Dispassion and postures: a review of the Greater
Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund
Fellowships for Individual Artists 2006 Exhibition
Inova/Vogel
3253 N. Downer Avenue
www3.uwm.edu/arts/about/inova.html
Through December 9.
By Katherine Murrell
The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have
become an anticipated event in the Milwaukee art calendar,
and gender politics aside, offer something of an annual gauge
of contemporary art practice in Milwaukee. This is a vehicle for
established and emerging artists to be selected by a jury for
public recognition of their work, as well as monetary awards to
support their artistic efforts. So into this exhibition of the
Fellowship winners I went with high expectations.
Entering the venerable Inova/Vogel galleries, the first thing I
saw, looming down the hall, solitary and glowingly lit, was Scott
Reeder’s American Dick. Pretty literal, even at thirty feet. It
prefigured, in ways, elements and themes of the exhibition as a
whole. In this case, it was like something off a high school kid’s
notebook. Reeder's work is admittedly simple, meant to be
down-to-earth and far from high-brow. As noted by writer
Rachel Kushner, who contributed the catalog essay on
Reeder’s work, he is purposefully kitschy and vernacular.
This approach can be loads of fun, but in this case, is flat and
deadpan, mirroring the painting technique and sarcasm of
images such as the poor bloke at the center of Symmetrical
Pirate. This swarthy veteran of the high seas totters on two
peg legs and has two hooks instead of hands. And he’s a
perch for twin orange birds on his shoulders. But are we to
feel sorry for poor old Captain Hooks? Is he comical? Is he just
a formal arrangement of shape and color? He can be read as
any of those things, but his vagueness diffuses any pathos or
empathy that could be dredged up in our hearts. Instead he’s
more like a whimsical decoration.
The three-dimensional Bamboombox instigates karaoke urges
as it plays tiki-lounge versions of 1960s and 70s protest songs.
The repackaging of these songs in Muzak fashion disarms them
of their original power and fire, and accentuates the narcotic
feeling of this installation. The banality in subject and execution
is overwhelming; my brain is shutting down and I’d like a drink
with an umbrella thank you, but not in a pleasant way.
Shaking off the slack feeling and walking into the adjacent
gallery with works by Chris Niver is an abrupt segue. Niver’s
works are small, elegant, and sparse. From a distance they
appear to be line drawings, which are how they were conceived,
but have been realized in straight-line stitches on linen. There
are intriguing insinuations of stories, especially in the manner of
Skull Island references, but strictly speaking they’re not
narratives. The black threads that comprise the images are
consistent in width and density, their subtle relationships played
out in the negative spaces between. Niver’s works is cool and
rational, and even the flickers of imaginative fantasy in his
pirate-like characters and landscape scenes are far more
refined than fantastic.
The third gallery installation on the first floor of Vogel features
the work of DoneBestDone, a multimedia collaborative that
works with video in morphing mélanges of cartoonish images
and colors. Bulletin boards show their stills and source material
which looks like flash art for temporary tattoos. The videos
relentlessly blink on by with trancey techno music burbling
away. Something tells me that the DBD crew spent many an
hour chortling at the astute slyness of South Park, to which
their short video How to be a Spy seems to owe a debt (you
can view this and many of their other projects online: www.
donebestdone.com)
The gallery space is pervaded by self-conscious cleverness
that is too cool to bother getting into anything deep. But
DoneBestDone seems to like it that way, according to filmmaker
and DBD guest Vince Ream, who makes the silliest contribution
to this year’s Nohl extravaganza with an off-the-cuff paragraph
and a half in the exhibition catalog; a concluding paragraph is
written his son of undetermined age, who offers a meandering
teen-speak sentence and finishes up with “Filler words filler
words filler words.” Make of that what you will, but it’s kind of
like discount-store dada, a knock-off of the real thing.
(Note: for a stunning piece of installation/video work, check out
the granddaddy of them all, the late Nam June Paik’s "Rain" in
the contemporary galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum.)
So on to the upstairs galleries at Inova/Vogel. Heading into the
display by Marc Tasman, we’re strong-armed into a patriotic
wave of Americanism. Tasman’s premise for his installation is
that the United States flag should be changed to a field of
ninety-nine white stars on a field of blue, and nineteen stripes.
