My wife and I subscribe to the American Prospect, in which today I found an article by Sharon Butler, a professor of visual arts at Eastern Connecticut State University. The University is a bit north of here, but safely ensconced in our largely ignored Eastern part of the state. I enjoyed the article (subscription required to read the whole article), about the prospects for art in the age of Obama. I particularly enjoyed her take on the current exhibition at the Guggenheim, about which I expressed my own thoughts a few weeks ago. I said:
The other main attraction consisted of a collaboration of artists that, according to the museum’s website:
Working independently and in various collaborative constellations, they eschewed the discrete aesthetic object in favor of the exhibition environment as a dynamic arena, ever expanding in its physical and temporal parameters.
I have no reason to believe they did not succeed in their artistic endeavors, as I have no idea what the above means. Mostly the fruit of their efforts consisted of slogans written on the wall, or hanging from the ceiling, many of which made no sense whatsoever.
Ms. Butler says the exhibit in question was a perfect exemplar of art in the age of Bush:
Nowhere in the art world has this collective despondency and resignation been more starkly revealed than in a recent Guggenheim Museum exhibition lethargically titled “theanyspacewhatever.” Ten relational artists — that is, those focusing on how people and communities interact — who made it big over the past decade were commissioned to collaborate with curator Nancy Spector on installations that would occupy the museum’s five spirally arranged floors. Much of the show featured empty space, and Douglas Gordon’s faux-sage existential notions stenciled across the walls (“You’re closer than you know,” “Nothing will ever be the same”) seemed calculated to convey the profundity of banality and vice-versa — a Bushian notion if ever there were one. Perhaps the conceptual high point of the exhibition was Jorge Pardo’s maze of cardboard-screen partitions unevenly perforated with vaguely alien shapes, which made viewers yearn for it all to be over.
She’s right about the cardboard, but it beat the empty space by a mile:
I plead not guilty by reason of lack of notice to taking unauthorized pictures. We took the elevator up and worked our way down. The sign barring cameras was, so far as we noticed, only on the first floor as you enter the spiral. We only saw it as we exited.
But I digress (do I do anything else?). The main reason for writing this post is to let my readers know that Ms. Butler has a blog, and since she is from our neck of the woods, and since she appears to be a good leftie, i thought I would point you to it. It’s called Two Coats of Paint, and you can reach it at the link, or from the blogroll at the right. It’s about art, mostly, though she does hit on politics. Here’s her take on Bush’s official portrait.
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