tag:www.unsafeart.com,2009-12-08:/art_tourist/2 2012-02-20T15:44:36Z Taking time to look Movable Type Pro 4.35-en tag:www.unsafeart.com,2012:/art_tourist//2.178 2012-02-20T15:29:32Z 2012-02-20T15:44:36Z

Limitless Idea Project presents the Incompletable Spot Paintings, online at www.unsafeArt.com/Damien-Hirst-Style. Interact with 11 galleries - a gallery for each arrangement of colored spots - and their inexhaustible random color combinations.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Spot Paintings for the Ninety-Nine Percent Limitless Idea Project presents the Incompletable Spot Paintings, online at www.unsafeArt.com/Damien-Hirst-Style. Interact with 11 galleries - a gallery for each arrangement of colored spots - and their inexhaustible random color combinations.

Like the Compete Spot Paintings by Damien Hirst, these virtual exhibitions allow viewers to contemplate the wide world of colored circles - but in a near-infinite way. A new painting appears each time the screen is refreshed, and so viewers can easily see as many, or more, combinations of spots than Hirst painted. Colored circles may seem like a simple subject, but Hirst spent the past 25 years painting them. And hundreds of them are being shown in multiple exhibitions this year.

Arrangements of this handy shape, with an infinite number of sides and unending loopyness, is one element of both sets of spot paintings: the complete and the incompletable ones. The second constraint, for both, is the randomization of color.

Unlike Damien Hirst's work being shown at 11 Gagosian Galleries around the world, the virtual spot paintings are available to anyone with a modern Internet browser - one that supports HTML5. To see all these spot iterations, viewers don't need a jet-set bank account. No need to get on a plane, just on the Internet.

Hirst freely admits he didn't paint all his spots. He employs painters, and by doing so is saying that t he magical talent of the artist isn't necessary to set up his world of spots and their complex relationships. The virtual spot paintings eliminate the craft of painting entirely.

None of the circles or colors in the Incompletable Spot Paintings were ever drawn, painted, or even photographed, nor are they generated by a graphic program like Illustrator, Photoshop or Paint. They are created by text and the collaboratively-created programming that is the guts of browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 9.

Regardless of how the images are made, both the cloth and the virtual canvases make pure statements about the juxtaposition of color. As Hirst explained, "I was always a colourist, I've always had a phenomenal love of colour... I mean, I just move colour around on its own. So that's where the spot paintings came from - to create that structure to do those colours, and do nothing. I suddenly got what I wanted. It was just a way of pinning down the joy of colour." (http://ateliertally.com) 

"I started this project in January when I heard Damien Hirst was going to give a print to anyone who went to all the galleries showing his spot paintings," said Terry Talty, a conceptualist, who made the virtual paintings. The shows went up mid January and all will be closed by March 17.  "I couldn't visit Hong Kong for a day, and then dash off to some other place that I'd like to visit for a month. So, I didn't even confront the fact that I don't have the time or the money. I made these paintings for all of us who can't get out and smell the paint, for those of us who don't have the time or money to visit every gallery."

Viewers who look at all the virtual prints and comment on the blog about the work will also be given a prize. This prize, nor Hirst's giveaway print, have been determined by mid February 2012. 



 ]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.175 2011-11-11T05:09:49Z 2012-03-10T17:22:45Z

The clean sparse naturally lit sculpture center in Dallas, created by the 20th C. collector moguls Raymond and Patsy Nasher, shows Tony Cragg's 21st C. sculpture like they were made for each other.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com The clean sparse naturally lit sculpture center in Dallas, created by the 20th C. collector moguls Raymond and Patsy Nasher, shows Tony Cragg's 21st C. sculpture like they were made for each other.

Cragg's work is slick and purposeful, but so detailed it could only have been made by Computer-Aided somethings: like software and router, cutters and pointing-up devices. They are assembled by some kind of careful, aesthetically superior being(s).

Forms blow up the complexity in small detail over big surfaces. They demand attention. We think we see Washington's face on the black one, and so hold up a quarter to see. The familiar face from our money looks like its been twisted and morphed into abstractions of itself.

The spaces between these complex forms frames the woman in the ridiculous heels. All three stretching themselves taller. The piece in the entry way, the top photograph, has small intricate openings that let a viewer peak to the outside, and through a window in the fence, to the street. The complexity of the layers of our vision cannot be ignored when we're in the presence of this elaborate set of forms. We don't have to pay our phone bill with them, so they are instructive friends rather than our ultra-logical opponents. 

On the lower floor are two sculptures where narrative objects get piled together in what could be a messy heap, but instead become uniform and painfully-complex and beautiful sculptural forms. Physical sculpture is about full real, tactile, non-virtual shape and when most of what we experience is now virtual, the sense of real shape can be forgotten. The plunger colored sculpture in the foreground of this picture calls out to be touched. Nice shape. Beyond it is one of the two narratives that you just have to get up close and discover. Covering this boat like thing are hundreds of screw-in hooks, many repetitions of nearly the same object - and object that sames come on and back off at the same time.

Beyond that piece is a white form with black dots. Up close, the surface is covered with dice. To cover the form with these regular cubes the area where the smooth surface must break because of the cubes has the interest of a flowing arroyo. The number of dots on a die mean nothing. Likewise his drawings are made with a line |  or a circle o.   Ones or zeros, but they are not like programmings ones and zeros, there are infinite varieties of a hand-made 1 and hand-drawn 0. Push, pull.

I hear 3-D is the new New.
 
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Fred Sandback's work is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until the 23rd of October. Until then the museum is filled with lines drawn in yarn -- big lines, very precisely drawn in acrylic yarn.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Fred Sandback's work is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until the 23rd  of October. Until then the museum is filled with lines drawn in yarn -- big lines, very precisely drawn in acrylic yarn.

A line pulls you into the main floor gallery and points to a square drawn in yard that is attached in two points to the wall and two points to the floor. The lines are different colors, but all the same in that they are made of yarn. If it is two, three or four strands of yarn you hardly notice until you're seen several rooms of these shapes drawn in yarn. By that time you're noticing everything.

You notice as you walk down the hallway that the EXIT sign is not exactly hanging level. Some of the electrical plates on the floor, beautifully machined as they are, are not quite installed impeccably. The floor shows sign of uneven color that isn't entirely interesting. 

I came to see this show, after tromping through the Fall Home and Garden Show at the Convention Center. There I had gotten into a long discussion with the saleswoman from Kwal Paints who had a very nice booth that included a simulated room - a corner essentially that was painted more elaborately than most people paint their rooms but that showed off the bright bold colors the company offers. It was a very hard-edge, geometric design, and the woman asked me if I liked it. Yes I did, but I think the painter should have been more precise in one spot and should have chosen a different style of molding to join the corner. The woman was appalled that I'd be so critical.