Numerologist would get a kick out of this, as the ninety-nine
white stars are derived from 9 times 11, shorthand for
September 11. The stripes are read as nine plus ten, or
September 10. They can take on the alternate persona,
however, of reflecting the nineteen hijackers responsible for the
tragedies of 9/11.
Walking into this gallery is like entering into a great big
notebook full of plans and reasons and documents for this
proposal. Tasman begins his premise with a large version of
Old Glory hanging next to his newly minted design. It’s quite
funny, really, the blatant disparities in the two hangings. The
traditional flag is water-stained and wrinkled, taking the place of
the sad and tired “before” picture when compared to the new,
improved, made-over, sexy version, here represented by the
pristine and sparkling 99/19 stars and stripes.
The rest of Tasman’s offerings function as supports for his new
flag vision. On the walls are quotes by George W. Bush from
his post-9/11 speeches, echoing with the labored efforts for
coherence that characterize his public addresses. There are
also multimedia elements; a video of American flags waving
against a blue sky, homogenous except for the text that notes
their location, and a selection of YouTube videos showing
conceptions of patriotism dredged up from the great soup of
the internet populace. The cacophony of red, white and blue
finishes off with a display unit where you can take home a
miniature version of Tasman’s proposed flag design. It’s like a
microcosm of a major exhibition, with the obligatory multimedia
add-ins and even the gift shop at the end.
Taken at face value, there are many opinionated responses
that could be made to Tasman’s new flag idea. But as noted by
artist and writer Sarah Karouse in the catalog essay on this
installation, it can all be understood in a multiplicity of ways. A
subtext is the obsession with the wounds opened on 9/11, and
the heightened sense of nationalism combined with victimization
that has served as a reason and root for a variety of ills and
actions in the aftermath. These are powerful interpretations
and Karouse sensitively draws them out in her writing. In the
physical space of the exhibition, it’s difficult to see the duality of
interpretation, to grasp the suggestion of panic that lies
beneath the domineering stance of America as heroic victim.
But synthesizing these positions together provides an altered
view, one that is maybe hard to see because it is too close to
us in our society.
Sharing gallery space with Tasman are the large-scale
photographs of Dan Klopp. Whereas Tasman pummels you
over the head with an overbearing display, Klopp’s
photographs are quietly and politely remote. His project stems
from a trip to Trivandrum, Kerala, India where he and his guide,
anthropologist Matthew Wolfgram, persuaded people to be
photographed with motorcycles which are valued possessions
and symbols of status and pride. The bikes are placed front
and center, and the people they pose with either sit on them or
are placed behind. Klopp used a pinhole camera to produce
these images, a rather primitive apparatus that requires a long
exposure time, and the resulting images are black and white or
sepia toned. They’re extremely nostalgic, as though relics of
the 1950s or 60s. Much of the talk one hears about India in
recent times is on an economic front, with the rapid proliferation
of American technology companies and call centers springing
up overseas. There’s no sense of that in these images of
Trivandrum, in the far south of the Indian peninsula. These
show a society of today that looks like that of yesteryear.
The sense of distance applies to the feeling that this is all very
long ago, and to the sense that the people in his images are
reserved, even aloof, and strategically posed. We’re left
feeling like this is an array of amateur auditions for motorcycle
adverts rather than instantaneous street portraits that reveal
essential qualities and characteristics of humanity. Klopp also
presents portraits of marathon swimmer Jim Dreyer, who looks
like a muscle-bound “Creature from the Black Lagoon,”
emerging from the misty waters of Lake Michigan. Carefully
arranged and austere, these images like formal studies in
balance of light and tone rather than studious portraits.
Down the hall, Santiago Cucullo presents a variety of media,
including sculptures made of found objects, photography,
video, and wall stencils. The breadth of materials and subjects
makes his work hard to hang together, and the wall stencils
have the unfortunate fate of becoming decorative backdrops
rather than asserting their own sense of power and presence.
