ART STEW

The Annual Members’ Art Show is installed at Rochester Contemporary Art Center. This is a democratic exhibition: if you are a dues paying member of RoCo, you may deliver one piece of your art to include on the walls for this show – no judging, no art jury, no work ever denied (except for possible size restrictions.) As you might expect, the show is a free-for-all, art hung cheek by jowl as far as the eye can see from floor to nearly ceiling.

The result: it’s hard to see any art for all the art.

I have some trouble with art democracy. For most of my adult life, my job has been to judge the work of artists – either to sell or critique for publication. I’ve spoken out against the wasted opportunity for excellence in places such as the Gallery at High Falls where no exhibitor is ever turned.

But I’ve also written recently about art elitism – particularly the Memorial Art Gallery Biennial where, from hundreds of artists’ entries, under fifty make it to the wall with an exhibition meant to showcase regional art talent.

I’m not alone in the philosophical mush of uncertainty. RoCo claims that this is a totally unjudged show but is sponsoring a public “vote for your favorite” contest – by any definition, a “Best In Show.” Several individual prizes are awarded as well. Sounds a little hypocritical to me.

So is there such a thing as a successful, truly democratic art show? YES THERE IS! And it’s RoCo again. The 6x6 fund raising exhibit equalizes size, price (every art piece is sold for $20.) and total anonymity between buyer and artist. It’s such fun that good artists are happy to submit work even knowing that it may hang alongside that of an 8 year old from an elementary school art class. It's not even a close contest between the quality of the two RoCo shows: the 6X6 wins hands down.

``````````````````````````````````````````````

I lie awake these nights mentally sorting through rooms of furniture, rugs and art work. Some will stay in Rochester to live wherever it is we end up and the rest will land at our new house in North Carolina. I feel like I’m sending half my children off to a foster home – or worse, breaking up twins or dragging babies away from mom.

As excited as I am about setting up a new place “from scratch”, I also realize that many of my art treasures are rooted in Rochester/Upstate New York soil and they give me….what exactly? Credentials? Snob appeal? OH, NO! I AM ABOUT TO BECOME ANONYMOUS.

Well, that’s part of “reinvention” isn’t it? You roll the dice and you accept the challenges.

HOUSES: ANOTHER ART FORM

It’s time to move.

We bought this house five years ago. Our former house – a unique 1960 California contemporary where we’d lived for seven years (before that, a city townhouse and once, a 100-year old farm house) – was sold in a week. We moved into an apartment while we planned the “ultimate home for the mature couple.” It never got built and after living with rented furniture and even worse, rented artwork, we were ready to jump out our sixth floor window. Instead, we jumped here.

Once more we’ve poured ourselves into a house. It’s taken us five years of hard work – and more money, naturally – and now it is as close to perfection as I can make it and so, time to move on.

My best friend accuses me of self-sabotage. She claims that I can’t deal with success, that I manufacture reasons for turning perfection (whenever I get too close to whatever-that-is) into chaos and I wonder if she could be right.

I read somewhere once about achieving women who bore additional stress as they tried to keep up the face of success while, internally, feeling like an actor in someone else's play.

Do women feel like frauds most of the time? Is this the true curse of Eve?

Maybe Eve felt unworthy of all that perfection. Maybe she got tired of smiling and hosting all those garden tours while all the time thinking "this could be better. I can see the mistakes even if no one else can. I mean...poison ivy? How can I hide THAT one?"

But I prefer to believe that she looked around one day, dusted off her hands and said “There. It’s the best I can do with this place. Time for me to find a new challenge.”

``````````````````````````

The lead photograph is our current Colorado contemporary house that is “for sale.” It’s pretty grand. Our plan is to buy a small something in Upstate New York for spring/summer.

We’ve already made a commitment to purchase a little cottage in North Carolina for the cold months. My ideal is this rustic cabin. I love the textures and the piecework look of the place. If anyone knows of such a place near here, send me the information.

Meanwhile, prepare for more house images - real and imagined - in my upcoming blogs. Here's one that I like: Christina Brinkman's charming sculptures. They look like toys. She does her own woodworking. The slab-formed houses are porcelain and she collects antique wheels from on-line auctions.

YES, BUT IS IT ART?

My daughter was in town this weekend. She ran away from her grown-up life – one husband, two children, goldfish, cat and turtle – and for 48 hours, pretended she was single again. Some of her old friends came over; they dressed all in black, put on their twenty-year old Doc Marten’s and went to a rock concert.

She reports that the 1980’s have not completely died in Rochester, there are still plenty of mullets around, and in this, her home town, the 1990’s is still a bit cutting edge.

I think she’s being a tad harsh. Or is that the role of generations - one just recently past idealism of youth and coming into the judgmental middle years and the other, rage, passion, crusading replaced with acceptance, introspection, joy in wabi sabi, the imperfection of the universe?

Like bats, my daughter and her friends begin their social circling after dark and so, during Saturday afternoon, I took her with me to the art gallery craft sale; it was nice (yawn) (sigh) (ho-hum) and spontaneously, we wandered into the main gallery to see “Pain of the Flesh" which is NOT y-s-ho-h but startling and vulgar and almost-but-not quite shocking. I liked it - it is NOT a holiday show.

