping price tag to boot). Nott also designed the show’s killer invite. Donald Early’s painting depicting one of his trademark powerful women is virtuoso stuff. The rest of the exhibit is well paced and definitely worth checking out, presenting an impressive diversity of artistic visions, techniques, skill-levels and uses of materials.

A few blocks down from ArtSynergy on 5th South, ruby green is exhibiting political cartoons by some of the nation’s best cartoonists (including Nashville’s own Danny Aguila - one of the world’s nicest humans), with a focus on U.S. Presidents. “Presidents of the 20th Century” is a quirky show with tons of images, a perfect holiday stop for parents toting vacationing tots with cartoonist aspirations. The work is incredibly affordable and most pieces are for sale. Just ask Chris Campbell for pricing info. On deck for ruby is photog Michael Durham - should be a great show.

At the Arts Company, technically exquisite famous jock photos by Richard German are being featured. You’ll also find a lot of good work by local artists like Todd Greene (who’s upcoming show will be phenomenal - I’ve previewed the work), Jack Isenhour, Carole Buttrey and Paul Proctor. The winner was “Phoenix” by Michele Lambert, a large painting that’s positively stunning. It consists of a passionate figurative sketch imbedded in luminous Ab-Ex structure and color.

While the work on display at Arts Company was generally strong, the presentation is often cramped and unflattering to the art. The parking garage adjunct gallery is positively horrifying. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Squeezing between a bumper and a cinder block wall to view a quality artwork (and much of it was good, including Gray’s paintings) is a surreal experience, to be sure. Full disclosure: I’ve shown there.

At the other end of 5th, Finer Things’ 1st annual outdoor sculpture show is on view along the short drive to the gallery/showroom. The sculpture is predominantly abstract and features work by local artists and sculptors from elsewhere. The exhibit, as mentioned above, is Finer Things’ first attempt and as such ought not to be judged harshly. My favorite is Steve Benneyworth’s “Axis” (the sketch for which is included in “artGenerator”). It’s monumental, askew and well finished. Inside the gallery you’ll find gallery artists.

Joe Sorci is also included in the Finer Things exhibit, but it’s worthwhile to visit or revisit his terrific one-man show at Centennial Arts Center for a more comprehensive view of one of Nashville’s best contemporary 3D artists. If that doesn’t whet your appetite for outdoor sculpture take a walk along the sculpture trail at Cheekwood. One of the joys of outdoor/public sculpture is living with it through the seasons.

In Hillsboro Village Outside the Lines is featuring the paintings of Channel 5 News Guy Jay Korff in an exhibit titled “The Journey Home” (he must not have read 11/23 Unframed), along with OTL’s gallery artists. Korff’s naïve depictions of stylized houses on startlingly bright color fields are playful and festive. His work is consistent with the other offerings in the gallery, which range from wacky to upbeat wild. Owner Robin Cohn is an absolute gem and the antitheses of pretension. Evidently it’s a genetic thing, as her parents poured wine and schmoozed with the many visitors during the packed NAAD Open House last Thursday. I wonder if the Korff show is opening up a cross-discipline exchange opportunity. I’d love to do the weather once.

A couple of doors down, Zeitgeist is adding Buddy Jackson’s incredible figurative sculptures to their three-part building block show (Richard Painter, Will Berry and Glen Goldberg’s work remains up in the gallery). Jackson’s eight bronze and terracotta pieces pack a wallop and are not to be missed. “Following Signs”, depicting a bare-chested man with a distended belly, standing Christ-on-the-Cross-like with a serpent draped across his arms and shoulders is remarkable. All of his pieces resonate with spiritual and psychological intensity, while referencing sources as diverse as Rodin and Zuniga. Kudos.

In Green Hills, Bennett Galleries is gearing up for Scott Hill’s exhibit, which opens December 10. By last Thursday, the gallery had already pre-sold six of the artist’s beautiful, ethereal landscapes, prior to the show even being hung. This is definitely an early-bird-getting-the-worm situ.

Cumberland’s fifth “Small Packages” exhibit is the best yet, featuring the work of fifty-eight artists from here and across the country. There are tons of terrific pieces in the show, but my favorite was Sean Dudley’s “Specimen”. Leather, fur, a tube, light switch and insect - I think that’s what was listed under “Medium” on the tag. “Specimen” is frontrunner for the Unframed prize for most far out artwork at year’s end. Also notable were Libba Gillum’s portraits of Native Americans, Jane Braddock’s delicious abstractions and Megan Walborn’s small pieces from her Scarification series.

Finally, check out “Concurrent”, Part 3 of Sarratt’s Outdoor Installation Series. Lain York, Jeff Hand and Erika Wollam-Nichols collaborated on the environmental piece, building a visual dialectic from a Mark Twain quote. The gallery exhibit opened December 2 and includes 2D work by these artists. More on this next week.

Mea Culpa

Throughout a recent review of Werner Wildner’s exhibit at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, I misspelled his name. Thanks for the heads-up, Nicole Acarino (Assistant Curator).

More Sensations

While on vacation over the holidays in West Virginia, I listened in disbelief as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host (a doctor discussing health issues - I didn’t get his name) posited that a recent viral outbreak may have been caused by the elephant dung in Chris Ofili’s vapid “paintings”. He wondered if mosquitoes - the disease carriers - might have landed on the dung, picked up African microscopic bugs and subsequently spread harm across the land. Now, that’s dangerous art.

After Regular Hours: By Appointment Only, Please

Vanderbilt University doesn’t have a lock locally on destructive hijinks aimed at art. On a recent errand to In the Gallery (Full disclosure: I showed there), I arrived to find owner Carlton Wilkinson watching as some guys installed a new sheet of glass in his gallery’s front window. Thieves had broken into In the Gallery, damaging a rare African sculpture in the process and pilfering a staff. If you know anything about the crime, call 255-0705. That’s no way to treat your neighborhood art store and dealer.

Last Chance for Artsy Stocking Stuffers

In our scene survey a couple of weeks ago Local Color (Full disclosure: I showed there) and Midtown Gallery were left out like Rudolph, the reindeer with the oh-so-bright nose. Gay Petach’s work is being featured at Local Color, while Midtown is having its annual “Collector’s Christmas” show. These two galleries offer opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit next to veterans of the local scene. They also afford one-stop shopping for the art buyers who lean towards the decorative, though the sheer volume of art and artists shown means that there’s something on display for just about everybody’s taste. Price point is also a plus, as is the proximity of JJ’s Market, one of Nashville’s coolest alt. art venues and cafes.

Other Rudolphs include Shelton Gallery, which held its open house and holiday celebration last weekend. They feature everything from Red Grooms and Werner Wildner to naïve art, antiques, estate jewelry and sterling silver, in a comfortable and friendly atmosphere. Grooms and Wildner - wouldn’t they make a great surreal pro wrestling duo? Speaking of seeing Red, don’t forget to take the kiddies down to see the Carousel, Nashville’s best public artwork, over the holidays.

Auld Alliance is going over the top with Christmas cheer, exhibiting A.D. Smith’s “Sculptures of Saint Nicholas”. I don’t know if they’re art, doll or a hyper-real hybrid, but if these likenesses (smaller-than-life-size-but-not-by-much) of the fat jolly gift-giving guy are sure to put a smile on your mug, unless your name happens to be Scrooge.

Deck the Walls with Hills

Scott E. Hill’s exhibit “Celebration” is definitely the season’s hottest ticket as far as sales go, with day glo orange “sold” stickers on just about all the show’s tags. The folks at Bennett Galleries must be in festive spirits, thanks to Hill.

Hill is a twenty-eight year-old painter whose forte is the dreamy nostalgic landscape. The images generally involve a solitary figure interacting with a singular natural phenomenon (a waterfall, a comet) or a manmade wonder (a train or dirigible, which at a point in the not-so-distant past were considered to be penultimate symbols of humanity’s progress and ingenuity). Hill dates most of the pieces in his titles, as in “Signals, 1804″ and “Fireworks Celebration, 1801″. Hill is trying to reproduce the feeling one has in the instant when one stops being an onlooker and is made a participant in big world-changing events or an immaculate moment in Creation. Unfortunately, the romantic approach essentially cauterizes the rest of the picture. You’ll find no coolies working on Hill’s railroads. You won’t see the Hindenburg crashing to earth, you won’t shoot a deer on the way to the waterfall, get bit by malarial mosquitoes or step in a cow patty while strolling in his painted fields. He’s anaesthetizing an imagined moment in history in order to isolate awe.

The figures in Hill’s paintings face away from the viewer, and, depending on the size of the picture, we have little detail with which to identify these men and women beyond their dress. They are anonymous, and Hill uses anonymity as convention, to invite the viewer to step into the represented viewer’s shoes. It’s a fundamental device of illusionism, whether in cinema or a magic show.

In a some of Hill’s images, the technique works exceedingly well, as in “New World”, in which the dirigible in the distance appear by a trick of perspective to float directly above the figure in the painting. The casual relationship established between the man and the technological wonder by this placement of elements evokes a richer resonance of multiple meanings, swaying delicately near an existential interpretation.

While the consistent structure of the paintings throughout the series borders on the formulaic (little figures dwarfed by big horizon, a monumental focal point for the landscape, a defining tool - lantern, flag - carried by the figure), Hill introduces enough variations to keep things interesting. In several works, the artist leaves out the figure with terrific results (”Cross Country, 1901″). Hill’s smaller canvases depicting a single figure or landscape element are gems. The “Three Muses, 1805″ beautifully catches some naked girls frolicking in a dark landscape around a fire. My faves are Hill’s paintings on found postcards. The text and postage work as a substrate, helping create a multi-layered effect that pops.

The saving grace of “Celebration” is Hill’s excellent brushwork and graceful use of thinly applied oil washes and glazes. Combined with a classic dark landscape palette, the techniques imbue the surfaces with the texture of mist. Given Hill’s youth (which encourages critical allowances), the exhibit is big success. The only pitfall Hill faces now is the lure of bondage to a signature “style” at the expense of substance. Nostalgia has its appeal, but it is the bane of the artist’s eye.

Snake Bit

I somehow missed in my preview of Buddy Jackson’s excellent show at Zeitgeist, “signs following”, that the body of work was inspired by the Holiness snake handlers. Fortunately, the artist has produced an absolutely stunning catalog for the exhibit that illuminates the artist’s fascination with and inspiration by these spiritual daredevils.

On a return visit to the gallery, I was absolutely bowled over by several pieces installed just prior to the December 4 opening. “The Apostle” is an emblematic portrait of an Everyman, provided a powerful context by its inclusion in the show. “Before God” - a lovely nude with face shrouded upon which a serpent slithers - is a magnificent paean to lost innocence and a retelling of the fall from grace. “Church Mothers” is a southern “Three Graces”. My favorite however is “The Followers”, which unhinges the thematic narrative and inculcates “signs following” with the force of vision, while simultaneously placing the work squarely in the modern idiom.
It’s a fantastic show, made better by the inclusion of unrelated studio work - the latter places the conceptual focus of “signs following” in sharp relief. Text at the gallery entrance is a bit overpowering, but ties in well with the catalog and Jackson’s sense of graphic design.

Scene Notes

Check out “Still Life with Women” at Cheekwood’s Pineapple Room. It’s a group show featuring the work of eight women: Tanja Armstrong, Jill Beckham, Trish Tallon-Blanchard, Jean Brown, Lynn Driver, Kaaren Engel, Vinci Kolodziejski and Laura Young. This collective started out as an Artist’s Way study group, but has evolved into a creative hatchery for artistic women with past/other lives. While you’re there, order the Eggs Benedict. They’re the best in town.

At Destination Gallery at First Union Tower (Full disclosure: I curate the gallery), we have “Friends & Family”, an exhibit of artwork by the friends & family of First Union Tower tenants. It’s a beautiful little show that will tug on your heartstrings for sure. Nine year-old Brad Barrett’s entry - a pastel bald eagle - is truly remarkable, and Dan Brawner’s still lifes are excellent.

Finally, apologies to Jay Korff, whom I misrepresented a couple of weeks ago as being a reporter with Channel 5. He’s with Channel 2. If I watched TV I would know these things.

From me to you, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Light/Speed Carnival

Michael Durham’s exhibition of new photographs and film at ruby green (www.rubygreen.org), titled “Light/Speed”, opened January 14. Durham is active in the local arts community, teaching courses on camera essentials and creative photography, conducting affordable marathon slide shoots for area artists, and attending nearly every reception and lecture that happens in Nashville. He’s a fantastic commercial photog with an eyebrow-raising list of credits and clients, and, as “Light/Speed” proves, an artist of vision and technical prowess.

This outstanding show further solidifies ruby green’s rep for conceptually solid exhibits, featuring some of the area’s best and brightest art makers. Durham’s exhibition continues through February 26. Later in the year, an expanded version will hang at the Nashville International Airport through the auspices of the excellent Arts in the Airport program.

“Light/Speed” is a revel in luscious color. The images chronicle Durham’s adventures at the past couple of State Fairs. As photo documents, they capture the allure of the carnival: the promise of frivolity and excess with a dangerous edge. As experiments with light, motion and color, these photographs are compelling without being overtly didactic.

Durham is a master of his craft with a student’s fervor for discovery. The conceptual framework for “Light/Speed” reflects Durham’s fascination with the eye as a camera, the nature of light and the process by which outside stimuli are translated by the viewer’s optical machinery into a readable image with meaning. While the artist’s choice of processing methods and subject matter has much to do with optimizing visual impact and creating an enjoyable decorative artifact for the viewer, Durham’s prodigious craftsmanship as a photographer is directed towards serious study of the phenomenon of seeing. He’s investigating the way we witness our world, what we see and can’t see, how our experience as witness ties us to the universe, and how we try to interpret the meaning of vision.

In Durham’s production notes, the artist reveals his fascination with the history of the carnival and fair. He’s particularly taken with the rides that involve big well-lit objects spinning in a circular motion with people on board - especially the Ferris wheel and carousel. These machines are evocative as metaphors for cosmology and karma. They’re also poignant symbols of the industrial age (the American carousel tradition can traced to the mid-1800’s and the G.A. Dentzel Steam and Horsepower Carousel Company).

The carnival ride and the fair itself have ancient roots in western culture. According to encyclopedic references cited by Durham, the carousel dates back to Byzantine times (when the horseplay was quite real), and fairs have been popular at least since the Middle Ages.  What the artist seems to be after here is a celebration of the senses that has universal appeal and resonance. He’s also after a scenario in which one’s fears - of heights, of speed, of strangers and the strange, of excess - can be temporarily and safely faced and forgotten.

The science of perception is another preoccupation of Durham’s in “Light/Speed”. How we see, the physics of light in motion, whether what we see is a true reflection of the material world - Durham subtly develops the show thematically along these lines. The questions he raises about the visual experience and the limitations of the still image as a tool for describing it. This provides the groundwork for the artist’s introduction of the moving picture into the show fabric.

Unfortunately, the looped 8mm film Durham planned to incorporate into the exhibit was MIA at the reception due to last minute technical difficulties. However, a video version was screened on a monitor in the ruby green foyer, next to wall signage describing the physical mechanics of seeing. The film is a marvelous collage of images drawn from the same sources as the photos - intense, colored artificial light decoratively arrayed, moving while the camera moves in Durham’s hands. It’s Ab-Ex filmmaking of the highest order, recalling the visionary work of avant garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage.

Durham said in a recent interview that he has “always been interested in camera movement.” It’s a creative element that reveals the hand of the artist in the act of shooting an image, or arresting a moment mechanically. “The eye is the best camera there is… (But) what’s captured by the camera really exists. Our eyes just can’t catch it.”

This statement indicates why Durham is so fascinated by the experiments of Harvard physicist Lene Hau. Endowed by Edwin Land, “the inventor of instant photography”, Hau and a team of scientists endeavored to slow down the travel of light to a speed observable by the naked eye. Eventually Hau managed to reduce light speed to 38 mph.

In essence, Durham and everyone who uses a camera slows light speed to zero. In the process an artifact is created for the viewer. This is where the question of beauty enters the picture.

Durham’s photographs in the ruby green exhibit glow. They vibrate with exceptional color intensity, achieved through cross-processing high-speed slide film, then processing the images in color negative chemistry. Kudos to Chromatics. The Ferris wheels, carousels, heartburn-inducing foods - even the picture of Sideshow Benny clearing his sinuses with the aid of a sixteen penny nail - hum with a color concentration that is fabulous. There are still lifes, portraits, action shots in “Light/Speed”: all the stuff typical of a comprehensive photographic essay on a social phenomenon.

What’s sets this exhibit apart from most is Durham’s powerful aesthetic, technical virtuosity and conceptual focus. “Light/Speed” is a powerful show by a standout local artist.

Scene Notes

If you haven’t had a chance to get over to the Parthenon to see “Infusion: Five Artists from Santa Fe and Taos”, you only have until the weekend to do so. It’s a terrific show, featuring work by Enid Tidwell, Caroline Farris, Kenneth O’Neil and husband/wife/artists Irv and Jan Janeiro. The work is heavy on texture, animism and minimal ennui, with each artist balancing the imperative influence of the beautiful high desert land and the imperative influence of coastal (NYC/CAL) modern art trends. It’s a very interesting collection of objects and sensibilities brought to you by VAAN, your neighborhood visual art omnibus.

Also check out Finer Things’ first annual indoor art invitational. As with the outdoor version, which appears to be dissipating, the gallery/fine home décor outfitter deserves an “A” for effort. Some of the work in the show is terrific, and some is not. Down the line, though, Finer Things’ invitationals could become a staple of the scene.

Sensored Magazine’s “Sensing Change” opened on the January 15 at ArtSynergy (Compleat Revelation: I helped David Glick hang the show and have a few pieces in it). If you’re a fan of the ‘zine (”Nashville’s Premier Creative Vehicle”), you’ll dig this exhibit. Mark Palen, Renee White, Roger Walker, Dane Carder, Jennifer Quigley, Eric Johnston and Joe Hardwick are a few of those included in the show, which will continue through mid-March.

Reinstating the Draft(-ing Table)
By Paul McLean

In the second of a two-part series covering the latest exhibit at the Cumberland Gallery, “New Works by Sean Dudley and Marilyn Murphy”, we’ll explore the latter’s “fractured narrative” paintings and drawings.

Draftsmanship is a fundamental skill for painters and sculptors. Traditional artists don’t just imagine art in their heads, then execute it. That better describes the business of the philosopher. Artists think with their hands, expressing ideas through the tip of a pencil, pen, brush or chisel.

Ultimately, the artist can resolve many or most formal problems of design, composition, and color, by using the drawing as a creative means to an end - the desired “end” being a fully realized painting or sculpture. In the process, though (and this is what makes sketchbooks like da Vinci’s and Picasso’s so valuable), the artist provides us, in a series of drawings, an opportunity to witness the magical evolution of inspiration, through aesthetic, into art.

Sometimes, though, artists fall in love with drawing, for its own sake. They love the control and directness that sketching with graphite or ink on paper affords them. The pencil, pen, paper and table become extensions of the artist and her vision. Marilyn Murphy is just such an artist.

Murphy is the Chair of the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Department. While serving as an art instructor and administrator at Vandy for nearly two decades, she has successfully pursued a career as a fine artist.  Murphy has received numerous awards for her artwork, which has been exhibited coast-to-coast at dozens of galleries, museums and academic institutions. She’s listed in plenty of “Who’s Who…” compilations, and gives lectures on art at colleges and universities across the nation.

“I love to draw.” Murphy said, in a recent Artradio interview. When she gets home, after a day at the office, Murphy will relax, maybe take a nap, then work from 7PM til 3AM. “It’s fun just to get in the studio and lose myself.” But Murphy’s time in the studio is not solely occupied by hours at the drawing board. She is a diligent researcher, and often her process involves “puttering” about with appropriated images.

“In order to start a drawing, I pretty much have an idea where I want to go with it. ‘Putter Time’ is very important to me. I like to sit with images, sit and think,” says Murphy. It’s a form of Object Meditation, which involves the artist’s playing, experimenting with a variety of compositions and combinations of visual information.

Murphy’s research for her work also involves travel to places like the National Severe Storms Laboratory and various photographic archives, for some on-site “puttering”. For the work exhibited in the Cumberland Gallery show, Murphy attended a conference in Miami Beach, and while there spent some time on South Beach. “I couldn’t believe the Art Deco – I love Art Deco - and the beach umbrellas. I’ve gotten onto a sort of beach umbrella jag.”

Of her process, accumulating and appropriating visual elements for her drawings and paintings, Murphy enthuses, “I love looking at things. I love going out to the flea market and antique malls, and I will look through anybody’s photographs, or postcards, anywhere, anytime. I’ve gathered this great mound of images, old Popular Science magazines, Life magazines from the Forties and Fifties… for the people – I love that time period for the drape of the cloth, and it takes it out of our own time period. It makes it a more symbolic representation.”

Essentially, what Murphy describes here is the artist hunting for a visual switch, which connects the artist’s “outside” with her “inside”. When that switch turns on, and when an artist has the tools to render a visual description of the switch’s turning on, then the viewer of the resulting artwork gets to share in the artist’s magical experience of creating a bridge between the outer and inner worlds. In my opinion, that’s what Art’s all about.

Marilyn Murphy’s work, the paintings (which I see as beautifully painted drawings) and her graphite on paper drawings, are a lyrical dialectic on the nature of this process. They only appear to be Narrative, due to Murphy’s expert understanding of and technical ability to represent the dramatic relationship - central to a good narrative picture.

Murphy strives only to render the “appearance of a narrative”. In her artist’s statement, she writes, “The puzzling or curious situations I develop appear much like a movie still with an implied story, but few clues are given about the final outcome.” The sense of narrative disorientation that Murphy’s work instills in the viewer is heightened by her deconstruction of the narrative formula.

She fragments the image’s implied chronology (costuming the figures in nostalgic attire and using Deco architecture for site setting). She infuses every “common” object in her compositions (machines, ships, windows, wineglasses…) with powerful symbolic, even allegorical (not narrative) significance. And Murphy uses her creative power (wind) to activate these objects (swirling twisters made of pieces of paper), producing surreal visual effects that ultimately disintegrate the narrative thread.

Murphy’s virtuoso drawing and her remarkable formal and compositional skills create a faulty suspension of disbelief. The fact that one will never know how the story ended, or what it was about, may leave some viewers strangely disappointed. Murphy’s work asks, “When is a narrative not a narrative, and why create an anti-narrative with the tools of photo- or hyper- realism?” These are important issues for Narrative painters to explore, as the genre continues to emerge as the Southeast’s hottest art commodity.

Scene

Artists: Don’t forget that a couple of deadlines for submitting proposals for public art stuff are approaching, including the Tennessee Arts Commission’s call for artists to show at the TAC gallery downtown (Call Timothy Weber at 532-9798 for more info). Also, the last day for artists to submit ideas for installing their work in the New Main Library is March 1 (Call 862-6720 for info).

And if you need a post-Valentine’s Day romantic recharge, stop by American Pop Culture Gallery and scope the sexy b/w photographs of Dennis Keim, which are guaranteed to raise your temperature. Through Mar 17, at Wesley Place, 2055 Scarritt Pl.; call 327-1977.

Continued Silence

Last week we talked about silence as a starting place for art. We’ll continue on that path with a look at two exhibits: Carol Mode’s “Blue: Signs and Symbols” at the Temporary Contemporary and Kay Barnett’s “Trappist Monasteries in America: A Photo Documentary” at the Downtown Presbyterian Church.

Mode is a long-time fixture in the Nashville art scene, as are her abstract paintings. She utilizes Op-patterning and grids, geometric forms and structural design motifs, strong colors and visual push/pull (attained through complex surface layering) to create vibrant 2D surfaces. The artist often identifies the work in conversation by describing where it was painted. Mode has been the recipient of a number of grants, which have permitted her to paint in Basel, Switzerland, London (where the work in “Blue” was created) and, most recently, in Clearmont, Wyoming for a one-month residency at the Ucross Foundation.

“Blue” was inspired by the azure New Mexico twilight, and more specifically, the palpable lack of sound that permeates the high desert land in the “purple hour”. A cathartic moment on a hike near a pueblo synthesized for Mode the physical/spiritual, outside/inside, alien/indigenous with a burst of adrenaline. Silence shattered by Indian voices raised in prayer, dropped flashlight, fear in the throat, giddily skittering away from the reservation’s edge, along the path…

In the sixty sketches, pinned unceremoniously to the wall in a staggered arrangement, brilliant blue pervades. Circular shapes, shorthand spheres, move through these works on paper, above/within/consisting of the grids and other decorative elements. Mode sees the circles as representative of silence set apart from the cacophony of modern life, as ideas, as a pregnant absence of sound. The work flowed easily at a production pace, in a London space, far removed from the source of their inspiration.

Would a viewer be able to deduce this background for the work from the work itself? Highly unlikely – which is one of the crucibles of painting abstractly and, more generally, working in the contemporary idiom. Mode’s story is critical for the viewer’s understanding of her aesthetic intent (fueled by experience and a metaphysical response to that experience).  Without it, the art, though well-executed, is diminished considerably. What does the viewer miss when an artist forfeits explicit representation in the images or handy contextual corroboration?

A quick aside: if you’re visiting Cheekwood to see “Blue”, which runs through October, don’t miss Megan Walborn and Marty Spence’s two-woman show at the Pineapple room. It’s the most elegant and eloquent work I’ve seen there, consisting of Walborn’s arresting organic ceramic sculptures and Spence’s hazy bridge-scapes. Beautiful show!

Silence from the Outside-In

In the heart of Nashville’s City Center, on the ground level of the “Downtown Prez”, Kay Barnett’s cibachrome images chronicle the lives of members of the Cistercian Order who seek to grow closer to their God through a rigorous regimen of prayer, silence and repetitive hard work (“Red Apron”). The title tags for the images have background info on the Order. From a book by monk Thomas Keating: “One of the things that prayer, as it deepens, will affect is our intuition of the oneness of the human race, and indeed, the oneness of all creation…”

Barnett presents Trappists in stiff portraits (“Theophane the Monk”), at their tasks, and during ceremony. She also documents the monasteries’ beautiful rural settings (with special attention given, as in “Colorado View”, to designated individual meditation getaways) and houses of worship. Thomas Merton - the first Trappist in America to be allowed to live as a hermit - is famous for his spiritual writings, and his legacy is well represented in text and images here.

As the title of the exhibit indicates, this is a photo documentary. Few of the images have the standalone quality of fine artifacts. However, “Trappist Monasteries” is a powerful account of the transformational force of devotional silence, when its coupled with simple living - and a great sister-show to Carl Schuman’s at Destination Gallery.

Kudos to one of the most art conscious churches in Nashville! The Downtown Presbyterian “gallery” doubles as a soup kitchen, a fact that adds to the pertinence of the images.

Don’t Be Quiet About This

Jo El Logiudice has done a tremendous job at the helm of the 25 year-old Sarratt Gallery on the Vanderbilt campus, introducing students and the rest of us to a variety of innovative work by accomplished artists. This fall Sarratt has undertaken an ambitious series of outdoor environmental installations by noted local, regional and national art makers like Adrienne Outlaw, Mary Lucking-Reilly, Jeff Hand and Lain York.

The most recent installment is “Trees from the Forest”, a grouping of dozens of found-object sculptures by Alvaro Garcia, a Cuban-born, Yale-educated painter-turned-visual-art-wildman based out of NYC. Sited next to the University Club, Garcia’s installation is a Vesuvian eruption of the creative force by an artist with a deep and varied literacy in visual/structural media. His medium for making consists of tire rubber, plexi-glass, raw wood, chains, welded steel, fencing and odds and ends (like a bird’s nest). Garcia redirects the trauma inherent in castoff man-made materials and the wreckage precipitated by natural disasters into raw and potent madcap totems. Within their formal configurations they reveal coded allusions by Garcia to scientific classification systems, figurative traditions both tribal and classical, Ab-Ex, monument-making and environmental/architectural design traditions. Even the tree-hugging movement gets a nod in Garcia’s expansive ouvre.

