Charleston’s
Art Scene
on the Square
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Christopher Hanlon
| W |
hat was it that was so thrilling about last November’s opening of the
downtown Charleston gallery now known as Art Fart? I’ll confess that
like everyone else I hate the name, though I found myself warming to it
when I discovered that the exhibition organizers, attempting to place
a press release in advance of the opening, were rebuffed by someone at
the Times-Courier who told them they couldn’t print the word
“fart.” One resents the name under the assumption that the priggishness
to which Art Fart supposes itself the antidote doesn’t really exist.
But reader, this just in: it not only exists — it runs the local paper
of record.
It’s been a few years since Charleston had a gallery opening, and more than a few since an art event of any kind — the Embarrass Valley Film Festival being the significant exception — made Monroe Avenue look a bit like Friday night in Soho, with crowds milling around a transformed storefront and gabbing about composition, color, glazes, influences. It was nice, and the open bar made it nicer. Inside we found work that was simultaneously urbane and “local,” work people found themselves buying, work that could keep you up late into the night drinking and dropping names.
Shane Rodems’ large canvas “Global Warming” is a perfect example of what I mean.
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Rodems is one of the organizers of Art Fart, and something about his sensibility references that of Eric Fischl, whose greatest works are meant to perturb what Fischl saw, during the days of Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign, as an endemically middle-American state of denial. In Sleepwalker (1979), the painting of which I’m most reminded when I look at Global Warming, Fischl placed a pubescent boy in a plastic wading pool, surrounded by the lawn furniture of post-Vietnam suburban America, masturbating over his own shadow, literally coming of age.
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As an effort to undermine that junior-varsity image of American boyhood that painters like Norman Rockwell had mythologized as part of what made the Cold War worth fighting, the painting is devastatingly effective. There’s a blankness to Fischl’s tone of voice in this painting, an impassivity as he discerns the gulf between the boy’s psyche and the plastic destiny his parents — nowhere in sight, notice — have prepared for him.
The problem for us, of course, is that Fischl’s critique is no longer radical — the idea that American suburban life consists of a sheen, stretched paper-thin over a seething miasma of libido and aggression, was mainstreamed even before Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), let alone 1999’s tritest film, American Beauty. In the opening shot of Blue Velvet, which came out the year after White Noise, David Lynch probably rehearsed the tired indictment as well as anyone else, with the camera panning past the smiling faces of caucasian suburbanites watering their lawns, panning down to delve into the lawns themselves, and further, into the intestinal tracts of the worms eating their way through those lawns, panning in toward death, death, death. But before all of this, there was Fischl’s masturbating boy in 1979, desecrating his backyard, the barbecue, Our Way Of Life itself.
I’m not saying that Rodems’ painting refers consciously to Fischl, but it may. If so, its mode of homage is cleverly, if only somewhat, disguised. In Rodems’ painting, the boy is replaced with Rodems himself, standing calf-deep in a river, the end of a garden hose curving from one pelvic-high fist, the nozzle referencing both the penis and the wading pool of Fischl’s painting and releasing its clear stream with a splash into the water. The utterly synthetic locale within which Fischl’s boy ejaculates now gives way to Rodems’ waterscape — but why is Rodems augmenting the river’s current with that of his garden hose? Is he pissing into the river?
Or is he reuniting the water to its source? Global Warming suggests that here too we are at the scene of some protest, that an ecological violence is Rodems’ target, but like Fischl Rodems imagines that protest as a semi-desecration, perhaps a desecration of which Rodems’ hose is only the barest metonym.
None of this is to diminish Rodems as somehow less original than one would have. Part of the pleasure of Art Fart is all the garrulous chatting between Coles County artists and their influences. Kit Morice’s “Still Faithful,” a pastel and charcoal depiction of a dog’s skeleton mounted on a mantelpiece along with a few flower buds, should remind everyone of Georgia O’Keefe’s similar interest in the juxtaposition of bone and blossom. To call such tributes derivative — or to think of them as mere tributes — is to miss much. The creative misreading of one’s predecessors, as Harold Bloom taught us a long time ago, is the engine within the history of art itself.
The thing people kept saying about Jessica Freudenberg was “And she’s an undergrad!” I think I kept hearing this phrase because many of Freudenberg’s paintings display a technical skill one expects from artists who have put in a lot of studio time, and who hence tend to be older than she. To be honest, I felt as if some of Freudenberg’s messages were pitched to a younger audience than those with whom I’m exactly interested. Two paintings depict Barbie dolls: in “Give Me Envy, Give Me Malice, Give Me Your Attention,” the plastic head has been seared open, revealing a hollowness behind the doll’s vacant smile; in “Birthday Wishes,” a toddler version of Barbie gazes with idiotic glee up between the legs of an adult Barbie, whose sexless pelvis occupies the pinnacle of the child’s gaze, of the V formed by Barbie’s legs (and completing this compositional arrow, the whole scene is staged at the summit of a birthday cake). There’s nothing wrong with paintings like this. They seem eminently correct, in a way, even if one supposes that Freudenberg isn’t familiar with Todd Haynes, Deborah Colotti, or the other Californians who have used Barbie dolls to comment on the distorted body images of American girls and women. But still one leaves with the impression that Freudenberg wasn’t born to imitate such commentaries, that her best work will emerge elsewhere.
Take,
for instance, Chemical Reaction and Self-Portrait.