Then I went to see Fred Sandback. His work is about precision. It is nothing like the Home and Garden Show.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.172 2011-10-12T01:13:13Z 2011-10-21T15:23:56Z

Robert Adams photographs at the Denver Art Museum are the spitting image of ones we've taken as young people exploring rural Colorado in the '70s and '80s. They are Black and White and make the jarring primary colors of the commercialism of that day look tolerable. And the landscapes beautiful. Like the romanticism of Pete Seeger, 'I am the blue of my sky and the brown of my earth.' And they make the same folksy protest, as well.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Robert Adams photographs at the Denver Art Museum are the spitting image of ones we've taken as young people exploring rural Colorado and beyond in the '70s and '80s. They are Black and White and make the jarring primary colors of the commercialism of that day look tolerable. And the landscapes beautiful. Like the romanticism of Pete Seeger, 'I am the blue of my sky and the brown of my earth.' And they make the same folksy protest, as well.

We didn't and still don't want to see all the beautiful land in the West to be churned up and spit out as the same old shopping mall. Why not just leave it, and fix the old shopping mall?  Well, because that land looks so easy, just lying there. Adams' photographs prove it.

His photographs of a common farm house on the plains of eastern Colorado looks wonderfully textured in black and white, the wall paper less busy with color and the people richly gray. He didn't make them to be nostalgic. He was just depicting life as it was, and it wasn't that easy. But, with hindsight, we can see that a lot more people were trying to keep that life than managed to do so. There were still a lot of small farms in Colorado, but everything was changing. Farmers only grew what they could sell to big companies. There were no farmers' markets in the city where they could sell anything else. And they had to buy Roundup.

We were, and still are, environmentalists. We wanted then, and still do want, organic food and clean energy.  We environmentalists are the domestic terrorists that exPresident Bush warned everyone about.  We personally may not have advocated burning private property on the Vail Valley ridgeline in the National Forest, as the ELF did when Vail Resorts was building Two Elk Lodge (in memory of the elk that used to be there). I, personally, wouldn't have had the nerve to do it, but I have advocated for less development, especially outside of established ski resorts. There are some who argue that Vail and everything within 25 miles of it, is already ruined. But there are people who thought the new development was the place to draw the line. And they were completely ignored.

Logically, the ski business is flat, so they don't need more property. And Two Elks was the opulent symbol of expansion by a Vail that couldn't be stopped. The frustration of people who see that Two Elks wasn't at all necessary for most Earthlings, is what prompts terrorism. A little arson at midnight, to a half finished building far out in the wilderness where there was no threat to human life or anything but the building - the symbol of wastefulness.  

If you understand this frustration, the feeling of not being heard, you can imagine why an Arab might want to become a terrorist? Can you imagine how hard it would be to be heard in a kingdom where you are a subject and not a citizen?

Look at the people calmly viewing Robert Adams photographs and you  will see them smiling. They want that peaceful landscape. Then the scowls -- people are bugged by the lost of citrus orchards in California. Orchards or shopping malls. People do want orchards. There are too many shopping malls between people and their orchards. Because now most of us live in the city.

Change isn't necessarily bad. But are we doing very much to figure out which change is good and which is bad?

Robert Adams photographs might be a place to start.




]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.168 2011-08-10T22:01:06Z 2011-09-10T17:09:28Z

One work in the summer exhibition at the MCA (Another Victory over the Sun), the short video by Miguel Calderon, called Gato Encerrado, I've seen several times. It was scary, wariness-evoking every time, except one.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Museum of Contemporary Art Denver: Another Victory Over the Sun
June 9, 2011 - August 21, 2011

Victory over the Sun is the title of a 1913 Russian opera. Another Victory over the Sun is the name of the summer exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

One work, the short video by Miguel Calderon, called Los Pasos del Enemigo, The Steps of the Enemy, I've seen several times. It was scary, wariness evoking every time, except one.

First, you have be aware there's no sunlight coming into the museum, so you can't really find the entrance to the video room. You can hear sounds of a wild cat before you find the entrance through the heavy black curtain into this gallery.

I fumbled around in the pretty-near-blackness and stand in pitch darkness. I don't know what's in this space with me.   There's a burst of guttural roars - a big cat of some kind - and then you're surprised by the flash of yellow eyes and menacing teeth, and a sporadic variety of more growls.

On the day before the show opened, I heard that sound of tape ripping off a roll. They were finishing the work of blocking out all the sunlight. You've seen movies of people being duck taped. It's a scary sound in a dark room with a panther growling at you. The steps of the enemy ... when it's dark you can see those steps.

The next visit I was by myself, and realized I have very poor depth perception in the hearing sense. I knew what was going to happen but still I felt not so confident. The piece is very effective at letting us know our place is nature is very complicated.

Another time, I read the curatorial card that explains the piece and it refers to a Spanish expression:  'gato encerrado,' which literally means 'locked up cat'. I learn it is also the Spanish equivalent of: 'something's fishy' or 'I smell a rat.'  And I start to think of how the video was made - probably at a zoo - with a locked up cat. I'm being scared, effectively, by a big cat in a cage. And my enemies, I'm not sure where they are. I am in the dark about them.

The only time I was not creeped out, scared, and off balance, I went into this gallery with a bunch of people, who all happened to be my family. We can bump into each other and its funny not scary. One laughs and someone makes a joke that we've probably heard before.

It made me realize why all those Ancestral Puebloans who used to live at Mesa Verde vanished - completely vanished from the Mesa - about the same time. They wanted to stick together.

If you'd like to read or hear more about this exhibition on UnsafeArt.com, please click on Personal Victory.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.166 2011-08-10T20:09:26Z 2011-09-10T16:43:53Z

Learning to step into the shade was my first victory over the sun. Is this show about how man's ingenuity can beat nature's unpleasantness? Or do we need to know the art history themes attributed to the first Victory Over the Sun to get this show?

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Museum of Contemporary Art Denver: Another Victory Over the Sun
June 9, 2011 - August 21, 2011

Learning to step into the shade was my first victory over the sun. Is this show about how man's ingenuity can beat nature's unpleasantness? Or do we need to know the art history themes attributed to the first Victory Over the Sun to get this show?

Victory Over the Sun is the title of a 1913 opera produced by Russians called Youth Group. They included adults as old as 50 so this was no camp project but an assertion of their own importance from a new group of 'emerging' artists - poets who wrote the libretto in Zaum, a language developed from the emotional and instinctual quality of sounds - and artists, including Kazimir Malevich, who is often credited with making the first abstract painting.  A reproduction of this Victory, made by the California Institute of the Arts, plays in the elevator, if you wish to watch it. The opera, Internet research points out to me, claimed to vanquish the 'sun,' a symbol for the previous generation of artists, called the Symbolists, rational, intellectual, nature lovers. The new school victors' were right to gloat because their thinking did predominate art for the next twenty years, evolving into, generally, surrealism. These artists made paintings and poetry with whatever came out of their heads. Natural man triumphs over the sun and rationality.

The show directs us to this opera as a source, and then does some of its own battling with the sun. For Another Victory Over the Sun museum staffers blocked out all natural light. This building is no windowless schoolhouse, but a green building that uses natural light for most of its daytime illumination and the effect is noticeable. The entry is lit by a Dan Flavin piece called Monument to V. Tatlin. Tatlin was another Russian artist from the early 20th century. Anyone standing near the piece glows fluorescent.