The most visceral pieces in the exhibition, I would argue, are
Cucullo’s Gorgon’s Head (Stheno) and Gorgon’s Head
(Euryale). The dark coverings are airline blankets, those thin,
insubstantial pieces of cloth that may not provide a whole lot of
warmth, yet are somehow comforting all the same. But now
they’re appropriated for frightening mask-like forms, covering
round shapes like decapitated heads. The connection with
aviation, having recently come out of Tasman’s gallery space,
is also fresh in the mind. They conjure up a multiplicity of
modern fears and anxieties in their disembodied state.
The imagery of Chris Smith across the hall is a direct foil to
this. Smith seems to have a predilection for the ordinary, the
banal, and the moderately tacky. His photographs of modern
domestic architecture and pastiches of family holidays play
upon stereotypes, but Smith hesitates in making any revealing
commentaries. The documentary impulse is there, but reflects
back to us what we already are painfully aware of when we
drive down through commercial wastelands of big-box shopping
avenues and uninspired suburbs. There is an interesting
subtext in his images of garbage which appears to be humble,
quotidian debris. But look a little more closely and consult the
wall text and you’ll find out it’s so much more exotic – it’s
Spanish garbage! Really, if nothing else we can now examine
refuse as a reflection of globalization.
Upon leaving the Nohl Fellowship exhibition I mentally summed
up what I had seen. There were a few intriguing or provocative
things, there were some that left me feeling empty, and some
that left me annoyed or bored. But on the whole, the works on
view are all quite safe. There’s no pushing the envelope in
artistic technique or materials, and thematically, issues are
addressed on an impersonal scale rather than from an intimate
point of view. The questions posed are broad, and avoid
staking personal claims or stalwart positions on the part of the
artists. This seems to be a very “acceptable” (read: safe)
position to be in, which begs the question, is this the new
academic, mainstream art? Is this where we are in terms of the
status quo, rather than out somewhere on the artistic frontier?
Cool cleverness without risks neatly avoids the dramas and
despairs that plague human existence. It seems that the road
currently travelled is one of correctness and acceptable
dispassion rather than fiery emotional investment, at least for
this year.
Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund
Fellowships for Individual Artists 2006 Exhibition
Inova/Vogel
3253 N. Downer Avenue
www3.uwm.edu/arts/about/inova.html
Through December 9.
By Katherine Murrell
The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have
become an anticipated event in the Milwaukee art calendar,
and gender politics aside, offer something of an annual gauge
of contemporary art practice in Milwaukee. This is a vehicle for
established and emerging artists to be selected by a jury for
public recognition of their work, as well as monetary awards to
support their artistic efforts. So into this exhibition of the
Fellowship winners I went with high expectations.
Entering the venerable Inova/Vogel galleries, the first thing I
saw, looming down the hall, solitary and glowingly lit, was Scott
Reeder’s American Dick. Pretty literal, even at thirty feet. It
prefigured, in ways, elements and themes of the exhibition as a
whole. In this case, it was like something off a high school kid’s
notebook. Reeder's work is admittedly simple, meant to be
down-to-earth and far from high-brow. As noted by writer
Rachel Kushner, who contributed the catalog essay on
Reeder’s work, he is purposefully kitschy and vernacular.
This approach can be loads of fun, but in this case, is flat and
deadpan, mirroring the painting technique and sarcasm of
images such as the poor bloke at the center of Symmetrical
Pirate. This swarthy veteran of the high seas totters on two
peg legs and has two hooks instead of hands. And he’s a
perch for twin orange birds on his shoulders. But are we to
feel sorry for poor old Captain Hooks? Is he comical? Is he just
a formal arrangement of shape and color? He can be read as
any of those things, but his vagueness diffuses any pathos or
empathy that could be dredged up in our hearts. Instead he’s
more like a whimsical decoration.
The three-dimensional Bamboombox instigates karaoke urges
as it plays tiki-lounge versions of 1960s and 70s protest songs.
The repackaging of these songs in Muzak fashion disarms them
of their original power and fire, and accentuates the narcotic
feeling of this installation. The banality in subject and execution
is overwhelming; my brain is shutting down and I’d like a drink
with an umbrella thank you, but not in a pleasant way.
