 Tye-dye Trees + Carwash, Lisa Sanditz Courtesy CRG Gallery, on view at CCS in February |
The concept for the New York Gates was first developed in 1979, but without approval by the city's Parks Department it was not permitted until Mayor Bloomberg stepped in to expedite things in 2003. It has taken two years for the artists to arrange fabrication of the various components of the project and there's a local angle to this, as the saffron-yellow, square vinyl posts on the sides of the gates were extruded by a plastics manufacturer located in Dutchess County.
Bulgarian artist Christo and his wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, have made a name for themselves since the 1970s with their large-scale public works. Christo began wrapping objects in his own conceptually driven sculptural work starting in the 1950s, but once he and Jeanne-Claude joined forces, the idea took on a much more ambitious scale. The piece that first brought them widespread attention in the US, Running Fence, consisted of an 18-foot-high curtain of fabric that stretched across more than 24 miles of rolling hills of Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California, ending in the surf of the Pacific Ocean, thereby "wrapping" a piece of the landscape.
Conceived by the artists as "a visual golden river" running through the park during the otherwise dull gray of winter, The Gates will stand only through February 27, when it will be dismantled and the various components recycled. But so far as the artists are concerned, the totality of the piece includes the years of meticulous planning, negotiations with land owners and governmental agencies, completion of environmental-impact statements, employment of workers, and every other aspect of the complex undertaking. In addition, they do not apply for or accept a penny of public money to realize their vision—the whole thing is paid for by the sale of Christo's beautifully executed preparatory drawings of the work, which are sold to interested collectors directly by Jeanne-Claude, bypassing the gallery network altogether. Theirs is a fairly brilliant strategy—a holistic, politically and economically aware concept of artmaking, and the final products are intended for the consumption and enjoyment of the public.
Deep thinking about social and economic relationships, as practiced by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, is essential to a truly holistic, ecological worldview. Artists have the potential to make a tremendous contribution here, as approaching the world aesthetically opens a way to think about things as a synergistic part of an overall system rather than as isolated, objective phenomena. Making art inevitably implicates the artist in a network of relationships, from the source of the canvas and paint to the work's reception by an audience, although these underpinnings are not always evident.
Not all artists approach these issues in the same ways or with the same level of (self)consciousness, nor would I want them to. But there come moments when these issues of context should be acknowledged more fully, especially when an exhibition purports to represent work on the basis of its geographic location.
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is starting a major building expansion, which has required shifting its regular permanent collection off-site for safekeeping during construction. The graduate program's February exhibitions, curated by its first-year students, normally draws upon that collection for its content; however, due to the current inaccessibility of that work, a decision was taken to focus on "artists who live and work in the Hudson Valley," as is stated on the CCS Web site.
The twinned pair of exhibitions will feature a range of strong, interesting work—so far so good—but apparently the list of artists to be included ranges from those who make their permanent home in the region, to those with weekend homes or studios here, to those who teach a few weeks in the summer in Bard's MFA program, commuting up from the city. It seems that the exhibition's putative organizing principle was more of a catch-all concept for these artists, rather than a significant curatorial framework.
Think of the potential of an exhibition that truly explored the role of place—and of course this is an issue that is uniquely charged by our region's proximity to New York, international center of the art trade—as it underscored the range of compelling work being made in the area. The curatorial charge would extend far beyond mere aesthetic issues to touch upon the social and economic context of each artist and his/her work, as such relationships serve literally to create the contemporary environment of the Hudson Valley. My main trepidation with the CCS exhibition is that it will serve mostly to veil the real transactions of power and prestige that generate much meaning in the art world, while failing to illuminate much of anything about the artists who are part of the social fabric here.
Up here in "the country," these larger, holistic issues are most frequently represented in exhibitions that explore the ecological dimension literally. An interesting contrast to the CCS show is "Nature," curated by Fawn Potash and Lorrie Fredette at the Catskill Mountain Foundation Gallery in Hunter. Bringing together work by four (bona fide) Hudson Valley–based artists, we find four conceptually diverse—and challenging—lenses through which to see this theme. Laura Moriarty's handmade, colorful "geodes" created by laborious scrapings of waxy encaustic paint that are then presented as products of a geological excavation, and Portia Munson's large-scale digital images of botanical specimens scanned directly into her computer offer complex, contrasting readings of the exhibition's theme that press far beyond the hackneyed expectations often linked with the moniker "Hudson Valley Art." The sort of mindfulness embodied in this column's title is not easy to attain—or keep—but by staying in touch with one's immediate context (whether you're an international star like Christo or a Hudson Valley artist), the work gains a new and different kind of power.