The other works in the show produce their own light, too, and it helps to illustrate the exhibition notes that claim art can create a reality more intense than its architecture. Art is like a campfire, we're told, it is more than its logs and twigs.

Man over Nature, New over Old, Emotion/Instinct/Feeling over Rational Intellect, Art over Tangibles.: that's our list of given possible themes.

Many of the pieces in this show offer experiences that are more than the sum of its parts, and yes, they are emotive, and about nature, and all done in this millennium. We can feel the snarls of a panther in the dark, glow with the moon over water, play with mirrors in an overgrown castle, speed up the transit of the sun, imagine infinity, contemplate the twitter of birds, and graph the sway of trees.

Yes, I learned about emotional vs. rational art appreciation. Yesterday, I visited the museum with a friend who believes the sensory/instinctual human has power over the rational. She believes that a guru gazing on her will heal her body. (She's also using everything Western Medicine has to offer for her cancer.)

We walked into the gallery with the piece called Between the Moon and Sea. It is a wooden boardwalk built over a room-encompassing, black plastic pool of water illuminated by a beach-ball-size, cloth-covered lamp. "This must be a come-down for someone who has lived in the mountains for so long," I said to my friend, thinking of my experience of back-county moonlight ski trips as a much bigger, heart-thumbing, cold--and-hot-at-the-same-time kind of experience.  She completely disagreed. She loves the piece. It makes her think of everything she loves about nature -- and more, and more.  I slow down and stop trying to rationalize if this piece works, and take a photo of the EXIT sign reflected in the water. You may listen to us talk about the entire Another Victory over the Sun exhibition, if you'd like.

She and I are predisposed to give art the benefit of the doubt. Many of my environmentalist friends are not. They see art as just another commercialism of man's intention to triumph over nature. And they want nature to win. They are certain than nature will not go down easily, and if it does, it will take us humans with it.

Contemporary art's urban emphasis is somewhat the cause of my enviro friends' distaste. Land art was only big when it was about machines tearing up nature and making things like the Spiral Jetty. Present-day land artists like Andy Goldsworthy, seem somewhat parochial, while graffiti gets attention. Publicized contemporary art is often messy and about shit and self-inflicted violence or rooms that remind me of bad roommates. Rarely does it talk about the concerns of the environmentalist.  But this Victory does. Although I'm not sure the environmentalist or the curators know it.

The experiences in this MCA exhibition are as powerful as my friend said, unless I analyze them to death. When I experience Los Pasos del Enemigo, The Steps of the Enemy,  panthers are, I am reminded, amazing. They make sounds and behave in ways that people living in a city forget. I don't want them to disappear even if they are scary. Everyone wants the opportunity to contemplate the moon in a quiet, under-developed place. We like the quiet and peace of undisturbed land, even if the birds are so loud. We like the sun, actually.

In the upstairs galleries are three different artist installations that show at least four more instances of the wonder of everyday nature. Outside the gallery showing trees in a breeze and bird's on a branch, the curatorial notes tell us David Zimmer's work shows the 'enigmatic in the everyday.' That's a nice phrase for the puzzles that nature provides all the time. And art can make vivid.

Another makes me think about how the sun's daily journey changes how I see object on the planet and on my desk. The third gives me a mirror view tour of a Mexican villa over grown by nature.

Most of the work in this show does create new realities. For me, the reality I came away with is that contemporary art doesn't need to be messy, necessarily urban, self-expressive, but should be clear. Sometime the clarity can only but felt. Sometimes the enigmas are not understandable. Not at the moment; but art gives me the hope that they can be.
]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.164 2011-07-11T16:29:21Z 2011-08-26T17:47:06Z

Inside Britain, inside the Tate Modern, there's a big show of Joan Miro work, but today I look at a living artist, Taryn Simon. In A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, she shows a series of photo and text assemblages - each with about three parts. One is a grid of passport-like photos, next is text, and third, what the artist calls footnotes.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com July 8, 2011
Tate Modern: Taryn Simon A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

My goal is to pass beyond the guy at the podium and start my trip to England and beyond. 'What's the purpose of your trip?' the guy asks holding my passport. To see art, of course. Instead, I say 'visit family.' I want to slip in, look ordinary like my passport photo on its neutral background.

Inside Britain, inside the Tate Modern, there's a big show of Joan Miro work, but today I look at a living artist, Taryn Simon. In A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, she shows a series of photo and text assemblages - each with about three parts. One is a grid of passport-like photos, next is text, and third, what the artist calls footnotes.

When the photo is stark enough, like these or a passport, The Identity could be anyone's. One of Simon's subjects is the double for Saddam Hussein's son. Another is a rabbit.

I had to testify, once, before a grand jury. I was handed a page of color photos with the open-ended question: could I identify anyone on this page?  My husband's picture was there and I didn't recognize him until the district attorney pointed him out. The photo was such a bad likeness, and I was surprised to see him on this sheet. He'd sold a truck to a friend, one of the suspected pot growers. I guessed another photo might be a female friend. She was so plain and typical looking in this photo that I wasn't sure. 'Poor pothead, doesn't even know her own people,' I am sure the grand jury was thinking. I was thinking how hard a person is to identify with one photograph.

To truly identify an individual ask to see a facebook page, a library record, my home, or my journal. But, that is not the purpose of passport control. Their job is security; so scan my body for weapons, make sure I am committed to working for a more just and liberal - sorry, liberated - society, and plan to harm no one. What is the artist's job?

Simon's show - in three big galleries - consists of many large, nicely framed grids of photos - images of small heads on a 'non-place' background. They are similar in style, but different from a passport photo in that they are full of one of the necessary ingredients of abstract art: namelessness. Abstract art removed the human so that the image could be universal. The humanlessness of passport photos is why governments want retinal scans and DNA. The artist either doesn't know how humanless these photos are, or we're to feel like they are the universal human.

I read the wall's worth of information about how the grid is like a family tree showing relationships - descendants below antecedents - and then read the details at each piece about some weird political situation that involves these identities - like Saddam's son's double. Or, people whose relatives have declared them dead so they can steal their land.

Conceptually, the project is interesting.  However, the artist has not made the best choices for conveying the information to her audience. Sure anything goes in postmodern art. But, we're at the Tate Modern here, and there needs to be some discrimination. Why?  Because a lot of people will see the work, so it should be effective for the audience - the viewers that will see it.  Otherwise, it's just granddad boring us with pictures he took of his hotel rooms on his bus tour of Germany.

Look at the people in this exhibition. They're myopically reading the walls. Or standing in the center talking. One of our group suggests that Simon make it easier to read the narrative, and give us the time and space to read it - publish a book.  Good idea, but her current audience is, right now, wandering through the Tate Modern. And, it's a big crowd, a less-than-mainstream crowd: people willing and able to look at contemporary visual art.  Give us the visuals.