These two paintings hang next to each other in the gallery, brooding
in the same desultory lexicon of late-teenage angst. Self-Portrait
is a tall panel Freudenberg has converted to a darkness that all
but envelops her own face, down in a corner, itself cut in half
by the edge of the panel. This is meant to convey that Freudenberg
knows darkness, I think — she sees a red door and she wants to paint
it black, etc. But in Chemical Reaction, we see the contours
of something profound, a statement of blank, abject horror worthy
of Munch. Not the Barbie dolls, but this painting makes one marvel
that she’s an undergrad. |
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Natalie Boyer has hung some of her recent painting at Art Fart. A friend of mine owns two Boyer paintings from years ago (back when Boyer’s name was Brown), large canvases that disturbed me when she bought them and that continue to bother me today. They are part of a series that evolved from Boyer’s paintings of women’s underwear stretched across flat vertical surfaces (for instance, often nailed to walls), yanked in multiple directions, contorted, pulled. In the paintings that eventually found their way to my friend’s house, the diaphanous bras and briefs had become anatomical parts themselves, or apparently so. Bodily tissues, sinuous gore that include in their makeup the suggestion of sliced breasts and labia, were now pinned up, stretched mostly beyond recognition, made to appear as meat pulled on a hook. And yet the carnage is made to glisten, to appear gossamerlike in some profoundly disturbing way.
There was a trompe l’oeile quality to these works not unlike the work of John Frederick Peto, whose postbellum paintings of calling cards, elastic bands, lithographs, and scribbled notes — always pinned or pasted to some rustic and wooden vertical surface — captured the nostalgia of that postwar generation as it sifted through the detritus of war and emancipation. And Boyer’s post-feminist-revolution work, in which bras are not burned but pinned for display like some relic, soon to be followed by dissected human anatomy itself, retains a melancholy and meditative air, though her scope has tightened considerably over the past couple of years. At Art Fart, a series of small Boyer paintings on wood depict various diseases of the skin: Urticaria, Hidradenitis Suppurativa, Lamellar Ichthyosis. Boyer’s paintings are realistically representational, and through the regular, tight scale of the series and her glossy resin coatings, she somehow makes the lesions, hives, and suppurations almost appetizing, a row of revoltingly luscious desserts. These panels repel and attract, as did the older works. Boyer’s larger-scale “Silence” is different, though — a study of a human head in repose, surrounded by a calming sea of fawn and hush.
Karen Reed’s stoneware vessels occupied various nooks here and there; like Freudenberg’s and Boyer’s paintings, Reed’s vessels are essentially studies in human anatomy. Her “Cold Moon Cannister Set,” a group of three slab-constructed vessels, bulges outward in a maternal, voluptuous way, and that Reed has chosen to present them on a hillock of black lace underlines their sensual presence. Though I’ll answer for it later, I’ll even go out on a limb and call “Va Voom Vase” a burgeoning hourglass of cone-7 fired stoneware, a self-portrait. In a similar way, I expect there’s a lot of Lorelei Sims in “Maddoner-n-Chyle,” an expertly welded study in balance, surface, and interiority made of steel springs, cantilevers, and other carefully found and re-appropriated objects.
The work on display at Art Fart was often of the most arresting caliber. But I think that much of the power of this event — the reason there were so many smiles on so many faces, the buzz and charge it generated — had everything to do with the current moment in Charleston culture. We’re a bit at loose ends at this moment in the town’s history, I think. I’ve heard about the days when Jeffrey Lynch held smart discussions about art and politics on EIU’s television station, but that was done before my time here. Around town, the days of the really good open mics are in recession, with Jackson Avenue Coffee apparently having found its calling as a high-school hangout and a gallery for mostly religiously-themed painting (one can only take in so many variations on the crucifixion over a latté) and with Friends & Co. now catering to a Hit Mix Crowd. Speaking of which, our university no longer boasts a radio station that serves its community by offering something to make a person think new thoughts. The square is nearly as doleful as ever, with most of the real transactions happening out in drive-thru land upon hellish Route 16.
A couple of years ago we saw a Buy Local movement rise up and then lose steam. Starbuck’s has come to town; there’s talk of Panera. Then there’s the FutureGen debacle, which dangled before our eyes a prospect for large-scale economic revival and then snatched it away again. I don’t know what I think about coal sequestration, to tell you the truth; but I imagine that at some level when the new plant fell through, we all emitted a collective sigh. Silly to have courted optimism, we reminded ourselves. Windfalls like that just don’t come our way, ever. I once heard a visiting stand-up from Indianapolis ask: Did you hear about the upcoming Charleston zoo? They’re going to exhibit an animal never before seen around these parts: a man with hope.
And
so it’s not a stretch, just now, to feel like maybe Charleston is in the
process of embracing its destiny as a stop along I-57 where you can get
a Big Mac, a mocha-mocha, a degree. So hats off to Art Fart, which offered
a moment of relief from this sense of almost fated decline into sameness.
There are other, significant pretexts upon which to imagine a different
destiny for this college town, of course. The new Doudna Fine Arts facility
has taken shape over the last nine months of construction, a crystalline
formation of copper, steel, concrete, and glass ascending into the western
sky. There are those who speak in future-tense-Doudna of “the preeminent
arts venue in Central Illinois,” by which they seem to mean, better than
the Krannert in Champaign. One either admires their chutzpah or marvels
at the depths of their incomprehension, but then, who is anyone to call
that ambition a pipe dream? These things too will be revealed. For a
moment on a Friday evening in November on Monroe Avenue, we felt worthy
of better times, destined for higher callings.
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