Unfortunately, “Trees” has been mistaken by losers to be a jungle gym for (one assumes) drunken antics. Both Garcia’s and Adrienne Outlaw’s installations have been vandalized (“Trees” twice). Although subsequent measures to educate and involve the university community have since been undertaken, this pattern of random disrespect for artistic expression is a blemish on the outstanding Sarratt program and the Vanderbilt community in general. What does this say about the cultural legitimacy of VU? The outdoor installation series is a much-needed step towards bringing public art to a campus, which traditionally has had almost none. Vanderbilt, which hosts the awesome Public Art Forum lecture series and is beginning to acquire permanent pieces for the campus, deserves credit for supporting the Sarratt program. However, it must use these (disgraceful) occurrences of art-hate as a clue/incentive that the work of integrating art into the fabric of VU life has just begun, and will not always be painless. A graduate program in fine art would do wonders to raise cultural awareness at the university, and there’s not a valid excuse for one of the best-endowed higher-learning institutions in America not to have one.

Here’s a letter by Adrienne Outlaw, in which she describes her installation/vandalism experience and offers an official solution:

During her recent visit to Nashville, Beverly Pepper commented that her own work has been vandalized, saying great art challenges people to the extent they they may fear its message and try to destroy it.

I’ve seen and heard of people reacting to art this way many times.  I was prepared for the potential vandalism at Vanderbilt because much of my art is about temptation and because of the temporal nature of the installation, which was 41,000 yards of monofilament linking several trees. Knowing that, I had mixed reactions to the attempted destruction of my installation on Vanderbilt’s campus.

I was surprised by the general lack of knowledge and understanding on the part of Vanderbilt students, staff and faculty about installation art in general. People seemed to enjoy the work’s beauty, but didn’t understand why it was there or what it was meant to do. As we installed the work, we often explained the piece, which was intended to call attention to the environment and the beauty of the trees.

I think it’s a shame some person or persons chose to vandalize the work which others enjoyed. Any type of property destruction reeks of ignorance, fear and anger. The vandalism was especially disappointing to students on the Sarratt Visual Arts Committee, which along with Project Dialogue put hundreds of hours into making the work accessible. The students I worked with were mature, thoughtful and understanding of the need for both art and art education. When part of my installation was vandalized, they paid for and reinstalled a portion of the work themselves.

Vanderbilt has been publicly criticized many times for its lack of artistic leadership in Nashville as well as for its lack of support for its art department. The outdoor sculpture series was meant to give people the opportunity to view art — especially non-traditional art — while Sarratt Gallery undergoes renovation.

My hope is that University officials seriously consider the apparent lack of artistic appreciation and do something about it. When art at Ohio University was damaged, resulting in negative publicity, the institution unanimously passed a “Resolution on Vandalism of University Art and Architecture” in 1994 calling for the following:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Council urges the College of the Arts, the Office of the University Architect, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Campus Art and Memorials Committee to foster educational efforts which would promote respect for and support of the University’s public art in all persons living, learning, working, or visiting at the University; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Council urges the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President for Business and Administration, and the Office of the Vice President for Finance to ensure that creative measures are developed and sufficient resources are provided to protect University art and architecture from vandalism; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the Council directs its President to forward this resolution to the above-named offices and to further disseminate it to members of the University community.

My hope is that the University not shy away from challenging their students, staff and faculty through art. My hope is that they take this opportunity to learn that with more support from the administration, art educators at Vanderbilt may be able to broaden the minds of those on campus.

Adrienne Outlaw

The full Ohio resolution can be found on the web at: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~nylander/CGS/grad/cgsdocs

Art As Target

It’s an outrage. The Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University has attempted through its Outdoor Installation series to provide students and visitors to the VU campus an opportunity to experience environmental art on the university grounds. The gallery’s efforts were marred by anonymous acts of violence perpetrated against the art of Adrienne Outlaw and Alvaro Garcia (a visiting artist of national repute). Segments of Outlaw’s monofilament installation and some of Garcia’s sculptures were damaged in separate incidents last fall. Garcia, who has exhibited public art for decades in a multitude of settings, from museums to blighted urban neighborhoods, had never experienced such disrespectful treatment - the worse for its occurring on an A-list college campus.

In Unframed, Outlaw responded to the situation with an open letter to Vanderbilt, calling for an official resolution on public art. Taking a cue from an Ohio University resolution precipitated by a similar bout with art vandalism, Outlaw submitted what amounts to a template that VU administrators could use to create their own resolution. The proposed resolution would represent a concrete commitment on Vanderbilt’s part to protect public art on campus and heighten awareness within the university community of the value of public art.

Here it is again, a “Resolution on Vandalism of University Art and Architecture”(passed by Ohio University in 1994):

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Council urges the College of the Arts, the Office of the University Architect, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Campus Art and Memorials Committee to foster educational efforts which would promote respect for and support of the University’s public art in all persons living, learning, working, or visiting at the University; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Council urges the Office of the President, the Office of the Vice President for Business and Administration, and the Office of the Vice President for Finance to ensure that creative measures are developed and sufficient resources are provided to protect University art and architecture from vandalism; and

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the Council directs its President to forward this resolution to the above-named offices and to further disseminate it to members of the University community.

What has Vanderbilt done subsequently to address the terrorism against contemporary public art exhibited on its campus? Nothing. Officials I contacted in the course of putting together the first story failed to return phone calls. They insinuated that the vandals were campus visitors (which they may have been). They called attention to other plans for the installation of public art at Vanderbilt. They explained the difficulties of protecting public art from such wanton acts of violence. But they did nothing to remedy the problem.

More of the Same

On two separate occasions last week, vandals wreaked havoc on the third Sarratt-sponsored outdoor installation, a collaborative piece by Jeff Hand, Lain York and Erika Wollam-Nichols titled “The Only Difference…”. The installation consists of a wooden text fence, which read, “THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RUT AND A GRAVE IS THE DEPTH”. The cryptic humor in this one-liner belongs to Mark Twain. The artists sprayed white paint through the fence/stencil onto the lawn, branding the grass with fragments of the text in various configurations.  It’s an exercise in meaning deconstruction designed to jump start viewer word/thought play. Some dolt(s) misinterpreted the artwork’s public placement as a personal invitation for viewer participation.

The first attack on the artwork resulted in severe damage to the text fence. Vandals used tools (a crowbar, a hammer?) to break portions of the lettering and also attempted unsuccessfully to knock over the work. The second incident involved the defacing of one of the lawn text fragments with spray paint. The initial damage occurred within thirty-six hours of the opening reception (the attacks on the first two outdoor installations also took place shortly after they were installed). Erika Wollam-Nichols was the first of the artists to witness the wreckage. “I felt like somebody broke into my house,” she said. She described traversing the lawn toward the damaged artwork in disbelief, wondering, “Why, why would somebody do this?…Time stopped. I stood there with my hands in my pockets feeling victimized, and I didn’t expect to feel that way.” York and Hand both described the emotional trauma caused by the attacks on their artwork. Anger, sadness, a sense of being violated, resignation, a devaluation of the artistic endeavor - what a turnaround from the high brought on by the well-attended, upbeat reception for “Concurrent”, the gallery show featuring 2D work by York, Hand and Wollam-Nichols, which opened December 2 at Sarratt Gallery.

Unlike the violence perpetrated upon it, this exhibition and installation did not happen overnight. These three local artists began working on the concept for the installation six months ago, meeting more or less weekly, exchanging ideas, searching for elements of shared vision on which to build an artist collaboration. Eventually, the three decided on text as the aesthetic common bond (each uses or had used text in their images) and the conceptual foundation for their planned installation. Wollam-Nichols suggested the Twain quote (a favorite of hers), which worked for York and Hand. The artists had hoped to take their show on the road, after the run at Vanderbilt concluded. They had discussed the possibility of vandalism, given the attacks on Outlaw’s and Garcia’s installations, but as Wollam-Nichols said, “I felt stupid afterwards. You make decisions, worrying about details, changing stuff, thinking, What’s the best way to do this? Then you put it out there and somebody comes along and kicks your art.” Fortunately, they photographed the work before the vandals got to it.

Said York, “Whattiya going to do? I’m just going to keep on keepin’ on.” The artists have decided to leave the text fence up, in part. Now it reads, “THE _____ _________ BETWEEN A RUT ______ ___ GRAVE ____ _____ DEPTH”. Leaving the work in place is an act of artistic tenacity, but one tainted by the paranoiac aftershocks which acts of terrorism typically engender. When I finally spoke with Wollam-Nichols following several unsuccessful attempts to contact her last week, she asked me after our hellos, “Have they done it again?”

Afterthoughts

The destructive actions of those responsible for these art attacks speaks of an utter disregard and disrespect for public art, artists and free speech - and, bottom line, this is an issue of free speech. Until (if ever) the culprits are identified and held accountable, or at the least, Vanderbilt University takes an official stand (i.e., a resolution) against vandalism perpetrated on art on campus, the art disconnect will remain entrenched at VU.

In a Tennessean article covering the vandalism, Alan Bostick reported Michael J. Schoenfeld, Vanderbilt’s vice chancellor for media relations as saying, “Vanderbilt deplores any violence or vandalism to art, and we are working to educate the community about this form of expression.” At this point, these words ring hollow. It would be different if Schoenfeld had made this claim when Outlaw’s piece was cut down months ago, and a concrete course of action been subsequently undertaken by the university to protect the artwork on campus. The situation is certainly no longer an issue of students needing time to adjust to a public art learning curve, as Sarratt’s Michele Douglas suggests. Vanderbilt’s students are supposedly some of the country’s best and brightest - not a bunch of mindless hooligans, bashing art with crowbars because they thought it was outdoor furniture. How many artworks need to be trashed before Vanderbilt students realize it’s a no-no to destroy public art/free speech artifacts? The real question to VU: Why do public artworks require 24/7 video surveillance and security on your campus? The university’s administration is right to be concerned about damage control, but wrong about which sort of damage needs to be controlled. If, as university officials insinuate, the vandals turn out to be campus visitors, I’ll apologize in this column. It’s entirely plausible that art haters regularly creep onto the Vanderbilt grounds in the middle of weekend nights, carrying crowbars, blades and spray paint, seeking out newly installed outdoor sculptures upon which to vent their rage. Or coming up with pithy ripostes to text based art.

To the vandal/graffiti hack who sprayed this on the lawn, degrading the artists who generously offered you a piece of themselves and their artwork: “THE ONLY DIFFERENCE b/w art & graffiti is permission”… The only difference between an artist and you (a dumbass psuedo-critic, faux-pundit, censor-disguised-as-hipster, sin huevos worm), is the courage/commitment required to create a relevant, resonant artifact, present it to the community and put your real name on it.

Finally, kudos to the Sarratt Gallery staff and student assistants. The stupid violence of a thug or thugs has done nothing of substance to detract from your outstanding efforts to introduce contemporary public art to the Vanderbilt community and midtown Nashville. Keep on keepin’ on.

Where Art Thou?

Have you noticed the incredible shrinking visual arts coverage at the Tennessean? In what’s obviously an editorial decision motivated by demographics, the color spread featuring a culture-centric event in the Sunday paper went to the section for non-artsy Nashville gals. If this trend continues, the Gannett daily may eventually resemble USA Today, Gannett’s most visible property, which only provides significant coverage for messes like “Sensation”. Are Hollywood movies and Top 40 CD’s the only cultural commodities worth review in print? If you subscribe to the Tennessean and are miffed by your primary community news vehicle’s marginalization of art - incredible in light of the visual arts renaissance that’s happening in Nashville - let them know.

Fine Art Café Dining

I had a blast this week checking out art hung in local eateries & cafes. Peggy Snow opened a show at Tin Angel on Tuesday of last week. The affair was a sparkling one, with yummy finger food and liquid refreshment provided by the restaurant. Snow flitted about signing and distributing gratis posters commemorating the demolished Jacksonian Apartments. The event was well-attended (I saw Tom Turk and Susan Knowles, lots of artsies and suits and ties - a diverse mix). The painting reproduced on the poster has been purchased by the Angel and was on view, along with a good number of Snow’s quirky, frenetic canvases in rustic frames. Snow’s all about discovering the beauty hiding in decay and neglect in both rural and urban settings, painted in post-storm hues with jarring jumps from light to dark. The paintings were tough to see against their brick backdrop in the Angel’s mood lighting, and the work was uneven with flashes of inspiration, but fans of Snow’s work will love the show, which runs through December 10.

Dane Carver’s exhibit at Jody’s is terrific, a great first shot from this young artist. Carver has a gift as a keen observer of social dynamics, and renders Everyman vignettes in comix shorthand, with a minimal palette, on board. The body of work (37 + pieces) Carver exhibits at Jody’s is voluminous and provides moments of both hilarity and ironic/poetic empathy for the viewer. The world he depicts is filled with characters stuck in situations as universally identifiable as those portrayed in your favorite Peanuts strip. The presentation works as a joke on the staunch gallery picture-hanging method (tags for the pieces are hand-scrawled on cardboard), and the artwork is priced appropriately - no pretension here. The show opened on Nov. 10, as part of Sensored Magazine’s “Feeding the Senses” series, and was followed by musical acts Park Ellis and Mancy Kane. I really loved Carver’s paintings, and have already been back to see the show again (and chow down another Boxcar Burger).

In another debut, newcomer Andy Dykeman opened an exhibit of Ab-Ex paintings at JJ’s Market on Nov. 11, titled “Texture As Feeling”. Dykeman is a pre-med student, who started painting as a creative outlet (”therapy” he says), when his run as a punk rock drummer came to a close. Since then he’s worked as a chimney sweep and at the morgue. The latter job led to his current studies. All of these variegated employment experiences, as well as Dykeman’s youth in Alton, Illinois seem to have seeped into the canvases in “Texture”. Alton, by the way, is a colorful little town: home of Robert Wadlow, “The World’s Tallest Man”, birthplace of Miles Davis and James Earl Ray, and is the resting place for Elijah P. Lovejoy, a.k.a., first man to die in America for freedom of the press (lynched for abolitionist writings). Alton has also been cited as a paranormal vortex and called “the most haunted small town in the United States. Toss in Dykeman’s philosophy degree and you have a unique aesthetic. The paintings actually are pretty rudimentary as Ab-Ex goes, with plenty of references to Physics and the microscopic world. The colors don’t really pop, as if they sit under a thin layer of ash. But there’s definitely some good push-pull and latent ferocity in “Texture As Feeling”, though that show title makes one pine for a good mosh pit.

Art Salons

Tim Murphy and Janet Jarzynka have an outstanding exhibit hanging at Velvet, a new salon situated at the corner of 18th and Division, in a finely appointed house with a yummy purple-painted exterior. Murphy and Jarzynka are both terrific painters and their artwork meshes well together throughout Velvet’s lushly decorated interior space. In the waiting room, Murphy demonstrates a developed dexterity with the figure, showing finished studies executed during recent model-sketching sessions at Ruby Green. These works though are more than exercises in form. At times they exhibit formal brilliance, when Murphy slices and dices figurative fragments, arranging them so that they simultaneously abstract and create a psychologically-rich narrative commentary. The result is conceptually stimulating and just plain sexy.

In the next room Murphy shows hyper-real still lifes of fruit and jelly beans, heavy on the varnish and powerfully hued. Jarzynka’s work is introduced here and her large still lifes seem to double as symbolic self-portraits. The narrative unfolds pictorially through the objects, fetishes really, collected and displayed for the viewer. Her paintings are fully realized, though there are moments of brut strokes and outlines, which threaten to dismantle the cohesiveness of the image, but never quite do. A tiny gem of a painting by Murphy titled “Houston Street” hangs in the adjoining bathroom. “Houston Street” captures a moment in light, every bit as expansive and moody as a film still from atmospheric noire b/w cinema.

The shampoo room features Jaryznka’s work, including some absolutely fantastic Southwestern landscapes, as well as two more of her large symbolic interiors. Don’t miss “Feelin’ Shroomy”, a still life depicting two mushrooms on an O’Keefe-ish background of bone/paint/fabric. The cutting room exhibits some of Murphy’s more aesthetically expansive 4D paintings, in which the guy appears to be loosening up, with excellent results. He paints super real fruit study paintings within Ab-Ex gestural paintings, illustrative of process and concept, within the same picture plane. Very good stuff. Kudos to these two and Velvet for a great show.

Nashville’s Salon Row is happening, artwise. A few doors down on Division, Montana Streets will be opening an exhibit for Julie Lee and Tom Wills on Nov. 20, which will benefit Belcourt, Yes! Currently at Salon F/X, Diane Hendron Wakefield is showing her photographs. Mixing beauty with beautifying definitely is working in Midtown.

A Small Statement for the Propagation of the Grotesque in the Medium

I attended Werner Wilder’s opening at the Vanderbilt Fine Gallery for his exhibit titled “Light and Dark”. He was there wearing a hand-scripted sign bearing his name on cardboard. Having left the reception early, I missed whatever syrupy antics may have occurred as the evening progressed. What I saw were the visual artifacts of a genuine master in his prime. “Owl in Red Cap” and “Death in the Forest” are magnificent anomalies, fabricated at a time when contemporary art was inexorably consuming the aesthetic landscape. The divergence of craft and concept was approaching ascendancy in the artworld, and that devolution has reached a pinnacle since, as epitomized in “Sensation”.

Nonetheless, great art is not reliant upon, nor diminished by, the au currant. For an artist to “hit it” greatly once in a lifetime is a marvel, and Wilder knows what this is like. The magical moments of genius in “Light and Dark” don’t happen in the bizarre morphing of the commonplace into the horrific, the innocuous into the repulsive, and the childish fairy tale into the fever of adult’s-only gory hallucination. The remarkable in Wilder’s work occurs when he uses the surreal as a vehicle for describing the mechanics, the armatures of life and death: the transmutation of the body, the puncturing of the shell of consciousness and the rapture of seeing the world as it really is. His super-real, virtuoso renditions of birds demonstrate his capacity for unwavering realism. His dissection of action, the social order, the subject at rest (”Stabbed Pig”, “Ceremonial Procession” and “Bird on a Wall”, respectively) illustrate his magnificent gift for the reduction of elements to essence.  His gift is not, however, limited to dismantling. Wilder is equally adept at the crushingly complex task of cogently reassembling those elements into a visual construct of simple (and shocking) narrative power.

Joseph Mella, as usual, has done a great job putting together this exhibition of Wilder’s work. “Light and Dark” is not about a guy who had talent and drank it away. That’s a hollow lament in a city without any appreciable arts program or meaningful endowment for individual excellence in the visual arts. Nor is it a morality tale about alcoholism - a common, fatal disease with tragic social consequences. This show is about art, art-making, and the artist. “Light and Dark” is an exhibition of extraordinary expressions, as rare and beautiful as any Muse - light or dark - can inspire. Wilder is an artist who touched the Mystery, and no circumstance or analysis will ever deprive him of that experience.

Epilogue

Wilder gets nothing, when his art is resold for sums in the tens of thousands of dollars.

The Aesthetics of Dissipation

Donald Sultan’s exhibit, “Selected Works”, at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary samples four distinct series in the Asheville, North Carolina native’s ouvre. In this show, Sultan riffs on the playing-card-as-improv-template, captures tobacco smoke in midair, and gambols “parts is parts” with the body. The outcome is a paean on filling time, with ennui. All of the works are on paper.

Sultan is recognized as an outstanding printmaker, exhibited by major galleries and museums across the country. Fruit, flowers and the objects of the everyday are grist for his viz art mill. He has a gift for reduction, flattening sensual 3D shapes into Ab-Ex fields of color, light and dark. His dramatic modern still lifes are formally reliant on negative space, which pops the objects in Sultan’s large-scale work and provides the smaller work with a compelling density.

“Basically I think I am a Minimalist. But I keep trying to add as much stuff as I can and still keep the sense,” Sultan says. The work in the Temp Contemp exhibit is more conceptual than minimal. The reductive, painterly and representational sensibilities of the artist infuse the images with plastic compression and tension. The tension emerges from the prevalence of a subtly ironic subtext throughout the series. Each of the series is distinct as such, but the presence of the artist and his playfully twisted vision envelops the work like a smoky haze.

Though Sultan’s visual sense is masterful and his choice of mediums dynamic, his aesthetic bends towards naughty pleasures. His child-like renditions of anatomical components (with titles like “Assholes” and “Female Sex”) are not so much whimsical as deadpan decadent, evoking trends in post-70’s grownup art comics. They rely on the drafting aesthetics of the minimalists (less is more) for their smart appearance.

Games of chance and smoking (until this century, these were boy pursuits, emblems of back room intrigue, in European culture) typically go together like peanut butter and jelly. But in today’s climate of self-improvement, they carry tangible moral baggage. Again, Sultan reduces such connotations to the impact of background noise, sublimated by his muscular formal prowess (the cards) and acute sensitivity to the visually fragile (smoke).

The body part aquatints in the show (on the surface) are documents of the artist’s own physicality. They are actual imprints of his dermal self. There is about these pieces something of brutal narcissism, though the resulting surface effects can be arresting (”Full Face”). In essence, these are negative records of life preserved in resin, as dead as roman burial masks.

The watercolor and aquatint body parts are installed on opposite ends of the small Temp Contemp Gallery. When viewed in its entirety, “Selected Works” is formed as a crucible not of sacrifice, but of self-sacrifice to the gods of dissipation. It is a dark and brooding collection of images, with a heavy moral undertow. The exhibition invites righteous judgement on an ascetic basis. Simultaneously, the work demands evaluation on purely aesthetic grounds, where the images stand strong.

There’s not much groundbreaking in Sultan’s choice of subjects. The self-portrait, figure study, playing cards and smoke (or smoking) - all appear throughout western painting. What differentiates Sultan’s work is his disturbing juxtaposition of the fragile and the impenetrable, the frivolous and the dread.

This artist cloaks dialectics behind a decorative loafer’s insouciance. “Selected Works” raises the question, Is art a means for redefining moral self-study in the public arena? Or is this art a personal statement in defense of the artist’s right to public discussion of private parts and pastimes? The precision of execution in the work conflicts strenuously with the slacker shrug the subtext implies as an answer.

Kudos to the Temp Contemp.  “Selected Works” is an excellent if diminutive survey of a major national art talent (who loves to scrawl big titles in the borders of his little 2D prints). If you’re interested in seeing more of Donald Sultan’s art, check the web (http://www.parasolpress.com/sultan.html  or http://www.jeanstephengalleries.com/sultanprice.html). Also worth reading is the artist’s statement for “Selected Works”, “The Game of Perception”, available in the gallery.

Signals

Todd Greene’s latest body of work is called “Signals”. The show opened in the Arts Company parking garage on December 18. Twenty-odd paintings were displayed on white wall sections arranged in a circular pattern and clip-light-lit for effect in the center of the garage. Other works by Greene and other gallery artists were exhibited on the facing concrete walls. There were only a few cars, tools, power cords and ladders on the periphery. The space almost had an edgy alternative space feel for the event. The installation was dismantled after the opening, but you can still see the paintings from “Signals” in the Arts Company’s galleries.

Greene is one of Nashville’s best young artists, and this series is a leap of faith for him and his many devoted collectors and supporters. One of the joys of following an artist’s development comes from witnessing his or her mustering the courage to take the next right step. Often that next right step involves abandoning the comfortable for the unknown or even the unknowable.

In “Signals”, Greene to a great extent has eschewed illustration as a didactic means to a narrative end. The artist’s “Paw Paw Sermons” and last year’s “Salvage” were explicit and forthright series. Greene’s gifted with keen rendering skills, the ability to imbue the figure with vitality and a fine sense of thematic pacing (i.e., tightly managed image evolution). These qualities have made Greene’s previous artwork viscerally accessible to a broad audience.

In the new work he puts down the pen and picks up the brush, risking much (relaxation of control - a wrenching prospect for a fine draftsman) in a gesture akin to emptying a vessel or spring-cleaning. Greene is divesting himself of what is no longer artistically sustaining, and following where his art is leading him. As a result, “Signals” is less a story told, and more an invocation - a poetic and lyrical visual experience for the viewer.

The circular arrangement of the installation indicated the cyclical passage of body to spirit, material consciousness to spiritual, and the existence of both within a single space/framework. It was a metaphor for the soul living in the flesh, but implied worlds within worlds and a universe beyond the reach of the senses. Much of the work was sold and removed opening night, so viewing continuity of the series is lost. It’s too bad. The installation was unusual and compelling.

It affected me this way: I found myself turning on a point in the installation center, surveying a landscape of arithmetic complexity, tapped by the repetition of circles, crosses, and meaningful forms (Greene has a story or corroborating anecdotes for each element). The artist’s use of color and saturation of hue work cumulatively, as one circles or turns, to instill in the viewer an impression of brilliance, glow. The work in “Signals” is not meant to overwhelm, but to activate. He has assimilated the pop in pop art and abandoned its pap.

The images are rooted by the simplest of geometric forms - the circle, square, and triangle. It’s a key to the universality of the images. Greene appropriated nautical signal flags as a template and regenerates them as simple abstract forms in much the same way that Donald Sultan reinvents playing cards. Artists are instinctually compelled to reinterpret signs and symbols, and so perpetuate, transmute or destroy them. Green is after transmutation. By layering overlapping forms and symbolic representations (stars, the “strong tower”, body-as-vessel-for-spirit), and luminous color, Greene constructs remarkable depth in his surfaces. The pictures become both visionary windows and devices for reflection. In some pieces texture is a metaphor for the physical as fact.

Greene has been emphatic in his use of art-making to document a journey straddling worldly and unseen realities. According to the artist, “Signals” refers to phenomena that occur in the physical plane, but which are really individually applicable clues as to what’s happening in the spiritual world. Greene’s artwork also contains references to the artist’s memories, changing circumstances (see the wedding rings?) and questions about the future. “Nine Signs” (the show’s alpha piece), a grid of gorgeous geometric abstractions, heavy on texture, was my favorite.

“Signals” marks an auspicious beginning for a new phase in Greene’s work.

Multi-referential/Querencia

Life Art

Art that’s about life will deny definition, just as life does. The methods by which we define stuff - classification, dissection, magnification, system analysis, the simple comparison of parts, to name a few – fail to fully embrace or illuminate the totality of living art. That doesn’t mean that the investigation of art by these methods isn’t a worthy task. It simply means that inspecting art’s parts (the remnants, reproductions, materials, historicity, etc.) will always fail to “solve” the art. Objective viewing is not enough.

Both the artist and the viewer must, in my view, apply themselves subjectively in making art and viewing art, respectively. Art lacking the “signature” of the artist – some sign, symbol or reference to the artist’s experiential humanity – is “dead”, or soul-less art. The viewer who is unwilling to look at art through his/her own human eyes, will never be satisfied, filled up by – understand - art. Without a subjective point of reference for art-seeing, the viewer might as well be looking at bugs pinned to a velvet covered board.

“Querencia”

Charlotte Avant’s current exhibit, “Querencia” (on view at the Centennial Arts Center through 6/25) wrestles mightily with these very issues and is the best debut exhibit by a young artist I’ve seen, since moving to Nashville. It may be difficult at first for the casual viewer to discern why these paintings and works on paper and glass are so good. This is due to both the limitations of CAC’s modest exhibition space and the spatial eros of Avant’s work.

However, the artist’s tenacious adherence to the show’s conceptual tenet binds the disparate individual pieces into a cogent whole. Avant draws upon her own personal/artistic history and sense of place to establish her querencia – the most fertile soil for her creative root. From the vantage of her querencia, Avant scans her (and our) world with the dispassionate eye of a true artist. Utilizing microscopy, architecture, maps, the grid, organic forms, etc., as symbolic referents, she concisely builds an argument for a fruitful outcome for the meeting of opposing forces.

