Susceptible to Images

John Sobczak has worked behind the scenes of the
Milwaukee art community for 20 years, first as Michael
Lord’s gallery assistant and then in the same role at
Dean Jensen Gallery. Those who know John might
describe him as bright, articulate, frank, funny and
moody (sometimes crabby). He was one of the first
curators in Milwaukee to recognize the value of
photography back in the mid-1980s as he guided
Michael Lord in showing emerging photographers such
as Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman as well as
young, international painters such as Donald Baechler
and Georg Baselitz.

John Sobczak has clearly stayed in the background of
things, but has also quietly and steadily enhanced the
level of art viewing in Milwaukee. Fortunately, Sobczak
comes forward a bit this month with a show that he
curated at Dean Jensen Gallery called "Discarded
Yours: Art Made from New York Junk," July 28 - Sept. 9.

Ever since he graduated from UW-Milwaukee’s art program in the early 1980s, Sobczak has been driving a
rental truck back and forth to NYC to pick up art work for Michel Lord or Dean Jensen. Over these many forays
to New York, he became interested in certain rough-around-the-edges East Village artists. It was actually in
1989, during Jensen’s first year participating in the Outsider Art Fair there that Sobczak stumbled into Max Fish
bar on Ludlow Street. Here he was introduced to Harry Druzd, bass player, artist and bartender extraordinaire.
Druzd holds court over a who’s who of visual artists at this East Village hangout, where Sobczak hangs his
hat whenever he lands in New York. Through Druzd, he met the three other artists he has included in this
exhibition.

It’s about time someone forged a connection between NYC’s hip bar scene and Milwaukee. Not to mention
the fact that the four artists Sobczak has selected for the show have never shown their work here before and
they were all here on Gallery Night, July 28.

There are a couple good things about this exhibition.
The first is that it shows a bit of curatorial spunk. None
of the artists’ work seems very commercial, so
Jensen is brave to support such an endeavor. He also
put forth the money to publish a short catalog/booklet.
How rare is this? In Milwaukee, it seems that art is
almost never fully digested in any form and curators or
gallery dealers can be exceedingly lazy in their
scholarship. In a short space, Sobczak’s essay does
the seemingly miraculous: it introduces the work,
provides a historicalcontext for it and speaks of the
concepts and ideas in a personable, informal voice
that actually engages the reader. It almost sounds as
if he’s having fun. Oh my gosh. And then there’s the art
work itself, which comprises a succinct and focused
notion: that high art and everyday life can harmonize. It’
s the gap between art and life that all four of these
doyens of Max Fish bar occupy, perhaps in both their
social and professional roles.

Harry Druzd’s work ranges from paintings to
installations, and for this show he has amassed 15
garbage bags full of cigarette boxes. After getting
interested in how his young daughter would build
things with blocks, he decided “to try and make blocks
out of some other material.” I bet the 10-year-old was
impressed by the 16,000 cigarette boxes daddy
collected over several years and then stacked and
arranged into an elegant sculpture called

Smokestack. His piece in Milwaukee is actually the 8th or 9th reincarnation of the cigarette boxes into a
gallery installation, but each time he totally redesigns it, working first from schematic drawings (some of
which are in the exhibition). Besides the sophistication of the piece as it incorporates complex patterns from
the careful arrangement of the different brands, Druzd’s work offers that wonderful reassurance that anything
and everything can be a tool for an innovative mind.

What’s striking about these two pieces at Jensen’s is how delicate they appear. One misstep or bump and
the whole thing falls down. Druzd said that this is part of the fascination. When he and his daughter would
build with the cardboard blocks they would finish a structure, step back and then throw stuffed animals at it to
knock it down. The fact that these sculptures are both tentative and solid offers a charged dynamic with a built-
in sense of their impending demise. One has to stifle the desire to kick it and watch it tumble.

Druzd’s exceedingly simple yet grand endeavor, to me, offers a simple but profound message: brick by brick --
it’s the inconsequential, small, even incidental acts, that if done with focus and care build up to important
accomplishments. A bartender collects, sorts and categorizes cigarette boxes. He begins to notice the
nuances of their colors and designs and works them into intricate patterns and forms. He sits on the gallery
floor with a friend and one pack at a time, stacks them up. He puts in an eight-hour day, stacking boxes. The
result transcends the material.

The other three artists are John Drury, who Sobczak desribes as the “black sheep” of the Studio Glass
Movement, the antichrist of Dale Chihuly ; Greg Woolard who stitches detailed, patterned quilts from snippets
of gay porn magazines; and Rick Rodine who also uses vintage magazine clippings to make collages that
suggest speed and motion.

All four artists work in a sophisticatedly subversive mode and manage to make very fine objects out of low-end
stuff. This breath of fresh air that Jensen and Sobczak blow in from New York could serve as a new model for
our little gallery scene: curatorial conviction, a thoughtful and useful essay, and, heck, a new bar stop at in
NYC.

-Debra Brehmer

Debra Brehmer is co-editor of Susceptible to Images.
Comments? Email dbrehmer@susceptibletoimages.com