Could the relationships have been identified graphically? Tiny text at the side giving the name wasn't helpful enough. The 'footnotes' sections are not in giant frames. They're small, filled with documents, some interesting character snapshots, and the meat. Isn't it annoying to read footnotes that are more interesting than the main body of the work?

Yes, there was that big explanation at the beginning of how the project worked, rows related to the rows above and below. We all felt compelled to read that, but then the artist mixed it up, and it wasn't the key to work out the relationships after all.  Obviously relationship is important. If there were no pictures the person was dead. I read it. I could go and do more reading, youTube searching, and see if I could understand it.

I did watch the video, and the artist is a lovely young woman. She spent four years traveling around the world, and the relationships she says she's trying to present are those of chance, blood or other elements of fate. Nowhere in the show, but on the video she says, people are each just one in a long string of births and deaths all with stories attached, and they keep coming (hopefully).

But we didn't get to meet these people on a trip around the world, and we need more to feel or understand it - otherwise this is just a big waste of time, effort and money, which is why people hate contemporary art.  It feels like the artist is doing this for herself. Self expression: well then, you can just keep it to yourself.

The weak photographs - even as wallpaper - draw our attention because of the size of the frames. We look, we try to understand, but unfortunately there isn't enough visually in front of us to engage us further and enable us to really see something more than just the narrative summary she gives us.

Maybe this show is an example of how bad journalism is nowadays. The only story that I could read to the end was about Sadaam's son's double, and yeah, I know, it's coming out as a movie soon.  It's a tabloid kind of story, and the lives of ordinary people usually aren't, even if they are doing very interesting things. Like trying to make art about the relationships of unique ordinary people.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.167 2011-06-10T20:58:38Z 2011-08-26T21:47:40Z

Here's the rub with battling nature: you may very easily lose.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Museum of Contemporary Art Denver: Another Victory Over the Sun
June 9, 2011 - August 21, 2011

Victory over the Sun is the title of a 1913 Russian opera. Another Victory over the Sun is the name of the summer exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

What this metaphor means is debatable. Is it the classic man vs. nature?

Maybe the works in this new Victory will shed light on the debate.

A video plays a big vertical projection of a building in New York City, the RCA building, a nice piece of early 20th C. architecture. It's fascinating to watch light hits the building in changing ways that really help define the 3-dimensional space of this cityscape. 

When I read more of the exhibition notes, I figure out that the artist, Erin Shirreff, has photographed sunlight moving throughout the day over an Ansel Adams' photograph of the building. I have some forward-thinking nostalgia about the experience of seeing printed matter in natural light at all times of day. This memory/recent experience is so unlike the constant light of a computer screen.

In the same room, are minimalist blocks of plaster by the same artist, who is currently artist in resident at the minimalist refuge in Marfa, Texas. Her thin planks stand braced against the wall, bent like something plastic, but now hard. The unnatural light from the cans on the ceiling make pretty shadows on the wall. These pieces are delicate, and mottled. Could be made of stone but they seem to fragile. And I'm warned by a museum guard not to get too close. I learn the material is plaster with an addition of Texas ash.

Here's the rub with battling nature: you may very easily lose. Shirreff added ash to the plaster, which weakened it, and didn't really make the fine waves I love to see in marble. Her technique left the planks susceptible to warping. And breakage. In fact, one of the pieces arrived broken. It is obvious she wanted clean, firm and natural forms.  It's a little too obvious this artist isn't used to physically making things.

To read or hear more UnsafeArt about this show, please visit Personal Victory.
]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.165 2011-06-10T19:17:17Z 2011-08-26T20:54:57Z

'Between the Moon and the Sea' by Spencer Finch is a simple wooden dock is built in a large gallery. A wide, but shallow black structure holds water on the floor and a lit, stitched ball plays the moon, hanging from the not-too-disguised ceiling. In this space, one is invited to contemplate the moon and sea, as we are told is a Japanese custom.

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Museum of Contemporary Art Denver: Another Victory Over the Sun
June 9, 2011 - August 21, 2011

Victory over the Sun is the title of a 1913 Russian opera. Another Victory over the Sun is the name of the summer exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

What this metaphor means is debatable. It may be that the Futurists, soon to be Russian Constructivists, who produced the opera in St. Petersburg were defying the established order of high fine art and asserting that emotional intelligence is more powerful than rationality, which their predecessors valued. A victory of instinctual man over shiny, old rational man.

Maybe the works in this new Victory will shed light on the debate.

Take Between the Moon and the Sea by Spencer Finch.  A simple wooden dock is built in a large gallery.  A wide, but shallow black structure holds water on the floor and a lit, stitched ball plays the moon, hanging from the not-too-disguised ceiling.  In this space, one is invited to contemplate the moon and sea, as we are told is a Japanese custom.

There's a similar Colorado tradition: to stare at the moon and the stars far away from city lights. Going on a moonlight ski is a way to do this and snow provides the other surface like the sea. Shutting out the sun, like a non-electric camper's nighttime, does draw attention to the remaining light and this created dock-in-a-dark-gallery is a pleasant reminder of the revelations that come with a simple act of contemplating the moon.  

Contemporary art, after Pop Art, sometimes seems so much about pop and so little about what really flows deep. If that's what the Futurists where thinking was emotional intelligence as opposed to the rational world of worrying about paying the bills and making our e-mail work, then I think they were on to something.

To read more about this show, see Personal Victory.
]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.161 2011-05-24T15:35:15Z 2011-07-06T11:52:13Z

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com When I walk into a Gothic cathedral I get what its creators hoped would be the original Shock & Awe Treatment. The containing of this much space exudes power. Commands some awe. Worship in the right souls, if not mine.

The modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago is one more building in the new shockwave of awe inspiring architecture. Its volume made this institution the second largest art museum in the U.S when it was completed in 2009.  It was time we became another couple of its art tourists.

We walked up a long ramp from the botanic gardens in Grant Park and landed on the top floor in front of the rooftop restaurant.  Saw the new installation out on the high patio which was the subject of an editorial in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday - and noticed that it did indeed block the view to downtown, but gives a peephole to Millennium Park. After stepping off the vinyl of the patio floor, we descended by escalator between walls of glass to the first floor and into the expanse of the new glass and white metal building designed by Renzo Piano.

Then a fortunate thing happened. Right in front of us was the show I wanted to see: contemporary photographs by Uta Barth. Knowing now how much there is to see in this enormous wing, without even contemplating the impressive Impressionist stuff that's in the old building, I would have been challenged to give full attention to this small, two-room show.

Instead it became my grand entry to this amazing space - a beautifully sparse beginning worthy of a Coen Brothers movie. Barth's work is ethereal. Drawings without any lines.

They are photographs, and are essentially scenes. Interiors. An out of focus table, soft shadows of a glass and pitcher, or maybe a bottle. Not the things just the shadows of them.  A fragment of an arm and a hand's shadow.

The first objects I saw were a pair of 'couch sized' photos. No frames just the image mounted on a sturdy piece of white Plexiglas   - the hardware, the physical disappeared. The next images included little tangible stuff, little more than a simple orb of a ceiling lamp. The top edge of a couch made its way into the frame, too, but the real focus was shadow and light.