In “Prelude”, the invite piece and, according to Avant, the starting point for the body of work, the artist in the simplest graphic terms, outlines her premise. From here, she exultantly explores the vast arena she has entered/built, tapping diverse sources for inspiration and explication – medical science/ancient “life science”, corporeal experience/communal experience, abstraction/realism, systems/space… All are contextualized by the 2D plane upon which they are “represented”.

The magic of this approach is that these juxtapositions can be layered to create what “Avant” has termed “multi-referential art”. Rather than lazily “leaving it up to the viewer” to solve the art, Avant provides the viewer an objective/metaphysical catalyst via the art. To put it another way, she builds a viewing window in which, yes, all those combinations/visual deductions are accounted for. The artist can expect the viewer to assemble meaning from the art (just as a medical researcher expects a petrie dish to grow cultures). She also provides enough of a variety of recognizable visual stimulants (patterns, forms, color combinations…), thereby allowing the viewer a number of entry points into the dialog.

Hopefully, following the artist’s lead, the viewer will recognize the viability of her/his own ideas/vision/experience/history and subsequently apply them to the visual cues.  In this way, the viewer himself gives life to the artwork, becoming in effect a collaborator with the artist, who has already invested herself in the artwork.
The fact that Avant possesses the awareness of this pyramidal relationship among artist/art object/viewer and is capable of expressing it in a body of work at this stage in her career indicates a potential for greatness.

My favorites in the show are the larger paintings, like “Measure/Immeasure”, “Chroma-Sea-Soma”, though the works on paper and paintings on glass are wonderful, too. “Querencia” is a must see, as will be the next exhibit at CAC, featuring the painting of Larry Whitson. Joe Sorci will be installing his sculpture in the CAC garden next month, which should be a fantastic fit. Throw in the regular class schedule and the lovely kinetic Lynn Emery sculpture out front – CAC is happenin’ this summer!

Scene Notes

Shows like Avant’s and Kimberly Goodson’s (luscious Rothko-esque abstractions) at JJ’s Market, featuring young artists new or returning to Nashville bode well for the city’s visual arts future. Speaking of Nashville’s visual arts future, and continuing our discussion of valuation of art – what do you think of artists cutting off donations of their work to auctions and fundraisers until Metro passes a percent for the arts provision?

Salvage (Excerpted from Paul McLean’s In Review “Unframed” Column, 7/6/99)

Speaking of spiritual discovery, Todd Green’s long anticipated follow-up to his immensely popular “Paw Paw Series” opens 7/9 at JJ’s Market. The exhibit is titled “Salvage” and it’s a passionate indictment of the commercialization of Christ. The work in the show draws from a variety of sources - pop art, “Jesus Saves” road signs and the aesthetics of circus sideshows. Green uses materials as divergent as popcorn sacks, papier-mache and canvas as substrates for his tightly graphic renditions of strongmen (“Mighty Fortress”), fat ladies, barkers (“Mr. Creamy”), cowboys, clowns (“The Fool”) and magicians. These simultaneously gawkish and surprisingly sympathetic caricatures constitute Green’s new pantheon of symbolic imagery. They replace the burning crosses and churches, numerology and figurative hieroglyphics, which the artist appropriated from his preacher Paw Paw’s shorthand in previous series.

The artist has patinaed the collages, constructions and paintings in “Salvage”, so they appear as though they might have been rescued from the scrap heap, picked up at a flea market or “salvaged from a dilapidated circus”, as Green puts it. He’s creating a material metaphor for salvation (“in the world, but not of it”). The deliverance of the lost soul is a story of timeless resonance, and Green has made it his own in this body of work.

Throughout the series, signage text calls the viewer to “REPENT” and reminds him that “JESUS SAVES” and “HE IS RISEN”. However, the carnival characters, for whom these slogans establish a subtext, undermine these exhortations. The real narrative in “Salvage” is a hidden narrative, derived from multiple readings of the central symbols. This narrative ultimately describes the artist’s faith in the transcending, transformative power of his God, which has nothing to do with “Christians” who market faith for their own enrichment.

Green is aware that the artwork, which is for sale, may attract criticism of the “pot calling the kettle black” variety. This, though, is the conceptual trapdoor of “Salvage”. Green is willing to cast himself in the role of “King Hypocrite”, in order to call attention to the practices of religious hucksters. “It’s a turning over of the money-changers’ tables in the temple thing,” the artist said. If Green is preaching anything here, he’s preaching the danger of preaching without vigilance, or about the pitfalls and confusion one encounters when seeking salvation.

He’s constructed a persuasive visual dialectic on the problematic mixing of commerce and religion in this show, but not at the expense of his art. Green’s latest efforts are visually exciting and undeniably fresh. They’d catch your attention, whether or not you knew what the artist’s point was. A courageous and solid effort by the Nashville artist…

Scene Notes

It’s that time of year again: ARTrageous, Nashville’s biggest, splashiest, most whacked-out art event is slated for Saturday, November 6. The galleries participating in the annual stomp include American Artisan, the Arts Company, Cumberland Gallery, Finer Things, In the Gallery, Local Color, Outside the Lines and Ruby Green. For $65 (a big chunk of change for most of the artists I know, who generally must donate a painting for auction to attend), you can do the gallery tour and Club Escapade (post-art-hop party). If you just want to party, it’s $45. Proceeds will benefit Nashville Cares, which brings meals to those homebound with AIDS.

There’ll be a slew of openings around town on ARTrageous weekend. Auld Alliance will be featuring the work of Claudia Hartly, Diane Ainsworth, Alison Bibbee and Gary Bodner, with an reception scheduled for Friday, November 5. Also on Friday, “Printkabinet”, an installation by Terri Jones opens at the Temp Contemp at Cheekwood. On Saturday, “Queer Art History Lessons”, portraits by Bruce Childs, opens at the Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bi- and Transgender Life in Nashville from 2-4 PM. If you feel like blowing off ARTrageous, but still feel like being artsy, drop by 12th & Porter Saturday night for the Sensored Magazine’s bash to support the art programs of a local school.

Stuff already up: If you did “a V-8” for the opening, this would be a great time to catch the VAAN group show at ArtSynergy. The exhibit contains some real gems. At the Tennessee State Museum “Preserving Our Stories: 150 Years of the Tennessee Historical Society” is on view through the beginning of the year. At Fido you can check out Glen Rose when you hit Hillsboro Village and Ron York’s ARTrageous opening at Outside the Lines. Grab a cup of Bongo Joe and dig Rose’s landscapes shot with infrared film, as the Zeitgeist/Fido photog-only series continues. For digital art, check out “Jacques Barbey: The Poet’s Heart” at Chromatics while you’re getting your slides done. If you need a makeover aesthetically and hair-wise, drop by Velvet, “Nashville’s Smoothest Salon”, and be transported by the 4D art of Tim Murphy to the sounds of snip-snip. Tim is an outstanding painter who contributes vastly to the local scene as an arts educator, advocate and co-conspirator within the city’s alternative artist gangs.

Speaking of alterna-artsies and “Big Toes” in the local scene: Did you miss Richard Mitchell’s far-out, viewable-for-one-hour-only art happening at Fugitive Arts Center, on September 25? Mitchell created a meta-architecture within the Fugi artspace (complete with architectural model), then used local artsy bodies (4), separated from the crowd by fabric walls cut to make peep holes, through which the viewer could inspect the models. The latter wore white teri-cloth robes, but photos of (presumably) their own nude bodies were projected onto their robed bodies. An audio track of muffled conversations – the kind of talk that happens during a figure-drawing session – provided an audio backdrop for the spectacle. The room was dimly lit, giving the proceedings a murky, almost seedy flavor. The event was righteous-cool, and Urchard certainly hit the pscho-sexual-aesthetic dynamics of the artist working with a live model (with viewer-as-voyeur), providing a thoroughly modern spin on an aspect of art-making that’s been integral to artistic representation for hundreds of years. Currently at Fugitive: “Studies For Eruption”, an installation by Jack Dingo Ryan.

Another Big Thang: On Tuesday, November 2, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts is opening the doors to its 24,000 sq. ft. gallery space, for a public preview at noon. The event will also be a “grand opening” for the post office downstairs. It features an artsy Tuck Hinton design and permanently installed artwork, as well as a working mail center, with all the amenities. Next week, we’ll cover the reception and more about Frist.

Enough art for a weekend, Nashville?

Heavy Metal Object Lessons

Richard Painter (what a name for an artist!) is a quiet-spoken guy whose work roars like Vulcan’s workshop. His current show at Zeitgeist, “Heavy Metal”, and his installation in Cheekwood’s “Concept Metro”, remind the reviewer of the collected artifacts unearthed from the ill-fated village at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, preserved in hard lava for the ages. Painter invents catastrophic elemental events in his studio, using the marrow of modern life - lead, gold, steel, wood and flame - to freeze-frame fragile instants of thought, movement, history, existential reality both internal and external, social constructs… In other words: the bones of the living. Once enshrined (or interred), he classifies the object in Latin, like any good scientist would do.

Art itself is simultaneously a subject in Painter’s work, and this artist is willing to go to any length to better know its parameters. As demonstrated in his Cheekwood installation, Painter is willing to be destroyer and maker, if the outcome furthers his dialectic (in this case, a scathing diatribe on retail art valuation). What temper his furious wrestling with the elemental are Painter’s workman’s discipline and his willingness to venture within for a subject and story. We see this in “Bad Boy”, a blistering visual polemic on male acculturation, and in “Solo”, a silver-leafed (1/250,000th of an inch thick) leaf, imprinted in lead. The latter piece Painter executed after a sabbatical away from the studio, and is a genuine metaphor for the gift that is the creative act.

At times, though, Painter approaches the monumental, and here we find evidence of the sheer power of art and its author to present the epic in an object. In “Ecstasis”, Painter appropriates an image from Piazetta’s “Ecstasy of St. Francis” and burns it into the wood substrate using a propane torch. It’s a branding, like a tattoo, which works like a code word for “Rapture” to anyone who’s been there. The most recent Wired Magazine contains an article about scientists fiddling with the brain in an effort to precipitate spiritual epiphanies in their human subjects – “Ecstasis” is kind of like that.

Finally, the mythic and the moral are strongly depicted in Painter’s work, as can be seen in “Oracle” and “Vanitas”. However, a sermon from the artist is not what this is about: the context for the morality tale of Everyman is a life that ends in death, but within which the fragile rose of simple joy blossoms, in spite of the neglect, hard rains, concrete and storms. It’s a beautiful-real vision, if fierce, and it puts Painter in the same category as big boyz like Beuys and Keifer, though perhaps on the other side of the ledger. This show is must-see.

Postscript: I have a question. Does Nashville buy serious art made by local artists?

Oops

In last week’s cover story, I got the date wrong for this Fall’s Public Art Forum series’ kickoff slide-lecture, featuring abstract painter/sculptor Beverly Pepper and Dale Lanzone, president of International Public Art/Marlborough. The event is set for Thursday, Oct. 14, at 7 p.m. in the Rotunda of Vanderbilt University’s Social Religious Building, 1930 South Drive.  The event is free and open to the public at no charge.

Also at Vanderbilt, the Sarratt Gallery will host a lecture and reception for artists Mary Lucking-Reiley, Adrienne Outlaw and Alvaro Garcia. They’ll be talking about their respective site-specific environmental art installations on the Vandy campus.

Heavy Metal

In case you’ve not gotten around to seeing Anton Weiss’ latest exhibit at Bennett Galleries in Green Hills, here’s a reminder. The show (what’s left of it, rather – many of the works have sold) will be up through the end of the week. Weiss has been working, teaching and exhibiting locally for decades. His new schtick is painting on metal.

The signature sculptural frames Weiss builds for his Ab-Ex paintings are now fully integrated into his rich pictorial surfaces, serving as both substrate to- and textural element in subtly layered gestural abstractions. The gorgeous, elegantly crafted metal and wood constructions, embellished with patinas and textural finishes, initially provided the artist more control over the presentation of his canvases. Eventually, however, the frames began to serve as a plastic design element, in addition to doing the job as functional protective device. As with all good framing, Weiss’ frames introduced a harmonious combination of hard and soft to his work, a coupling, and a sense of completeness. His pedigreed abstractions were now contained within a refined profile bespeaking artisanship and edge. The frames were a perfect design complement to the sensuality of his potent brushwork on richly blended color fields, mottled with subtle patterning and staccato mark-making, and chock full of chops, effects.

With this exhibit, the artist’s combination of 3D and 2D elements has evolved into a seamless symbiosis, emphasized by pieces that are only sculpture and only painting. These latter works (“Tribal Heritage” for example) establish points of reference for the paintings on metal and illustrate Weiss’ firm commitment to artifice on its own terms. He now has added to his artist’s toolbox sculptural elements like rivets, metal loops, machined patterns and other surface devices. The paint effectively plays off these elements, sometimes incorporating them in a visual cue, sometimes splashing against them. His virtuoso use of subtle reinforcing brush strokes, daubs, speckled/flung paint, glazes and incisions seem fresh on his new favorite painting surface. And since his palette is relatively subdued - at times flat even, relying on earthy tones to pop brilliant flashes of color - the line between low-tone pictorial abstraction and sculptural patina is blurred in the new work.

My faves include: “Interaction – Black II”, a large and spectacularly rendered exercise; “Sentinel”, a cross-over work that is pretty much a bas relief nearly bereft of any evidence of paint; “Transformation” – one of two pure sculptures in the exhibit, the base for which resembles an up-ended all-metal foot locker; and a four-piece series that is a lyric on the cyclical changing of the seasons. In several pieces, there are hints that Weiss be finding objective inspiration in pictographic expressions of ancient peoples, and the reviewer wonders whether this may be an indication of where Weiss will go with his work next.

Let’s face it, Abstraction, as a totally encompassing aesthetic vehicle, is a myth that’s no longer viable, despite Frank Stella’s hopes for the form. That fact does not preclude one from totally enjoying the work of an artist like Weiss, who has earned a Master of Means in his chosen medium(s).

It all boils down to the nature of Art. Art fills voids (a perfect example is the evolution of the 3D elements in Weiss’ own work). Ultimately, the limitations of Abstraction as a container for meaning ensure Abstraction’s future as a formal convention.

Art that’s not divorced from life is going to reflect the social environment of the artist, either overtly or as a subtext. However, an artist crosses a line when he or she uses artistic tools for social commentary or documentation.  The artsyworld is conflicted as to whether or not the results constitute “pure art”. On one side of the issue are the iconoclasts (“art for art’s sake” is their motto), and on the other are the populists (“everything is art - for everybody” is their battle cry). In the center of the storm are the artists, their images, the techniques by which they’re produced and the media in which the images appear. What’s at stake is the definition of art’s purpose. As a reference, check out September’s ARTnews.

The cover story discusses the upcoming retrospective of beloved American illustrator Norman Rockwell, which will be traveling to major museums around the country (including – egads - the Guggenheim). The furor surrounding Rockwell’s show demonstrates how touchy people can get about defining art and artsy priorities. Does a show of his work constitute aesthetic heresy, the slumming of institutions in popular visual art illiteracy for the dollar’s sake?  Or does this reinforce the changing mission of museums, which are seeking to make the ivory tower more accessible to the masses (One thing that you can be sure of is that busloads of folks are going to visit Rockwell’s exhibit)? Beyond the rhetoric, this show is a concession t0 the viewer’s desire for identification with the what they see in a piece of art.

In a recent conversation with Chase Rynd about the Frist Center’s inaugural Euro-master show, we broached the complex issue of Elitism vs. Discernment.

The Desirability of the Unattainable
New Works by Sean Dudley and Marilyn Murphy

By Paul McLean

The latest exhibition at Cumberland Gallery features the work of two Nashville-based artists, Sean Dudley and Marilyn Murphy. In some ways the show is an odd juxtaposition of tenuously related contemporary aesthetes, whose visions, as expressed in their work, raise more questions than they answer. In Art this can be a good thing, precipitating the reevaluation of the parameters imposed on and defining the art of the moment.

“Dramatic” is how Cumberland Gallery owner Carol Stein described the exhibit, and everybody who took a creative writing class knows that conflict is the root of drama. Create a potential conflict, and you get tension. This exhibit is tense. It is also not the sort of show one can expect to “get” at a single viewing. Especially when the gallery is packed with black-clad artists, students, collectors, etc., as it was for the show’s February 6 reception.

In this review, the first in a two part series, we’ll focus on the provocative work of Sean Dudley. Marilyn Murphy’s virtuoso drawings and dark, atmospheric paintings will be covered in the next column.

“New Works…” marks the first major gallery exhibit of Sean Dudley’s figurative paintings, which he “frames” himself (more on the presentation later). Since his graduation from Rhode Island School of Design (RISDE), Dudley has established a reputation as a craftsman of exquisite books, which he creates in his studio at Cummins Station.

Dudley’s experience as an art student at RISDE proved to be, in essence, a point of departure for the painter. Sean found himself in an art school that wouldn’t let him paint his vision. “(West Coast Ab-Ex painter) Diebenkorn was god when I was at RISDE. While I tried to take what I could from it, I’ve never been about that type of painting. I’ve always been about figurative painting, even in school. It was a real battle for me to paint what I wanted to paint, because none of the teachers wanted to talk about it.” Sean responded by traveling to Italy and studying the classical methods of the Western art-making tradition.

Dudley’s reaction to current notions of the modern aesthetic is indicative of a broader movement in painting, towards the reintegration of the old Art with the new Art.
Odd Nerdrum (What a name!) is the controversial poster boy of this movement. “I never use the word ‘art’. Art today has no meaning. It provides a service like an electrician does, or a baker. Since there are no rules in art, I am not an artist. So I say my work is anti-art – it is kitsch. I am a kitsch maker,” says Nerdrum. Not surprisingly, Dudley says Of Nerdrum, “He’s one of my primary influences.”

The fact that artists like Nerdrum are controversial illuminates an ironic state of affairs in the art world. To be an “art rebel” today simply requires that one makes paintings or sculptures that are identifiable with those made before 1940, or even 1900. Says Dudley, “This is a subject I have very strong opinions about. Because of what happened in the 20th Century, with Duchamp and Warhol, and other people like that, people can get away with just about anything and call it art. Because of that, very few people really know what art is anymore.”

Nonetheless, Dudley acknowledges that without the innovation of 20th Century artists, his own work would not be possible. What identifies Dudley’s work as contemporary tradition-retro is his remarkable integration of seemingly incompatible elements, held together by Old World, references, formal design and technique. His constructions straddle the line between sculpture and painting, intertwining hard forged metal and soft painted skin. They also dance between the conceptual and the narrative, precise figurative rendering and evocative anatomical distortion.

Dudley uses the passionate palette of Modigliani to paint his nudes (their feet and hands especially seem to emanate heat). But he also subtly alludes to the model’s skeletal frame pressing uncomfortably from within, against her skin, in the manner of the German Expressionists. When you add to the visual mix the graphic black edges outlining the figure, the difficult, almost painful poses of the models, and broad areas of flat, almost white, skin, the viewer is left with conflicted impulses. “Beautiful to see, hot, but don’t touch,” the paintings say.

“I think the pieces are most successful, when they attract and repel you at the same time. With that tension, of having something that you want to touch, and something that you shouldn’t touch, is the desirability of the unattainable,” Sean says.

Dudley’s subject is ostensibly the nude, though his work is just as much about the elaborately constructed sculptural “frames” fashioned out of steel and wood, sometimes accentuated with fine gilding. Dudley reckons he uses the figure as a landscape, but this viewer sees the figure in his work as vehicle for the artist to plumb the depths of conceptual, aesthetic and emotional exploration. Unfortunately, it seems Dudley is not yet ready to share the resulting discoveries with us.

While Dudley’s constructions reveal the artist’s intimate affair with the tools and technical demands of rigorous craftsmanship. But they also function at times as a buffer between the viewer and the artist’s inner vision. The only unframed piece in the show, a reclining nude on a blue background, painted on an oval canvas (one of two large canvases in the exhibit), raises another question: can Dudley’s painting successfully be disengaged from the “frames”?

All in all, however, this is a tremendous first effort by a young painter.  The pieces in this show yield a sense that Dudley’s drive to improve his craft has at times led him to set his artistic sights beyond his ability to execute. Sometimes he hits exquisitely, and sometimes he misses, but the effort in the attempt bodes well for him as he continues to mature.

Scene

“Byzantium: Art and Ritual” opens at the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery, Thursday, February 18, with a reception from 5-7 PM. Don’t miss this exhibit of full-scale fresco copies, icons, and other devotional objects. Another hot ticket is the great hyper-realist paintings of Dale Kennington at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary Gallery, through February 28. Speaking of Cheekwood, kudos to In Review’s own Adrienne Outlaw, the winner of a Metro Nashville Arts Commission grant to in-stall her work in one of the Temp-Contemp stable stalls! Speaking of MNAC, kudos to executive director Tom Turk, who was recently elected president of the U.S. Urban Arts Federation! Big job!

Get on the Map

The biggest news to hit Nashville’s art scene lately is the Frist Center’s announcement of “European Masterworks: Painting from the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario”. Slated to open in April of 2001, the exhibit will survey art history over the past five hundred years and include lots of big time dead artists and a few living A-list artists. Barring the collapse of civilization in Y2K, this exhibit ensures that the grand opening of the Frist Center will indeed be grand, a major step towards the city getting on the cultural map.

Exchange

In last week’s column we started talking about cultural exchange as a symptom of an art scene’s vitality. How the deal works: the artist makes the art (ensconced in time, place and history), the artwork’s identity is shaped by the critical community and interested parties (dealers, curators, the public) and presented in “art houses” – galleries and museums. Where, how and to whom it’s presented often has to do with money matters and perceived prestige.

The modern concept of the traveling museum exhibit is based on this formula. “Masterworks” is a great example, as are the Y2K shows at Cheekwood, the Tennessee State Museum’s “The West in American Art” (continuing through September 26) and Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery’s “The Satirical Eye”, featuring the great Honore Daumier and others. To create and travel such exhibits involves significant, sometime epic, resources and effort.

To accomplish the same sort of exchange on a much smaller scale - say, at a retail gallery or small public artspace - is much more doable. Artists constantly proselytize to one another (and anyone else who’ll listen) about their fave artists, artworks, art movements and theories. It’s a part of the creative culture. The best dealers use the gallery as a forum to do basically the same thing with their clientele.

Nashville-Santa Fe Connection

Zeitgeist’s second installment of “Introductions III”, which closed last week, featured the work of three New Mexico-based artists, all of whom are represented by Santa Fe’s Turner-Carroll Gallery. Local favorite Kit Ruether had a successful exhibit at TCG last year (and is slated for another this November). Ruether facilitated a meeting of the owners of the two galleries.

It turned out that the Zeitlins and TCG owners Tonya Turner Carroll & Michael Carroll had a lot in common. They had opened their galleries without prior experience in the art biz, and yet both galleries had survived their first five years. Both have answered the question, “What do you do once you’re ‘established’?” by exhibiting work that’s “difficult”, by their respective market standards. They’ve chosen to push the aesthetic envelope by exhibiting artists from outside their communities (TCG shows several artists from overseas), while continuing to develop local emerging talent.

“Introductions III” (part two) built a bridge between these two galleries, and by extension, Santa Fe and Nashville. The artists chosen by the Zeitlins for the show– Jessica Brommer, Rand Smith and Greg Murr – don’t produce work that is recognizably Southwestern. In fact, the show was almost entirely colorless, devoid of brilliant sunsets, pueblos, cholla, cowpokes or any other motif associated with the region’s rich painting tradition. These young artists have eschewed pleasant illusionism and instead are plumbing the depths of ennui in inky pools of psycho-centric modernity. In this respect the work is more closely kin to the German Expressionists than it is to the Taos school. However, the artists’ literary references, dramatic use of patinae and layering, fascination with arcane or archetypal symbolism, obsessive/compulsive mark-making, and high-ratcheted angst made them a perfect fit for Zeitgeist.

My favorites included Brommer’s gaunt “An Awful Flower Grew in His Brain”, depicting a tumor-sick, bleary figure, animated through a triptych, rendered in twitchy lines and awash in a wasteland of darkness and sand-colored surface. The artist has imbedded her subject in the image by disintegrating his form/edge/outline with scumbled paint strokes. The three canvases create a haunting trinity, a visual poetic cue for a bleak study of the nature of pain and illness of the comprehensive variety. Murr’s “Two faces and Glass” and “Drink/Deny”, and Smith’s “Beyond Seeing” and “Help Is Here” were my other faves. After several visits to “Introductions”, though, I had to avoid rusty razor blades for a while and assuage a big thirst for all things clean and watery.

It’s Good for You

As Nashville becomes more of a cultural destination, such exchanges will occur with greater frequency at all levels of the scene. Check out some other aesthetic exchange programs on view around the city this month.

Artists – an itinerant lot – tend to migrate from more saturated art markets like Santa Fe, NYC and Chicago to more open markets like Nashville. It’s already happening. Witness sculptor Matthew Foster (formerly of Santa Fe) whose work is showing currently at In the Gallery. He tired of the art mecca rat race and moved here for love, quality of life and art.  We benefit by seeing the sort of work – stone carved into stylized figurative expressions of spiritual strength, with a crystal or two thrown in for measure – which is riguer on Canyon Road, but fresh here.

Also worth a visit: ”Through Our Hands: Artists Express Their Heritage” at the Hartzler-Towner Multicultural Museum at Scarritt-Bennett, which opens September 17. The show presents nine artists from around the world (and down the street) interpreting their diverse aesthetic traditions. Included in the exhibit are Kate Badoe (Ghana), Pei Ling Becker (Taiwan), Julia Coals (Cherokee), Nancy Hall (Apache), A.J. Isbister (Canadian Plains Cree), Pierre Moulion (Cameroon), Mark Palen (Euro-American), Mary Lee Prescott (Oneida), and Terri Talbert (Euro-American).

Final Notes

ArtRadio has a new time on WRVU: Saturday mornings, 8-10 AM. Set your alarms, artsies… Election reminder: both Tim Garrett and Ronnie Steine support the PFTA provision for Nashville. Vote for art!

Milo Santini & Other Artworld Phenoms

The Artworld loves a Phenom, because Phenoms generate phenomenal sales pitches. Yarns about artists, their lives or their art-making process – when delivered by a canny, colorful art dealer - can spellbind a collector into opening her wallet and shelling out boucoup shekels. Often, the more emotionally wrenching or uplifting the artist’s story, the higher the price one can expect to pay for the artist’s work. The entire Outsider Artist movement is a function of this artsy sales axiom.

In the early 90’s, I did some empirical testing, which to my mind proves the validity of the contention above. I was writing a novel set in the Artworld, and the main character was the last Outsider painter in Santa Fe. I named him with the help of my wife’s uncle. “Milo Santini”, a ‘Nam vet who never really came back from the conflict, lived the squatter’s life with his dogs in a hootch high up in the Sangre de Cristos, overlooking Santa Fe. Every night, he’d drift down to town, pick up the burrito the good people at Tomasita’s Restaurant left out for him, and head to the Plaza for a streetlit painting session. Before the sun rose he’d pack up and head for the hills.

Disenchanted with the Artworld, Milo wouldn’t exhibit his work in galleries, though he’d been invited to do so many times. Instead, he hung his paintings in Laundromats all over Northern New Mexico. As his notoriety grew, Milo’s work became attractive to collectors and dealers in the secondary market, and they began to scour those Laundromats, hoping beyond hope to happen upon “a Milo”.

