It’s time for another reincarnation of the ‘nude show,’ the annual exhibit which almost by itself gave institutional heft to what had been a sleepy clubhouse for independent painters, seldom visited. Although wildly popular, in time the exhibit itself became deranged, body parts and sex acts, a polaroid of a bruise, breasts on a spoon, finally underwent a crisis, had a breakdown, disappeared. Now it reemerges after a soul-searching rehab as ‘Demographically Speaking, a Figurative Exhibition,’ still wearing the same blindfold it had on when it went away. Frankly, this inability to deal with art directly without an overlay of identity politics, some non-visual social agenda, reveals a failure of nerve, an unwillingness to take a stand about art itself, and I’m not the first to notice.
In order to enter their competition, along with three images, a resume and bio, there’s this ‘required’ questionnaire. Starts off ok, race, gender, and age, but then it gets sorta confusing, like do I check ‘polysexual’ -- well aren’t we all? What does any of this have to do with art? Art is democratic first of all, ought to be, because honesty, talent, and character aren’t judged by skin color, orientation, such as that, not anymore, maybe they missed that part. Their call is divisive in its diversity, bigoted in its distinctions, and not really about art is it?
What’s actually important, always, is what goes up on the wall, and it will only seem typical if they produce an exhibition with a monotone sensibility from a pc checklist of sources. It hasn’t been ethnicity or gender that has denied access to an audience to many artists who have attempted to find support here, but an academic bias favoring obscurity and innuendo, the insider kabuki of the culture mob, over straight-ahead representational art -- the sort that allows the viewer to participate out of their own experience, the kind people take home.
In order to enter their competition, along with three images, a resume and bio, there’s this ‘required’ questionnaire. Starts off ok, race, gender, and age, but then it gets sorta confusing, like do I check ‘polysexual’ -- well aren’t we all? What does any of this have to do with art? Art is democratic first of all, ought to be, because honesty, talent, and character aren’t judged by skin color, orientation, such as that, not anymore, maybe they missed that part. Their call is divisive in its diversity, bigoted in its distinctions, and not really about art is it?
What’s actually important, always, is what goes up on the wall, and it will only seem typical if they produce an exhibition with a monotone sensibility from a pc checklist of sources. It hasn’t been ethnicity or gender that has denied access to an audience to many artists who have attempted to find support here, but an academic bias favoring obscurity and innuendo, the insider kabuki of the culture mob, over straight-ahead representational art -- the sort that allows the viewer to participate out of their own experience, the kind people take home.
1 comment:
As someone who was president of that sleepy clubhouse in 1995-96, we came the closest to the idea you expressed about the exhibit, but was hijacked in the worst way a very few years later. Art politics disgust me and the people who pull the strings now at the clubhouse represent perfectly the kind of place Mark Twain famously said he'd like to go to at the end of the world--twenty years behind the times. The community is ripe for something to rise up and represent the representational artists of this area and let the hijacked clubhouse wither away into the irrelevancy it deserves. The resurgence of representational art and the schools outside of academe that teach it should be a wake up call to those who ought to see but are too caught up in their bubble to see anything outside of it. Meanwhile, artists who paint things without the signifiers of insider kabuki carry on.
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