and though I was fascinated by what I saw, the fact that I was allowed to interact with it, I was unsettled by the way he de-mythologized an image whose greatest asset is its weirdness.
The New Masters
SAIC's 2003 MFA Exhibition
If the undergraduate exhibition was difficult to categorize and encapsulate in a cogent, yet somewhat entertaining review, this year's Masters of Fine Art exhibition at Gallery 2 was impossible. I told myself I wouldn't try - yet I ended up hunting for overarching themes anyway. Unsurprisingly, the common threads I found were strikingly similar to those I unwound in April: ideas like nostalgia, consumerist critique, memory, process, and pacifism.
In an essay on the art market in his book Air Guitar, Dave Hickey borrows Ed Rucha's expression: "I wanted to achieve "Huh? Wow!" (as opposed to 'Wow! Huh?')" As an art critic I'm still figuring out exactly how I judge quality in artwork, so this particular dialectic - whether an artwork made me think before it dazzled me, or whether it dazzled me and then puzzled me - was a question I asked myself again and again.
Shawn Lawson and Wafaa Bilal's installation (Quicktime required), for instance, supplied a big initial wow: a flat-screen monitor encased in a gilded frame was mounted on the wall, revealing the iconic image of Manet's painting "The Bar at the Folies Bergere." When I walked in front of it, I saw myself in the mirror behind the barmaid. Then the image dissolved from the work of Manet to Lawson and Bilal's live-action recreation of the scene, with an eerie look-alike actress cast as the barmaid. She looked at me, somewhat confrontationally, and my reflection remained behind her. Wow! Yet the inevitable huh? came afterward - the enduring enigma of Manet's painting is the question of whether or not there is a mirror behind the barmaid, and though I was fascinated by what I saw, the fact that I was allowed to interact with it, I was unsettled by the way he de-mythologized an image whose greatest asset is its weirdness.
One thing that stood out in work from the MFA students was that they used to their advantage their obligatory background in art history, yet its influence often manifested itself in surprising ways. While Bilal and Lawson tweaked an iconic Post-Impressionist masterpiece with the aid of contemporary technology, it looked as if Jaye Rhee did too with "Cherry Blossoms," a twelve-channel video installation that recalled Van Gogh's painting of a flowering almond tree, itself influenced by the Japonisme trend of the late 19th century. Rhee's work looked fresh and captivating because the cherry blossoms took on a curious, inorganic appearance when rendered by a video camera.
Meanwhile, Megan Rodgers took a cue from the Surrealists' obsessions with dreams and symbols and presented a literal record of her unconscious life with "Dream Catalogue," a painstakingly indexed library-style card file of her dreams, catalogued alphabetically and cross-referenced by subject. Nearby was a heavy wood table and chairs, complete with a traditional green reading lamp, for visitors' quiet perusal and intimate study of Rodgers' dreams. She created a lighthearted tension between the very private, mysterious, chaotic sphere of dreams and the public, scientific, organized sphere of a library.
While Rodgers literalized the subconscious mind, Malin Lindelow made use of the allegorical realm of myth. Her installation "Embedded (Tales from the Rhizome)" accomplished the difficult task of truly removing the viewer from the hectic gallery environment and into a secluded, private world. In a small room filled with wood, moss, dirt and forest sounds, Lindelow placed an oversize storybook with two sets of headphones that supply separate narrations, one for each gender. Her fairy tale of self-discovery was a sort of Mad Lib-style exercise in which each recording supplied (heterosexually) gender-appropriate pronouns for listeners. Whether Lindelow's goal was to imply that subconscious desires are directly, naturally affected by one's gender or that our gendered experience is dictated to us by culture was unclear, but the musky-smelling, enchanted environment in which she posed these questions was enchanting.
Another entry into the "wow! huh?" faction was Ryan Wade Davis' meticulous re-creation of the stage from Elvis' '68 Comeback Special in an installation called "Get Rhythm." The stage was bare except for a microphone stand and amp playing Davis' own recording of a Johnny Cash song that Cash wrote for Elvis but was never recorded. Without the accompanying wall text, I wouldn't have guessed - so it seemed to be an exercise in fame versus obscurity. Or it's simply about loving Elvis. Or Johnny Cash - I think.
This is not to say that a "wow! huh?" reaction is inferior, necessarily. With all due respect to Ed Ruscha, it might be exactly what the artist wants to communicate, especially when appropriating and deconstructing a familiar image. Though Ruscha's Pop sensibilities meant that he wanted the viewer to recognize the proverbial icon first, and notice its re-contextualization as art afterward, it seems that Lawson/Bilal and Davis want the audience to notice the installation, and the status of the object/image as art first and then ruminate on its inherent cultural familiarity.
This is not to say a clever installation itself has ceased to attract my attention. Paola Cabal's "Here Tomorrow," a floor-wall painting created specifically for this exhibition, replicated in paint the tonal grey shadows that its adjacent window cast on it. The perfection of its site-specificity was fascinating - it is rare to see a work created for a space that not only makes use of the space, but concerns the nature of the space itself - especially indoors and particularly in a gallery setting. This was both conceptually and formally remarkable. Since the painting's subject is shadows, which are inherently changeable, the visible content of the wall transformed itself as the incoming light did during the course of the day.
Christopher Rose's "Untitled Pink" and "Blue Riot Paintings" were stylized blow-ups of photographic source material, mimicking the jagged pixels of a dot-matrix printer. Yet he doesn't stray into Chuck Close or Gerhard Richter territory here - he manages to make the source disappear and create a new look entirely, outlining his figures with shiny paint marker and inserting patterns into areas of the candy-colored scheme. Aimee Elizabeth Stern's portrait of a masked trio - looking like a family of Lone Rangers or Zorroes - was accompanied by a cape and mask hanging on the wall, presumably a costume of one of her subjects. It seemed as if both Stern and Rose have a sense of humor about their paintings without making them overtly funny.
There were photographs with found object sculpture as well, like Ciprian Contreras' Jeff Wall-ish "object landscapes" coupled with a found object installation, "Shoe Star" - quite literally a five pointed star on the gallery floor, comprised of retro-cool shoes and connected shoe-laces. Also toying with "landscape" as concept was Lisa Stinner, whose photographs of empty or ignored spaces at places like the Field Museum, Navy Pier and Merchandise Mart communicated loneliness in their tourist-ridden, commercialized, hectic contexts.
In an exceptionally busy spring art season, the MFA exhibition held its own as a art-lovin' destination. So many of the graduates were mounting their work in other exhibitions - including high-profile shows at ArtChicago, the Stray Show, ArtHotel, ArtBoat - I couldn't keep count. As for the hundred-odd artists I haven't discussed here, there's no question whether they will be successful, because most of them are already there.