The only place you could get a Milo, other than a Laundromat, was a little tie shop at the Inn at Loretto, owned by an attractive young lady named Sophie, who had befriended the reclusive artist. Sophie would sell a few of his pieces every month, take the proceeds from these sales and buy tobacco, chile, paint, dope, canvas, dog food, etc. She would trade this stuff with Milo for new paintings whenever he came to town during the day (about twice a month).

This is where the line between art and life begins to blur. My wife Sophia actually worked at a tie shop at the Inn at Loretto, and I actually painted funny little paintings on pieces of board, which I signed in big letters: MILO.
We worked out the story she would tell folks about Milo, based on my novel, and priced the paintings starting at $15. They sold like crazy. One of the first folks to buy a piece was a gal who, tears in her eyes after hearing Milo’s “story”, exclaimed that she planned to use her Milo painting on the set of the Off-Broadway play she was producing.

Everyone who heard Sophia spin the Milo yarn wanted desperately to meet him. We had a contingency plan for that, too. She would wistfully say, “You just missed him”, or “He’ll possibly be in tomorrow, but we never know for sure.” If the erstwhile Milo fan had just missed him, or inquired as to his appearance, Sophia would describe him thus: “Well, he’s medium height and weight, though his weight fluctuates wildly depending on the season, and it’s hard to tell his exact height, ‘cause he alternates between cowboy boots and sandals. His hair is brownish in the winter, but the sun bleaches it blondish in the summer. His eyes are greenish blue, but in the right light, they look brown…” and so on.

As often happens in small towns, word of our escapade got back to Sophia’s uncle, who happens to be a very successful painter. One of the uncle’s clients, who had spent about $20,000 on his paintings the day before, came rushing into his kitchen gushing about his “discovery”, Milo Santini. Shortly after, we abandoned our plans for “Who Is Milo Santini?” billboards and bumper stickers. It was starting to get a tad weird.

By the way, the whole thing was inspired by a great Mark Twain short story about a starving artist who enlists the aid of some friends and invents a persona, a dead artist, whose work sells posthumously at an amazing clip. That brings up another Artworld incongruity: it’s one of the only occupations in which dying is an upwardly mobile career move.

I Was a Teenage Artiste

In the years I worked in galleries selling art, I encountered a dozen or so child prodigies. Their dealers’ sales pitches were, but for minor details (like artist’s name, country of origin and economic circumstances), identical to Alexandra Nechita’s. The other art prodigy du jour, selling prints in the $3000 range, is Russian-born Beso Kazaishvili. Like Alexandra, Beso is in his early teens. His story, as told on the North American Artworks Homepage, which also features Nechita: “One evening in the winter of 1991, during a fierce night of fighting, having no proclevities (sic) toward art, Beso was visited by “four points of light” that left him numb and in a state of shock. When he awoke the next morning he began to create beautiful paintings and drawings.” Who needs training when you’ve got “four points of light” and a top notch marketing team?

Nechita’s one-week-only exhibit at the Tennessee State Museum has generated a lot of talk in the scene, since the opening on 4/24. For that reason alone, the exhibition was worthwhile. The Alexandra’s colorful paintings and prints, priced from several thousand dollars to $100,000, were installed salon-style on a couple of walls near the entrance to the “Impressions of Normandy” show.

Her nickname, “the petite Picasso”, has elicited from some the “I knew Picasso, and you, sir, are no Picasso” response. Comments about child exploitation and the publicity machine that surrounds Nechita have been common, as is artists’ price tag envy. Just as plentiful, maybe more so, have been exaltations that Alexandra is an inspiration, even a gift from God. All of these sorts of associations struck me as excessive. She’s too young with too little life experience and practice to be a master, but her work is precocious. She consistently pushes herself as an artist, and her paintings show moments of excellence. A lot of people have asked me what I think of her work. I tell them, it’s really great for a 13 year-old, and I mean that.

After interviewing Alexandra twice, once for ArtRadio and once for Alterna T.V, I was completely smitten by her. She’s an attractive, confident, charming and energetic young girl, whose attentive and equally pleasant parents were always nearby. Nechita speaks passionately about painting and the way people respond to her work, and lovingly about her family. Aside from the travel, appearances and engagements associated with her responsibilities as a $10 million-a-year franchise, Alexandra’s life (thanks to her family and teachers) is a normal one. Her biggest worry concerns starting high school next year (after surviving the rigors of an audience with the Emperor and Empress of Japan, how tough can it be for the little artist?). She has favorite teachers, an allowance and loves to play with her younger brother. She only gets to paint in her studio after her homework is done. In a word, she’s precious, and I wish her a long and prosperous run.

With her incredible attitude and strong family support, a wealth of art supplies at her disposal and instructors waiting to help her along, Alexandra has the potential to be a great painter… If she continues on the road she’s traveling, the proverbial American one paved with gold. The problem is - and I think it’s behind many artsies’ trepidation about Nechita’s current Phenom status– we all know how brutal the art biz can be. We don’t want to see this sweet, talented girl’s success turn into another Artworld train wreck.

The Unconditioned Line

Elliott Puckette’s opening at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary on 4/30 was a doozy. It was a glittering event, lacking only a cameraman shooting an art scene highlight show. Artists of every stripe and the culturati (Bob “Daddy-o” Wade’s term) gleefully schmoozed in the Frist Learning Center courtyard under a white tent, munching horse doovers and sipping light booze. Art opening fashion statements abounded – black, black everywhere.  The weather and the artist’s talk (the dazzling Ms. Puckette toted her lovely child throughout) were divine.

The exhibition consists of Puckette’s ink sketches on found ledger sheets and primary-colored monochromatic paintings on board, containing meticulously incised calligraphic abstractions. Puckette’s images are distilled explorations of the “unconditioned line”. By that, I mean a line denuded of cultural baggage, stylization and cliché. Puckette emphasizes the visual autonomy of her line-making in the ink sketches, by juxtaposing their lack of stylistic relativity with the textual residue floating in the ledger paper’s patina of age. Simultaneously mundane (it’s accounting) and exotic (the found script is in either florid, generally unreadable English or Arabic) the squiggles of utile text dance with Puckette’s dreamy linear renderings. Ultimately, however, the artist’s precise lines make the background noise on the substrate dissolve, like faces in a crowd enveloping one’s lover.

If one accepts that the line is a visual art fundamental and the making of visual art is a discipline, then it follows that artists ought to study the nature of the line as an art-making device.  Such research is therefore vital for the general furtherance of the science of artistic creation. In Art’s Age of Innovation (the past 150 years), many Mad Scientists have made this pursuit their raison d’être. Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, Brice Marden, Mondrian, Twombly and many others have distinguished themselves as “line specialists”. These artists have minimized the visual significance of traditional aesthetic components – like 3D illusion, formal convention, even color at times – and made the line their “subject”. Puckette’s elegant line-work is a sensuous and hypnotic addition to the “literature” of line.

Her luminous “paintings”, linear ruminations on translucent red, blue and yellow fields, only acknowledge gestural abstract painting. It is relevant to note that during her talk Puckette said that she tries to ignore the underpainting while she incises the line. Her white lines slice through the layers of pigment and binder, which appear frozen in the middle of a gravity-directed paint/magma flow. Mindfully applied, the sweeping, broad strokes in the underpainting encompass what the lines in Puckette’s work do not: dripping chance, full space and color. The result is a tension that establishes a dimensional body on the 2D surface of the images, and an Op-art effect within the line. If one gazes at Puckette’s paintings without focusing, then follows the lines, then unfocuses again, and repeats the process, the gesso-white line on the red painting, for instance, appears green. Very cool effect.

EP & Surreal Auto-writing

Puckette’s work owes much to another 20th century artistic invention: automatic writing, a literary sort of “speaking in tongues”. The history of automatic writing (a development of Surrealism cited by Puckette in her talk), reveals a potential pitfall for line scientists like Elliott and for Art in general.

In “What is Surrealism”, Andre Breton described the movement’s express aim as “the liberation of man”. He defined Surrealism in 1924 as “Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of thought. Thought’s dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.” Surrealism relies on associations discovered “in the disinterested play of thought”, couched “in the omnipotence of the dream”.

It’s important to recall that the initial phase of this movement occurred in France, in the first half-decade after the bloodbath of WWI. Dada and Surrealism both in some ways reflect a collective shell shock among artists, which Breton calls “post-war disorder, a state of mind essentially anarchic”. What’s surprisingly courageous about these artists’ response to the fractured world around them is their adamant refused to allow Surrealism to develop into some “transcendental attitude”. On the contrary, their goal was to express “a desire to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses…at all costs to avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable of facing the breath of the street.”

A cursory web search for “automatic writing” reveals that this practice has become a common tool for spiritualism, not the window to reality the Surrealists envisioned. The Course in Miracles and other “channeled” texts have been ghost-written (literally, according to their body-restricted authors) under the guidance of other-worldly entities. The “recital of dreams, improvised speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and actions”, all early manifestations of Surrealism, have become popular pastimes in recent years. Again, just take a look at the web’s plethora of dream log and “poetry” sites. Spontaneous, “whatever comes into your head” gibberish art is as common as bad landscapes used to be, a logical outcome of Surrealism’s attempt to produce a “fundamental crisis of the ‘object’” in art. In a strange way, Surrealism has indeed faced the “breath of the street” and democratized the art-making process. That’s a good thing. In this artist’s opinion, though big “A” art could use some Scope.

Puckette illustrates in her work the element that performs the function of Scope in the artworld: Beauty. The unabashed lyricism and refined sense of craft found in her pieces mitigate the potential for cliché and jaundiced accessibility that aesthetic “spontaneity” can engender. The beauty of her compositions also makes us forget whether we’re escaping or not, and whether that’s wrong or not. Another great show at the Temp Contemp (through 5/30).

Site Specificity

At Elliott Puckette’s opening I was talking with Sean Dudley, and he asked me if I had written about “Impressions of Normandy”. I sheepishly admitted I had not. Though in a column a couple of weeks ago I admonished the “doofs” who had yet to see this remarkable exhibit, I have failed to address why it’s a valuable show to see (thanks, Sean).

“Painting is an art of sight and should therefore concern itself with things seen.” So saith Gustave Courbet in the exhibit catalog for “Impressions”. His “A Bay with Cliffs” is a gem in a show of gems. “Impressions of Normandy” is significant for its emphasis on place, its preponderant site specificity. Normandy is the “control” in this show, and the variables are the craft and vision each artist in the exhibit applies to the conveyance of Normandy-ness to the viewer. As a result, we can for example compare Courbet’s Norman cliffs with Le Poittevin’s, or Fowler’s rendition of St. Peter’s Church in Caen with Lottier’s. In this context, the names of the artists are not of primary importance. Instead, the diversity of vision they bring to bear on their shared subject is paramount.

The scope of the show is ambitious.  The placement of emphasis on Normandy allowed curator Jim Hoobler to select artists that are rarely shown together. His keen curatorial eye and aesthetic subtlety led to choices that as an exhibited body introduce, imply or predicate the major European movements in painting over a span of 120 years, from the late 18th century through the first decade of the 20th.  Further, t’s impossible not to see the elemental fury of Ab-Ex painters in Vlamink’s “Marine”, or their formal roots in Boudin and Guillemet’s beach scenes.

“Impressions” was perhaps a poor choice for a title - a little grasping, but one can see the logic. This show is more about artists’ intense sight and “the thing seen” in a general sense, than about the mad light science that developed into Impressionism. This exhibit demonstrates with great clarity an artistic truth: the artist’s eye is spiritually invested, intellectually connected, but housed in a body with feet that touch the ground. (through 5/30).

Coolest Invite of the Year Award

…goes to Zeitgeist, which announced its move to Hillsboro Village (1819 21st) with a card presenting a (real) nail and the invitation “come hang with us” on the front. Zeitgeist will have an open house preview on 5/15 and an artists’ reception 5/29 to celebrate its moving into Nashville’s coolest hood.

…Memphis?

This past weekend was the Nashville art scene’s rockingest weekend of the year so far. A slew of important openings demonstrated definitively the exciting tenor of the city’s visual arts renaissance. Our art scene is like a big rough-cut diamond in the process of being polished. Facets of the rock are already refined and shining bright. Other areas are looking good, but need work. Some facets are raw and should stay that way. Instead of wearing this simile into the ground, let’s put on our monoptical goggle and examine the sparkles.

Figuration

Let’s start with Dean Fisher’s show at Bennett Galleries in Green Hills. In a word, it’s fabulous. The artist is a Chicago native who’s traveled, studied and painted all over the world. His stunning figurative studies of the female form are a luscious integration of classical and modern sensibilities and techniques. Infused with muted atmospheric color and executed with virtuoso brushwork, these paintings manage to communicate alternately a meditative, and rapturous fascination with feminine beauty and mystique. The setting for the figures is a dreamy Home, symbolic elements of which (eggs, seashells, ceramic vessels, toys, vegetables, cups) are isolated in a few paintings as still lifes. The Homeland Fisher describes in some small, moody and well-articulated landscapes. Dean Fisher exhibit is a tremendous figurative tour d’force, and not to be missed.

Two other current exhibits, which opened this month, highlight the figure as a device for artifice. Around the corner from Bennett at Cumberland you’ll find another virtuoso figurative riff. Donald Earley’s lithos and drawings are breathtaking. At the opening I talked with several noted local artists who were as much in awe as I am, of Earley’s expressive, classically inspired studies. We all want to study with him. He imbues the line with life, rendering the character of his African American models in the romantic manner, with such sensitivity that one feels that one knows their very human-ness. Earley is a master with drypoint and uses his skill to create identification between viewer and subject. There are few more valuable functions of art than this.

At Finer Things, Megan Walborn debuts as curator with the figurative survey “From Head to Toe”. Standouts in this show are Bruce Peebles’ “The Pregnancy”, Dan Corbin’s “Dancer” and Kurt Perschke’s digitally manipulated sketches and Linda Johnson’s “Vision of Sonancy”. Walborn’s choice to make the figure the theme for her first curatorial effort is a gutsy move, in a town as conflicted as Nashville is when it comes to the body. For instance, a law prohibits The Tennessee State Museum from exhibiting artwork that depicts human genitalia (Perhaps to stave off painful public questions by kids, like: “Gasp! Look at Apollo’s peepee, Mommy”?). Right down the street, though, you can gander at the real thing at Déjà vu. What’s up with that?!

Education

Speaking of arts education, The Nashville Entertainment Association (the other NEA) is putting on the gala Artstravaganza this weekend. The goal of the event is to raise money for arts programs in Nashville’s schools. Untitled has been enlisted to install art in a number of locations (primarily in “the Gulch”) to serve as backdrop for the performances slated. Untitled members like Tim Murphy, Rebecca Walk and others have donated work for an on-line auction sponsored by Citysearch. “Petite Picasso” Alexandra Nechita also has donated a litho for the fundraiser, which will be held from 5/17-24. I generally despise the notion of artists (who usually are as affluent as door-to-door worm vendors) being expected to give their work away to elicit bucks from well-heeled patrons, but this is certainly a cause worthy of the community’s support.

Installations and More

Other sparkles that need mentioning: the reopening of Zeitgeist in Hillsboro Village; Gray (a one-name artist from Paint Rock, TN) and Bill Steber at the Arts Company; Greg Pond at Ruby Green (opening 5/21); Dave Holland at the Fugitive Art Center; Sue Mulcahy at the Parthenon; and “Concept Metro: Installation Art By Six Nashville Artists At Cheekwood (opens 5/21). I’m off to work on my stall, right now….

Correction: Elliott Puckette’s paper came from Italy and India, not England and Arabia. Update: ArtRadio, the showgram that I host on WRVU where we talk art every week has a new time: Saturdays from 1-3 PM. Tune in.

Identity

The art that a community embraces reflects the community’s vision of/for itself. A community’s civic well being can be girded by art that represents the history, vibe, sensibilities, priorities and ethnicity of its people (see the Carousel). In a word, identity is what public art gives a community. Conversely, if you have no significant public art, you either have no civic identity, or, worse, you reinforce the perception (rightly or no) that identity - not to be confused with image - doesn’t matter to the community.

So, what’s Nashville’s identity, and what kind of art reflects the community’s vision of itself? Let’s look at some examples currently exhibiting around town.

Hatch

The Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is currently showing twenty examples of Hatch Showprints, selected by gallery director Joseph Mella and Hatch man Jim Sherraden. In my biased opinion, these posters without doubt outshine the ones representing ADGFAD, which occupy the front two-thirds of the space. The Hatch prints constitute a veritable cultural record of the city’s past 120 years. Visually, the clean, colorful Hatch designs are stunning and irrepressibly unique.

Poster shops have lamentably all but erased the market for original artwork in the $30 – 200 range, pandering to folks who prefer bad reprints of Monets to a canvas painted by a kid just out of art school. However, posters like Hatch’s have a place in the compendium of Western Art. Think of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, the German expressionists, Picasso – all these guys made killer posters for exhibits and performances. If that’s too frumpy for you, think of Crumb’s San Francisco posters of the ‘60’s. A quick look at eBay will show you just how valuable artsy posters are to certain collectors.

When I spoke with Hatch’s Delaney Gill, she told me that several collectors purchase one of each poster that Hatch prints (600 per year). Vanderbilt, to their credit, is negotiating with Hatch for a similar arrangement. Just so you know, anyone can commission Hatch to design a poster: it’s only $1.50 per poster, with a minimum order of 100. What a deal!

If your desire for Hatch work isn’t sated after visiting VFAG, drive out to the airport. Beautiful big Hatch posters, mostly made for the “Silas Green Traveling Minstrel Show” (1905-55) hang in the C Concourse. Well worth the trip.

Art @BNA

Also at the airport, you can see the photographs of Jim McGuire, whose work primarily focuses on the colorful characters found in the country music biz. I have a friend who’s worked for years designing album packages for country artists, and she fails to see the artistic merit of images like McGuire’s or Marty Stuart’s (hanging currently at Cheekwood’s Temp Contemp). Folks like my friend have spent too much time tossing pics of stars in the garbage, or de-wrinkling them in Photoshop, to get it. Photos like McGuire’s and especially Stuart’s simultaneously chronicle the lives and humanize the people - recognizable to millions fans all over the world – who’ve played an important role in Nashville’s cultural history.

The Art in the Airport program does a great job balancing community and aesthetic concerns in their exhibits. Currently, locally based/internationally recognized fiber artist Arlyn Ende and her husband, noted sculptor Jack Hastings, have work installed throughout the airport. Ende’s grouping of five wall pieces in the ticketing area is a fabulous lyric on flight. My favorites are the large oil pastels “Raven” and “The Field Sparrow”, which (through magnification) reduce to abstraction the plumage of these birds. I also dig her virtuoso collage “Too Crazy for Words”, which hangs near one of Hastings’ kinetic pieces in the AB Concourse. The latter’s playful, large hanging sculptures, painted in vibrant bright hues, float above the halls leading to the arrival/departure gates. Air from the vents nearby gently set these sculptures a-waving, prodding the geometric forms, mirrors, and stylized bugs and birds into motion.

Finally, Don Gilbert’s fine 2D abstractions, with heady names like “Khryses” and “Woman of Akhaia”, hang opposite Ende’s in the ticketing area, and in one of the concourses. These works are subtly colored, technically rich paintings behind glass, which reward the up-close viewer. The next time you’re in transit or picking up/dropping off someone at the airport, take a moment to enjoy the art.

Signs, Pump Boys, Etc.

If you dig the world of the American roadside, check out John Baeder’s photo-based art at the Ryman, when you go to see Pump Boys and Dinettes. John has nine paintings hanging at the landmark theatre in conjunction with the production. He also is showing images from his book Sign Language at the American Center on West End at 31st. Baeder’s images affect sentimental realism, through a surprisingly effective melding of mediums. He uses the photo to chronicle, and the paint for emotive expression and interpretation. Together, these tools create settings for songs you heard on an AM radio thirty years ago.

A Question

Does identity matter to Nashville? Temporary exhibits like these don’t require the kind of community investment that permanent installations require. What do you think of artists boycotting temporary public space exhibitions until Metro approves a percent for the arts provision?

Life in Focus

Last week we featured several of Rebecca Walk’s photographs from her show currently on display at Fido. Her optic forays into bizarre society yield images that say, “Gotcha!” She exposes with her camera the scarification that circumstances leave on people. Walk seems fascinated by what people hide and reveal, and the ceremonies they invent for lifting the shroud on their secrets. In “Gladys”, a cigarette in a dimly lit room is the key to unlocking an old woman’s solitary moment. In “Pool Player”, a game of billiards, a girl and a camera unveil the twist in a man’s character, a flash of desperation. It should come as no surprise that New Orleans - with its carnival atmosphere, danger-edged decadence, mystery and history - has become a source of inspiration for Walk’s imagery. Her aesthetic is all cultural barbed wire and light, glaring through apertures in the inky dark, sometimes soothed by grace (as in “Form, Light and Shadow”).

Walk is one of the Nashville photographers chosen to create a body of work for the New Main Library. She and Lain York are working together to showcase photography in the coffee shop/Zeitgeist adjunct artspace, in an effort to bring more attention to the efforts of local photogs. The fact is, though, that Nashville right now isn’t hurting for photography shows, as the diverse photo-based offerings on view right now demonstrate.

Chris Verene’s disturbing “Selections from Galesburg” chronicles the artist’s family and friends, who live in a decaying small town in the Midwest. Verene’s garishly colored images contradict the palpable grimness pervasive in the lives of his subjects. The gaudy prints look like what you’d expect a conversation with some of these people would sound like- “Jerry Springer”, “white bread”, “redneck“ (these are terms I overheard people using to describe the images at the opening).

What differentiates his work from Walk’s (who is also attracted to the socially disenfranchised for subject matter), is Verene’s familial connection with the people whom he photographs. His relation to the striving souls in discount-store clothes undermines any urge the viewer might have to dehumanize, ignore or discard these folks. Verene’s unwavering gaze at his own roots arrests our/his concern with superficialities and directs us towards the bonds of love and simple humor that make small town life a timelessly relevant theme. Verene does not however ignore the ways in which life in a small town magnifies violence, idiosyncrasies/madness, lost dreams and loneliness. Exploitative? Maybe. Psychologically unsettling? Definitely. Worth seeing? Yes.

Mark Tucker’s show “What It’s Like To Be a Teenager in 1999” at Bongo Java is one of the best surprises I’ve had in a while. The exhibit’s popularity has a lot do with its portraits, mostly big Gap-ad-like shots of the heavily pierced youth trybe that frequents or works at the popular coffee shop. The show, however, is as much a conceptual exercise as it is a collection of photos.

Tucker took thirty portraits with a big “old wooden 8 x 10 camera”, printed and mounted them on watercolor paper, then gave them back to the subjects. How these young ones dealt with their own images is wild. Parents, if you could get a surgical cross-section of your teenager’s brain, this might very well be what it would look like. The resulting images are suspended from above and clipped to wires in a no-frills presentation. The portraits are bordered with poetry, paint, collage, lyrics, cartoons, wonder and angst. “We are countless and humming now, shhh”, reads one, and that could be the anthem for the generation. If you happen to miss the show, which closes September 15, you can view the images at www.marktucker.com.

At the Parthenon, two photography exhibits are wrapping up: Simin Vafaie’s “Peregrinations” and Robert Evan’s “Colors and Patterns of the Natural World”. Vafaie’s show in the West Gallery is a touching lyric on painful remembrance in a wanderer’s heart. The artist is a refugee from Iran who lost everything in the revolution, and lost her “beautiful (singing) voice” as well. Photography and travel have become a means of redemption from loss for her. That subtext makes her acute awareness of native expression an ache the viewer can sense. Through Vafaie’s lens culturally identifying architectural features become artifacts of anamnesis, as do fabric, children, dancers, places of worship and vessels. “Miracle at Sunrise” is my fave, but “Reminiscence”, depicting a strong lock on an old rough-hewn door, is probably the most telling work in the exhibit.

Evan’s nature photography did little for me, though the show has been very popular with the Parthenon’s visitors, according to the staff. It’s a respectable show. The work is certainly proficient, colorful, formally strong at times with nods to abstract principles of composition, etc. However, despite  the artist’s romantic quest to capture the perfect moment in nature, to brave the elements, to be a witness to the magnificence of creation… this reviewer did not feel transported, for a variety of reasons. He’s fresh from a trip to New Mexico, South Dakota and the States in between, loves lore-based outdoor realist photography like Marc Gaede’s, and would prefer either the real thing or more artifice/interpretation.

A Last Note

Photography has greatly eclipsed the illustration and satirical cartoon as the vehicle of choice among print-based artists for social commentary and documentation. “The Satirical Eye” at Vanderbilt’s Fine Art Gallery showcases the power and longevity of lithography as a medium. It’s a great show. In the hands of masters like Daumier, Cham, Gavarni and de Beaumont, the cartoon can expose society and its foibles as poignantly as is possible through any medium.

Art that’s not divorced from life is going to reflect the social environment of the artist, either overtly or as a subtext. The question all these exhibits raise is “Does the ‘populart’ of captured moments from everyday life transmute into the ‘pure art’ for galleries and museums? As a reference, check out September’s ARTnews. The cover story discusses the upcoming retrospective of beloved American illustrator Norman Rockwell, which will be traveling to major museums around the country (including – “Egads!” go the iconoclasts - the Guggenheim). The furor surrounding Rockwell’s show demonstrates how touchy people can get about defining art and artsy priorities. Next week we’ll pursue this query further, but first I want to give a prize to the most powerful social documents I saw on my five-venue Nashville tour of print images.

THE WINNER IS: SUE COE’S THREE PRINTS AT THE VANDERBILT FINE ART GALLERY, BEHIND A PARTITION, UNLIT!!! THE MOST FEROCIOUS IMAGES I’VE SEEN ALL YEAR!!!

Intent and Vehicle

Which prize did NYC-based illustrator and artist Sue Coe win last week with her savage images (on view currently at the Vandy Fine Art Gallery)? Coe is the top dog in the first annual Unframed Howl Award for Social Outrage/Commentary Aired in a Visual Art Medium. I’ve been a big fan of Coe’s since the Eighties, when she was blistering her way into artworld prominence with scalpel-sharp black and white 2D rage-against-the-machine broadsides. Her enemies? Political bullies, the proponents of Progress and Power at any price, those who walk on the skulls of the weak like they were taking a stroll around Radnor Lake. Specifically, Coe has lashed out at the meat industry, landlords, racists, sexists, and the Reagan administration, to name a few of her targets. I included her in last week’s column to raise a point about art and artists dealing with politics, society and culture as subjects for their work.

There’s a great tradition, intertwined with the development of the print mediums (especially that great amplifier of sometimes-free speech, the printing press), of visual artists hanging society’s dirty laundry out to dry. For a great reference check out the Graphic Witness homepage at www.graphicwitness.org. The site provides a survey of issue art and visual commentary by notables like Coe, George Grosz, Robert Crumb and Honore Daumier.

Photography has greatly eclipsed the illustration and satirical cartoon as vehicle-of-choice for artists compelled to serve as voice for the victim/disenfranchised or chronicler of the little guy’s daily grind (or being ground by the powerful into dust or burger). Photo shows like several of those reviewed in last week’s column (Verene’s, Walk’s and Tucker’s), illustrate why. Photography (though it’s often a contextual illusion) seems to capture the truth in a moment. The film renders circumstance with a visual democracy verging on banality, heightening (or deadening) the emotional impact of the seen on the secondhand witness. The crux of the equation is the photographer’s decision to shoot what he shoots. We as viewers must ask, “Why is he asking us to look at this?” That is true of all visual art, but the immediacy of the photographic medium makes this question imperative.

If art is contingent on its role as the viewer’s mirror, and the viewer is assumed to be a reflection of his circumstance, then we can understand the potential social power an artist possesses to shape the viewer, and ultimately society. Print-based work like Coe’s (and Verene’s, et al.) illustrates how this aesthetic model functions: issue art asks us, “Is this how we want to view ourselves? If not, then this is what we must change.” This is the concertina wire line between art and morality, and our response to it as viewers and artists determines the vitality and value of art in its social context.