Shaking off the slack feeling and walking into the adjacent
gallery with works by Chris Niver is an abrupt segue. Niver’s
works are small, elegant, and sparse. From a distance they
appear to be line drawings, which are how they were conceived,
but have been realized in straight-line stitches on linen. There
are intriguing insinuations of stories, especially in the manner of
Skull Island references, but strictly speaking they’re not
narratives. The black threads that comprise the images are
consistent in width and density, their subtle relationships played
out in the negative spaces between. Niver’s works is cool and
rational, and even the flickers of imaginative fantasy in his
pirate-like characters and landscape scenes are far more
refined than fantastic.
The third gallery installation on the first floor of Vogel features
the work of DoneBestDone, a multimedia collaborative that
works with video in morphing mélanges of cartoonish images
and colors. Bulletin boards show their stills and source material
which looks like flash art for temporary tattoos. The videos
relentlessly blink on by with trancey techno music burbling
away. Something tells me that the DBD crew spent many an
hour chortling at the astute slyness of South Park, to which
their short video How to be a Spy seems to owe a debt (you
can view this and many of their other projects online: www.
donebestdone.com)
The gallery space is pervaded by self-conscious cleverness
that is too cool to bother getting into anything deep. But
DoneBestDone seems to like it that way, according to filmmaker
and DBD guest Vince Ream, who makes the silliest contribution
to this year’s Nohl extravaganza with an off-the-cuff paragraph
and a half in the exhibition catalog; a concluding paragraph is
written his son of undetermined age, who offers a meandering
teen-speak sentence and finishes up with “Filler words filler
words filler words.” Make of that what you will, but it’s kind of
like discount-store dada, a knock-off of the real thing.
(Note: for a stunning piece of installation/video work, check out
the granddaddy of them all, the late Nam June Paik’s "Rain" in
the contemporary galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum.)
So on to the upstairs galleries at Inova/Vogel. Heading into the
display by Marc Tasman, we’re strong-armed into a patriotic
wave of Americanism. Tasman’s premise for his installation is
that the United States flag should be changed to a field of
ninety-nine white stars on a field of blue, and nineteen stripes.
Numerologist would get a kick out of this, as the ninety-nine
white stars are derived from 9 times 11, shorthand for
September 11. The stripes are read as nine plus ten, or
September 10. They can take on the alternate persona,
however, of reflecting the nineteen hijackers responsible for the
tragedies of 9/11.
Walking into this gallery is like entering into a great big
notebook full of plans and reasons and documents for this
proposal. Tasman begins his premise with a large version of
Old Glory hanging next to his newly minted design. It’s quite
funny, really, the blatant disparities in the two hangings. The
traditional flag is water-stained and wrinkled, taking the place of
the sad and tired “before” picture when compared to the new,
improved, made-over, sexy version, here represented by the
pristine and sparkling 99/19 stars and stripes.
The rest of Tasman’s offerings function as supports for his new
flag vision. On the walls are quotes by George W. Bush from
his post-9/11 speeches, echoing with the labored efforts for
coherence that characterize his public addresses. There are
also multimedia elements; a video of American flags waving
against a blue sky, homogenous except for the text that notes
their location, and a selection of YouTube videos showing
conceptions of patriotism dredged up from the great soup of
the internet populace. The cacophony of red, white and blue
finishes off with a display unit where you can take home a
miniature version of Tasman’s proposed flag design. It’s like a
microcosm of a major exhibition, with the obligatory multimedia
add-ins and even the gift shop at the end.
Taken at face value, there are many opinionated responses
that could be made to Tasman’s new flag idea. But as noted by
artist and writer Sarah Karouse in the catalog essay on this
installation, it can all be understood in a multiplicity of ways. A
subtext is the obsession with the wounds opened on 9/11, and
the heightened sense of nationalism combined with victimization
that has served as a reason and root for a variety of ills and
actions in the aftermath. These are powerful interpretations
and Karouse sensitively draws them out in her writing. In the
physical space of the exhibition, it’s difficult to see the duality of
interpretation, to grasp the suggestion of panic that lies
beneath the domineering stance of America as heroic victim.
But synthesizing these positions together provides an altered
view, one that is maybe hard to see because it is too close to
us in our society.
