 MOLLY RAUSCH "NOTHING IS WRONG WITH YOU" |
As much as we hate to think so, most of the artists we now hold in high esteem had a pretty hard time either making their work and/or finding an audience to appreciate it. The wildly successful multimillionaire artist is a fairly recent phenomenon, not to mention a very rare one. For every contemporary "name," there are hundreds of others struggling in relative obscurity.
Don't get me wrong: There certainly are some current "blue chip" artists making work that's worth its salt, but often, I find, the hothouse conditions created by the go-go market for contemporary art have had a warping effect on the work that gets made in such a context. The elite club of hot young artists (the two or three dozen names you'll see repeated regularly in the pages of ArtForum and Art in America) are the beneficiaries nowadays of a crop of well-to-do hedge- fund managers who take something of a busman's holiday when they play the odds by investing in the contemporary art game. There's a tremendous amount of money at play in the upper reaches of the art market as a result, while significantly less trickles down (or rather, comes from more "ordinary" collectors further down the food chain).
As Cyndi Lauper once sang, "Money changes everything." Successfully making the quantum leap to the upper echelons of contemporary art, while immediately gratifying for the artist, can serve to shift one's perspective as well. I recently heard a story about a fairly famous contemporary painter who was having work done on his studio, which features a breathtaking view of the Hudson River. Gazing appreciatively out the window, a visitor asked the painter how he liked the large, brightly-lit studio, wrapped in such a panorama. The response? "I like my studio in Greece better."
Perhaps if I had a home in Greece to work from, I might feel the same way. Yet it's still hard to understand the radical disconnect that such an attitude reveals—and it's just such a concern for presence and place that has provided the power of the Hudson Valley for artists from Thomas Cole in the 19th century up to our own time.
Finding the singular, artistic statement in the familiarity of everyday places and objects has been a central concern of painter Molly Rausch for a few years now. Iconic, sometimes symbolically charged objects—a typewriter, a chair, a book of matches, a door—are isolated against a flatly painted background, often with a few expressionistic drips that reveal more about the grounding function of gravity than the subjective life of the artist herself. The calculatedly casual effect of her contour drawings of these objects come into new focus in her latest series of works, which will be on view at the Van Brunt Gallery in Beacon this month.
"I was doing paintings in pairs for a while," she told me, "and so it seemed like they were talking to one another already, which led me to start adding text to them as well." These oil paintings (executed on large squares of plywood that often reveal their grain beneath their colored surfaces) each pair an object with an odd one-liner, for example the clawfoot bathtub that appears with the legend "Just because I don't say anything doesn't mean I'm quiet."
The simplicity of the drawings (the objects are drawn with oil stick first, then surrounded by the lightly textured background color afterward) and the brevity of the texts combine to create, in the best cases, a deftly balanced, subtly nuanced whole. The phrases come across as part joke, part Zen koan, concealing as much as they reveal about the human condition. They can also be both personal and universal in scope, as with "I can't paint any bigger or it won't fit in my car," touching upon a common concern for artists who are still responsible for schlepping their own work from place to place.
These pieces are deceptively simple—by combining word and image, Rausch runs the risk of turning either the words into a caption or the picture into a cartoon, but somehow neither quite happens. Grounded in her own decidedly non-jet-set life, the paintings serve as signposts, landmarks, talismans, a resting point between the mundane and the sublime. Given the developments (real estate and otherwise) in the Hudson Valley in recent years, I am hard-pressed to think of a more apt focus for art that's still connected to its—no, this—place.
Speaking of place, one of my favorites for experiencing outdoor sculpture in recent years has been the Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, near Ghent in Columbia County. They recently opened their summer season with a knockout group show that features, as usual, a number of the bigger blue-chip names of the art world—Olafur Eliasson, Carl Andre, Magdalena Abakanowitz, and a host of others—whose works are sensitively nestled into various locations in the rolling meadows and wooded trails that make up the property. Here the sense of place quite literally comes from the land itself, which hosts the work of a huge range of contemporary sculptors, from the geometrically abstract to the representational to the indescribably postmodern, all of which invite a certain intimate regard by virtue of the matchless appeal of the landscape that surrounds them. Given the right sort of bright blue, puffy cloud day, I can hardly think of a better place to be.