“The Satirical Eye” at Vanderbilt’s Fine Art Gallery showcases the power and longevity of lithography as a social/aesthetic reflector. In the hands of masters like Daumier, Cham, Gavarni and de Beaumont, the cartoon can be a mighty tool for exposing injustice and society’s foibles, mirroring human nature, politics and culture as poignantly as is possible through any artistic means. The prints in this show were created to appeal to the masses, and do so by tapping into the humor, titillation, outrage and grief that are a part of daily life, now as then. These cartoonists gave their public in a greatly condensed form what we get today from the sitcom, the op-ed page, the evening news, movie, documentary photograph and pulp fiction. Daumier for one, according to VFAG director Joseph Mella, never considered his print work to be Big-A art. However, his cartoons demand our respect, if for no other reason than they can do so much with so little. All you need to do Daumier is a stone, some litho-tools, a press, an audience and – most importantly – the technical virtuosity and vision of an art giant, tempered by compassion for the human condition.

Being a socially minded artist has its drawbacks. Sometimes folks get pissed when an artist asks them to examine themselves or their community. Critics have periodically hammered Coe, and Daumier routinely faced censorship during his lifetime. Norman Rockwell, paramount populartist of this century, has been routinely pummeled by the “It’s not Art” cops. A Rockwell retrospective (see September’s ARTnews cover story) will soon be touring the country, visiting - “Egad!” shout the iconoclasts - the Guggenheim in 2001.

Whether you think the satirical cartoon, illustration, and documentary photography constitute Fine Art mediums or not, they must be considered in a Fine Art and social context. As mediums they all point to a truth about art: Art divorced from real life is a luxury item, a commodity, a polite conversation starter. Art relegated to this status in effect is stripped of any moral imperative established by art’s serving as a societal mirror. If such is the case, art (and by extension the artist) is like a set of tonsils – they used to be good for something, evolution has made ‘em a potential liability, and if they start to bother you, surgically remove them. Next question: whose body are we talking about?

Two Weeks in September

On deck in the Nashville art scene: the year’s grandest openings, including the month’s biggest event, Jack Spencer’s “Images of the South” at Cumberland Gallery. Over the next several columns, we’ll cover Spencer’s exhibit, Anton Weiss’ spectacular show at Bennett Galleries, Anna Jaap at Zeitgeist, Joe Sorci at Centennial Arts Center, Richard Mitchell at Fugitive Art Center, Cheryl Pfeiffer at Ruby Green, Carl Schuman at Destination Gallery, Diane Burko at the Parthenon, the opening of Finer Things’ Outdoor Sculpture Gallery, and much more (…Including what’s happening with the Percent for Art provision). Can you deny it? Nashville’s art scene is HOPPING this fall!

Hitting It

“Art is a language few can speak, but everyone loves to hear it. It’s not about the parameters, the tools you use to make it – it’s about hitting it,” Jack Spencer said, gruffly, with rumbling passion. We were sitting in a dimly lit, nearly empty bar a few months ago, talking about art. Talking about art, especially his art, is something Jack does not enjoy doing. He would much rather be making art than trying to describe it.

With the publication of Native Soil, his lustrous coffee table book, Spencer has become a member of an exclusive club. This Nashville-based photographer is officially an A-List (Big “A”) Artist. Over the next several months he’ll be the featured artist in a dozen of America’s best galleries, in every major cultural center in the country. The obligatory NYC premier exhibit (at the Bonnie Benruby Gallery) was cancelled due to Hurricane Floyd’s soaking of the Big Apple. Thanks to this act of God, “Images of the South” at Cumberland Gallery is essentially the inaugural show/book-signing of Spencer’s Native Soil continental exhibition series. For Nashville to host his debut is an art scene honor, an opportunity to give a local-boy-made-good his due. Kudos, Mr. Jack!

The September 18 reception at Cumberland was a grand, friendly affair. The books and photographs were flying out the door. The week before, Spencer had instructed me to read Jorge Luis Borges’ “Borges and I”, which Spencer cited as a spot-on description of his current mind-state, as he gazed into the precipice of his success. Borges’ one-page take on artistic success/acclaim, in which the writer muses on his famous self, calling him “the other one”, absolutely pins the strangeness of “fame” for an artist who’s most at home in the solitude of making. Jack Spencer is such an artist.

Borges writes: “It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to… news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary… I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not save me, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition.” When we (including Spencer himself) pick up and browse through Native Soil, we are witnessing the transformation of Spencer’s images into living cultural documents, and the elevation of the artist and his enterprise to the realm of myth. It is no wonder that Spencer has experienced a sort of quizzical detachment from his own notoriety – after all, he’s still a maker.

For a photographer the publication of a book like Native Soil is a career-catapulter. Such a book creates a clamor among collectors for a documented piece of art by the celebrated photog. No matter if the piece in question erupted out of a moment ten years ago, when something outside of himself grabbed and shook the artist, who responded by hitting it. Popular clamor among collectors in response to reproduced art has nothing to do with artistic evolution or the artist’s artifact. It has to do with owning the myth. The tension in this market-based equation points to the .38 Special of the artistic enterprise in the 20th Century: the numbered edition, the reproduction, the document of the artifact.

The numbered edition has in the past century dramatically changed the artistic enterprise, the criteria for market success and market expectations of the artist. Its influence has spread to painting and sculpting, with artists being expected to create repetitively in order to be more easily recognizable to collectors. The artist is encouraged to walk a thin line between factory worker and mythic maker. As Borges says, “…my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue and a falling away…”

The Work

Meanwhile, back in the studio, Jack Spencer is printing… printing… printing the images he has kindled into luminescence over the past twelve years, using the South as a palette, using the 2D surface to build a window between time and infinity (between elements and the elemental), telling a story that escapes/transcends the spoken/written word. He cites Eudora Welty, Mark Rothko, Odd Nerdrum and Ansel Adams as influences for his work, and all of these are specifically appropriate references.  He’s repeatedly grappling with a few images - culled from thousands of photographs – that spark indelible remembrances, connections and epiphanies (first in the maker, then the viewer) beyond the moment and milieu captured in the picture through technical virtuosity. Spencer considers his vision - his ability to see the universal in the specific, in the humble, in the other  - to be a gift. Within this vision, a defining quality of the artist, is the wellspring of Myth, the “it” that must be “hit”. That wellspring is the wondrous spirit of our shared human experience/dream. Great art is the transcendent artifact, realized when the artist will not stop investing his skill, passion and best self, until his work has documented and therefore perpetuated  the miraculous fact of our very existence. The great artist is not done until (through his artifice and artifact) he has established a means for us to view ourselves as “the other one”, whom we can see as clearly as one sees oneself in a mirror.

Until I met Jack Spencer and was introduced to his work, I didn’t think such an achievement was possible through photography. Anyone who thinks his work is about black folks in the South ought to be publicly shorn, branded, flogged and prohibited from making artspeak for a period not exceeding ten years. It is no wonder that Spencer prefers making it to talking about it.

Maybe…

When I arrived in Nashville about this time two years ago, many of the artists I met were incredulous that I had left Santa Fe, with its 200+ galleries and reputation as an Art Mecca, for the Music (not Art) City. My reply is truer now than it was then: Nashville’s art scene is much more cohesive than Santa Fe’s, and its artists more tightly knit and supportive of one another. Beyond that, I believe Nashville to be poised for a cultural renaissance, and there’s the money here to finance it. Maybe…

While Santa Fe boasts the second largest art market in the USA (behind New York City), and while a fifth of its population are artists or in the art business, its reputation as an artist’s community and as an art center/boom town is based on nostalgia for the 70’s.  That’s when Santa Fe morphed, from a sleepy little town at an ancient commerce crossroads, to a tourist destination famous for its arts and crafts. Circumstances and wealth (from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado oil money) fueled it, and today stories of that time are the stuff of legend among the Santa Fe “locals” who witnessed the town’s transformation.

I worked for a couple of months in 1993 for a guy named David Rettig, whose 19 year-old gallery was dying (He’s now one of the administrators for renowned sculptor Allan Houser’s estate.). Rettig told me once about the critical moment, the turning point for Santa Fe: Fritz Scholder’s opening at the Elaine Horwitch Gallery. It was the early Seventies, when Canyon Road gallery owners like Joe Wade and artists like Alfred Morang used to close up their shops and studios in the middle of the afternoon, to go play softball at Alameda Park.

David had been hired on as a twenty-something gallery director three months prior at EHG, and was totally unprepared (like everyone else) for what happened the night of that reception. In less than two hours’ time, the entire exhibition sold out, generating almost a quarter million dollars in sales, a phenomenon unheard of for a regional contemporary gallery at that time. “At the end we were writing vouchers on napkins,” Rettig told me. Soon, galleries were sprouting like chamisa all over Santa Fe.

How is this significant to Nashville? I believe the variables particular to 70s Santa Fe exist here in Nashville today: 1) Lots of money (from the music, publishing and medical industries), and 2) An influx of large numbers of culture-hungry, gainfully employed, youngish people from major urban areas, where art is obvious and accessible. For those of you who still cling to the notion that nothing’s happening in the visual arts in Nashville, let me do a survey of what’s “Blowing in the Wind” this spring. The scene is simmering, and an event like the one described above is all it would take to bring it to a boil. Maybe…

Alternative Spaces?

According to The Arts in Nashville - that incredibly interesting study recently published by the Metro Nashville Arts Commission and sponsored by the Frist Foundation - when asked what arts facilities were needed in the community, Nashvillians overwhelmingly pointed to the lack of “Museums and galleries for paintings and sculpture.”   In that void-to-be-filled you’ll find artists, arts organizations, churches, businesses and Bredesen-enlightened Metro, collaborating to create venues where five years ago none or few existed.

The ArtSynergy (500 Lafayette) and the 5th Avenue of the Arts projects are both rumored to be nearing critical mass, as is a new artist’s cooperative on 5th South, called Ruby Green (where Studio 514 used to be).  Wading through the participants’ enthusiasm for the New, to ascertain the impact these developments will have for Nashville’s visual artists won’t be possible - until the doors open and the paintings are hung. That said, VAAN’s involvement with ArtSynergy, and the 5thAOTA’s being pushed forward by the Downtown Partnership, Ann Brown, and others – including lots of artists and arts advocates - translates into serious potential for The Real Thing to occur. Maybe…

Annual alternative events like untitled’s Glow Show (the sixth, to be held this year at Chestnut Square on Mar. 13 and 14), and the second D.I.G. Show at The Downtown Presbyterian Church (Mar. 7, organized by painters Todd Greene and Tom Wills with the blessing of Pastor John Hilley), are evidence of the vitality of the “underground” and “emerging” artist cooperatives thriving in Nashville right now. Such groups will take on the veneer of credibility with time, and with a backdrop of few more Art Landmarks - like the Carousel, Michael Cooper’s 2nd Avenue Mural (credit to the Downtown Partnership), the New Main Library and Museum.

Programs to show art in public places, such as Arts in the Airport (now showing Michael McBride and James Threalkill) and at the Vandy Medical Center are vital to the health of the visual arts community. The rotating exhibits at government and educational venues – like those at the TSM (can you say Normandy?), TPAC, the TAC, the Parthenon, Centennial Arts Center, Fisk, Vanderbilt, and Belmont Universities - are the meat and potatoes of any metropolitan art scene. Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary (“Brad Thomas – A Misinformed Clown Hands Crayons to the Hungry Children” opens Mar. 5) is doing a remarkable job of at least attempting to show edgy work, that’s “new” for Nashville.

But where do artists show, when their resumes won’t get them a wall in one of these places or in one of the few galleries in town – or when they need to make some extra dough? Check out the restaurants and cafes. Places like Fido, Bongo Java, JJ’s, Provence (now showing Paul Proctor and Carol Buttrey), Café Luna and Corner Market are perfect for art-loving caffeine junkies. Just about all of Jody Faison’s popular eateries sport original art on the walls, with special mention for Jody’s and 12th and Porter (Susie Creagh). The Big Guy doesn’t have the corner on the vittles & visuals market: Amy’s, Merchants, Seanachie, Zola, Tin Angel, Mere Bulles, and Cheekwood’s Pineapple Room (Jimmy Abegg) all serve that combo.

We haven’t even gotten to the galleries and business/artist collaborations…

Does this sound a little optimistic to you? Good. Now for the facts. Visual Arts will never be BIG in Nashville, until Nashvillians stop asking artists whether or not they make a living at making art, and instead ask whether they take VISA or checks. That’s true on both the micro and macro scale. Asking artists if they’re serious enough about their work to quit day-jobbin’ is qualitatively equal to asking a community if it’s committed to its Arts. The answer in both cases is either a proud “Yes!” or a stammering excuse.

Until Nashville makes the leap and implements a 1% for the Arts program (visualize Seattle), we’ll have plenty of moanin’ and flailin’, scratchin’ and clawin’ at the little pie, and pointin’ of fingers…in other words, stammering excuses - and the visual arts in Nashville will be an afterthought.  Without the commitment that that 1% requires, the possibility of a story like David Rettig’s repeating itself here is a mirage, and visual artists without day jobs will be few and far between.

Fighting Not Enough Time

This week, we continue our look at alternative artspaces in Nashville.

On a blustery semi-sunny Sunday, an exhibition of Tom Wills’ “Anti-Hero” pastel paintings opened at Harpeth Hall School’s Marnie Sheridan Gallery. It was the last day of February, and I made the cross-town drive ruminating on the number one reason Nashvillians cite for missing such events, according to The Arts in Nashville: Not Enough Time. I’ve long contended that Not Enough Time is the artist’s mortal foe, but I didn’t feel any urge to gloat when the MNAC survey proved me right. More on this later.

After parking the car, I walked into the spacious two-tiered gallery and was greeted by Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, performed wonderfully by a Harpeth Hall student quartet. It was one of those blissful Art Moments, which every so often makes the time invested in an art outing delightfully well spent. Luxurious Spring light streamed into the space through the hall’s big windows, glittering on Wills’ nicely presented pastels. Seemingly everything and everyone sparkled, like the Dinner Party People that monthly grace the pages of Martha Stewart’s Living. There were families dressed in their Sunday best, milling about, chatting, and enjoying food, drink and good art. No one was dressed in black, not even the artists. This was an optimized art-viewing experience: an exhibition of a cogent body of work, shown in a well-appointed community venue, where young and old comfortably mingle. It was an occasion when the hanging of an exhibit provided an excuse for a joyous gathering of friends and family, students and patrons.

The pastel paintings in the exhibit (which comprise Wills’ first serious image sequence) have been shown piecemeal elsewhere. However, a one-man show does for an artist’s work what a microscope does for a blood sample: it magnifies and intensifies the viewer’s experience of the subject - which can reveal good stuff or bad stuff, depending on the vitality of the sample (artwork) and its source (artist). Wills’ Anti-Hero series fares well under the one-man microscope.

Tom Wills’ is a young artist who graduated in 1994 from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky with majors in Art and English. Since then he has been active in the alternative art scene here in Nashville, exhibiting at JJ’s Market, Artclectic, Artrageous, Harding Academy, Watkins, and Belle Meade Fall Fest. He and Todd Greene founded the D.I.G. Show at the Downtown Presbyterian Church (as mentioned last week, D.I.G. II will hang at Downtown Pres from March 7 through April 17). He’s sold pieces to Metro Nashville Airport and Opryland, and is represented locally by the Arts Company and Auld Alliance Gallery.

Wills’ aesthetic is constructed on a Narrative foundation and informed by the artist’s love of the Tennessee landscape. Conceptually, Wills’ pastel paintings are firmly rooted in the artist’s Christian faith, though they also reflect his affinity for epic and fantastical literature, and mythic storytelling. To his credit, Wills allows the paintings to function decoratively and thematically in equal measure, rather than needlessly weighting them down with heavy-handed visual referents. He permits the viewer to respond to his pastels either as nicely executed scenes, or to delve deeper into the symbolically rich tale of spiritual struggle and transformation, which lives within the plastic surfaces of his images.

Best “read” sequentially if one moves clockwise around the hall, The “Anti-Hero” epic starts with Wills’ grim and sketchy “artist-as-young-Everyman” self-portrait opposite the gallery entrance. The next piece - a psychologically charged and stormy work - describes the artist’s shadowy transformation into the Anti-Hero. The rest of the paintings tell a fascinating tale of the Anti-Hero’s journey through a dimension where the earth is flesh, stone is faith, trees are people or ghosts, and roads are the metaphysical pathways through life, traversed solely through the vehicle of Choice. Manmade constructs are portrayed as visual echoes, present but distant reflections of their makers’ moral impetus. In the Anti-Hero’s world, interaction, communication and movement are magical actions, which reveal the elemental characters in the tale, as much as they reveal anything about them. The setting for the Anti-Hero epic is a dimension where the Apparent drifts and eddies beyond surface meaning, into the realm of the Metaphorical and Allegorical. It is a world riddled with portals to the Unknown, where states of being are as real as skin. The titles give the viewer clues to the Narrative, which relates the Anti-Hero’s quest for spiritual reality/humanity, but a careful observer can ascertain much of the story without the text.

If you prefer your heroic journeys on the printed page, movie or television screen, or behind a Playstation, Wills’ pastel paintings work just fine as lush, energetic impressionist pictures of cedars in fallow Tennessee and Kentucky fields, rendered from vantage points near the states’ highways and byways. As is common with young artists, Wills sometimes endeavors to paint beyond his ability to execute. But his sincerity, conceptual focus and artistic skill are sufficient to overcome the shortcomings evident at times in the work. His exhibition at the Marnie Sheridan Gallery at Harpeth Hall School continues through 3/15.

Not Enough Time

Artists and gallery people often soul search for an explanation for the visual arts’ loss of cultural clout in the community. Everywhere I go I meet artists, and everywhere I go there are artists who bitterly complain about the lack of community support for painters and sculptors. “Why is it that fifty people attending an art opening is a decent crowd, when across the river next year tens of thousands of Titans fans will gather every Sabbath to holler for the home team?” That’s the sort of refrain one commonly encounters when artists gather, minus a few expletives, puffs of smoke and sips of coffee.

The real culprit behind poor turnout for art functions is Not Enough Time. Not apathy, not ignorance, not the home entertainment center, the arena, the mall, the arcade, not suburban isolationism, social dysfunction, etc., etc. - these are just symptoms. If a guy or gal’s too worn out after a long workweek to get up off the couch to change the TV channel, then the chances aren’t good that he or she will hoof it to an art show.

Art demands the mental/physical/emotional/spiritual involvement of the viewer. It is an active pursuit. The time/money/attendance-eaters described above are the sort of passive entertainment one submits to, when one is sucked dry by the demands of the workplace. What’s the solution?

In the past week I saw a lot of art, and it didn’t take a lot of effort on my part. As the following samples prove, integrating art into your daily life does not have to be a chore. Carol Mode’s lovely abstract paintings, hypnotically patterned and painted in lush hues, can be seen in the lobby of the American Center (3100 West End) through 3/18. Featuring work she created during residencies in Switzerland and Taos, and in her Nashville studio, the exhibit provides a wonderful opportunity for a bag lunch decompression hour for working Joes and Janes. Rima Jabbur’s haunting hyper-real paintings are on display at Sarratt Student Center (Vanderbilt campus, just off 24th) through 3/19. A bit of warning: these are not first-date paintings. Carmel, CA artist Robin Winfield is showing richly textured and colored photo collage paintings of Mexican doors, in an aptly titled exhibit - “Doorways to Mexico” - at Finer Things (1898 Nolensville). Pass on the vacation to Cozumel, and swing by Rusty and Kim’s instead - the drinking water is finer. Finally, congratulations to Mike Mitchell on his 2/26 show in the basement of his friend Nate’s house, just off 46th. His playful constructions, priced to sell, flew out the door. They also managed to put a smile on this artist’s face, and a bounce in his step.

The Research of the Image

Monet painted haystacks and lily ponds, over and over again. It was research, of the artistic variety, and from Monet’s studies one learns that light never strikes an object the same way twice. One also learns to look for bliss in the most humble of things.

George Rodrique is the Energizer Bunny of the artworld. He paints bug-eyed blue dogs, thousands of ‘em - which sell for up to $100,000 apiece (his prints are much cheaper). His blue dog series is pap, and from Rodrique’s repetition of an inane image ad nauseum, one learns about marketing, Not Enough Time and art-as-punchline.

Not Enough Time is the key to Rodrique’s success. The Artist’s Ultimate Foe can actually aid an artist who submits to comfortability in achieving notoriety. If enough people say something’s good, some folks - who can afford art and for whom comfortability is a must - will buy the work on the basis of the artist’s representation or sales history, or because it’s “fun”. History treats Salieri-types poorly, and my guess is that Rodrique’s blue dogs in the not-so-distant future will be about as compelling and valuable as Leroy Neimann’s originals and prints are today.

On the other hand, Not Enough Time was Monet’s enemy. The Impressionists were reviled when they first appeared on the scene, because their paintings didn’t look like paintings were supposed to look, back then. We all know how that story ends: with the Impressionists sitting pretty today at the head of the artworld table. But Not Enough Time was Monet’s nemesis in another way. The artist only had one lifetime for his experiments. One can sense the urgency in his work, propelling Monet’s exhaustive “research” into the very nature of Seeing, and manifesting in his compulsively quick brushwork. Herein lies the crux, the drama in the creative endeavor for those artists I lovingly call “Mad Scientists”: So many variations, so little time.

The qualitative comparison between Rodrique and Monet reveals a tension fundamental to the artistic endeavor. This tension can, and often does, escalate into a full-blown conflict (which has nothing to do with “taste”) between artist and art, viewer and object, and artist and viewer. The artist must constantly battle the urge to succumb to the visual norms in his or her preferred medium, in order to be true to Vision. At the same time, he or she must remember that Art is made to be viewed. By abandoning stylistic conventions (like framing as presentation, for instance) which indicate to the art viewing audience: “I am Art - look at me,” the artist risks neglecting or rejecting the viewer.

How an artist deals with this fundamental conflict is everything in the artistic process, and it is the thing in the art that cannot be hidden. Bluster and artspeak won’t hide it, at least not for long. And the cold, hard fact is, the artist must face this conflict each time she or he addresses a new canvas, uncut stone, or whatever the blank-page-to-be-filled may be, in the artist’s chosen medium. ‘Cause the Muse is watching, always, and She suffers idiot savants not at all. A success today doesn’t guarantee a repeat tomorrow, or ever. All you songwriters out there know it’s true.

“The Misinformed Clown Hands Crayons to the Hungry Children”, Brad Thomas’ exhibition of multi-media constructions, opened at Cheekwood’s new Temporary Contemporary Gallery on March 6. Thomas installed sixty-five pieces in the smallish space, sixty of which are hung as a polyptich, all of which repeat an appropriated image/form - the Clown. These artworks, selected from a series of over 3,000 pieces, present in the form of a visual essay the artist’s grappling with the issues described above. It is a remarkably cohesive exhibit, probably the best I’ve ever seen on the subject.

The show is cohesive, not because of the repetition of the Clown/God throughout. Rather, “The Misinformed Clown” works as a completed thought, to which each element in each piece contributes a facet. This is the mark of an artist who has shouldered his responsibilities to his Muse, his craft, his audience, and - most importantly - himself. Few people understand the commitment (mental, physical, spiritual and emotional) required, for an artist to create a body of work like this one. It takes dedication, tenacity and a touch of madness. The artist must have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, arrived at through relentless detection and deduction, indicative of a fervent willingness to go wherever the concept leads (See the movie Pi). Simultaneously, the artist must engage in unblinking self-examination, cataloguing each action and reaction, pattern and “happy accident”, blind spot and Vision. An opus like Thomas’ Clown series is a great achievement, an explosion of Art, fueled by a furious force, equal parts youthful wonder and rancor.

For the viewer concerned with surface, texture, tactile diversity - the very physicality of art, this is a great body of work. Thomas’ experience working in his father’s construction business instilled in him a keen sense of craft, and a fondness for diverse materials. Thomas’ faculty for presentation allows him to cleanly incorporate nearly any appropriated material - distressed frames, plexi, glass, photos, pages from books, maps, rust, tin and other metals, wood, a variety of paints, nails - into the artwork. Only the conceptual strength of the series, embodied in the repeated Clown image/form, prevents a sensory cacophony.

It’s through the Clown (isn’t it funny how that word and image poke the artspeak in the ribs?), that the lure of complacency is transcended. The Clown, a visual template, is the eye of Thomas’ creative whirlwind - and it’s the artist who’s being transformed by the exhaustive re-invocation of the Clown/Progenitor. The Clown and artist meld eventually, and the artist’s redemption is obtained through his work reinventing the Clown/himself. It’s all about the “research”. The truth we glean about Art, evident in Thomas’ artistic exploration, is this: our stomachs won’t be fed by the Clown series, but our humanity will.

“The Misinformed Clown”, by my “reading” starts with “Young God: Gleaner in Repose”. A field of Institutional Pastel Green painted canvas frames the (acrylic gel-transfer) applied laughing/crying Clown, who cradles a photographic self-portrait of the artist. The Clown is not Chuckles: he’s kind of scary, a denizen of bad dreams. The artist’s a good-looking young guy with a goatee and glasses, in a blue suit, and he looks like he’s dead, prostrate on concrete, with a hand outstretched. The self-portrait is recessed in the surface and lining the box which houses it are pictures of kids from a primary school annual. Over their eyes Thomas has glued cutout words, which add up to something Cezanne wrote, just before he died:

Shall I ever reach the goal so eagerly and so long pursued? I hope so, but as long as it has not been attained a vague feeling of discomfort persists which will not disappear until I have gained the harbour - that is, until I shall have accomplished something more promising than what has gone before, therefore verifying my theories, which in themselves, are easy to put forth. The only thing that is really difficult is to prove what one believes. So I am going on with my researches. It is the research of the concrete, of the image, and behind it all is not only the divorce of the artist from the process but also the concurrent attempt to establish a philosophy of reality that owes nothing to the divine revelation or universal truths.

In other words, it’s about the artist learning from/while making - limited only by his Vision and life span - the creative force that drives the “research” his only taskmaster. As Brad Thomas said to me, “You’re the workhorse, pulling this divine wagon.”

The rest of the sixty-four pieces in the show are like a map of Brad Thomas’ world, a narrative describing his inner life, a formula for artistic revelation, a trip down 20th Century Art History Lane, and a hundred other things, any one of which would fuel a good conversation at Fido. In the end, though, this exhibition is about a promising young Mad Scientist finding/creating Beauty, unfettered by convention.

The exhibition continues through 3/28.

They snarled. They threw bananas. They encouraged the guys in the audience to amputate our members, gift-wrap and mail them to Jesse Helms. They showed us posters, and they cited statistics. They wore high heels, short skirts and gorilla masks. They are Gorilla Girls, the self-proclaimed “conscience of the art world”, who have gotten famous postering Manhattan with often hilarious jabs at gender and racial disparity in the art marketplace. They wore black, so we knew they were artists.

Consisting of a slide presentation and Q & A session, the GG appearance drew a standing-room-only crowd of students, feminists, and art folks to VU’s Wilson Hall on 3/16. Ronnie Steinberg, director of Vanderbilt’s Women’s Studies program, coordinated the event with the help of other departments at the University, including Fine Arts.

I arrived for the show a few minutes before it was scheduled to begin, and was stunned to see the lobby outside the lecture hall teeming with people. Art talks rarely attract more than a few dozen people, and a couple hundred people were waiting for the Gorilla Girls. I cut in front of the line with the help of Shawn Dudley and David Ribar, so I got a seat when the doors finally opened. I sat with some formidable females in the Nashville visual arts scene: Susan Knowles, Jane Braddock, Marilyn Murphy, Linda Marks, and Carol Mode. I also spotted, from where I sat, several Untitled members and Joseph and Su Mella.