What do you think of these? I asked the guard, who let me know she'd had some time to look at them. 'I don't get it at all,' she said. They're just shadows. Maybe, somebody's house. Somebody who likes the way they decorated their house.'

'I think you had it right the first time,' I said. 'If somebody cared about the decoration, we'd see more of it. I think it's about how beautiful the shadows are. How they fall on the wall and what shapes and tones they make.'

I've seen light do this kind of thing before - been inside small spaces where shadows piled up on each other - and I thank the artist for reminding me to look.

Then I asked my friend what she thought. She felt like the artist was ripping off the craftsperson who designed the lamp.

We went into the next room and the photos were even more abstract - just curving lines of white on a undulating gray field. The gray was a textured curtain draping in waves like the folds of cloth on the characters in classical painting. The flow of white was a cast of bright light repeating this curling wave is a graphical way. Just a natural incident of light, somewhat manipulated by the artist playing with the curtain.  

Yes, she manipulated the curtain, she admitted on the curatorial card. And this is not normal for Barth, the info continued. She didn't modify the photographs, just helped the light fall in a beautiful way. So it's not naturally occurring shadows and light. Artist modified light, instead. I've heard many artists talk about their work with more evasion than a politician. This is the epitome of transparency. 

There was another little space behind the wall where the photographs hung, and catalogs of  Bath's work were laid out on a white table with a single chair available to readers. The big windows to the courtyard were covered with white vinyl film with a little wave cut out so you could see outside. 'Wouldn't it have been nice with a curtain? my friend said. 'Instead of plastic.'

It would have been so easy to ignore the subtle images Barth photographs, but seeing them made it easier for us to sense the enormous gulf between cloth and vinyl. We'd been given a little boost of Day Vision.

And then, we went back through the show, past the guard and she stopped me, 'Those shadows on the lamp are really interesting.. I've been wondering .., 'why'd that light land on the wall like that?' We talked about shadows a little more and went out into the courtyard where light was bouncing around like a crazy person.

I neglected to ask the guard what she considers her life work, but my friend, a lawyer by education, makes mosaics, and I write about the experience of looking at contemporary art.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.158 2011-04-29T17:00:45Z 2011-05-18T17:28:14Z

Blink at DAM and it's goneApril 29, 2011Six weeks is not long enough. Blink is a show at the Denver Art Museum that will close in three days. No street banners advertised Blink just a little sandwich board outside the...

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Blink at DAM and it's gone

April 29, 2011

Six weeks is not long enough. Blink is a show at the Denver Art Museum that will close in three days. No street banners advertised Blink just a little sandwich board outside the museum and I've been wanting to get to the museum since the show opened March 13. Finally, I get to the museum today, and I need more time.

To visit this video - or as the Denver Art Museum wants to call it Time-Based Media - exhibition with your mother, your brother-in-law, an aunt and some kids is also the wrong way to go.

We all enter the second floor museum space and it feels like a dark arcade of at least 40 video games. The room feels good sized when it a painting show is inside, but with the asymmetrical and weirdly-angled walls dictated by the new-age architecture of the building, it is too small and too occupied by too many things speaking at once.

We are not able to multi-task no matter what our age. Brain scientists is fairly certain of this. A good multi-tasker is someone who is better at turning off and on focus quicker than others. They still concentrate on just one thing at a time.

If this show is about time, then we need to have a little of it to look at each work of art in this exhibition, particularly because we have to overcome the arcade effect. At first, one can't decide which game to play, so we dash around the room and see what 'catches our eye.'

In my dash, there were several works from the DAM's permanent collection that I recognized. I could skip those. And one piece was up in a closet-like space and was a one-liner: look that video is pretending to be something coming through the ceiling.

On my second pass through the gallery, I saw a B&W film of a cupped hand holding a pool of water. The last time I'd passed by I was sure it was just an abstraction of someone's hand. And then I watched as the water drained from the cupped hand. And I kept watching and I saw the abstraction I'd seen before. 'What is this I?' asked one of the kids.

'A blurry picture of somebody's hand.'

'What are they doing?' I asked.  'Don't know,' was the answer.

Then, the video faded to black and looped to the beginning with the hand full of water. The reflection on the water was a man's face - the artist holding the water - and as the pool became smaller and smaller, the face became more and more abstract, blurring the details on the palm of his hand. The face was so unrecognizable that it wasn't until I saw the whole piece that I could recognize it in the middle.

This is how I spent my trip to the 40-plus video exhibition Blink discovering the work of Oscar Muñoz, the artist watching water leave the palm of his hand.

.....................................................................
Oscar Muñoz is a Colombian artist, and a still photo of this piece can be found by following the link. Nto be confused with the Texan, comic magician who works with school kids.

If you like thinking about his work, see my Art Tourists entry about Dissolve, the 2010 SITE Santa Fe biennial.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.155 2011-03-26T20:49:30Z 2011-05-18T17:53:15Z

'"I wish I'd thought of it first," says Frieda, one of the women who works in the cafe on top of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. She's talking about the work of Allison Smith, who makes replicas of,...

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com '"I wish I'd thought of it first," says Frieda, one of the women who works in the cafe on top of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

She's talking about the work of Allison Smith, who makes replicas of, for example, an improvised WWI gas mask.

Smith's work is on view on the floor just below us and people are in the gallery with her making stuff as we speak. Frieda explains to me that Smith takes stuff that is involved with war and killing and puts it back into the everyday world through crafts.

Smith's show is made up of four easy to explain elements: a series of page-size collages that contain pictures of old household things, mostly Victorian, pasted to beige, hand-made paper; a 6-foot reproduction of an old-fashioned candleholder that bounces light from a giant electric candle; a half-finished braided rug; and display cases filled with the replicas of war items. 

The last one deserves a little more explanation. Smith takes cell-phone photos or downloads images of artifacts from museums. She then reproduces them with felt and other things you'd find in hobby stores.  The old items that interest her are ones that look hand made. Finally she tags them and documents where she found them. 

For the entire duration of her show, people have been braiding strips of fabric together to complete the big circular rug that lies in one of the largest gallery rooms of the museum.

Today, that room is filled with a crowd --mostly women-- carding sheep shearings into fiber, then spinning those into wool yarn that is then being woven on looms into a shawl. Teams of women are going from sheep to shawl in a friendly competition accompanied by nearly continuous lectures on fiber art and craft.

When the room hushes to hear Sara Goldenberg-White talk about the garments and installation art she makes from copper thread, aluminum foil and cloth, the whirring of the spinning wheels is the loudest thing in the room. That sound and sitting on a braided rug like my grandmother used to make gives me a down-home feeling than I usually don't experience in elite museums of art. And I am in one, not in a living history museum.

The next lecturer is a very smart woman - an art historian who is no stranger to elite museums of art. She talks about the craft revolution of the 60s and 70s, which she explained was the first real revival of craft since the Arts & Craft Movement, which Wikipedia dates from 1860-1910. 

