April Art
About two weeks ago, on a Zoom call for work, I listened in as our creative team and our client had a spirited debate about buttons. The creative team offered rectangular buttons but the client wanted round buttons. The rectangles look “pro” but the round buttons look more humane. On the client side of the call we had a mix of marketing, e-commerce directors, IT, and website content managers. Personally, I liked the rectangles. Every button on every website is a round pill-shape and the rectangles felt fresh. Also big, easy to tap. Good for mobile device users.
I thought about this again today, when I went gallery hopping. I was thinking back at how the average person has such a high degree of visual literacy. The language folks were using sounded like a critique from art school. But we were talking about buttons. We are all swimming in visual culture and we’re all experts.
Laura Beth Reese: Influenced
Laura Beth Reese’s showInfluenced is up through April at Blue Sky, the Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts. The show is situated in the large back gallery, away from windows. You have to enter the gallery and turn a corner to see the work. This makes the reveal all the more shocking. When I turned around the corner to see her work I felt like I had accidentally walked into a strip club. It’s Portland; that can happen.
Reese’s show is of and about the internet, specifically the culture of internet marketing on social platforms like Instagram. In Reese’s words, from the exhibition website:
#influenced (2020-present) examines the ever-changing landscape of the internet and its impact on our culture. Using a large format camera, I photograph carefully constructed temporary installations that investigate the phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of social media, celebrity, and consumerism: the influencer. The subjects of the photographs are celebrities and influencers—like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner—who have achieved fame by marketing and branding themselves, creating public personas designed for mass consumption.
Kim and Paris are represented here as well as the overwhelming candy coated yuck of the world of Instagram influencers and celebrities. Reese is asking herself “why do I find this crap so compelling?” and examines this by photographing photographs found on social media.
Above, where she describes her subjects as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton - yes they are there. But to be pedantic, Reese has photographed photographs. She has created large blown-up cut-outs of these influencers and photographed the cut outs in space with the same lighting, staging, and props you might find in the original social media.
The effect is jarring. By using the same photographic techniques that render human features flat and flawless, the cut-out Kims-Kardashian blend seamlessly with their “real” props and backdrop. It’s a live-action Photoshop trick flatting the real and the hyperreal smashed together in one image. Reese’s images carefully crank up the absurdity of the source material in a way that is both disturbing and compelling. To be less poetic: This shit is weird, and we consume it every day.
The photos themselves are digital prints on vinyl, glued to the wall. The prints are huge. 40” x 50”. Big enough for the characters within to feel like they occupy your same space.
I left the exhibit asking myself similar questions. Why do I feel so drawn to this slop? What is it that’s so compelling? It also left me wanting to make big digital prints and glue them on walls. When viewing art makes me hungry make art, that art is a success.
See more of the exhibition work on her website.
Ben Buswell: This Land
From the photographs in the newsletter, Ben Buswell’sThis Land looked compelling. The centerpiece of the exhibit is a large array aluminum angle bars arranged almost like a weaving. Lights are arranged overhead, so the shiny aluminum catches the light in a way that reminds me of Walter De Maria’s Broken Kilometer.
From the exhibition notes:
The centerpiece of the exhibition is an expansive floor piece, a mirrored landscape that despite its reflective surface disallows the viewer to catch sight of their own image.
So immediately, the work is losing me. I like the aluminum floor piece, aesthetically. It’s compelling. But I’m an artist. I will look at and enjoybricks, wood grain, and that weird leaf over there on the ground.
De Maria’s Broken Kilometer works so well, in part, because of the clarity. The title tells you everything you need to bring to the piece. This is one kilometer of brass, broken up so it fits in the gallery. Look at it. Look how big it is. Look how shiny it is. Imagine it stretched all the way out in one long line. Did you ever think you could fit a whole kilometer in here?
From the exhibition notes, Buswell’s Magpie is supposed to be a mirrored landscape which disallows my reflection. But, no, it isn’t. The aluminum isn’t polished. It’s not mirrored. it’s shiny. This is a categorical error. This is tantamount to saying the sticky wooden bar table I’m sitting at to write is disallowing my reflection. I mean, maybe, I guess. Or maybe it’s just not reflective? (If somehow the artist had created a truly mirrored surface that wouldn’t let me see my reflection, then we’d really have something).
We’re off to a bad start.
As I look at the aluminum floor piece, directly behind my head is a framed collage of photographs with what appear to be holes punched through, revealing something behind them. Perhaps cursive writing, perhaps numbers. The exhibition takes the title of this piece, This Land
The overall effect is like an orderly constellation of points. The gallery guide indicates that the piece is made from “embellished emulsion prints, data”.
Similarly, the titular photographic work in the exhibition is a visualization of data points (violence rates, income levels, federal money, etc.), collected and reimagined through simple physical acts in an effort to “see” the nation without preconceptions.
Based upon this I assume that maybe the number of hole punches correlate to some number or another. There is an aspect of this that tickles me. I imagine estimating projects at work with a handful of beans. As each project is finished, add the estimated beans to a jar. Taking longer than you thought? Add some beans. At the end of the project, you can count up the beans. Look at them beans!
But the piece This Land is a chart without axes or a key. (A Bezos Chart) Without knowing what represents what, it’s just stuff.
I hesitate to use terms like good and bad when describing art. These can be qualitative terms, but they also carry a moral judgement. Bad artist! No! Bad!
I try to think in terms of success or failure. I think this work fails.
I think it’s to ask “how can you determine an artwork’s success or failure? It’s art? Isn’t it all just...art?”
With contemporary, institutional art, art of the museum, art of the MFA program, art of the academy tradition art methods have been long abandoned and can’t be used as a yardstick for measuring quality. Beauty isn’t a qualitative measure for this kind of art either. This kind of work is often anti-beauty, or at least has no aspirations towards beauty. So again, not relevant. If the work happens to be beautiful, that’s a bonus.
I should stress: All of this is fine even it’s not your cup of tea. It’s a big world, there’s something for everyone. This is why I split my time visiting art institutions and commercial galleries. One (hopefully) makes me think, the other makes me yearn.
But this art can be judged, I think, by the conditions it lays out for itself in its artist statement. Institutional, academic art can only function with wall text; an adjoining essay which lays out the concepts you should consider when experiencing the art. Contemporary art outside of a white cube, without wall text to describe it, is just stuff. Without that context, there’s no way to know how to consider it, or even if you should.
When the artist says “I want to collapse space through empathy in order to give our position in that space potential for a greater understanding, particularly in our relations with others” I can question whether or not they have done so. These are the termsthe artist sets for themselves and the work and I don’t think they were met.
Secret Gallery
I didn’t love the show at Oregon Contemporary. I have to admit though, it got me to think long and hard about why I didn’t like it. There was something special hidden around a corner.
The main exhibition area of Oregon Contemporary is made up of two large galleries. Along the left side of the space, a sort of curtain wall divides the exhibition spaces from other parts of the building. Art collectives Well Well Projectsand Carnation Contemporaryrent these spaces for their own gallery shows. But there’s a special, secret, third space. A small gallery with a desk and a nice lounge chair. The art on the walls is in between spaces. Perhaps it’s on its way to a show. Maybe it’s just resting.
You never know how long any piece may be there. You never know what’s coming next.
This time there was a bold Keith Haring figure drawn onto a sheet of framed glass, a stately homage to the square by Josef Albers, and a lavish painting by Manoucher Yektai. Yektaiis totally new to me. The luscious paint tempted me to dip my hands into the surface of the painting and scoop out big handfuls of paint. (I resisted).