The presentation was hampered by technical difficulties, but the audience was a supportive one, in general. Alba Thomas and Rosalba Carriera (pseudonyms assumed by these two Gorilla Girls, referencing female art historical figures - or those who should be, according to the G-Girls, and protecting the GG’s anonymity), described their organization’s mission, discoveries and activities since 1985, the year the Gorilla Girls got their start.

Once I got over the penis thing, I really started to get inspired by their brand of arts activism.  When a member of the audience asked one of the Girls if their work extends beyond the shores of Manhattan, Alba (or Rosalba, I can’t remember which - the masks all look the same to me) responded with an invitation.

Since the Gorilla Girls could do little to directly effect change in the art world outside of New York City, they encouraged a do-it-yourself approach. They exhorted us to view the Gorilla Girls as a “model” for starting “cells” of advocacy. We could form a “cell”, appropriate the things the G-Girls do that we found useful, and leave the rest - thus expanding the Gorilla Girl “model” and spirit of arts activism. That gave me an idea.

But first, let’s look at our community through the peepholes of a Gorilla mask. “New Works by Raine Bedsole and (Nashville favorite) Kit Reuther” opened 3/13 at Cumberland Gallery (Carol Stein, owner). It’s Kit’s first feature show at Nashville’s premier artspace, and Raine’s third. Lots of red dots were in evidence.

Reuther painted for years at her kitchen table (something to which a lot of artists, myself included, can relate), and the objects she incorporates into her still lifes are often still the stuff you can get at by opening a cupboard (bowls, dishes, jars). Her stark light/dark contrasts - typified by a recurring placement of white ceramics, set on a white-table-cloth-draped table, against charcoal gray background - obviate a minimal aesthetic shrouding an intensely personal narrative.

This body of work evidences Ruether’s drive to expand her vision beyond the humble world portrayed in her technically adept canvasses, into a transformative vehicle of exploration. She accomplishes this miraculous molting by infusing the elements in her work with metaphorical, narrative, and allegorical referents. Kit is beginning to share with the viewer the intense inner life, which feeds her aesthetic.

Ruether’s powerful personal language is now balanced by a stronger sense of perspective and valuation - keys to a readable narrative. In works like “Still Life with Origami”, “Gown and Quail Eggs”, and “Still Life with Two Bones”, the artist’s meticulous justaposition of elements evokes in one a feeling that one should know what she’s trying to say. When this happens, Ruether is successfully “speaking” to the viewer in a visual whisper.

This feeling leads the viewer to the most remarkable facet of Kit’s show: her exploration of “veiling”. Take, for instance Ruether’s “Draped Chair”. The chair has become a ubiquitous object/subject cliché in contemporary painting, a means by which the artist invites the viewer to “come sit in the painting for a while”. Ruether’s chair is covered, the way one covers furniture in an unoccupied home.

If one moves from piece to piece, one realizes that Kit is examining systematically the way we choose what we remember and what we see. The tension in her work arises from our need to know what’s behind the door that’s closed, what’s in the space from which our view is blocked, what’s in the opaque ceramic jug, what’s within the egg’s shell. Her inclusion of empty translucent objects only serves to heighten the suspense. Ruether’s accomplishment in this line of inquiry is stellar.

Raine Bedsole is a New Orleans based artist, though she has family ties to our community. Her work in the Cumberland exhibit repeats a figurative form throughout (See last week’s column on object repitition for a thorough study of the method). The show consists of two groupings, one of monoprints and one of small studies, four large encaustic painting/colages, and a grouping of three smaller head studies.

The monoprints as body evoke a family tree, and as a sequence indicate Bedsole’s fascination with the figure as a tool for describing interpersonal relationships, especially romantic ones. The artist does not neglect her craft in doing so, displaying her usual attentiveness to color, gesture and design. Even in this medium, which provides little satisfaction to the artist who digs texture, Bedsole manages to use the incisive stroke effectively.

The rest of the pieces in the show display the artist’s familiar method of layering paint, texture, text and symbolic imagery to create a 4D window to her world, through sculptural and reductive means. The bigger works, including the three head studies describe the inertia that one’s internal dialog generates, and the pressure enforced on one by the definitions others intentionally or inadvertently apply to the individual.

It is a chilling series of painting, in this respect, until one reaches “Lotuses of the Ganges”. In this redemptive piece, Bedsole reveals her faith in a spiritual resolution for the complexities of human interaction, a place where the vessel, the pendulum, failure and wonder are saved by the sacred word. It is a remarkable work. (The show continues through 4/17.)

Three other shows of note: Barbara Yontz, local arts educator and artist, is exhibiting work at Café Lylla in Green Hills. It’s a beautiful, lush group of paintings, which, through the artist’s humor and skill, transcends the purely decorative. R. Lafayette Mitchell’s “Futurist Visions” are on exhibit at the Parthenon (Susan Shockley, Curator). It’s all that jazz, it’s science fiction, it’s movement and color - a good showing for Ruby Green member Mitchell.

Finally, “The Dance”, Adrienne Outlaw’s first solo show opened 3/4 at the Hiram V. Gordon Gallery at TSU (Michael McBride, Director). Adrienne’s decision to re-dedicate herself to art-making has obviously re-invigorated her work. Her glue-stiffened skirts, shorts and shirts in this show are dancing all over the gallery. My favorite is “Startled”, though “Street Ballet”, “Gertrude” and “Twist” are all close seconds.

Adrienne’s forms are convincingly animated, the fabric effectively molded to indicate musculature, the movement of the model captured magically in the fiber, like DNA residue or a petrified footprint. Outlaw even ventures into  narrative by including herself in the group as The Watcher. It’s a joyous installation, very cleanly presented, with the energy of a street party.
One wonders where all the arts activists that attended the Gorilla Girl’s presentation were the night of Adrienne’s opening. Outlaw, through her column here at IR and her weekly spot on WPLN, has done as much as anyone to give Nashville’s visual arts scene a voice. Her opening should have been packed with artists and art appeciators. If you haven’t seen it, go - and write something nice in the guest book. She’s earned it.

Now, for my idea: I’m a West Virginian artist. There are zero artists from WV represented in Janson’s History of Western Art. Further, no artists, men or women, of Mountaineer heritage are represented in the art industry periodicals, newspapers, galleries and museums of New York City (where most major art forums are located). New Yorkers monopolize the art industry and for more than a century have made it impossible for all but a few token rural artists (e.g., Granma Moses) to “make it” in the art world.

I’ve had enough of this blatant urban discrimination against my people, and the Gorilla Girls, themselves perpetuators of the Big Apple Monopoly, have given me the means to combat the problem. From now on, you’ll be seeing me at art openings wearing bib overalls and no shoes, a fake ZZ Top beard, wearing a straw hat, smoking a corn-cob pipe and carrying a musket. I’ll pass out flyers with big X’s scrawled on brown grocery bag paper with a lump of coal (those like me will know what this means), and I’ll holler at all the folks that look like they’re from New York, shop there or want to show their artwork there. We can make a difference! If necessary, we can resort to “terrorist tactics” (ever hear of the Hatfields?), just like the G-Girls. I’m calling Anna Jaap today.

Beware the Hill-Williams & Wilmas!

To Have

Mike Cooper’s mural at 6th and Church is done, and another “Urban Icon” – Richard Haas’ term – has been added to the Nashville cityscape. Cooper has absorbed and re-invented the street corner, communicating an artist’s vision of a Downtown moment’s “was”, “is” and “will be”. In this way, he’s created a creative flow chart analysis of the dynamics of the Nashville art scene (More later).

Incorporating as compositional elements the pre-existing architectural features of the wall upon which the mural’s painted, Cooper signifies the “was” of the surface of his “canvas”. The “is” involves the artist’s depicting an imaginary instant in the creation of the mural, which deconstructs the mural-making process for the viewer. Pieces of the “puzzle” or composition are being hauled up, mulled over and finally placed where they belong. Everybody, even the dog who’s fetching a puzzle piece, is joining in the work/play - everybody except the viewer (who gets to kick back on a bench and watch). A man leaning out one of the windows directs us to the New Main Library - the “will be” of the mural – which is presently under construction across the street. The centerpiece of the mural is a big faux picture window reflecting the view of the library one will have from the mural wall, once the library is completed.

This project is another example of how the culture-conscious segment of the business community is stepping forward in the absence of a percent for the arts program, to instigate worthy creative endeavors. Similarly motivated ventures include temporary lobby exhibits like the American Center’s (assisted by Atlanta-based Barkin-Leeds – now showing Melissa Hefferlin and Daud Akhriev) and Duke Realty’s (coordinated by the Arts Company - now showing Paul Harmon and John Guidon) in Brentwood. Also in Brentwood, PBI sets an example of higher level commitment for a culture-conscious business, with impressive signature panels by Zeitgeist artist Richard Painter, commissioned specifically for PBI’s public entrance.

Businesses are also recognizing the value of sponsoring visual arts events and projects. AGFA and the Computer Exchange (which set up a multimedia display for the artist’s CD-ROM at the opening) sponsored Diane Barrie’s exhibit at Destination Gallery (covered in last week’s column). The success of the 5th AOTA project depends on just this sort of enlightened arts sponsorship.

However, the business community can only go so far in fostering a healthy art scene here, limited as they are by perceived parameters of “taste”, and an atmosphere of knee jerk litigation over 1st Amendment issues. This is why the artist’s gallery and alternative exhibition space are vital to the health of Nashville’s art scene.

To Have Not

Two such spaces had their inaugural openings in the past month: Ruby Green and the Fugitive Art Center (great name!) at 400 Houston. When artists get together for this sort of enterprise, the process is often as interesting as the product, usually involving brutal late-night renovation and installation sessions, high emotions and blowout openings – and short organizational lifespans. These symptoms of the phenomenon have little relation to the value such endeavors have for the scene. “Happenings” and artist collaborations historically have proven instrumental in the introduction of important artists, artistic innovation and subject matter too “hot” for institutional commerce-rooted venues.

Ruby Green (514 5th) opened 3/19 with an exhibition of Pidge Cash’s compelling exhibition “Metalwoven Metaphors”. If you visited the space when it was Studio 514, you’ll be blown away by the transformation that’s taken place, since partners Chris Campbell and husband Chris Dugger took over. Campbell lived and worked at Paolo Saleri’s “City of the Future” in Arizona, and is applying the cool, weird architect’s notion of multi-purpose buildings to Ruby Green. To that end, workshops, “slide days” and figure drawing sessions are scheduled to start in April, in the utile section of the space.

Cash’s interestingly lit fiber sculptures are beautifully presented in Ruby Green’s clean, elegantly accoutered gallery and foyer. The artist pushes the limits of weaving as a medium, dancing with both 2D and 3D contemporary aesthetics, installation concerns and light and shadow as presentation elements. To her credit, Cash doesn’t abandon the roots of her craft, including a metalwoven basket and other nods to the tradition in the 13 piece show. The artist’s work revisits an interesting 30 year-old question, regarding the extent to which a given medium (in this case, fiber) is versatile enough to satisfy expressive criteria typically reserved for painting and sculpture, the western-tradition’s hallowed artistic vehicles. Cash’s artwork, with its subtle use of color, formal articulation and thematic resonance, reinforces fiber art’s resilience as an artist’s tool, despite its relatively recent addition to the toolbox.

The Fugitive Art Center officially opened 3/27, with a group show of local artists, many of whom have exhibited prodigiously for years in Nashville and have been heavily involved in Untitled and other groups and projects. The reception was a tres edgy event, notice for which was mostly spread by word of mouth. Works by Gadsby Creson, Tim Murphy, David Glick, Urchard Mitchell, Marty Spence, Dallas Moore, Megan Walborn, Lain York, Brian Hunter and Greg Pond were hung on freshly installed and painted drywall and cogently situated around the gallery. The factory floors in the Chestnut artspace are raw, clamp lights provide illumination and the overall impression is one of sophisticated, grungy cool.

Pond says of the FAC, “We’re creating an exhibition space dedicated to the exploration of edgy, progressive contemporary art and the presentation thereof.” Pond, York and Hunter comprise the nucleus of FAC, though on several visits prior to the reception, I saw most of the members of the show contributing time, energy and sweat to the project.
My favorites in the show (which closed shortly after the event) included Glick’s morphing nude, Pond’s massive sculptural centerpiece (like a leather-wrapped tusk 8’ long underscored by a sheath of 3’ long animal hair) and Urchard’s savage exploration of the Sixties’ cultural legacy. For the most part, the rest of the work was consistently solid.

The next show at FAC (opening 4/3), entitled “Flesh”, will feature sculpture and installation by Terry Glispin. The artist “employs materials such as cast rubber vinyl and iron, addressing issues of sex and identity,” according to Pond. It should be a shocker, and not something you’re likely to see in a Nashville office building (479-3850 for info).

To Have and Have Not

It’s artists and artists’ venues like these that force established museums and galleries to refocus on what’s current. Some of Nashville’s institutions, like the Parthenon and Cheekwood, are pushing forward progressively with an exhibition agenda that embraces the new, while maintaining a foundation in the traditional. The Frist Museum and the Library projects are incidentally pressurizing the scene, as the area’s other institutions develop strategies to maintain their relevance. All of us Nashvillians, artists or no, are already benefiting from the momentum that’s developing around the opening of the new facilities. But the real growth will occur with the broadening of the foundation for artistic achievement in the city, subsequent to their completion.

With this in mind, I attended the “Final Stroke” ceremony (3/30) and watched as several businessmen put the finishing touches on Mike Cooper’s fanciful mural. In the crowd of proud suit-wearing supporters of public visual art were familiar faces {Tom Turk, Sandra Duncan and Sara Miller} from the Metro Arts Commission and Downtown Partnership. Gazing up at the mural, reveling in the din of construction behind me, it hit me: Mike had captured precisely in his big painting the status quo of the Nashville art scene.

Here’s how I “read” it: High above us are the artists and arts advocates, working feverishly at their task, simultaneously attempting to piece together a sense of their own value, suspended from above, unsupported from below. The Library, reflected in the window but not yet there, represents the institutional foundation for the city, invaluable for Nashville’s creating a positive cultural identity of itself. And in the open space between, signified by the faux bricks, are the contributions of the business community, without whom meaningful growth is not possible. Most of Nashville is sitting on benches watching the whole thing go down. I haven’t figured out who the dog is, yet. If you have any ideas, let me know.

This week we continue our examination of the exhibition space as the “arena of ideas”.

“Combinations”, “Originality” and “Blanks”

I met Gregori Maiofis at a forum put together by VAAN, which I was invited to moderate. Attended by a couple dozen artists, students and art lovers, the forum was meant to provide VAAN members an opportunity to ask questions of the artist and Susan Shockley, the curator. My contribution was supposed to involve stimulation of conversation and, if that failed, entertainment value.

It was the Thursday before the opening (3/20) of Maiofis’ exhibit “Painting as Improvisation” at the Parthenon.. I’d been told he preferred to lecture, and our attempts at discussion bore this out. When Dave Ribar in a complimentary way invited Maiofis to talk about his attraction to Baroque, the Russian-born painter grunted, “There is no attraction.” A cursory look around the gallery clearly debunked this claim. Maiofis then launched into several lengthy diatribes about his art, becoming pissy when anyone attempted to interject a question.

Maybe it was a cultural thing, a language thing, or maybe we were both just tired, but I walked away from the forum a little early with the impression that Maiofis was a pompous boor. His paintings, however, are terrific, if you can get past the rhetoric the artist has pinned to them. For instance, the artist writes in his catalog:

“My painting presents a blank field in which the dispersed elements are placed and where they could extend and connect to one another. But this is precisely what my work does not specify. The created ‘combination’ is ready for further development and it is the viewer who is invited to complete the chain and to turn a fragmented image into a text without ‘blanks’. The schematic drawings in my scenario are simply suggestions for one possible reading. They do not point to the original state of the text.” In other words, Maiofis lets the viewer finish in her mind the Narrative the artist has started… My question is, “Why would an artist not finish the painting himself?”

Maiofis would prefer his “combinations” not be referred to as collages, because “…the word ‘collage’ is not a neutral term the way it was composed, because it strongly connotes those aesthetic ideologies which created the collage and which used to serve as a virtual sign.” (?) Whatever.

The thing he’s really after – and this is an artistic home run – is an “’open combination’. This device has a resemblance to the way that ancient and partially destroyed works have been presented in art books – the remaining fragments organized according to our idea of what the original looked like.” As an example, Maiofis used the museum practice of building a display around a cultural fragment, extrapolating a scenario based on the piece. The artist is pointing to this process, rightly, as a critical moment when the act of art-making – as determined by culture, historical pressures, the artist’s motivations and circumstances – is contextualized by de facto analysis and narrative invention on the part of critical interpreters. Very cool stuff.

An aesthetic home run, however, is only assured when the artist/hitter runs the bases. The idea must be clearly expressed in the work, or it’s simply a philosophy of painting. What stunts Maiofis’ argument is his dissociation from the meaning  of the historical “signs” (read “narrative”) he’s appropriated for his images, and his unwillingness to disclose his own experiential relationship with the “text”, for the viewer.

Maoifis is therefore undermining any meaningful contribution he could make, towards the re-integration of classical and contemporary aesthetics. He’s so close, it hurts. Maiofis misses much of the relevance his work has to the work of other artists who’ve addressed or are in the process of addressing related formal, thematic and technical issues. For instance, in the wonderful catalog the Parthenon produced for his exhibit, Maiofis writes about what he calls “space in-between” (the more or less unpainted areas of his canvases). “The basic structural constituent of my method is the solution of the ‘space in-between’ – the emptiness of the space separating each fragment from another, an emptiness which gives no information about the possible seam…” He goes on to describe how this empty space is vital to creating ‘open combinations’, fragments which defy a definitive contextual “reading”.

About this particular formal device, Maiofis could have just said, “See Robert Ryman. He’s the ranking Mad Scientist in this department.” Or, since the space in-between has been a major formal concern for painters always, but especially in the past century of 2D innovation, Maiofis could have acknowledged any of a hundred great painters as references. These associations are what ground an artist and grow his vision. An artist incapable of recognizing his own aesthetic context will stagnate.

Another issue in question is the artist’s choice of appropriated imagery. Del Sarto’s “Abraham’s Sacrifice” – and this can be said of most of the images Maiofis uses in his “combinations” – is a dramatic scene with archetypal resonance. Images describing violence and contracted sexuality reverberate throughout the exhibit, emphasized by the pervasive crimson hues, offset by ochres and touches of blue. One must ask, “Why?” Since we’re provided no clues by the artist as to his own attraction to or identification with these images, and because he intentionally negates a definitive reading of their chaotic configuration, the question arises as to whether Maiofis is utilizing their visual impact gratuitously. If so, the work becomes titillating cliché, made worse by technical proficiency, a painterly T & A spatter show.

Despite the ambiguities of his methods, if not his intent, Maiofis is obviously pushing himself as a painter. At 29 years of age, the artist is extending himself into the critical dialogue within art’s arena of ideas. His paintings work like cut-aways, revealing the internal machinery of classical painting – the grid, the cartoon, the underpainting. This deconstruction provides a vacuum within which the artist can precisely describe the enigmatic art of composing art, and the nature of the creative decision.

Whether he’ll admit it or not is irrelevant. Maiofis’ strong point is his balanced integration of classical and contemporary aesthetics and techniques. This is what made him the perfect fit for the Parthenon, helping Shockley and the rest of the museum’s able staff build a reputation for progressive art excellence on an established classical foundation.

It’s not the fact that Gregori Maiofis work is problematic that makes it a worthwhile endeavor to show. It’s why it’s problematic that matters, as described above. “Painting as Improvisation” is an exhibit that vividly pronounces a change in art a-coming, even if falls short of indicating the key to the change. It’s a gutsy show, and a big step forward for the Parthenon.

One of the functions of the gallery or museum exhibition space is to initiate a dialogue among critics, viewers, artists and curators about things like artistic “value”, “vision”, and “relevance”. The gallery in this respect is an arena of ideas. If that’s so, then part of the job of being an artist entails presenting the viewer with images that stimulate the imagination., generate interest or response, and introduce aesthetic questions and solutions. Several exciting new exhibits that have opened recently in Nashville bring this role of the artspace into focus.

The shows we’ll cover this week and next also illuminate the importance of the curator’s choice of an artist for an exhibit. The kind of work a gallery shows says everything about the direction in which it wishes to grow, and the identity it is seeking to establish for itself.

Shake the Tree

“I always think about the audience in relation to art,” says Crossville-based artist Andrew Saftel, whose exhibit “Shake the Tree” opened 4/2 at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary Gallery. “Who is the artist making this work for? Sometimes I see a lot of art that’s for critics and other artists, and if the public comes in, it does nothing but intimidate and confuse people. So I try to make it accessible for people.”

“Shake the Tree” is an airy show, part Calder, part Chagall, part existential gut punch. The watercolor paintings and fragile assemblages in Saftel’s show are approachable, without being insipid. This visual soft-sell allows the viewer to immediately immerse him- or herself in the complex meaning-layers that fortify Saftel’s images with resonance and depth.

The artist’s gentle, inviting and playful paintings pack conceptual and emotional impact into the thinnest layers of pigment. The work’s powerful formal structure, almost transparent to the casual viewer, indicates an elusive, almost dissolved, hierarchy of interpretations. Linked by strands of poetry and appropriated text, these layers, like life, resist simplification. As one moves from piece to piece, however, patterns emerge and pivotal elements are reinforced by repetition, again a vivid description of life.

What elevates Saftel’s work beyond the decorative and into the arena of ideas, however, is the artist’s investing of delicately rendered visual elements with the weightiest of existential Truths. His repeated Man-as-beast-of-burden-for-his-own-karmic-baggage, reminiscent of Giacometti’s figures, is as powerful a symbolic image as any I’ve seen. Equally consequential is Saftel’s use of a simple bucket (which the artist bought in the Old City of Jerusalem, while on the TAC’s Israeli-Tennessee artist exchange last fall) as a metaphor for Man-as-vessel-for-Knowledge. The actual bucket, which appears in several of the watercolors is an element in the assemblage “Make It Up”.
Such seamless transition from 2D to 3D (I loved the sculptural pieces) allows Saftel to communicate to the viewer, whether she is a child or art historian, the concrete roots of the artist’s vision. References to religion, history and technology, either in text or image, provide a context for the moments in which the art is made and viewed.

“Shake the Tree” also works as an epic travelogue, chronicling the artist’s assuming the role of visionary pilgrim and returning from the journey to share his discoveries with the community. In other words, Saftel is using his trip to Israel as a vehicle for describing the phenomenon of an artist pursuing vision, creating work and exhibiting that work in the arena of ideas.

Says Saftel, “I’ve been asked, ‘What am I trying to accomplish with these paintings, or with the work in general?’ I feel like, if somebody can come to one of these objects, and have an experience, at any level, that they don’t have out in the world, in the rest of their lives, then you’re successful in making these objects. Whether it’s a physical experience, where your heart beats a little faster, or an intellectual experience, that makes you think, or see the world, or believe something that you didn’t before, then I feel that it’s a successful venture.”

Cheekwood’s Terri Smith, curator of “Shaking the Tree”, has strived, since the Temp Contemp opened, to introduce cutting edge contemporary art and artists to Nashville. Saftel was an exceptional choice for furthering the gallery’s agenda,. Additionally, the show has served to introduce a facet of the artist’s work not generally featured by his local representative, the Cumberland Gallery. Kudos to all involved!

Diverse Visions

If you’re keen on art-concept + execution, you’ll have a blast at VU. The annual Vanderbilt faculty show opened 3/27 at the University’s Fine Arts Gallery. Featuring recent work by Michael Aurbach, Susan DeMay, Don Evans, Marilyn, Murphy, Ron Porter and Carlton Wilkinson, the exhibit presents a broad range of aesthetics, mediums, and artistic sensibilities in a relatively limited space. All these artists are accomplished, and they’re all out there, pushing the limits of their ideas and favored avenues of expression.

The trick in assembling any group show is creating a sense of solidarity among the artists participating in the exhibit, while allowing the individual pieces room to breathe. Joseph Mella, the gallery’s curator has done a fine job hanging the space so that one can zero in on an artist or object, without feeling pinched by the surrounding work. The result is a show that emphasizes both general and singular quality of vision and craftsmanship in the Vanderbilt faculty’s artwork.

I had favorite pieces by each of the artists: Porter’s “Cage’s Coda”; Evan’s “The Eclectic World of Don Evans…”; Wilkinson’s “Once Loved”; Aurbach’s “Witness: Conspiracy No. 1”; Murphy’s “Studying Vincent and the Mystery of Vision”; and De May’s “My Burial Urn”. If you’re curious to see what their students are doing, take a short walk across campus to Sarratt. The student show is running concurrently there.

The Dog

William Parker, longtime big toe of the Nashville art scene and my favorite framer, answered my question of last week, “Who does the dog in Michael Cooper’s mural represent?” William was being brutalized by his own installation schedule the day I saw him, having already been to several galleries, museums and homes by noon, to deliver, hang or fix art. After finishing a crisis art repair for me, he called Ambiance to get directions to his next crisis. As he shuffled out the door, William looked over his shoulder and said soulfully, “Framers are the dogs of the art world.” There you have it.

The Nashville visual arts scene is poppin’. The scuttlebutt: there’s a rumble in art circles that the Music City is shifting, happening, getting a big city artsy vibe. A quick scan of doings about town in April and May shows what the buzz is about.

The “Rynd Chase”

Let’s start with the “Rynd Chase”, the Frist Center’s amazingly shrewd gesture to introduce their newly appointed Executive Director, Rynd Chase, to about 500 local artists. The soiree (4/8) took place at Vanderbilt’s University Club (classy) and was a pivotal moment in the development of a serious art scene for Nashville.  It was a rush to see so many artists, dealers and arts advocates gathered in one room. For the price of invites, rent, wine, cheese & crackers, and the wait staff for a couple of hours, the FC built a foundation of goodwill in the artists’ community that could prove to be priceless in the near future - if the FC’s gesture materializes as a real commitment to regional artists.

You’ll know why I’ve been calling the event the “Rynd Chase”, if you were there. A throng of enthusiastic artsies engulfed Rynd from the get-together’s start to finish. The charming and effusive Rynd, it must be said, appeared to genuinely revel in the attention. He demonstrates an affinity for creative folks that is definitely not the norm among institutional administrators. We may have a legitimately enviable situ developing here.

Rynd formerly directed the Tacoma Art Museum, just outside Seattle (the nation’s undisputed prototype for public arts excellence). His experience there is precious, and one hopes that Rynd steps forward to advocate a similar program for Nashville. However, what’s most exciting about Chase’s (he makes you want to call him by his first name) appointment is his vision for the new museum: “While we are intent upon bringing major artwork from different cultures and eras - national and international work - to the museum, we are also intent upon focusing on regional artwork as well. My attitude is that that’s what going to make us unique from other museums in the country. We’ll be one of the few places you can see Southeast regional artwork,” Rynd said in a recent ArtRadio interview. Should this vision be implemented, the stage would be set for the FC to become the premier showcase of the strongest work being made in the US today: Southeast art.

Stellaaaaa!

One of contemporary art’s Grand Wizards, Frank Stella, will be giving a lecture at Vanderbilt’s David K. Wilson Hall, Room 103, on 5/27. Another in the stellar Public Arts Forum series, Stella’s appearance is nothing short of miraculous. This man is one of the great artists and art theoreticians alive today. Working Space, a compilation of Stella’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures from the early ‘80’s is the most profound analysis of the crisis in modern painting, its history and future that I have encountered. An example: “If abstraction has doubts about its ability to survive on its own, it has to take another look at where it came from, to reconsider its relationship to the mechanics of representation. After all, the gestures of abstraction are no more than the revealing magnification of the gestures of its heritage…” This is an absolutely must-see event.