My daughter was wearing her pre-concert-barhopping black garb including this hand painted jacket that she bought when she was in full-blown rebel mode in 1992 and living in Seattle. The museum guards began following her, talking to each other, nearly pointing, and when they saw that I was onto them, one of them said “her coat fits right into this show!”

We left the museum and drove to Main Street and the Scio Street garage to see the newly finished tile mosaic installation commissioned by the City, the work of artist Jill Gussow.

It’s colorful. Represents a ton of hours of work. It’s good… and decorative…and impossible not to like. But what if it was installed behind a kitchen stove or in a shower stall? Does the fact that it’s big, make it good? Does intricacy make it ingenious? Is this the best kind of public art – non-controversial?

I guess I can only ask the questions. I think my daughter’s jacket is repugnant and tasteless and I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it. But it captures a certain spirit of its time and place. The murals are cheerful, colorful, fun. Do they tell us more about ourselves? Our place? Our time?Is this good public art or is it more lipstick on a pig?

Art in the Woods

Witch hazel is in bloom. I just saw it as I walked my dogs along the wood’s edge and my heart leapt as it does every fall. Witch hazel blossoms are easy to miss. They are small tufts – more like bits of yellow thread than flower petals – attached up and down the dark limbs of this under-story bush.

You need to be up close to appreciate the subtle witch hazel blooms. They appear just as the color bullies of the woods are at their strongest – maple, black cherry, sumac, beech and ash - each elbowing for attention. Those are too easy. You can appreciate their color with a drive-by, even from a tour bus window with people yakking in your ear and someone on a speaker explaining temperatures and geographic history (an occasional joke thrown in.) In a week or two, after a heavy rain or wind, their fifteen minutes of fame will be over for another year and the trees will be left empty handed. Witch hazel blooms will remain until about Thanksgiving. It’s not uncommon to see them holding up through a light snowfall or locked in a glaze of ice along their parent stems.

I remember finding our hillside of witch hazel. It was our first year on this property. We had moved into the house in early winter; I had open-heart surgery ten months later. I was taking my first post-operative walk outdoors, alone, wondering how my life would change and mostly, what was I spared to do? Even more disturbing, what if I never found my life’s grand purpose? That’s when I saw the witch hazel and I wanted to tell everybody about it – no joking.

`````````````````````````````````````````

Debra Audet’s memorial service was held Saturday in a grand gothic cathedral on East Avenue. Her friends and family spoke eloquently about her life, her gifts and the meaningfulness of her life in theirs. It was a fitting tribute.

You can tell a lot about a woman from her haircut and humor. Debra was class all the way – style that never goes out of fashion, tastes that transcend fad. Her laugh lifted the very air around her and she intuitively and magnetically attracted an army of people like herself: talented, bright, quick to savor life.

`````````````````````````````````````````

Here’s a photograph of a garden “folly” in a tiny city backyard in Davidson, North Carolina. I have christened it “the cathedral” and somehow – in my mind’s maize – the witch hazel, Debra’s life and the garden cathedral all tell a similar story.

COMFORT ZONE: Right or Wrong?

Bill Stewart and Kathy Calderwood opened the fall season with an exhibition of their work in the spankin’ new art gallery at Nazareth College. Kudos to Nazareth College for having the good grace to include such a class space in the re-do of their art center and to the Sands’ family (Wine anyone?) for underwriting this brilliant facility. I am, however, unclear about how the gallery will operate. Is it to be used strictly for Nazareth College faculty and students? What a shame that would be! And who is serving as its director? Experience tells us that unless a qualified dictator is hired, the gallery space will fall into an art cow pie. So let us be positive and assume that the future quality of the exhibitions will be top rate with art that inspires, challenges and informs us all – faculty, students or voyeurs.

But is that what we truly want? Or do we really crave “comfort art”? Otherwise, how else can you explain Thomas Kincaid (the “painter of light”) with his cheesy cabins sitting in moonlit snow/English spring garden/fall foliage/beside a stream, animals peeking through windows, the top money-producing artist in America today? (Yes! It’s true!) Or the quilt show at Memorial Art Gallery being the largest attendance draw they had all year?

I was asked today to give my opinion about an up-coming tour of art galleries in our region with the caveat that “some members really don’t like that far out stuff.” So is the steering committee right to avoid subjecting viewers to the art fringe? But how and when does the fringe become mainstream? Has our definition of "fringe" changed in the last 5 years? 10 years? How did that happen?

Is it true that the greater our exposure to art of all ilk, the more refined and informed our art tastes? Then are museum guards the MOST sophisticated art audience in the world? Must I keep staring at the “white on white” painting until I understand it or can I simply walk away and admit that it’s all bunk?