Sharing gallery space with Tasman are the large-scale
photographs of Dan Klopp. Whereas Tasman pummels you
over the head with an overbearing display, Klopp’s
photographs are quietly and politely remote. His project stems
from a trip to Trivandrum, Kerala, India where he and his guide,
anthropologist Matthew Wolfgram, persuaded people to be
photographed with motorcycles which are valued possessions
and symbols of status and pride. The bikes are placed front
and center, and the people they pose with either sit on them or
are placed behind. Klopp used a pinhole camera to produce
these images, a rather primitive apparatus that requires a long
exposure time, and the resulting images are black and white or
sepia toned. They’re extremely nostalgic, as though relics of
the 1950s or 60s. Much of the talk one hears about India in
recent times is on an economic front, with the rapid proliferation
of American technology companies and call centers springing
up overseas. There’s no sense of that in these images of
Trivandrum, in the far south of the Indian peninsula. These
show a society of today that looks like that of yesteryear.
The sense of distance applies to the feeling that this is all very
long ago, and to the sense that the people in his images are
reserved, even aloof, and strategically posed. We’re left
feeling like this is an array of amateur auditions for motorcycle
adverts rather than instantaneous street portraits that reveal
essential qualities and characteristics of humanity. Klopp also
presents portraits of marathon swimmer Jim Dreyer, who looks
like a muscle-bound “Creature from the Black Lagoon,”
emerging from the misty waters of Lake Michigan. Carefully
arranged and austere, these images like formal studies in
balance of light and tone rather than studious portraits.
Down the hall, Santiago Cucullo presents a variety of media,
including sculptures made of found objects, photography,
video, and wall stencils. The breadth of materials and subjects
makes his work hard to hang together, and the wall stencils
have the unfortunate fate of becoming decorative backdrops
rather than asserting their own sense of power and presence.
The most visceral pieces in the exhibition, I would argue, are
Cucullo’s Gorgon’s Head (Stheno) and Gorgon’s Head
(Euryale). The dark coverings are airline blankets, those thin,
insubstantial pieces of cloth that may not provide a whole lot of
warmth, yet are somehow comforting all the same. But now
they’re appropriated for frightening mask-like forms, covering
round shapes like decapitated heads. The connection with
aviation, having recently come out of Tasman’s gallery space,
is also fresh in the mind. They conjure up a multiplicity of
modern fears and anxieties in their disembodied state.
The imagery of Chris Smith across the hall is a direct foil to
this. Smith seems to have a predilection for the ordinary, the
banal, and the moderately tacky. His photographs of modern
domestic architecture and pastiches of family holidays play
upon stereotypes, but Smith hesitates in making any revealing
commentaries. The documentary impulse is there, but reflects
back to us what we already are painfully aware of when we
drive down through commercial wastelands of big-box shopping
avenues and uninspired suburbs. There is an interesting
subtext in his images of garbage which appears to be humble,
quotidian debris. But look a little more closely and consult the
wall text and you’ll find out it’s so much more exotic – it’s
Spanish garbage! Really, if nothing else we can now examine
refuse as a reflection of globalization.
Upon leaving the Nohl Fellowship exhibition I mentally summed
up what I had seen. There were a few intriguing or provocative
things, there were some that left me feeling empty, and some
that left me annoyed or bored. But on the whole, the works on
view are all quite safe. There’s no pushing the envelope in
artistic technique or materials, and thematically, issues are
addressed on an impersonal scale rather than from an intimate
point of view. The questions posed are broad, and avoid
staking personal claims or stalwart positions on the part of the
artists. This seems to be a very “acceptable” (read: safe)
position to be in, which begs the question, is this the new
academic, mainstream art? Is this where we are in terms of the
status quo, rather than out somewhere on the artistic frontier?
Cool cleverness without risks neatly avoids the dramas and
despairs that plague human existence. It seems that the road
currently travelled is one of correctness and acceptable
dispassion rather than fiery emotional investment, at least for
this year.
Full Moon Edition No. 2 11.24.07
| Copyright 2007 Art History Chicks LLC |
| Installation view of works by Scott Reeder. At right: Symmetrical Pirate. Foreground: Bamboombox. |
| Installation view of works by Chris Niver. |
| Installation view of works by DoneBestDone. |
| Installation view of works by Marc Tasman. |
| Installation view of works by Dan Klopp. |
| Santiago Cucullo, Gorgon’s Head (Stheno) and Gorgon’s Head (Euryale). |
| Chris Smith, Holiday, 2007. |
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