Across the nation, critics are asking if we dare ignore an artist who has generated a billion dollars in sales. The often-strident debate about Jeff Koons centers on the unquestionable fact that some artists whose works were reviled at first were later elevated into the pantheon of masters. Does our age wish to be identified by posterity with those who ignored Van Gogh and rejected Warhol? That Koons’ art falls so far short of them borders on irrelevant here: what counts are bodies through the turnstiles and cash in the till.
Happy Utah, then, where a very different conversation opens up. Perhaps the most useful and accurate definition of art is this: that part of any endeavor learned by practice under supervision of someone who learned from a previous teacher in the same way. Thus masters turn apprentices into journeymen, a process that now occurs primarily at colleges, where working artists engage promising students in a hands-on version of the Socratic method. The Biennial Faculty Exhibition at Weber State, running until mid-November, is where those teachers publicly demonstrate the decisive qualities that inspire their students to pay attention. Then for two weeks in December, their latest crop of graduates will reply, equally publicly, by holding the Fall BFA Thesis Exhibition in the same gallery. Anyone interested can eavesdrop on the discourse within Utah’s influential community of art-makers.
Two things are soon apparent on entering the Shaw Gallery. The first is that, to paraphrase The Wizard of Oz, we’re not in Utah any more. No rugged, majestic redrock; no visions of angels; no illustrated parables. Anyone who doesn’t enjoy a visit to UMOCA or CUAC will find little pleasure here. A work like Jason Manley’s “Drive Through,” a free-standing aluminum girder-and-truss structure festooned with illuminated signs, presents a view of Utah here and now, rather than out there and then, that will alienate some viewers. Sure, our cities look like this, but do we need to see it reproduced here? Can’t we recollect the park where we spent our vacation instead? “Drive Through” argues that a vacation is valued precisely for its escape value, and that we should expend a little more contemplation on the place where we spend most of our actual lives.
A second impression concerns the challenge of large groups. This single, cubical room proffers over 30 artists, requiring individual works to rise above their surroundings. Finding breathing room for individual artworks conventionally involves a cellular arrangement that leaves most of them isolated, if not asphyxiated to the point where all but the strongest blend into the grid and disappear. This exhibition marks the debut of gallery director Lydia Gravis, who has broken the spell by breaking the first rule. In most galleries, pylons—moveable wall-like units—are used to divide a big, square space into smaller, still square, room-like spaces. In too many galleries, keeping the pylons parallel to the walls seems like the 11th Commandment. Gravis’s choice to arrange them on the diagonal here gives the two-dimensional works hung on them a reasonable approximation of the power and autonomy of the sculptures standing among them on their own feet, like Kathryn Bradshaw’s “Kmb,” a life-sized human figure made of invisible tape that solidifies the boundary between where the figure was and where she’s never been. Maybe getting painting off the wall is a necessary step on the way to giving it the sovereignty of “Kmb” and its contemporaries. In any event, a higher percentage of the works in this show speak clearly, in their own voices, than might otherwise be expected.
Of course, no artist wants her curatorial efforts to distract from her studio work. Lydia Gravis and K Stevenson are both represented here by medium-sized drawings akin to those they showed, alongside Al Denyer’s, at the Alice Gallery in March, where they demonstrated a coherent, while still free-swinging approach to the newly elevated art of drawing. Recalling that occasion, it suddenly strikes me that there may be a third lesson on display here. Academic custom separates drawing from printmaking, and both from graphic design, each its own discipline with its own avatars here. And yet every successful work of visual art must first succeed on the abstract level. Set aside content, narrative, whatever: if the viewer doesn’t feel confident that the artist is in control of the design, the work starts out at a disadvantage. And if, in the end, unity and coherence do not emerge, then the work fails on the most essential level and falls back into the primordial, visual soup from which all art emerges. Here we see Weber State grounding artists in crucial design skills. Alongside Gravis and Stevenson, Gretchen Reynolds’ “Indelible Nature of Unconditional Love” series in Sumi ink recalls Alexander Calder, the celebrated inventor of the mobile and the less-well-known master of drawing in 3-D, with wire in place of graphite. Emily King’s “Horses for Days”—as in, I drew horses for days on end—begins in a stunt: how many square yards of paper can she fill without making a mistake? But as well ask, How many variations can a drawing subject undergo before something unprecedented emerges? Computers come into play in Mark Biddle’s “Everything Half Off,” Joshua Winegar’s untitled photo of light in water, and especially in Molly Morin’s magnetic “North, South, East, West: Mosquitos Like Asteroids” and “Sine Wave: Through Laboring Lips.” In these geometric essays, as densely built up as the hundred layers of hand-rubbed lacquer on a hotrod builder’s labor of love, the perfection of a mere line becoming a two-dimensional skeleton of an eventual three-dimensional illusion contrasts with the hand-made, deliberately imperfect paper on which it is imprinted.
