 Encounter Josephine Bloodgood | oil | 26 x 24 |
The main crime of academic painting in the 19th century, according to critic Clement Greenberg, was that it fundamentally confused the means and aims of its medium with literature. All those skillfully crafted illusionistic paintings were largely bent on "disappearing" themselves as paint-on-canvas, redirecting the viewer to understand the story being told, whether it was a tale from mythology or a sweetly Victorian moral fable.
He may have had a point there, but there is something very fundamental about the storytelling impulse, and it doesn't necessarily proscribe visual expression. (Art History I students almost universally want to understand cave paintings as narratives about the hunt, and they may not be totally off-base in thinking so.)
During the 20th century, the royal road to pure Form was paved by the accomplishments of primarily abstract artists, from Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian to Pollock, Rothko, and Newman. Greenberg was one of the biggest cheerleaders for this development, championing Pollock's classic drip paintings from the late '40s as one of the most accomplished expressions of "advanced art," as he called it, largely because there was no subject matter to get between the viewer and a direct confrontation with the autonomous medium.
Perhaps at the time, such a Puritanical insistence on eradicating representation may have made sense, as a corrective to some of the excesses of the 19th century. But as the concept took hold and came to dominate much of the central aesthetic discussion in movements such as Minimalism, Land Art, and others, it seems that the locus of the storytelling was really only shifted to the "meta" level. The work itself was expected to present a sort of aesthetic pantomime, refusing to talk about itself too much, leaving the narrative task instead to surrogates like the critics and curators who wrote about it, or to be presented in the now standard-issue "artist's statement."
In the contemporary art scene, this meta-narrative has metastasized. I subscribe to an e-mail art news list called e-flux, which consists largely of exhibition announcements, advertising for contemporary art publications, and the like. (The posts can be seen at www.e-flux.com without subscribing.) Over the past two or three years, I've noticed a set of peculiar similarities in many of these notices, namely the pairing of a particularly vacuous photographic image—an empty street, some non-descript interior with part of a figure, or something that looks like an out-of-context frame from a home movie—with a text that tries to fill in the gaps like a savant with a thesaurus. To wit (the artists' names have been omitted to protect the potentially innocent):
In the context of art, the works of the artists engage critically in different ways with the social and aesthetic function of film and television. Both the repertoire of images and narratives of the classical cinematographic medium and the communicative function of the mass medium television are investigated. The medium film serves the artists as a matrix for their critical analytical investigations. References emerge to contexts the history of media as well as to phenomena of representation in contemporary everyday life.
Talk about the return of the repressed! I think it's an exhibition about how we watch television, or something. On the whole, I think I'd rather stay home where I control the clicker.
Coming off a steady diet of this sort of thing "in the context of art," it's refreshing to come upon the annual juried exhibition at the Muroff-Kotler Gallery at UCCC that opens on March 11. The exhibit's curators specifically solicited artists from the mid-Hudson region to submit entries that openly embrace "The Narrative Impulse" without having to apologize for it or over-intellectualize it.
The storytelling drive must be alive and well, because over 150 artists responded to the call. Sifting through this formidable stack, juror (and Beacon gallerist) Carl van Brunt selected work by 42 artists for the show. "They're all good at narrative, but I haven't quite decrypted them all," he admitted to me. A number of the works are charged with some sort of implicit narrative, he said, without necessarily giving the whole thing away.
A number of the works accomplish this by inferring a human or animal presence through various means. Dan Feldman's 40 Nights, #2 presents us with a real, twin-size mattress, painted with the delicate, limp form of an empty woman's nightgown. The reality of the bed meshes impressively with the image to capture something of the texture of bittersweet memory, as though someone once beloved is no longer present. Marian I. Schoetle's untitled installation is a garment rack hung with four pieces of empty, diaphanous white clothing that converts the implied human form into a hauntingly sculptural presence. In a more formalist vein, Armand Rusillon's Fly's Tongue looks at first like an Abstract Expressionist splash of black paint across blank canvas; the title converts the image, like a Rorshach test, into a close study of entomological form, wittily reversing Greenberg's proscription of representation.
Other works embrace a more literary approach. The painting I'm in a Tree... by Tona Wilson (no relation) captures the stylized world of a dark children's storybook, while one of the more surprising entries, Laura Wilensky's Past and Present Teapot, deploys a more Alice-in-Wonderland sensibility as she converts a normally utilitarian object into an excuse for spinning an elaborate tale.
As should be apparent from even this small selection, the exhibition features works from an enormous range of media—from painting to sculpture to digital photography to collage to ceramics to installation (it's hard to think of a medium that's been overlooked)—and they all share, at some point, this embrace of narrative, all in some way in direct contrast to the centralized, absolutist proclamations of Greenberg's 20th-century proclamations.
It's reassuring to see artists "vote with their feet" in this way, and to see talented work of "depth and sincerity," as Carl van Brunt put it, finding a way to connect with its audience on such an utterly human basis.