Backbone > Lucid Dreaming
Fact or Fiction?
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Fairy tales rarely document happy events, unless they’ve been slickly
bowdlerized in a Disney production. The originary for these common stories was to tell a tale that would enthrall its listeners, draw them in to a marvelous, almost unbelievable world in which animals and witches with frighteningly effective evil powers could create chaos in the lives of simple millers, bakers, woodsmen, and their children. Reading the unexpurgated version of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Household Tales reveals a catalogue of trauma, injustice, and revenge, and the endings are not unequivocally happy, as at the conclusion of “Fundevogel”, which closes with the considerably less-than-reassuring observation that “then the children went home together and were heartily delighted, and if they are not dead, they are living still.”

The stories are populated by abused children, wicked step-parents, and a wide array of superstitiously charged objects and spells, that simply lie in wait to trip up anyone unlucky enough to encounter them. After a thorough review of these stories, it seems clear that the function of such tales was anything but soporific—indeed the original, bloodthirsty versions would inspire more nightmares than sweet dreams if used as bedtime stories. And yet we continue to find the form compelling. The invocation “Once upon a time…” carries a magical spell of its own, one that is difficult to resist. It carries with it the promise of a story, a narrative, a tale of a place that we mig ht never arrive at on our own. The lure is undeniable.

The perennially enticing quality of the story is the hook of an exhibition now on display at the New York State Museum in Albany, entitled (of course), “Once Upon A Time.” Organized by Maura Heffner from the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, it is part of an ongoing series of exhibitions at the State Museum showcasing work from other major cultural institutions. An ironic aspect of the show (left entirely unmentioned in any of its informational material) is the fact that for much of the 20th Century, storytelling was quite explicitly out of vogue in modern art. In the formulation of the powerful critic Clement Greenberg, telling stories was about narrative, and narrative was something that happens in literature, not visual art. The goal, according to him, for all true modern art was to remain true to the conditions of its own media—stories are told in words, and modern pictures are about color and two-dimensionality. There was to be no mixing of the literary into the visual, which had been the mistake of all those schlocky 19th-century academic painters, who were forever painting Greek gods and goddesses, and anecdotes from history.

This sort of purist notion of what art was all but abandoned by the 1970s, when the star of Modernism began to wane and a rag-tag group of new approaches began to coalesce into something called Post-Modernism. A prime example of this new outlook is present here in Mary Kelly’s “Primapara, Manicure/Pedicure” series from 1974. A row of ten small, simply framed black-and-white photographs document Kelly trimming the nails of her infant son, at once preserving the intimacy of the act and formalizing it aesthetically to make it art. Kelly’s project was explicitly feminist: She created an extended series of artworks-cum-documentary of her experience as a new mother, exploring the relationship between herself and her son in often openly psychoanalytic terms, pointedly critiquing the often misogynist ideas of Freud and Lacan while telling the story of her own frequently conflicted experience of motherhood. But the personal, documentary content of this piece seems to belie the premise of the exhibition: the subtitle of the show is “Fiction and Fantasy in Contemporary Art,” but neither term seems to apply to the reality foregrounded in this piece.

Other work in the show ranges from the comic (Vik Muniz’s photograph preserving his rendition of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, drawn in Bosco chocolate syrup) to the astonishingly beautiful (Josiah McElheny’s blown-glass fantasy artifacts ‘documenting’ an entirely imaginary woman devoted to Dior’s post-war fashions). But one key aspect of Greenberg’s modernist attitude remains intact in the contemporary artworld, and in this exhibition as well—and that is an undeniable elitism toward the public at large. The main problem is that much of The Artworld so prides itself on its distance from the potential “everyday” viewer that artists feel pressed to alienate the public through various esoteric, oblique, or simply obnoxious means. Accessibility too often implies the kiss of death. Outside the sacred circle of artists, critics, dealers, and collectors, most of us are simply left (out in the) cold by the work, quite intentionally.

Easily the worst offender here is Paul Pfeiffer’s The Pure Products Go Crazy, a silent video tape loop of Tom Cruise in a few seconds taken from Risky Business, in which the “pure product” of the young Cruise collapses face-first onto the family couch (after boogeying down to Bob Seger), in what is transformed into an apparent epileptic seizure, as his arms and legs vibrate and rest, vibrate and rest, in an endless repetition. The machine projecting the image, supported by a curved bar attached directly to the wall, is several times larger than the image itself, the whole unit serving as a rather irritating variety of electronic “sculpture”. Exhibitions aimed at outreach audiences (like this one) may try to create a curatorial context for such work, attempting to prove to “the public” (aka the unwashed masses) that these pure products of the artworld really are relevant to everyday life; however, the result is all-too-often disappointingly condescending, the product of the elitism inherent in the relationship between The Artworld and the rest of us.

A completely different approach is taken in another current exhibition, ironically also titled “Once Upon a Time,” at the Center for Photography at Woodstock through March 16. Curator Colleen Kenyon was inspired by a striking advertisement in the New York Times that compared the onset of mental illness to the ending of a fairy tale. She immediately became intrigued with the idea of “what happens when everything that you know you are vanishes? How do you come back from a devastating loss?” And so last year she put out a national call for photographic submissions on the theme—and was deluged with a massive response. Many artists implored her that even if their work was not included in the show, it was still incredibly important to understand the issues of trauma and loss, and how artists deal with it. Winnowing through the enormous number of submissions, she narrowed it down to 19 photographers—and couldn’t bring herself to go any further. How to evaluate the aesthetic value of other people’s grief?

Each of the photographers included in this very dense exhibition has a story to tell, whether it’s the devastation of an HIV diagnosis, surviving cancer, gunshot wounds, or emotional trauma. These are artists whose lives have been irrevocably changed by enormous challenges to their bodies, their faith, their very sense of self. It’s a theme that resonates powerfully to anyone who has experienced anything like that sort of grief in their lives, regardless of the specific cause. Yet many of the artists report their work is often rejected as being too “personal”, too narrative, or too illustrative. It’s as if the powerful personal content communicated in the work made it less interesting as an aesthetic object. By contrast, Kenyon finds that rather than just functioning as some sort of “art therapy,” using art as a means to process trauma and loss is, perhaps, one of its most important functions.

While there are any number of touching, entertaining, or at least aesthetically pleasing works in the Albany show, as a group the fiction that it ultimately maintains is that art is always at one remove from reality, divorced from personal relevance. By contrast, the Woodstock version of “Once Upon a Time” honestly reflects the extent to which our stories (including art) ultimately ground us—nightmarish traumas and all.

Having witnessed all these things, I return home heartily delighted. And if I am not dead, I am living still.

“Once Upon a Time: Fiction and Fantasy in Contemporary Art,” through March 9 at the New York State Museum, Cultural Education Center, Empire State Plaza, Albany. (518) 474-5877 or www.nysm.nysed.gov/.

“Once Upon a Time,” through March 16 at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock. 679-9957 or www.cpw.org.