Most people have brushed up against something from the Arts & Craft Movement: Frank Lloyd Wright, Art Nouveau, Lalique glass, Rene Mackintosh Celtic jewelry. I live in a craftsman house built in 1906 and have uncovered wall paper reminiscent of the style of that time inspired by  the Omega Workshops of the Bloomsbury Group, or William Morris, a writer and textile maker important to this movement. Morris was a socialist and his mission was to produce better-designed objects for everyday consumption by average people. Like my house - small, simple but still functional and nice looking 100 years later.
 
I don't personally know anyone who was working around that time but I have visited the home of Vanessa Bell, who was Virginia Wolfe's sister and a Bloomsbury painter. Tables, walls, bedspreads, bed, curtains, all are painted or printed. I don't think Ms. Bell expected any of her or her boyfriend, Duncan Grant's homespun work to be shown in an art museum and they aren't.  They are in a historical home run by the National Trust. Bell's and Grant's paintings can be seen in art museums.

To be shown in an art museum is, however, what artists wanted who worked in the 60s-70s craft revolution. People who worked in clay, glass and metal in this period were working to show that any material could be used to make art. They were taking up the mantel of the Dada artists who used found objects and questioned what qualified something as art. In the 60s, craft artists had a dog in the fight, along with conceptual, performance and other ethereal artists challenging what was art.

And what came out of the challenge, the questioning and deconstructing, is what we now call Post-Modern, the stuff after the modern stuff (Modern: imagine Picasso, Henry Moore) which followed the Arts & Craft movement.

And post-Post-Modern is what will be next.

At the moment, in the Museum of Contemporary Art, I'm experiencing Post Modernism. The lecturer, before she started discussing craft revolutions, sat on the braided rug and told me that the craft/art disparity had gone (almost) away like racial or gender discrimination. She's obviously right because craft is nearly filling this floor of the museum. 

 As I sit on the braided rug surrounded by novice rug braiders at work finishing the centerpiece of the gallery, I'm certain that this rug wouldn't win the Blue Ribbon at the state fair.

Sure, technical quality or craftsmanship was another of the things that went out when the art/craft/conceptual walls were torn down in the art world. We, post-modernists get it - It's not the craft but the concept that's important. If Post Modernism has a slogan, it's 'Anything Goes."

The art historian continues to speak about how people engaged in craft in the 60s and 70s to do 'an honest days work' because they were finding their day jobs unfulfilling. Making crafts were for 'self valorization.' And like religion they offer 'community' like a craft co-op, where people got together to sell things, which she followed with a list that included  'macramé'.  And this, she didn't mention, has lead to craft fairs.

A woman sitting on the floor sewing together the coils of the braided rug talks to me about how much she is looking forward to getting into knitting because it is so good at filling time. My sister says the same thing about her stitch-by-numbers copies of famous paintings.
 
But Frieda upstairs sees more in the stitchery that Allison Smith does. When Smith is making replicas of gas masks and candles, and even rugs, Frieda sees her work as a concept that she wishes she come up with first.

Frieda wouldn't say that about an exhibit of Anazasi corn grinders at the Mesa Verde museum. They differ because Smith has looked at the past and produced an object - useless to us - made of materials we can imagine. We can't touch them because they are in a display case, so we have to imagine. My imagination brain cells have a harder time making out what the original gas mask really smelled and felt like. I wonder if it was a hood of burlap, and if there were different grades of burlap. But those cells know colored felt from grade show.

I don't hear anyone looking into the glass cases saying 'oh, yea, my grandfather had one of those.' I do hear it said about the collages of antiques hanging on the nearby wall. And I hear the spinning wheels. And we're all thinking how post modernly accepting we are to have all this art and/or craft in one place while someone is talking about knitters as 'craft revolutionaries' looking for honest work.

Meanwhile, on the first floor of this museum is a show of work by Dario Robleto, a man who makes ceramics out of human bones and paper out of soldiers' letters home. No crowd of people is downstairs making ceramic wine jugs with Dario Robleto.

And then I understand what post-Post Modernism needs to be. Future art needs to give us more tools to differentiate quality and importance. Anything may go, but anything is also free to fail.  Oil paint on canvas is just as likely to fail as rug braiding. Any kind of music is good; it's just a matter of taste. No it's not. Some music is much better than other music. Fresh ground beef from a well raised cow is better than a frozen fast food patty. But those statements are so unPost Modern of me.  Maybe there is a bad piece of beef from a well-raised cow and I grind it poorly, and it is even worse than McDonalds.

While you're busy thinking, postModernly, about all the possible ways the patty is better than the fresh beef, I'm going to slip in another unPost Modern comment and start your deconstructing wheels spinning again to find me wrong. The giant replica of the candle & candleholder is poorly crafted, awkward looking and only partially effective at wowing its audience as its diminutive cousin would have done centuries ago. It doesn't belong in an elite museum of art.  The braided rug, as communal as I felt sitting there with curators, artists and knitters, mocks the other people who were in the room, who make fine and very fine functional objects.

Yet, I fall back into the Post Modern world where I live and realize I'm eager to attend the event where we see antique examples of curation, and hear the anthropological lecture on the lives of curators in the 21st Century. They aren't actually making art, so I'll be curious to hear what they do for self valorization.  And I wish there were more people, today, who could do what they really feel is valuable work.

..............................................................

Allison Smith's Piece Work is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver from February 4, 2011 through May 29, 2011.


]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.147 2011-02-25T17:40:04Z 2011-06-07T22:17:03Z

February 24, 2011A massive body clad in black circled with a mane of a white beard, Hermann Nitsch is more than 70 years old, and the audience listened to him talk Thursday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver...

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com February 24, 2011
A massive body clad in black circled with a mane of a white beard, Hermann Nitsch is more than 70 years old, and the audience listened to him talk Thursday night at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver treating him with reverence.

The audience jibed familiarly with MCA director Adam Lerner as he introduced Nitsch, whose half dozen paintings and dozen religious vestments are on exhibit in the museum. Warmly, but casually, they greeted the team of interviewers: Patrick Greanley, a European literature scholar, and curator Simon Zalkind. The audience hushed to hear the artist speak.

The Austrian started in English and when he got rolling switched to German, and Greanley peddled hard to deliver the translation quickly and unobtrusively.

Zalkind asked questions I wanted to ask and with an intelligence I wished I had. My repetition of these questions is such a weak approximation: How did Nitsch get the idea to use performance so early, in the'60s? How was Nitsch influenced by Abstract Expressionism (a largely American movement important in the 1950s)?

It wasn't so much what Nitsch said -- he listed influences like Mallarme, Pollack, deKooning, many names that most audience members could pick out from the man's German with a good amount of effort -- it was the way he barely moved as he delivered the answers. And was rewarded with an odd reverence and hush. When he said Freud and Jung and John Cage, we felt we could lighten up. He'd sounded so ethereal, eclectic, and then it was obvious, performance comes from John Cage. This guy was part of the ordinary consciousness of his time. Then he names his special influence -- spirit. Not the kind bound to any religion, but the spirit that drives action. Then Zalkind pressed him on the weird nature of his form of self expression and Nitsch talked more about the all-encompassing power in humans and how it is bound too tightly by civilization. He's about unleashing all that human power.