Fugees, Rubies and Newbies

The Fugitive Arts Center continues to build a rep as an edgy, progressive contemporary art venue. Terry Glispin’s “Flesh” pushed the envelope during the month of April, with its valentine-hued tongues and sculptural howls exploring sexual identity, roles and the internal combustion relationships can ignite. On 4/24 the Fugees will present readings by Savannah, Georgia fiction writer Will Belford and local artist and poet Bryan Hunter, one of the core members of FAC. Using the gallery as a literary performance space is a great idea, and hopefully will spark a rebirth of the hallowed southern tradition of spoken word circles in an artsy context. For the month of May the FAC will present an opportunity for curious viewers to witness the transformation of the gallery into an organic art/life form. University of the South Fine Arts professor David Holland will install at FAC the material madness that constitutes “Hearts, Trains and Drains” – adding elements throughout the show’s run. A reception will be held 5/15. This should be a wild thang, the sort we’re coming to expect from the FAC art radicals.

Greg Pond, another of the Fugees, will be exhibiting his dangerous art at Ruby Green in a show called “Skinned”, which opens 5/15 (reception 5/21). This endeavor is an admirable display of community in the alternative scene, and more evidence that Ruby Green is developing into an artists’ hub. RG has begun hosting figure-drawing sessions every Tuesday evening, something longed for by many artists who aren’t interested in a class and who want to share the cost of a model. Also new-cool at RG are slide-shooting sessions of 2D and 3D artwork with photog Michael Durham. This is a great service. Just bring in artwork, pay a reasonable fee, and Michael will take and develop transparencies of the work. Call Ruby Green for more info (244-7179).

Newbies are hanging in other alternative spaces. Joe Simon at Bongo Java, Ginny Folk at Solo Mio, Amy Stephenson at 12th & Porter, and Vatsal Thakkar at JJ’s  have all put forth strong showings in their first Nashville exhibits. Following Thakkar’s powerful “Death of Jack” at JJ’s will be a terrific collaborative effort between Nashville’s Julie Lee (who recently sold an entire body of work in a day (!) at Montana Streets) and Irish photographer Trevor Henderson. “A Walk Through Antrim” opens 4/30.

Hot Galleries, Hot Bods & Anniversaries

Recently edging out Cumberland in the Scene’s “Best of” for top honors in the gallery category, Local Color celebrates its 9th Anniversary on 4/24. They’re featuring Sharon Charney’s “Earth, Sea & Sky” for the gala celebration, and her pleasingly meditative acrylic landscapes will be on view through May. Cumberland will be exhibiting Donald Earley and Ron Porter from 2/24 – 5/22. Both shows are worth the visit.

Finer Things is presenting a group show of figurative work by Randy Cooper, Dan Corbin, Kristi Hargrove, Linda Johnson, Tracy Lang, Adrienne Outlaw, Bruce Peebles, Kurt Perschke, Brad Sells and Shelley Spector. As always, you can be certain the artists’ work will be of high quality, elegantly presented and visually arresting. The opening reception is slated for 5/1.

On the Hill & Uptown

Cheekwood’s got a couple of major events coming up. The Temp Contemp will open an exhibition on 5/21 featuring installations by local artists (More on this in a later column), and the sculpture trail will open soon. I recently strolled down the 3D path out there and was blown away. This is going to be an incredible attraction when it’s completed. For now, though, make a point of visiting Botanic Hall and taking a gander at Lee Smith’s color photos of Japanese Gardens. They’re gorgeous.

Finally, the closing of “Impressions of Normandy” at the Tennessee State Museum happens 5/30. If you haven’t seen this show, you’re a doof. Go. ‘Nuff said. Also at TSM for one week only, paintings by 13 year-old art world phenom Alexandra Nechita. For those of you who like to say, “My kid could do that” – this show’s for you.

Caption for Jane-Allen McKinney kinetic mobiles:

Check out Paul’s segment on Jane-Allen McKinney’s kinetic sculpture at Bellevue Mall, on this Saturday’s Alterna-TV (11:30 PM, Fox 17)

Art You Don’t Understand

Yesterday I overheard two couples skewering the installations at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary. In particular they were mocking Elliott Puckette’s “scribbling on spread sheets”, Richard Painter’s bags of burnt art ash (“You can get one for $850, HAHAHAHA…”), and so on. On Saturday’s ArtRadio showgram, we got a random caller, who called us “arrogant”, thought all artists were “gays” and didn’t want to hear us talking about “all that socializing”. He just wanted to know how to draw, and wanted us to talk more about that.

These sorts of responses to art are common enough, and the disconnect between artists, artwork and viewer that they point to is as real as roadkill. As an artist, you come to terms with this disconnect, becoming humble, a teacher, an advocate or an art evangelist - or you turn mean and/or quit. Mean artists make mean work and say mean things to anyone in front of them. This tends to infuriate Republicans and the Moral Majority.

Artists often band together, choosing to surround themselves with like-minded supporters, effectively insulating themselves from the dumbass psuedo-critic’s barbs. Taken to the extreme, this herding instinct can encourage artists to “make statements”, that don’t have the intended enlightening effect on a casual viewer. When you stop to ponder the consequences of the us-and-them demarcations, you start to get savvy to the cruel dynamics of reciprocal revulsion between viewer and artist over the past 150 years. Censorship, slashed paintings, de-funding, no art in schools, mean art and artists inciting public wars in courts and legislatures… these are the fruits from the sickly disconnect art vine.

Recently, I interviewed Phil Bredesen for ArtRadio. One of our mayor’s favorite pastimes is painting. In fact, he’s caught the art “bug” in a big way, under the tutelage of Charles Brindley, a well known local painter and teacher. In his capacity as Mayor, Bredesen has done a great deal to support the visual arts in Nashville, though not as much as some would like. His proudest achievement, he says, is mandating that every Metro class gets an art teacher. Education is key to the dissolving of the art disconnect.

He’s overseen the installation of the Carousel and been a driving force in the establishment of the Frist Center. He also had a hand shaping the New Main Library’s emphasis on visual art. But he has reservations about businesses being required to dedicate a percent for the arts and doesn’t believe the government should serve as arts patron. I gathered from our interview that he advocates a “no hand-out” policy for artists. The day after that interview aired the Tennessean ran a front-page article on the deal Mayor Phil made with Dell to get them to locate their new factory here… How confusing!

I should mention that I’ve been working a brutal production schedule for my installation at Cheekwood, a collaboration with seven other artists, several terrific artisans, audio production experts, sponsors, etc. We’ve put a huge amount of resources, sweat, and time into the creation of a piece of art that defies definition, with very little financial compensation. That can be said of the other six artists showing their installations at the Temp Contemp’s “Concept Metro”. That can be said of the Dave Holland, with regards his installation at the Fugitive Art Center, Greg Pond at Zeitgeist and Ruby Green, the Untitleds at Artstravaganza, and a bunch of others out there making and showing art that you don’t understand easily.

But I’m writing this column eight hours before the opening of this show, and there’s a rock in my belly and a question that comes into my head, ‘round about this time: “Is it worth it?”…I guess my answer is “Only for the juice that comes from hitting it.” If you’re an artist, you know what I mean.

For the rest of the world and its ways and means, that’s not enough. The artist has to learn to not care in the moment of making about the world’s ways and means. It’s a kind of temporary insanity, without which hitting it doesn’t happen. Still, one wonders at a guy like Frank Stella (speaking at Vanderbilt this week) stays there for decades, hitting it again and again… in spite of all the in spite of’s.

I saw that a painting, a Cezanne I think, just sold for $60,000,000 at auction… How confusing!

Hillsboro Village is getting an art infusion as a result of Zeitgeist’s relocation there from Cummins Station. Now situated across from the Amoco where Acklen meets Hillsboro Road, Manuel and Janice Zeitlin’s space is half art gallery, half architect’s office. Zeitgeist’s first show in the new space seems overtly slanted towards commercially viable artwork. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the gallery in the course of moving didn’t abandon edgier and “emerging” artists, like Will Berry, Susan Sisk, Lain York and Tim Murphy. It’s artsies such as these who’ve helped Zeitgeist establish its reputation as a proven vehicle for contemporary art in Nashville.

Prominent in the new Zeitgeist’s inaugural exhibit is phenom Anna Jaap (who hails from my hometown of Beckley, West Virginia… btw, kudos to the Zeitlins for helping improve equity for WV artists). By my unofficial tally, Anna’s colorful canvases and prints hang in about a third of all Davidson and Williamson County homes. They’re painterly, distinctively colored and absolutely devoid of angst. It’s a pleasure to see her work displayed next to her husband Jeff Hand’s fanciful and lush pictures. Jeff’s paintings are lavish, with layered decorative patterning and a bright-hued palette, and equally absent sturm and drang. I especially liked his piece “Rough Cut”, the subject of which is a chainsaw. It’s a dense, evocative painting masquerading as painting lite.

The showstoppers here though are York’s four big boxes, hung back-to-back and suspended from the ceiling. Lain is one of the hardest working artists in Nashville and has remained committed to his exploration of layered text and imagery, bold color and full frontal cultural appropriation. It’s a delight to see his work featured at Zeitgeist. I also dug Jimmy Abegg’s poetic manipulated photos mounted on wood, unfortunately not hung but spread out on a tabletop.

This points to a problem with the exhibition space that hopefully will be improved as Zeitgeist settles in to its new digs. The gallery is essentially one long wall with a smallish full-width exhibit area at the entrance. Due to the layout, sizeable 3D work (like Greg Pond”s freaky-cool mechanized buffalo skin) feels pinched, situated between the front desk and storefront picture windows. Further, the wall pieces - diverse with regards execution, subject matter, artist and medium, but uniform with regards their high quality – tend to dissolve aesthetically and visually as one strolls down the gallery’s single long viewing path. Zeitgeist’s installers and curators will need to be inventive to prevent the artwork from “graying out” for the viewer in future exhibits. Mounting pieces on the opposite wall in the architects’ work area is also problematic, because it de-designates the art to a degree.

Fortunately, Zeitgeist’s new neighbors/old friends across the street at Fido are helping resolve the gallery’s space problem (at least for the moment). Fido is serving currently as Zeitgeist’s adjunct exhibit space, displaying additional works by gallery artists in this writer’s fave java source and local hangout. Bob Bernstein, Fido owner, shared a space with the Zeitlins when he first opened Bongo Java on Belmont Ave (where Bongo yet thrives). Janice for a year made desserts for Bongo. It’s still a great fit, making for the one of the coolest shows yet this year in a Music City coffeehouse.

Zeitgeist is planning another reception this month (5/29, 6-8 PM). Their first for “New Art – New Space” was a wild success. As a friend of mine said, “It was great to see people hanging out on the sidewalks of Hillsboro Village after looking at art, instead of hanging out on the sidewalks after watching a ball game on TV.”

Scene Notes:

A final reminder to make plans for attending “Broadsides”, Frank Stella’s lecture on Thursday, 5/27 in room 103 of Vanderbilt’s David K. Wilson Hall… Dave Holland’s installation at the Fugitive Art Center, entitled “Hearts, Trains and Drains”, is a stupendous foray into art as device for systems analysis. It’s a heady exploration of architectural  space and building materials working as a metaphor for the human body, mind and spirit.  Holland’s aesthetic, sweat and conceptual investment in the project for the alternative artspace is a testament to artistic obsession/compulsion. Finster’s got nothing on this man, in that department. Very cool stuff… Speaking of installation art in Nashville (!), between 900 and 1,000 people attended the opening for “Concept Metro” at Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary Gallery on 5/21. That’s a phenomenal turnout for an artist’s reception anywhere, but especially for Nashville on a busy Friday night. Just one more indication that this town is hungry for cutting edge visual art…

Black, White and a Touch of Color

Susan Mulcahy’s exhibit of sixteen powerful 2D works at the Parthenon is called “Black Wood Journey”. An inspiring exploration of process, spontaneity, and the plastic power of black on white, Mulcahy’s stormy mixed media pieces are firmly rooted in Ab-Ex. In her work the artist employs sweeping gesture and liberated mark making, revitalizing and re-inventing conventions like the landscape and architectural interior (a healthy balance between individual and referential concerns).

She does so while negotiating an aesthetic path through the geometry of modern abstraction, allowing the image “in transit” to direct her to the next right step in the picture’s development. One of the most difficult things an artist – especially one who works with abstraction - must learn in order to create living artifacts, is this willingness to react to combinations of pattern, tonal subtlety, 2D and 3D elements, texture and pictorial essence. The subject of Mulcahy’s work is this process of seeing, making, reacting, reassembling and moving on. She invites the viewer on a visual roadtrip through the world that the artist creates in the studio. What we see in the gallery are “snapshots”, memorializing ocular/inner moments in the artist’s journey.

Rather than the usual illustrative or descriptive tools, Mulcahy’s titles for her artwork are more emblematic of image evolution and the artist’s intimate identification within that process. Mulcahy’s creative endeavor is like a “Fan Dance”, during which she opens “Windows” to her “Secret” “Dreamscapes”, in “Calculated Disclosures” to her audience. The artist assumes in the drama of creation the persona of “Io” (Io is the innermost of Jupiter’s four planet-sized moons and one of the most volcanically active bodies in the solar system; Io is also, according to the Encyclopedia Mythica, the supreme god of the Maori and other Polynesian peoples. Io is considered to be ‘all-knowing’ and ‘eternal’ and his name may only be whispered. Io consists of both a male and female substance. He dwells above the sky in the highest heaven of the twelve upper worlds.), and the drama of making becomes a magical “Journey”.

As in any trek, chronology must be addressed (“Hinge of Hours”), and Mulcahy does so by incorporating materials such as wax, acrylic gel and gesso into her process. These substances are dynamically mutable: gel and gesso are liquid binders that dry hard, for instance, and wax when heated becomes liquid, then returns to its original state. Obviously, Mulcahy is conscious of the mystic qualities of artists’ materials - as indicated by the exhibit’s name - and the artist’s role as alchemist in the appropriation and application of these mediums. She makes “Choices”, performs “Experiment(s)”, and invokes (or evokes) the elements of this “Earth Place” to make concrete her “Dreaming”. Charcoal (carbon, dust – life passing), combined with materials that capture creative moments when they solidify, applied in dense layers – that’s Mulcahy’s creative vehicle for her “Black Wood Journey”.

My fave in the show is “Dreaming”, a large moody abstract landscape with an interestingly warped perspective and a hint of forest green. In it Mulcahy describes wind in a way I’ve never seen before (very cool). Swirling layers of charcoal enclose the scene, creating a “window frame” of cloudy black. The tree at the epicenter of the whirlwind is an emotive device that certainly drew me in. I also loved “Fan Dance”, “Earth Place, P6”, and “Hinge of Hours”, which reminded me of Scotland’s standing stones. “Black Wood Journey” is a terrific showing by Mulcahy, who for the past decade has served this community as arts advocate, educator, and artist.

Coolest Portrait Award of the Season

…goes to muso/artsy Daniel Tashian, who has a some pieces hanging at Sam & Zoe’s, that cool cafe by Hundred Oaks Mall. His portrait of Pee Wee Herman is a hoot! You’ve got to see it.

Zeitgeist Layout

In last week’s Unframed, I did some hand-wringing about the layout of Zeitgeist. I went to the artist’s reception on 5/29, though, and have to say that the floor plan works great for openings. By the time you’ve worked your way from the door to the rear of the gallery, and back again, you’ve had a chance to schmooze with everyone. The turnout for the event was great, and Manuel & Janice are sooooo friendly… Buzzwords: “Let’s head down to the Village. I hear there’s a big opening tonight!” Don’t you love it? One last thing: it was great to see Johnny Reed’s nude studies, which had been censored out of his Pineapple Room show at Cheekwood, included in the Zeitgeist exhibit…

Kinder, Gentler Column Writer

Thanks to photog Rebecca Walk for the new, happier headshot of (“ridiculously self-indulgent”?) yours truly. Rebecca is one of five local photographers commissioned to produce a body of work for the New Main Library’s planned exhibit “Nashville 2000: A Snapshot of the Millenium”. Walk, John Chastain, Bob Schatz, John Guider and Carlton Wilkinson – all accomplished artists – will seek to capture the identity of the city on film. Diverse in both vision and technique, this gang of five will surely produce a multi-faceted reflection Nashville for the show, and ultimately for the Library archives. Great project!

Africa in the Gallery

The aforementioned Carlton Wilkinson is a prototypical community artist. He’s a Vanderbilt University instructor, whose photos are currently exhibited at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Museum and will be included in another show there next year. Wilkinson is active in arts and mentoring programs for youth and active on issues affecting the African American community. He’s also been a gallery owner for the past eighteen years. His artspace is called In the Gallery and is situated on Jefferson, across the street from Centennial Park.

The latest show at In the Gallery, “The Art of Africa”, opened 6/26. The exhibit features tribal art, culled from the collections of African dealers. It’s a must-see for contemporary sculptors and painters, the culture-curious and serious collectors. The powerful exhibition showcases spectacular handcrafted masks, dance sticks, architectural elements, stools and chairs, figurines, bas-relief wall pieces and animist fetishes. Also included are amazing examples of ceremonial dress and fabric designs.

Artspeak falls short in describing or defining the impact of these stylized expressions of cultural identity. They transcend the role to which art is often relegated: that is, as a mechanism for decorative escapism. It’s no wonder that Picasso turned to Iberian masks for inspiration (see “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”) in his quest to re-vivify Western art earlier in this century.

My favorites in “The Art of Africa” are: the Gule mask from the Ivory Coast (immediately to your left after entering the gallery); the Bedu mask opposite the entrance; the 3D male/female pairs (the Pende carved relief and Yoruba beaded standing figures, especially – both exceedingly rare); the bronze Benin soldier; and the Bamana mother and Child. Nearly all the pieces in this exhibit, however, are remarkable for their fluent celebration of a world where storied earthly two-leggeds, four-leggeds, swimmers, flyers, creepers, plants, and stones live in and under a rich spiritual canopy of discovery.

Salvage

Speaking of spiritual discovery, Todd Green’s long anticipated follow-up to his immensely popular “Paw Paw Series” opens 7/9 at JJ’s Market. The exhibit is titled “Salvage” and it’s a passionate indictment of the commercialization of Christ. The work in the show draws from a variety of sources - pop art, “Jesus Saves” road signs and the aesthetics of circus sideshows. Green uses materials as divergent as popcorn sacks, papier-mache and canvas as substrates for his tightly graphic renditions of strongmen (“Mighty Fortress”), fat ladies, barkers (“Mr. Creamy”), cowboys, clowns (“The Fool”) and magicians. These simultaneously gawkish and surprisingly sympathetic caricatures constitute Green’s new pantheon of symbolic imagery. They replace the burning crosses and churches, numerology and figurative hieroglyphics, which the artist appropriated from his preacher Paw Paw’s shorthand in previous series.

The artist has patinaed  the collages, constructions and paintings in “Salvage”, so they appear as though they might have been rescued from the scrap heap, picked up at a flea market or “salvaged from a dilapidated circus”, as Green puts it. He’s creating a material metaphor for salvation (“in the world, but not of it”). The deliverance of the lost soul is a story of timeless resonance, and Green has made it his own in this body of work.

Throughout the series, signage text calls the viewer to “REPENT” and reminds him that “JESUS SAVES” and “HE IS RISEN”. However, the carnival characters, for whom these slogans establish a subtext, undermine these exhortations. The real narrative in “Salvage” is a hidden narrative, derived from multiple readings of the central symbols. This narrative ultimately describes the artist’s faith in the transcending, transformative power of his God, which has nothing to do with “Christians” who market faith for their own enrichment.

Green is aware that the artwork, which is for sale, may attract criticism of the “pot calling the kettle black” variety. This, though,  is the conceptual trapdoor of “Salvage”. Green is willing to cast himself in the role of “King Hypocrite”, in order to call attention to the practices of religious hucksters. “It’s a turning over of the money-changers’ tables in the temple thing,” the artist said. If Green is preaching anything here, he’s preaching the danger of preaching without vigilance, or about the pitfalls and confusion one encounters when seeking salvation.

He’s constructed a persuasive visual dialectic on the problematic mixing of commerce and religion in this show, but not at the expense of his art. Green’s latest efforts are visually exciting and undeniably fresh. They’d catch your attention, whether or not you knew what the artist’s point was. A courageous and solid effort by the Nashville artist…

Will our Next Mayor Care about Art?

Find out at the Mayoral Candidates’ Forum on the Arts and Architecture. It’s slated for 5:30-7 PM on 7/13 at Cheekwood. Can you say, “Sir, what is your view on a percent for the arts?”

Get Off Bongo’s Porch and…

Attend the Mayoral Candidates’ Viewpoints on the Arts and Architecture tonight (7/13 5:30-7 PM at Cheekwood). This is important. To submit a question for the candidates, e-mail lequire@mindspring.com or fax it to 367-4525. For more 411, call 256-7020. No artist or art lover (without a doctor’s slip or death in the family) ought to be anywhere else. This is a rare opportunity for the visual arts community to demonstrate with our bodies and queries/comments why and how Nashville needs to make a commitment to its own cultural identity. The program is sponsored by the Friends of the Arts.

Afterwards…

Visit Adrienne Outlaw’s exhibit, “Movements”, at the Temp Contemp. The show features a survey of Adrienne’s signature fiber art and constructions, including her animated clothing, bed of nails and wall pieces. “Divorce: 1997”, one I hadn’t seen before, consists of a tallish pedestal with a surprising crown: two hairpieces buried in sand. Anybody who’s experienced a smothering relationship will be able to identify with this piece.

Prepping for the Candidate’s Debate?

Get on the web and go to www.pan.ci.seattle.wa.us/Seattle/sac/home.htm. That’s the URL for the Seattle Arts Commission’s (SAC) homepage. Seattle passed a percent for the arts (PFTA) provision in 1973 - that’s over a quarter of a century ago. Since then, the city of half a million people (comparable to Nashville) has developed one of America’s most highly regarded public arts programs, based on that 1%.

For a good example of how the “percent mentality” manifests in public projects (useful comparatively for gauging what our city loses by not having a similar program), let’s take a look at how Seattle builds a football stadium.  The building of the Washington State Football/Soccer Stadium and Exhibition Center (my italics - the name says it all) is managed by the Public Stadium Authority and First & Goal Incorporated. Thanks to Seattle’s PFTA provision, visual art is an integral component of the stadium’s planned construction.

PSA and FGI will commission professional artists to create new artworks for the stadium, which will “complement the facility and represent the most innovative thinking in contemporary art.” The project’s goals are: to “capture the public’s interest and imagination”; to commission artworks “so compelling that visitors from around the world will come there expressly to see it”; that the artwork reflect “a diverse range of cultural and artistic perspectives”; that the “program will reach out into the community through public education”; and most importantly, that “the works will be a source of pride for the entire region”. Their budget? $1,500,000.

Not to diminish the remarkable efforts of Nashville sculptor Joe Sorci or the staunch commitment of those who’ve managed on a shoestring to facilitate the installation of Joe’s strong work on the Riverwalk by our Stadium – but Nashville’s relative neglect of cultural identity in the erection of this facility should be an embarrassment. We’ve missed a major opportunity to make a statement about priorities here.

Imagine

I got a “call for artists” from the SAC a couple of weeks ago and slumped in my chair when I read it. Only Seattle- or West Coast-based artists were eligible for the four programs for art purchases, outlined in the prospectus.

The first program, called “Renaissance Works”, “has been generated by 1% for Art funds from the Seattle Public Utility (SPU) which has as one of its responsibilities… the City’s recycling program. To draw attention to the function of the department and to focus on an apparent trend among some artists to use found materials in their artworks, the (SAC) is seeking artworks which use re-cycled materials as part of their creative expression. These artworks will become part of the SPU Portable Works Collection, currently numbering over 100 works… exhibited in SPU and other public locations.” Budget: $20,000 for purchases. (Sigh) What a cool idea!

The second, “Seattle Collects Visual Arts”, “…continues the SAC’s commitment to emerging, mid-career, and established individual artists… These works (part of a collection of over 1800 objects) are displayed in… the City’s municipal offices.”
Budget: $2,200 purchase award for emerging artists and $3-8,000 for more established artists. Keywords are “emerge” and “sustain”.

Through the third program, “Print Works”, SAC purchases “completed individual prints and print portfolios by local, regional or nationally recognized artists. In addition, SAC will select and fund an artist to produce a print edition. The collection is exhibited in municipal spaces and through public exhibitions in other locations”. Budget: $13,000.

Finally, and this should interest members of Nashville’s burgeoning filmmaking community, “The Moving Image” is a PFTA purchase award for artists who create digital works, film and video. The works supported reflect the vision of “an individual generative artist as the creator. Budget: $20,000.

Imagine Nashville Metro Arts Commission dispersing money for projects like these. Imagine picking up your duplicate driver’s license and stopping for a moment to look at the pretty picture. Then go to the candidate’s debate and demand that your next mayor advocate a PFTA provision.

Scene Notes

I thought July was supposed to be Nashville’s slow season! Think again. Don’t miss Zeitgeist’s “Introductions III”, which opens 7/17. This year’s episode features the work of Farrar Hood, Barry Jones and George Vitorovich. Also, don’t forget Michael Nott’s “Fin de Siecle” at Ruby Green (opening 7/16), and Jennifer Padgett’s “One Woman, Four Walls” at Local Color (opening 7/17).

Jay West, Dick Fulton and Bill Purcell went on the record. During the mayoral candidates’ forum at Cheekwood’s Botanical Hall ( 7/13), each in turn promised, if elected, to support a percent for the arts provision (PFTA) for Nashville. The standing room only event drew a crowd of 350 artists, arts administrators, gallery owners and arts supporters, many sporting red and white sticker/buttons proclaiming “I Love The Arts (And I Vote)”.

After the PFTA question, the rest was just conversation - albeit a friendly and enthusiastic conversation - rich in pol-speak and soft on specifics. However, there were some interesting admissions and omissions by the candidates, during the 1 1/2 hour long Q & A session. Chase Rynd pointed out to me after the forum that all of the PFTA talk centered on a percent coming from the city’s capital improvements. None of the candidates talked about Metro providing businesses with incentives to hop on the public art bus. Businesses voluntarily weaving purchased art into the building fabric of their facilities… it’s a grand idea, but experience shows that most will not invest in public art, unless they’re given something in return. When the candidates addressed the economic theory query, “Why not let the market decide…?” Purcell replied, “We tried that. It didn’t work!” Here, here!

Everybody’s favorite moment came about halfway through the forum– and whoever submitted “The Question” deserves a prize. The potential mayors were asked to disclose what subscriptions they held to arts programs (such as the symphony). Only Fulton actively participates in an arts organization. The Question’s second part required the candidates to specify which exhibit they’d attended most recently. “Uhhhhh… Normandy?” Well, sirs - just in case you get some free time in the next few weeks - here’s a listing of some worthwhile exhibits/events you can attend currently in Nashville, or which you missed in the past couple of weeks.

Sensory Overload

On 7/9, Trey Mitchell and the Sensored Magazine gang put on a “a multimedia event dedicated to building the art community in Nashville” at the Woodshed. Their vision for the thang was to “raise awareness of the Woodshed (as a creative vehicle) by holding the event there, and to raise awareness of Sensored by bringing the magazine to life. The event helped raise money to keep Sensored going,” said Mitchell. A worthwhile cause indeed. By all accounts “Sensory Overload” was a great success, and the latest issue of the magazine (#5), released that night, is the best yet. Sensored’s arts coverage is improving and the zine is beginning to look like the “Premier Creative Vehicle” it wants to be. All you readers who feel like there isn’t enough good arts writing in town and want to DIY: call Trey and submit your word-processed two cents for publication. Just be careful not to cross the line into “ridiculous self-indulgence”.