Jeremy Stott’s logos and Larry Clarkson’s heraldic emblems might generate less excitement than do more philosophic musings, even as Clarkson’s sheer size and aggressive bravura may win some fans not moved by Stott’s reticence. Yet their designs, like the product packaging shown here in other years, complete the circle begun by Jason Manley’s scaffold. We need to pay more attention to our surroundings, on every level, if we’re not willing to live in an ugly and degrading world. It’s a point also delivered poignantly by Angelica Pagel, in “Feeding the Soluble Fish,” or Kent Ripplinger’s “Monument Vallery Sunset”: two slideshows that speak in today’s digital language about time passing and timelessness.
Two extraordinary artists who are also professors stand out in this august group. Susan Makov and Jim Jacobs are retiring this year, a loss to the Weber community but a potential gain for the gallery audience. Artists who teach compromise their focus and energy, even as they may gain immeasurably from daily conversation with a community of artists. Makov has achieved mastery in the old sense, the way artists were expected to in past centuries. Her command of graphic imagery, both technically and aesthetically, appears to be encyclopedic, as witness her range of work, including paintings, book bindings, and printed works: broadsides, texts, and illustrations. Her former students have become influential teachers in turn, who will continue to teach the high standards evident in her definitive, energetic lines and sharp embossings, especially in graphically complex images of animals and their anatomies. In the five images here, she transforms potentially conventional ecological statements into piercing lessons viewers may try to turn away from, but which once seen are unlikely to be shaken off. Their power comes in part from her close association of pollution, here represented by trash, and birds not normally associated with humans, and so immune to the self-loathing that causes humans to denigrate pigeons, seagulls, and other overly familiar species. More to the point, the trash also suggests homes destroyed by natural disasters like hurricanes, putting viewers in the same predicament: victims of recoiling nature.
One exception demonstrates the effectiveness of Makov’s deep skill set. In the bird-less painting “Pile,”light-colored glyphs on a black ground generate a mountain of trash. Down into the middle of this cuts an area of stark white, giving a sense of depth to the massive heap, but suggestive also of an architectural interior, as if the point was that we dwell in just such a pile or our own trash. Here again, “Nest,” in which baby birds peer out into another trashed landscape, makes the point that in the sealed terrarium we share, we cannot escape the fate we create for others.
Jim Jacobs is also interested in what happens when humanity comes in contact with things non-human. But rather than working comfortably within a technical domain he has mastered, he restlessly challenges theoretical boundaries, as if eager to find out what he can do with his skills that no one has done before. Those who follow him have watched as he successively built up bas-relief details on his canvases, then punched out the negative spaces between, leading to remarkably rich compositions-in-depth: abstractions in which the material elements have their own voices instead of representing something else. The results can be seen either as paintings in which depth becomes real, or sculptures in which space is an illusion the artist controls, recalling Rosalind Krauss’s assertion that realistic sculpture climaxed, during the 19th century, in bas relief. At the risk of hyperbole, Jacobs might just be doing the most exciting art in Utah at this moment, and the idea that he will be spending more time in the studio is as thrilling to the critic as it may be anxiety-productive for him.
In the three sculptures here, Jacobs crystallizes a longtime theme: the erroneous notion that there exists a clear divide between the human and the natural. As Darwin showed convincingly, and Jacobs has demonstrated aesthetically, human beings fit within nature and do not require any separate act of creation. In the three works here, the evidence takes an almost literal turn. Employing skills sufficient to fool the eye, he vividly envisions continuity between wildly growing, free-form trees and manmade lumber. These transitions can be traversed in either direction, from one end that celebrates the organic growth of branch, leaf, and annual rings, or from the other end that glorifies grain patterns and the elegance of geometry in action. But art is never just a theology lesson, and as Jacobs’ branches turn into sprays, flexible fountains of wood that curve through space, or rise up from the floor on parabolic roots, they express the fact, and sometimes also the joy, of a mind and heart at one with nature.
Weber State University’s Biennial Faculty Exhibition is at the University’s Shaw Gallery through November 15.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