Zalkind asks about Catholicism. Nitsch answers 'I was educated as a Catholic, but maybe not so well.' The audience laughed. Were allowed, by this point, to laugh with him.

Zalkind asked if intensity is necessary? And Nitsch light on fire. Yes. The intensity of smearing feces - he invokes Freud -- not that this act is not actually part of Nitsch's work -- but intensity is absolutely important. His intensity is making a ritual for six days where the participants act animalistically smearing blood and paint over themselves and the canvas on the floors and walls, or so it appeared from photographs. The theatre if a Mystery Orgy theatre, after all.

He goes on about: the intensity of Tao. The intensity of grass growing. The guy is bi-polar intellectually: earthly and ethereal. And we've all got our ears peaked up to try to make out what really is the answer.

A moped and Chrysler, he said, when asked if the paintings are art on their own, or does a viewer really need to be a participant in one of the Orgy Mystery Theater performances. The paintings are merely documentations of the act of the theater. And the theater is just a release of some human power, a diversion from how it could be released violently with worse effects to humanity, but instead is a release that empowers each participant. How does it do this? We don't get the answer.

Does the exhibition do this?  The flowers in the room smell. The blood in the paintings has dried brown on the canvas, been layered under red paint and been stamped with foot prints. You'll have to add the intensity yourself. I want to taste the blood. I want to see the theatre.

The paintings are the moped, Nitsch finally said. The event is the Chrysler, and we're all invited to participate in his next event in the summer of 2013 in Austria.

]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.146 2011-02-12T23:40:38Z 2011-06-15T16:59:29Z

Required reading - exhibition notes -- Feb 4, 2011Glasses pile up lonely on small tables - half drunk, some empty, rings of wine at the bottom, inches left in some of red, some of urine yellow - abandoned outside the...

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com Required reading - exhibition notes -- Feb 4, 2011

Glasses pile up lonely on small tables - half drunk, some empty, rings of wine at the bottom, inches left in some of red, some of urine yellow - abandoned outside the big gallery rooms.

It's a three-show opening and there are plenty of people at the Museum of Contemporary Art tonight. As I head off to the quieter side, I feel I'm sneaking into the bedroom to get some space from the party. In one big gallery is the work of Hermann Nitsch. The show is called Bloodlines.

Paintings on the wall are big, covered with red from edge to edge with drips - streams of red - and red footprints. Vestments - priests' garb - are displayed like saddles over saw horses, like Indian blankets at a flea market. This isn't craft elevated to the wall like a famous tapestry; the robes are folded to look like the priest is still in them, kneeling before the altar. There are several, maybe a dozen bold, multi-colored robes lying there in a much more intimate and ordinary way than I've ever seen vestments. They are not protected by a sanctuary or even a docent. No one advises me not to touch. And coming so close, I can see that each one took someone a long time to make and has suffered some wear over time.
    
Flowers are in the room - bright ones - like the robes - but I'm not sure it feels festive. More like an after-the-fest feeling. Religious images are pasted on some of the paintings, but no pang of sacrilege hits me. I'm reminded instead of the bad aesthetics of many an American church.

I grab the exhibition notes and proceed into a little hallway, jag around alone like I've found a secret passage. The nearby gallery is dim, and quiet like the one I just left. In the passage between them, a view opens to the main level: people drinking, laughing. Someone is running overhead and I can see the feet through the ceiling windows. 

Bloodlines - I read in the exhibition brochure - are paintings Nitsch made with blood (and mostly paint) in his studio and at a certain kind of happening the artist has directed since the early '60s, happenings called Orgy Mystery Theater.

When I arrive in the dim, next gallery, I'm oddly alone, like I've just missed something again. I can always feel regret when I think of having missed all the important art happenings, sit-ins and Woodstock. There are flowers and music and lots of red dominating the gallery space. Another priest's robe, painted with thick green paint, is stuck on the largest painting.

Not taking sacrilegious offense, I feel some Catholic guilt, the same guilt I feel being a tourist in a famous church and not doing the holy water routine. It's the guilt of not being a member. I don't dwell on this, I read the exhibition notes.

Nitsch, the brochure says, creates events where he makes these paintings. People get drunk, start smearing blood around and do who knows what else. Like the society in Lord of the Flies, the Orgy Mystery Theater drags in the participants, gets their hands dirty, makes them part of the pack.  I imagine that Nitsch creates a ritual that would be like one I could have had at Woodstock.

The notes tell me Nitsch means the event to be a cleansing ritual, a renewal, with blood that doesn't just cleanse, but also stains - hands and canvas. I get it. You get to be part of the mob, but the next morning, there is the guilt. The remo's.

I don't know if you need to have once been Catholic to know this guilt; it was certainly part of my catechism. It's a guilt that comes from having enjoyed something you know was wrong, or at least, you were told it was wrong: Rock&Roll, not wearing the burqa, drinking alcohol before your 21st birthday. And of course kids are busy doing the later because there is pleasure in guilt. And there are so few things a modern person needs to feel guilt about. So few that we, often, go out looking for them. 

I own the guilt of enjoying being Catholic and participating in the meaningless rituals to the point that I can still sing songs like the Gloria or that my arm knows how to make the sign of the cross although it quit doing that when I was 16. I can understand the satisfaction of guilt from being part of the pack, my pack that feeds on fears and offers illogical solutions. A pack that is one of the major causes of overpopulation.

Since the memory of being one with the mob, a conformist, a reciter of Latin gibberish can still give me a thrill: the big space, the meditation, the inspiration for rebirth, the passion, the mystery, I can easily imagine an orgy mystery theater, and how it might be rich with emotional food. 

When I look back up at the paintings, the blood-red is nothing like the red blood of Christ whipped up in my memory. The paintings are not vivid red as I had imagined, but more akin to faded abstract expressionism. 

An ordinary viewer can add too much. Or this show works to give a small glimpse to all the emotion and a big load of the remos.


Bloodlines, an exhibition of the work of Hermann Nitsch opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Feb 4, 2011. The artist will speak at the MCA on February 24. 
]]> tag:www.unsafeart.com,2011:/art_tourist//2.142 2011-02-06T17:09:17Z 2011-06-15T21:40:32Z

by Terry TaltyFebruary 6, 2011I'm a freelancer and - as my friend delicately put it - there's a gap in my schedule. Nobody loves you when you're down and out, so I hate to mention how down my financial future...

terry http://www.UnsafeArt.com February 6, 2011

I'm a freelancer and - as my friend delicately put it - there's a gap in my schedule. Nobody loves you when you're down and out, so I hate to mention how down my financial future seemed to me last night. It could just have been the weather.  Snowing for a week, no sun and frigid. So unDenver like. Snow, sure, but never without sun in between.