That night Larry Whitson’s exhibit of mixed media floral magnifications on canvas opened at Centennial Arts Center. The flowers are brut graphic renditions in boldly hued oils, centered on minimal, primarily white airbrushed backgrounds. The best of the images, like “Sunflower”, seem to vibrate and float off the canvas, due to Whitson’s Op-Pop chops. I dug the “Grass” paintings especially, which could have been titled “A Little Wildflower’s View of the World”. The eleven paintings in the exhibit comprise a strong transitional body of work by a painter who’s been showing for decades.

On 7/10, the Celebration of Cultures at Scarritt-Bennett Center illustrated how culturally diverse our city is. Throughout the day events showcased a Tradition-cornucopia of dance, food, music, talks on philosophy and spirituality, storytelling, puppet shows, painting and martial arts demonstrations. That afternoon at Cumberland Gallery, Sean Dudley and Sylvia Hyman gave a talk to about sixty art lovers and artists, as part of Cumberland’s continuing summer lecture series, “Close Encounters of the Art Kind” (on deck, Marilyn Murphy and Barry Buxkamper, 7/24 at 2 PM). By the way, the group show currently hanging at Cumberland is awesome and a must see.

That evening artsies hopped from well-attended opening to well-attended opening. Todd Green’s “Salvage” at JJ’s Market (see Unframed 7/6) appeared to be another sold-out success for the Nashville-based artist. The one-night-only event included popcorn, candied apples, balloons, carnival music and an appearance by the Planter’s Peanut Man. The next day “Salvage” was gone, replaced by four of Tom Wills’ colorful pastels. “The Surviving Trace”, Donna Tauscher and Lain York’s exhibit at the Fugitive Arts Center, also drew a nice crowd. A logistical conundrum, the show – essentially concept-based object poetics -consists of massive crates suspended above intimate prose scripted in cedar shavings on paper, lit from a source within the crates. The environment is tres New York and the installation a seamless collaboration between the two artists. The work manifests visually as an honest, emotive lyric on romance and remembrance, the resonance of which is cleverly ingrained in the installation design. Finally, Finer Things had a reception for “A Fine Line”, a showcase of “fine art furniture” or “functional art”, as Kim Brooks prefers to call it, by seventeen fine art craftspeople from around the country (including Craig Nutt, 1999 TAC Fellowship winner). Brooks said over 300 people attended the reception. All in all, not a bad weekend for the “slow season” for Nashville’s visual arts scene.

Last Note

I wonder how many of the Council candidates can answer The Question? Without their support, a PFTA provision will not pass.

Calling All Council Candidates

I’ve spent the past few days phoning all the City Council candidates and asking them one question: “If you’re elected, would you support a percent for the arts (PFTA) for Nashville?” I spoke with over forty of them, and the results were surprising.

Of the fifty-odd candidates with whom I spoke, or from whom I received a definitive response, forty indicated their support for a PFTA provision. The “yeas” include: Kevin Clark, James Richard Howarth, Tandy Rice, Chuck Sanford, Leo Waters, Melvin Black, ElGreco Gordon Brown (with a name like that, how could he not?), T.O. Kelley, Gene Parrish, Donnie Herford, Wilbert J. Jackson, Eileen Beehan, Bettye Balthrop, Rob Gaines, Gary Gentry, Phil Ponder, Charles French, James Bruce Stanley, Amanda McClendon, Don Ivancic, Jonathan Saad, Ricky Willis, Jim Hester, J.C. Smith, Ginger Hausser, Brianna Latham, Morris Haddox, Venita Lewis, Dorothy Wilson, Keith Pitts, James Taylor, Edward Frame, Bob Bogen, Jason Alexander, Tommy Bradley, Deborah Duncan, Don Knoch and David Bernt.

The only unequivocal “nay” came from Ralph Cohen. For him it seems public art = entertainment = “extra”. Other nays include Paul Collins and Edward Knight. Of the candidates who remain undecided on the PFTA issue, Michelle Arriola’s response to my query was most specific: her priority as a Councilperson would be “storm drainage”.

Most of the candidates were unfamiliar with PFTA programs in general (where the funding comes from, who would administer it, etc.). Many assumed such a program would mean increasing Metro’s budget by a percent, or that other programs would be cut to pay for that percent increase. Not true! Candidates, if you need to bone up on the nuts and bolts of successful PFTA programs around the country, call Tom Turk at the Metro Arts Commission (862-6720). MNAC has a clearinghouse of info, including actual ordinances, such as Seattle’s, that he would be happy to hand out. In fact, MNAC has helped draft a PFTA provision for Nashville, which had the misfortune of landing on Mayor Phil’s desk three days before the Dell deal happened. Hopefully, the next mayor and council can give the PFTA provision priority status. Passage of a PFTA bill would be the feel-good hit of the season, a “quality of life” coup. Afterwards, every elected councilperson who supported the bill could claim that he or she was responsible for helping forge Nashville’s cultural identity for the next millennium (and it would be the truth!).

Shaping Up Centennial

Sculptor Joe Sorci’s art heroes are Isamu Noguchi and Michelangelo, but his heavy metal pedigree comes via high steel construction. Sorci grew up in a steel town in western New York, the son of a steelworker. He made the transition to full-time artist a few years ago and has since been doggedly developing a nice resume chock full of exhibits and important commissions. For months Sorci’s been “pulling a Vulcan” in his Chestnut studio in preparation for “Shapes for the Millenium”, his installation of sculpture in the Centennial Art Center compound. Working closely with Janet Clough of Parks and Rec., Joe’s created a sculpture garden where until recently there was none. Sorci will continue to refine the installation through September 23, when the show officially opens.

“Shapes” will show through a cycle of seasons in the walled area behind and a few steps down from the CAC classrooms and exhibition space. Sorci plans to plant flowers around the compound walls to frame the installation with a burst of color. This site feature will serve to designate the outdoor exhibit area for part of the year, in the same way that lights designate art in a gallery. Benches will be installed to provide viewers a stopping place, from which they can take in the 3D array. “Shapes” is well conceived, showcasing the diversity of the sculptor’s experiments with form, materials, concept and color. The viewer enters the compound via the steps from the CAC fountain area. The only piece yet to be installed is “The Warrior”, a polished black Belgian marble piece, which will be erected in the fountain itself.

Sorci’s often-raw expressive treatments in stone and metal - sometimes finished with paint, patina or flame-generated markmaking, to emphasize design elements or conceptual features - are solidly grounded in his experiential vision. Several of the pieces in “Shapes”, like “Sunrise in the Village” and “Totem”, were inspired by Sorci’s touring of the American West’s Indian country. The aluminum cast wall piece entitled, “The Fossil”, is a map/codex describing the course of the Mississippi past Noranda Aluminum (New Madrid, Missouri), which commissioned the sculptor to create work utilizing materials integral to the company’s manufacturing process.
“The Spire”, the centerpiece of the exhibition that peaks above the walls enclosing the compound, references the artist’s spiritual connection with the land while he reaches for the sky. The exhibit’s circular flow is strong, which highlights the interesting combinations of elements in the sculpture: elegant contemporary aesthetic geometry/classically-rooted presentation features/tribal-based patterning. What holds the body of work together, though, is Sorci’s story of seeing, which he tells in graceful visual poetics a sculpture at a time.

Next Week

…We’ll cover three outstanding shows, which opened the weekend of July 17 (during Nashville’s slow season?!): Marla Faith at ArtSynergy, Michael Nott at Ruby Green and Introductions III at Zeitgeist.

Now Night, Soon Light

“Fin de Siecle” - which means “end of the century or cycle” - is the title of Michael Nott’s outstanding exhibit of paintings, currently on display at Ruby Green. The show, which opened July 16,is Wagnerian in its scope and intensity. The twelve pieces in the exhibit are large works bound together visually by Nott’s reduced but extremely effective use of materials (just black and red paint and gold leaf).
Conceptually, the show is just as expansive as the palette is minimal. Nott delves into the classics, especially the Aeneid, and emerges with a primer on the human condition, fraught with strife, conflict, drama and dread – and ultimately hope. He soberly presents this vision to the viewer in carefully chosen text and visual “samples” on big canvases that allow the idea/images room to breathe.

Aesthetically, Nott is influenced by abstract painters Ad Reinhart and Mark Rothko, and it shows. Nott’s paintings have the same physical presence that Reinhart and Rothko’s have – they seem to drain one’s body of inertia, whispering “sit, rest, see, remember.” Nott lived for several years near Rothko’s Chapel in Houston, and Nott’s black on black paintings bear the mark of the many hours he spent there. Rothko’s dark art womb was the final expression of space/art communion. Nott builds on this concept, providing the viewer points of departure for directed thought journeys.

Nott’s pedigree is in print and printing. Maybe it’s a genetic thing - his father did a stint working in a Hatch-type print shop, making labels for paint cans. Nott likes to point out that he’s “not a printmaker”, although for centuries there was only a wisp of a boundary separating printing and fine art printmaking. That said, Nott is obviously inspired by the ancient craft of printing, the mutable history of stylization in the print medium and the transformation of the tradition by the digital technology of the 20th Century.

The fulcrum of “Fin de Siecle” (say “fin deh say”) is the title piece for the exhibit, a 4’ x 8’ Lambda print. It essentially is a subjective - approaching random - map of the cultural and aesthetic associations that inform Nott’s art. “Fin de Siecle” consists of short historical biographies (such as the following one), which the artist has culled from encyclopedic sources and connects with pixel-thin white lines on a blue ground:

Derrida, Jacques (1930-    ), French philosopher and critic, the inventor of “Deconstruction”, the analysis of the language of literary and philosophical texts to identify their underlying metaphysical assumptions.

Nott installed a simple little red bench in front of this piece, indicating his intention that the viewer spend time to digest the print’s cataloged info-wealth. “Fin de Siecle” lived in a sort of binary limbo on computers for several years, until the technology (print and CPU) permitted its output into the real world. The Lambda print, basically a ridiculously “hi res” digital print on photographic paper, allows minute 5 point type to be readable without optical assistance.

What gives this piece – and by extension, this exhibition – its resonance is Nott’s breathtaking balancing act between the old and new. He appropriates and magnifies snippets of the past, reconfiguring the 2D fragments within the modern visual art idiom. However, Nott does so without degrading or disfiguring these artifacts capriciously, without denuding them of the unique characteristics that “place” them historically. He honors (which is why the gold he uses is appropriate, not tacky), animates and re-vitalizes them.

“Fin de Siecle” is an instructive show, in that it illustrates the viability of the artist reunifying the lessons of the past with the tools of the present. Yet Nott’s paintings constitute more than an object-discourse on canvas. From the black on black craquelure paintings “Lethe” and “Nunc Nox Mox Lux” in Ruby Green’s foyer to the blood red “Twenty” at the gallery’s far end, “Fin de Siecle” is full of surprises and rewards.

Introductions III

Introducing … VIDEO INSTALLATION!!! Zeitgeist’s latest installment of its “Introductions” series includes a conceptual piece by Barry Jones called “Pretend”. What’s significant about “Pretend”? According to Zeitgeist’s Lain York (a/k/a The Hardest-working Artist in Nashville), this is first time a video installation has been exhibited in a “mainstream” retail gallery.

“Pretend” is an emotional polemic on the perceptions/realities of schizophrenia. Jones’ brother is schizophrenic, so the content never seems gratuitous. The installation consists of a slideshow (a sequence of washed out film stills sampling cinematic representations of mental illness) projected on a psychology text, filmed on video and presented on a television. Arrayed in front of the monitor are three school desks, one of which is marked with the phrase, “I am not a killer.” The psychology textbook from the video has been placed upon the desk and opened to a page that contains a handwritten note from the artist. The tone of “Pretend” is sincere, though the social commentary approaches sermonizing. The danger of such message-based work is that the visual art can become second fiddle to the artist’s fervent attempt to modify the viewer’s thinking. In Jones’ case, the installation is personalized by a poem composed by his brother, providing the piece with jolting focal immediacy. The poem grounds “Pretend”, softening its conceptual rhetoric.

Although it’s surprising - given the quality of the work in the show - “Introductions III” is Jones, Farrar Hood and George Vitorovich’s first major exhibit.  Pastellist Farrar Hood, I was stunned to discover, is only twenty-two years old. Technically, her execution is impressive, as is the scale at which she renders her subjects (primarily portraiture and still lifes). Hood breaks no new ground with the figures, edibles and motifs to which she applies her precociously abundant skills, but her potential is obvious. Most promising is her flirtation with the breakdown of realism into abstraction. One hopes that, as her chops evolve, Hood’s inclinations as a portraitist will not smother the aesthetic risk-taking essential for an artist’s conceptual growth. My fave Hood is “Girl at Window”, a subtle and sure pastel, which immediately reminded me of Wyeth’s Helga series.

Vitorovich is a second generation Yugoslav-American raised in New York City and currently living in Bowling Green. He evinces a gift for visually manifesting archetypes and evoking the wonders of epic storytelling in compulsively dense mixed media images on wood boxes. Reminiscent of the great tales of mystical discovery (i.e., Gilgamesh, Illiad and The Lord of the Rings), Vitorovich’s art relies on recognizable symbols of psycho-spiritual drama and profundity. The lighthouse, tree (of life or knowledge), wolf, sleeping beauty, fountain, path through the woods – these are the building blocks for many a great story. Vitorovich utilizes these narrative linchpins to provide the viewer a visual experience akin to vivid dreaming. His articulation of the illustrative form is crisply proficient, his lushly layered grounds mesmerizing. He uses a clever mix of plaster, pigment, alkyds and mark-making to build images with texture and depth,  and invites viewer interaction (via the imagination) by building “buttons” and switches into the pictorial surface.  All Vitorovich’s epic lacks is a protagonist. The massive artistic effort involved in building this body of work, heroic though it is, cannot satisfy our craving for a Bilbo Baggins character to embody our fantasies of adventure.

Zeitgeist continues “Introductions III” with an opening on August 7 for three artists from the Southwest: Greg Murr, Jessica Brommer and Rand Clinton Smith, all of whom are represented by Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe. Think of it as a nascent artist exchange program

Memphis First?

In an ArtRadio interview on July 24, Tom Turk of MNAC told us that Memphis was going to pass its percent for the arts bill before we do. That’s quite a shame, considering that without MNAC’s efforts to help change State law so municipalities could enact PFTA provisions, it would be illegal to do so in Tennessee. If you want a PFTA ordinance for Nashville, call your candidate and let him or her know, then ask your candidate where he or she stands on the issue and vote accordingly.

Mea Culpa

We’ll get to Marla Faith at ArtSynergy and Michael Nott at Ruby Green over the next couple of weeks. I started writing about these cool shows and decided I just couldn’t squish ‘em all into one column.

Going for the Juggler

A working artist has to perform a balancing act on a daily basis. The creative endeavor – the Muse - has a consuming, seductive and jealous nature. An artist doesn’t generally have a nine to five mind (or schedule). Similarly, the art business often mimics the nature of the Muse – and can be just as consuming, seductive and jealous. If the community doesn’t support the artist, he has to supplement his income with other work. Teaching is the most common route artists take to that end, though as anyone who’s done it knows, teaching is just as demanding as art-making. The lack of security associated with the artist’s life can be hard on relationships. Significant others often are stymied by the rhythms and extremes of the creative process… and sometimes jealous of the artist’s affair with the Muse.

Samuel Dunson Jr.’s “Spiritual Destinies” are on view currently at In the Gallery.

SurvA

Moving is said to be one of the four most stressful things a person can do, but for an artist, a change of locale can revitalize his work and vision. There are many examples of this in the history of painting (Gaugin, O’Keefe and Agnes Martin come to mind immediately). In SurvA, Eric Johnston’s exhibit at Destination Gallery at First Union Tower, the viewer can trace the artist’s Transformation by Place through the three bodies of work on display.

Johnston’s strong conceptual focus through each series (probably honed during his time working as Kenneth Nolan’s studio assistant), his eye for scavenger beauty and his craftsman’s skill combine potently to instill in his artwork clear communicative power and resonance. The series of seven “shadowbox” framed object collages (grouped on the wall on the viewer’s right, if he has just entered DG via the Commerce St. doors) was completed in NYC. Except for the shiny happy Black & White woodcut faces that engage the viewer (establishing the series’ “subject”), all the materials in these constructions – even the finely finished frames and protective glass – were gathered by Johnston on “dumpster jumping” forays. The social/humanist commentary - intended by the artist or not – initiated by this subtle subtext is poignant. Johnston’s assemblages, fabricated from appropriated “throw-away” materials, speak to the concept of worth or mirth, buried in the city’s detritus (whether one refers to society’s discarded people or objects). Once the artist/salvager has spotted and been inspired by the “diamond in the rough”, all that’s required of the artist/salvager to revivify the castoff is compassionate commitment, care and craft. Johnston’s process works as a metaphor for reclaiming what’s lost or no longer valued.

As anyone who has lived in a city knows, the drama of valuation is intensified in the urban setting. The desperate shriek or raucous exultation – really, any outpouring of emotion, punctuating an event sequence - is simultaneously magnified and dispersed by the dense concentration of steel, concrete and stories (which shape the metropolis). Some people thrive on this experiential intensity, others are destroyed by it, and many simply are quietly consumed in the crush of volume. In these assemblages Johnston gives all of the players in the drama voice, and their beaming visages turn that drama into comedy, albeit a dark one.

The three constructions on the left wall, although created by Johnston using the same process, go further conceptually than the smiley face series. The tornado (“April 1998, Nashville”), cross (“Southern Cross”) and vessel (“Last Chance Gas”) relate internal states. They can be read from left to right on the wall, as a description of spiritual transformation. In these pieces Johnston is forced by the newness of his changed environment (these were built after his move to Nashville) to turn his vision outward. While Johnston’s attention is elsewhere, the viewer is afforded an unguarded approach into the artist’s sensibilities. Here we discover Johnston the expressive realist, who deftly uses symbols to mark the path by which he arrives at realizations and inspirations.

Finally, on the wall opposite the DG entrance, we witness Johnston’s transformation into a painter. His representational art is rooted in printing and printmaking, and his painting is rooted in post Ab-Ex “color field” techniques. The subject matter of these clean 2D panels derives from Johnston’s work in the lush garden behind his house. These paintings are at once sexy and strange, magnifying floral forms until they abstract into vaguely organic signs of rebirth.

“Faith” - depicting the “organs” of a flower superimposed on praying hands - is where this show culminates. It’s a powerful image, unabashedly fervent, stripped down to the essentials. For a guy having his first one-man show, Johnston displays a lot of trust in his viewer and confidence in his visual communication skills. “SurvA” is a great introduction to this artist’s work and aesthetic, both forthright and fresh. The exhibit opens August 20 and continues through September.

Faith Makes Room

Life Stages for Art

The “life” of an object d’art has several phases. The vaporous first stage of art-making can be described as “germination”. An artist has a vision, then embarks on a hunt for the missing pieces of his conceptual puzzle. Depending on his temperament, the artist’s search can be in degrees internal or external. Great art evinces both the maker’s unique “filters” (internal vision) and his context (external vision). In a perfect world, the valuation of artwork would reflect “germination”, the artist’s generative process. Unfortunately, the artist rarely is compensated for his initial creative investment, and attempts at valuing the “germination” can be misinterpreted as aesthetic sarcasm (refer to John Painter’s piece in Cheekwood’s “Concept Metro” for a great take on this).

The second phase of art-making involves the actual fabrication of the piece. Technique/method and concept/sensibility come together at this stage. In today’s “anything goes” art world, it’s okay for the artist to skew his work in the extreme, to stress technique or concept nearly exclusively. Most sustaining aesthetic traditions encourage a healthy balance between craft and vision, so that the artist and viewer can continue to communicate through the artistic medium. Again, the artist is generally expected to shell out the cost of materials, and if the work is on “spec”, there’s no guarantee of a return.

After the signature dries and its time in the studio ends, the artwork’s third stage of “life” - as a cultural commodity - has begun. The artist may romantically envision the artwork displayed by a dealer in a prominent gallery, sold for a good price and “retired” (stage four), a treasured heirloom in an important collection. Unfortunately, this event sequence is very rare. Most artwork never makes it to the gallery wall, much less into a collection.

What happens to art that never gets past stage two or three? If you’ve visited artists, you’ll know. “Art limbo” can look like this: paintings stacked in studios, closets, sheds, spare rooms, halls, attics, basements, storage units, and garages; small pieces stored in boxes, under beds, in dresser drawers, on shelves, in flat files and cabinets; 3D work (large) outdoors in gardens, yards… Prolific artists, for obvious reasons, have it hardest in this regard.

The artist can only give away so much art, before friends and family start to roll their eyes. Usually, at this point, a certain queasiness creeps into the artist’s guts. It’s a question of market value versus maker’s value, and what the art-maker invests in those first two stages of the art’s “life” doesn’t always add up in the latter two.

Faith Makes Room

One Nashville artist has come up with a slightly unorthodox solution for liquidating her space-eating unsold art. Marla Faith is having an art sale at ArtSynergy, and the price tags on her voluminous collection of charcoals, pastels, watercolors, oils, acrylics and collages are unbelievable. For thirty bucks (the cost of a pizza dinner for four) you can walk out the gallery door with an original piece of art.

Faith’s been accumulating artwork over a fifteen-year period, and she’s “Making Room for New Art” (the show’s title) by selling it at ridiculously low prices. Situating this exhibit/sale in an alternative exhibition space allows Faith to relax on presentation and focus on volume and price. In a show of this breadth (over ninety pieces), there’s something for everyone. Works range from big, dreamy, brightly colored canvases ($2- 300) to realist watercolors and sketches, chronicling an excursion the artist made to the Orient (starting at $50).

Faith, a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, has exhibited many of these pieces prior to “Making Room…” in galleries across the country and locally. She’s shifting her artistic focus to portraiture, and her old work was nagging at her. The need for a move forward helped her overcome reservations about breaking a rule of art retail: never lower your prices. “I’m no longer attached to them, “ Faith sagely/shyly told me at her opening.

Artists tend to think a lot about retail success, but their conclusions on the subject are generally porous. Faith said she thinks her work may be too “personal” to make it commercially, but the intimacy Faith shares with her viewer is her art’s greatest strength. Her work reads as a visually manifested analysis of her own romantic/emotional attachments and quest for inner healing. “Trust”, for example, is a stylistically gorgeous and poignantly symbolic painting depicting a man standing in a boat holding a woman above the waves by her ankles. Although Faith’s art seems to speak in the first person, anyone who wrestles with choice can identify with her images. Other gems in this show include just about all of her colored pencil sketches on paper (framed starting at $125 and unframed at $25) and some of the big charcoal/pastels in the downstairs gallery, like “Heart Muscle” (sold).

There are a few pieces in the show that feel unfinished, but that’s appropriate. “Making Room…” is about the value of the first two stages in art-making. For an artist, “germination” and fabrication are priceless – the juice that makes most artists go back to the well again and again, no matter what the market says. Ultimately, Marla Faith’s show at ArtSynergy is a testament to the power of the art bug and Faith’s aesthetic perseverance.

I’ve been asked by a bunch of artsies whether I’d be reviewing my own exhibition (with DddD) at In The Gallery. Of course, I replied in the negative. That would be ridiculously self-indulgent. However, I would like to share with you, faithful reader, my definition of art.

Defining art I believe to be a worthwhile, albeit pixilated, exercise. A definition of art is a chimerical thing, which changes for the artist as the artist changes. But an artist not inclined to bending his mind towards an understanding of his craft is generally not capable of building a meaningful relationship through his work with the viewer. There are certainly exceptions, but artists who avoid grappling with “What is art?” tend to make work that engages the viewer on physical, spiritual or emotional planes only. Kind of like the respective differences between a married couple humping, praying or crying together - and their lovemaking with an eye towards conception. The first three acts have their place, but ultimately what’s a marriage for, anyway?

So, for the record, here goes. Please note that this definition of art was composed at 2 A.M., in the heart of darkness of a brutal five-month production schedule. If the following resembles poetry, it is because I was writing in a state of delirium on very small canvas scraps, which may or may not have been reassembled later in the proper order. I do know that many of the more oblique-seeming riffs refer directly to pieces in the show, “In Sickness & In Health”.

What Is Art?

What is Art? What
Is Art the night? A drama of seekers
Smashed against the shadow of shunning?
- asking who will feed us (with bellies
full of nothing)? What
Is Art the scolding stripper
This night of two-way wanting buttercup
of the warm soft bed & slumber/
spider of the web of material versus
illusion alone bleak grim spore king jabber
-ing victory over self

Is Art the empty pocket pride
of knowing? What is that?
Will Death ignore me? His gun of
white steel on black shoulder resting
or sharp-jawed bear trap unhanded
‘ere a cold shrill embrace wrestling
the shrine of my pale remembrances
to the soaked thirsty earth - What
asylum does my vision afford me?

Will any Art assuage me of the
piercing crack (that smothering
that eggshell tomb laid open)
where man no woman can go
What is Art to this chastisement? What
Is Art a pill, a hushing fog?
No safe harbor there but treacherous
dreams and prickly lack, sham
stature, posing wide against the thin

“Elate me, undress me, pluck petals
from my rose!” What is Art? What
Is Art the grate to the City’s sewer
an auburn jelly, scaly crust, crumbs
yay eck roo la la sh meh ta da da
What? A wager? a fungal cloud
of vapor a disc ladder an inky veil
a nagging leech a cowl a dog
track a pillow a petrie dish a

chaste nostalgia a trophy?
What is Art? What room have you
built for her offspring, her blindness,
her ignorance of numbers and
peculiar reason? Which corner
will she stand in or crouch, her
hands between you and her eyes,
her 24k eyes or yellow eyes say
your filter? How will you paint

her walls of gesso and gypsum are
devoid the usual tremors of longing
are denuded and drab, stained by neglect
and correctness, dimly lit and bubbled
by the transmuting power of the Lie -
All is All and All is good (in this realm
of charitable murther, green wine,
bondaged land, shorn lambs, anthills
and craters)? - What? Who says this?

One who has seen it or one who has
run his fingers across bumps which
depict it? No matter. I stretch like a
cable cross the continent, bending grass
into barbed wire engines that roar
mantras techno smoke chants that
drown the Lie in cinders made of my
charred soul which is chained to
this conflagration fuel, booming low
like thunder and preceded by a cleansing
wind, erasing the tollgates and

What is Art? What
Is Art a mocking, a crash plane
on three points, a vibrating copper
wire contacting shiny maps of
dissipation? Is Art a window or a
spinning record, a flame in the
head backed by a model aiming a
gun - What? Is Art a notched stick?
Is Art a volume, a moving orb in
cosmic broth, an impression of lightbeams

witnessed by midgets, pygmies of gravity,
unbelievers in gaudy gowns, glittering
phantasms promising a bounty of
pleasures beyond the slavery to caste
and ragged urchins begging, beasts
of mimicry and bloated croakers
selling gimmicks, jawbreakers and
poetry, chilled by the icy waters -
of production, value and What
Is Art a liquid breath, a dirt-bound
sailor’s bottled ship, a key broken

in an antique brass-plated lock,
on a trunk adorned with proof of
passage, the skeletal remains of our
missing link, an impossible purchase,
a potsherd, the split burnt killed
oak, stabbed by a bolt hurled from
above, wrecked by a titan’s fist for the
fun of it and just to remind you who’s in
charge? What - “Yes,” as my head turned
and shook in the negative.

All I wanted was a song to sing,
a naming, a war, a home,
a fruitful field, no, a mountain
family rising out of the ocean, sea
mist in my nostrils, a ship full of
brothers and a love to return to,
sons and daughters safely on the
shore sharing my world, small as
it ever is.