Lucid Dreaming
by Beth Elaine Wilson

It's a Fine Line...

“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver.”

A few weeks ago, I found myself at the checkout counter of the grocery store, just in front of an acquaintance of mine from Rosendale. It emerged in our chat that she regularly reads this column, but skipped it last month because I had turned it over to Karen Elliot. “I guess you’re really busy fixing the house you just bought,” she said. I felt a simultaneous wave of gratification and remorse: gratification to know that someone would think so highly of my writing as to skip it when it wasn’t me writing the column, and remorse because, well—I am Karen Elliot also. It was a playful little game, based on the fact that Dr. George O’Mara is also a construct/stand-in/alter ego for one of the Inartco artists, and I enjoyed imagining a conversation between these two at least partly imaginary people, as a way to open up the very real “differentness” of what the show at Deep Listening was about.

Truth be told, I was fast approaching burnout last month, as happens occasionally with me. I just get really tired—it borders on ennui—with art attitudes and artspeak and the insufferable egos that go along all too often with any sort of art “scene”. Not that I want to add fuel to the fires of those who always find artistic or creative thought threatening or alienating, and who have developed a certain knee-jerk, reactionary response to perceived attacks upon their “culture”. It’s a difficult subject to broach in a column such as this—the cultural lines of demarcation are drawn so that once one enters the “public” sphere (aka the world of mass publication), any self-reflexive impulse, any real critique of the dynamics of the artworld tends to come across in a way that merely fans the flames of that good old American standby, anti-intellectualism.

So I continually find myself sailing between the Scylla of artworld pretension and the Charybdis of reactionary cultural suspicion–it’s telling that I have seen the quote at the beginning of this column attributed at different times to 1) one of several radical Surrealists on the prowl in Paris in the 1930s and 2) Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister for Adolph Hitler. I guess it depends upon what exactly you mean by ‘culture’, and what your relationship is to it.

And just to confuse the issue even more, there’s the sort of New Agey aesthetic that is often quite popular in these parts, the one that insists that art and artistic expression should be products of the pure soul, and that they should resonate with a consistently healing, peaceful energy (usually having to do with the color purple). While art, and particularly art-making, certainly can be healing phenomena, an uninterrupted diet of this sort of stuff can have a sort of Stepford Wife effect, and I’m not sure the results are as universally beneficial as the promoters of this work would like to believe. From where I stand, deep and meaningful spiritual development can, and often does, involve rupture and separation as much as it does soulful harmony. I am reminded of the story told me recently about a new acquaintance, who had started doing yoga five times a week (thus making it really a spiritual practice), calming himself from the inside out and changing radically his relationship to himself and others in very positive ways. In the process, he left his wife—evidently the relationship was predicated on a set of older, more dysfunctional patterns that the wife for whatever reason couldn’t abandon, and the marriage ended.

Art that speaks to me often has just this sort of quality—it will turn me upside down for a bit, make me think about something or somebody in a different and sometimes very uncomfortable way, in the long run giving me more information than I had before, and the potential for a deeper insight into how this crazy world works after all. To paraphrase Richard Hamilton in reverse, perhaps this is just what makes today’s art so difficult, so unappealing.

Sigmund Freud wrote a famous essay in the ‘teens on “The Uncanny,” the sort of weirdness-effect that was to be used to great advantage by the Surrealist movement in the ‘20s and ‘30s, whereby the familiar is made strange. Freud based his discussion on a short story by Hofmann, in which a man falls in love with an automaton, in effect a giant, life-like doll. I am reminded of this story, and its uncanny effects, by the life-size ceramic women created by artist Katherine Ruttenberg, who will be showing her most recent work at Davis & Hall Gallery in Hudson later this month.

In this new work (and reportedly there will be plenty of it), Ruttenberg has begun to clothe her roughly-formed, somewhat clumsy figures in “real” dresses, flimsy material that plays off the texture and weight of the ceramic bodies. Looking at a photograph of one of these pieces, one might be tempted to think of it as a resident in a rather rough-hewn dollhouse—but one look at the dimensions, and you realize that these are life-size figures, which impose themselves on the viewer, engaging the space like a fellow human, but with their own uncanny twist. She displayed some similar work in the “Utopia/Dystopia” show at Byrdcliffe last year, but those pieces were displayed (as with everything in that show) outside, and the earthy qualities of the ceramic tended to blend in with the landscape. In this show, I anticipate that the works will stand out more in the constructed interior space of the gallery, creating what I hope will be an even more pronounced interaction with the viewer.

A few side notes:
Core Gallery in New Paltz will be presenting a rather brave program of 8 Weeks of Installation and Performance from February 15-April 15, including an evening of live electronica, various installations, and an intriguing performance by Danielle Leventhal and Carolyn Lambert on March 24 and 25, in which “two women explore intimacy while confined to a restricted, yet public space within the gallery,” and their conversation will be broadcast throughout the space.

Rumor has it that even though the official deadline has passed, the Kingston Sculpture Biennial still has some slots available for sculpture submissions. The Biennial will open this year on July 15, but interested artists should contact the curator, George Donskoj, as soon as possible at 339-2996.

Katherine Ruttenberg, “Human Material,” March 17-April 14, at Davis & Hall Gallery, 362½ Warren Street, Hudson, (518) 822-8258.

8 Weeks of Installation and Performance, through April 15, at Core Gallery, 11 Church Street, New Paltz, 255-1600.