Anyway last night, I'm worrying about worldly things and I'm at an opening at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. Tons of people mill around me to see the three new shows. In retrospect, I can name the three by the method of getting in your face: Bones, Blood and War.

On the entry level is the work of Dario Robleto in an exhibition called "An Instinct toward Life." I'm standing in the white, big gallery surrounded by small things, spaced far apart. Bone and other human parts went into the art objects - that's the buzz in the room. Such a provocative theme should provoke me to gush with ideas, but the few thought bubbles arising are my same old ideas.
 
The boxing gloves (pictured) are titled The Melancholic Refuses to Surrender and reminds me why I hate boxing movies - the unnecessary pain of some sports. Broken male hand bones are just one of the listed ingredients in this piece and The Hustler. 

A wine jug, called The Skeleton Wine has a materials list that includes 'cast and carved bone, bone dust from every bone in the body, ground wisdom teeth.' And 'homemade wine'.

Next to the wine jug are a collection of little pitchers the white card says were used to feed invalids - apparently a while ago before the invention of the IV - with the title, "A Ghost Nurse Still Needs to Care." 

'Made out of bone,' my friend, a sociologist says.  Like bone china, I say.

I nearly trip over a pile of dinosaur and human bone dust on the floor as I dash off to a quiet corner to look out the window and take a phone call from my son. He's in traffic and I'm in a crowd and we can hardly hear each other. This happens more often than I want to remember and I promise to call him back. He promises to do the same and who knows what audio quality chance will give us next time.

I step back over the dinosaur and human dust. I do think, at that moment, about how my body might decompose and rejoin the earth after I'm dead. I've never been a fan of a niche in a cemetery. I want my dust to be spread on the garden just like my grandfather-in-law was added to his bean trench. I mentally follow my future remains through the ground, into Denver sewer system, down the Platte into the Gulf of Mexico, possibly reincorporated into fly, then fowl, into New Orleans chef. I feel disappointed, however, because these ideas were not new ones to me. I'd already used them for a short story.

When you get old, my uncle once said, you never have a new thought. You just recycle the old ones. Uhg.

In another corner, a pair of boots is standing in a pile of dust. Human bone dust, I guess. Inside each boot is a wooden leg. Carved by soldiers - amputees - my friend says - from the Civil War. I couldn't get close enough to the wall to read the card. 

The curator, Nora Burnett Abrams, associate curator of the MCA, says the cards on the wall are poetry and invites everyone to read them. My sociologist friend says the artist told her he writes the cards first, then conceptualizes the physical work. He's into metal detectors, she says, he finds lead bullets and wedding rings on battlefields. Human ring finger bones are in the next room covered with some of this lead.

Are you cringing yet? Or are you feeling as ho, hum as I'm feeling?

Whether it's fair criticism or not, this show has failed to seize my brain, and get me out of my funk.

Look at the world I'm living in. A place that needs Payday Loan shops. Not that I have a payday in my future. If I go to work at McDonalds I'd have to work more than 62.5 hours per week to make $2000 which, cut by an immediate minimum 15% for taxes, would barely cover my half of the mortgage, my ever-rising health insurance, food and bills. And I couldn't work at McDonald's alone, I'd have to get another minimum wage job at Wal-mart because they won't let you work full-time. They'd have to pay your health insurance.

Imagine a mom and dad having to work this much. No way they could take care of their own kids or ever cook a meal. Or go to an art museum.

Sure, tonight was an opening, so it was free, but I still had to rifle through the change drawer to get the train fare. And have the time.  And a couple of brain cells that aren't overloaded by responsibility and money trouble. When you're worried about your next job, or if you can ever settle your Pay-Day loan, you can't think about art or anything like it. You'd be lucky if you could hear a full sentence on one of the TVs that are constantly blaring at your workplaces.

I'm not criticizing the craft of the work. The artist has contrived each piece into a form that is a pleasing design. The ceramic jug doesn't look as strong as Wedgewood, but it doesn't need to be. It isn't intended to be functional.  Nor am I sure I want to criticize the shock value he's going after by using human bone, hair samples and love letters. That artwork reaches to get someone's attention is not a crime. We're all required to do some marketing.

I'm just saying that a concept can't generate feelings that the artwork doesn't corroborate.

Because each of Robleto's handmade objects is small, each has a natural intimacy. I should start to have a connection to the humans that might have used such a thing, but he add the same distance a history museum can't quite eliminate. He lines up the invalid feeders on rows of shelves, has a kaleidoscope pointing to the man/dinosaur dust, hides braided human hair flowers in a giant nest of craft-project paper flowers.

And then, there's the poetry. On the jug in The Skeleton Wine is an inscription "Scrubbing Your Soul Won't Make it Clean,"  and the following materials list:

Materials: cast and carved bone, bone dust from every bone in the body, ground wisdom teeth, homemade wine (water, sugar, fermented grapes, black cherries, plums, red raspberries, yeast, gelatin, tartaric acid, pectinase, sulfur dioxide, oak flavoring) fortified with calcium, potassium, creatine, zinc, iron, nickel, tin, copper, boron, vitamin K, crushed amino acids, glutamine, chromium, sodium, magnesium, colostrum, phosphorus, iodine, microcrystalline cellulose, quartz, rust, water extendable resin, typeset, driftwood shelf.)

What difference does it make if there is wine in this jug or not? We can't see it. We have to trust the artist that he has actually used any of the listed materials. It's a leap of faith and I'm not sure why I'm being asked to take this leap so that I can look at these materials in the new forms that this artist has made. Am I to scrub my soul with homemade wine and the blood of Christ, and still have to grab for the Comet?

If the artist is trying to inform me - explain what it takes to make wine - it's a self-serving attempt to gain my trust.

If the objects are made to deliver poetry in cleaver titles, then does that work? 

The piece, A Defeated Soldier Wants to Walk his Daughter up the Aisle - the boot - is made with wooden legs that Civil War amputee soldiers carved for themselves, the card verifies when I finally have a chance to read it. And the boots are World War I standard issue. I'm not trying to be a stickler for accuracy but when things don't fit logically they lend themselves to comedy. According to philosopher, Noël Carroll, incongruity is at the heart of all jokes. The titles makes the campy object a joke. Like a fraternity trophy used as a beer stein.
 
What gives me the most outrage is that Robleto has somehow sucked the ink off soldiers letters home and made them into dye for one of the pieces shown here. Maybe the soldier was a bad writer, but if I was his/her kid, I'd want the letter.

The arrogance of the artist, thinking that someone would wish their bone or their ink anonymously included in his ceramics or paper-making projects, is glaring.

I'm usually as willing to laugh at campy stuff as the next Post Modernist. Tonight, however, I feel like such an ordinary Joe, weighed down by real or imagined financial worries, that I'm not sure I'm the most open observer. Like an ordinary observer, I feel outside. And from here, it looks like too much of contemporary art is an inside joke.   

  
Terry Talty, who writes this blog, pleas for forgiveness for being a downer: Please do read the next installment, which is sure to be more optimistic. Sign up for the RSS feed, if you can spare the time.

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