Speaking of art . . .
by Geoff Wichert
A painting by Sunny Belliston hanging this month in the main gallery of the Central Utah Art Center (CUAC) looks something like a segment of wooden flooring that has been tilted upright and painted black. Narrow vertical stripes have been assembled—collaged—into a whole, rather then subdivided from the larger area. Up close, we see these long, narrow parts were derived from a variety of sources: paper and the like collected by the artist. These were painted black, taking the paint according to their different qualities, then sanded to abrade some paint off here and some of the collaged matter there.
During a recent lecture at the CUAC, which I previewed in this blog, Jeff Lambson pointed at this work and said Clyfford Still might have painted it. As someone who has taught art history, I was taken aback by this remark. Still painted interpenetrating, overlapping cloud-like shapes of richly saturated color that generate strong sensory impressions and emotional responses. Belliston’s canvas, by comparison, looked flat and felt cerebral, possibly reflecting on the philosophical nature of identity or the composite character of knowledge. But mine is only one response, one set of eyes, and I waited to hear the speaker explain the connection he had suggested. He didn’t. Other than to note its worn, weathered look and the found paper materials collaged in it, he said nothing about any of the work on display.
It should come as no surprise that one lecturer (two years ago I gave eight monthly lectures at the CUAC, and will speak there again in February) may disagree with another’s approach or opinions. Furthermore, that a writer invites his readers to what turns out to be a disappointing event is a risk we all take. But some standards should apply, and so here are some examples of good moments and bad from that appearance at the CUAC, and some that started well but went astray of the mark. Responses are encouraged.
The lecture I heard began well enough. The speaker stood amid his audience and addressed them in a relaxed and friendly manner, and encouraged them to respond to the art. In this, he contrasted with a recent event at the UMFA, which saw a supposed expert standing behind a podium, addressing a room full of journalists who grew restive when one among them began to engage the expert in a conversation that he did not encourage.
One thing a speaker does is set the tone. At the CUAC, the target mood was not only relaxed, but aspired to comedy. The speaker, whose job title, “curator,” has yet to appear in the dictionary, called himself an art critic, which he said means he “gets to make fun of art.” “Art Critic” is not all that popular a role in this society, and such gentle self-mockery might have been meant to help break the ice. But he followed it with some equally irreverent comments about historical art that strained credulity. They could have been boldly rhetorical, said for effect, but if so, they should have been corrected once the point was made.
Who knew that, as he stated categorically, before 1850 all art was propaganda, its topics and treatments dictated by Church, wealthy patrons, and national governments? (Leonardo da Vinci is only one artist who would find this surprising.) Or that the 1800s then saw the universal rise of “art for art’s sake,” in which artists had no interest in subject matter. “The Impressionists didn’t care what they painted; they painted any old thing. . . . They were only interested in the play of light.” This would no doubt have been a revelation to Monet, who never painted tense marital scenes, or Degas, who did. As for social issues, artists were not permitted—though we weren’t told who forbade them—to introduce those until after Modernism, a movement that occurred in the 1960s, when art was about “nothing at all.” But Post-modernism is distinguished for its introduction of social concerns that prior artists had not been allowed to touch. Case in point: Lambson’s own entre into art, the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he now recognizes as a species of illustrators with no social or political concerns.
One point that started well but fizzled began when the speaker asked his listeners about their involvement in MySpace and Facebook. Their response was nearly universal and very enthusiastic. Had he been able to link this topic in some way to the art surrounding him, he might have forged a real bond between his audience and today’s art. But having identified one of the salient features of present-day society, he failed to show any connection between these popular media and today’s art world, let alone the art he was there to explicate and promote. Instead, he reiterated his belief that Sunny Belliston wants us to see the landscape differently, as if that hadn’t been true of other artists in the centuries since Claude Lorrain legitimized the genre in the seventeenth century.
Someone acquainted with events leading up to the lecture told me that the subject was changed at the last minute from its promised topic—the art on view, which the two artists had reportedly failed to explain adequately to the speaker—to one with which the speaker was more comfortable. That was supposed to be “contemporary art,” another ill-chosen term that is often used to mean what “modern” used to mean. In fact, by the time he was done it was impossible to tell what he meant by “contemporary.” At one point, he said it was the stuff museums turned to buying when artists like Damien Hirst became too expensive for them. But if Hirst isn’t “contemporary,” who is? He made his best point of the evening when he argued that a contemporary artist is one who engages in the discourse of today’s art, but he didn’t explain what that is or what its issues are.
Instead, he talked about prices, museums, and collectors, without distinguishing the discourse from the market. They are not the same thing, but are parallel lines that meet only in the imaginary future, when we like to think esteemed contributions to art must inevitably rise in price. Until they do, one hundred million dollars paid for a Damien Hirst can only prove what that kind of conspicuous display has always proven: that some people have more money than sense. And good sense doesn’t just apply to questions about money. In an age of rampant and unregulated education, some caution is necessary in deciding whether to believe a given expert, and when to doubt.
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image: The Last of England. 1855, by Ford Madox Brown. The City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Forced by the Enclosures off the land that had sustained their agrarian lifestyle for generations, these displaced persons here set sail for an uncertain fate in Australia. Arguably the best known Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Last of England exemplifies the complex literary, historical, economic, social, political, and artistic concerns of the art movement that gave rise to the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, historical and fantasy fiction, and the William Morris Talent Agency.
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