Mihaly Cskszentmihalyi, the “happiness professor” at the University of Chicago reports that the longer we experience happiness (read his books on “Flow” for full description of that loaded term), the higher we evolve as individuals. Looking at art makes me happy and I've seen a bunch. Playing golf makes my friend Fred happy. He thinks my art taste is weird. Who's to say which of us is a more highly evolved individual? Can we respect the differences among us without being judgmental? Or does staying in a comfort zone too long give you brain sores?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A word or two about the Nazareth show: Bill Stewart is a friend of mine, someone I’ve known well for nearly twenty years. A few years ago, I feared – and wrote publicly – that he had entered a “comfort zone” of his own. This body of work dispels those fears. They scream “Catholic saints” – size, presentation, even the spare use of red and gestures of hands look like Stations of the Cross. It’s difficult to infuse artwork with humor, subtlety and intellectual content. Stewart manages all those things with this group of all-American saints.

The very best painting in this show is Kathy Calderwood’s little girl in “Green Shoes,” a painting of her 3 year old granddaughter. There isn’t a grandparent alive who could resist this picture and there isn’t an art critic anywhere who wouldn’t be happy pointing to this painting as an example of the essence of excellent contemporary portraiture.

PORTRAITS; NOW WHAT?

I have people all over my house. Mad Sally hangs above the fireplace and the Fisherman's Wife stands on the floor below. Three odd looking men watch me brush my teeth, a rigidly correct Presbyterian sits in judgment of living room activity and Mario Cuomo in clown face is downstairs along side a native american indian lady swallowing the sun. These are all works by Upstate New York artists and while other paintings have come and gone through our various homes, I still find these pieces interesting, mysterious and funny.

Yesterday the UPS man delivered a big box with a portrait of my sister Gaynell. It is none of those things. Gaynell died when she was thirty three years old. Her husband commissioned this painting and now, after forty years, he's sent it to me.

So I've looked up some information and history of portraiture. I already knew that once, historically, painters were only allowed to paint the likeness of royalty or heavenly beings. In some cultures, self-likenesses are still considered bad luck and even the Bible warns of "graven images." Still, humans attempt to re-create themselves with a visual record of their life, to somehow leave an immortal record behind that reveals the truth about themselves, that says "remember me always."

The portrait of my sister is badly painted. Paint is flaking and it looks nothing like her. It doesn't make me remember her kindly, with love. It only makes me feel sad.

So now what? What do I do with this thing? Why does it always feel wrong to destroy a work of art even if it's bad? I can't begin to tell you how many times people call me with the question: "we're downsizing....moving....my parent died and left me...." with the climax "what do I do with this ....painting/print/sculpture?" Face facts. Most of the art we accumulate has very little value to anybody else. Few of us are lucky enough to have picked up that Picasso for a few dollars in a garage sale that everybody else overlooked.

So I repeat the list of possible solutions that usually start and end with "donation." But the real question is : where is the graveyard for unwanted artwork?

Robert Marx , One season ends, another begins

An unexpected August draught sent my gardens into a strange plant purgatory. Color faded, leaves sagged or browned off and ferns simply turned toes up in early surrender. All I could do was pray "Oh Lord, either send rain, send cold or get me out of here!" Obviously, I could have dragged out watering cans and hoses - a bad political choice what with the environment and all.

These are the same gardens that soaked up so much of our resources over the past five years and after such a robust growing season, we hoped for better - one of those swaggering, black eyed Susan summers that melt into frosty nights and smokey clouds of red and orange maples and sumacs. I feel cheated and wonder "Is this what old age is like?"

I had a conversation with my doctor who asked if something was bothering me and I said "No one thing. I'm cosmically depressed." She said "Here, take these. You need a little teflon." So I did (I have really good health insurance.) Now I can almost endure this chapter but I wonder if a season of swagger will ever return.

There must be a "...but" in this scenario and sure enough! There they are! Ornamental grasses that I planted just a year or two ago and they are magnificent - cocky sure of themselves, not to be ignored and I say "o.k. then! Let's get on with this dance."

¶ ¶ ¶ ¶

Robert Marx has the enviable ability that convinces you - when you meet him - that you are the very person he's been waiting for days to see and HERE YOU ARE! The man who once was lanky has settled comfortably into his skeleton in old age and appears to observe world events and the silliness of humanity with thoughtful concern tinged with satire.

I bought this Marx etching in 1979 at Gallery 696. I'm trying very hard these to days to rise above and away from ownership of objects but last night, Chip and I committed

all our gift-giving dollars for the next several years toward the purchase of this oil painting. Was that back-sliding or an act of optimism? I need to think about this.

Art Gifts

I'm going to a wedding next week end and I've put together this little collage as a gift for the couple- two professional people bracketing 40 yrs. old. In other words, they really do not need sheets and a toaster.

But now I'm mucking around in the question of "the gift of art" - a subject that has wavered in and off my life screen for years now. Here are random thoughts:

Once, a very dear friend and talented artist offered to give me pieces of her work to pass along to my children who were just setting up households. I said "no thanks" thinking about the uncontrolled dogs, the scant housekeeping skills and general chaos that my daughters lived amongst. Art sculpture didn't stand a chance! But my friend looked like I had punched her in the face and I felt awful - still do! - and wonder how I might have handled that more diplomatically.

I know an artist who continuously complains how everybody takes advantage of her and her "generous nature." "Every time any organization wants to raise money, they hold an auction and want free art to sell. What do I get out of this? This is my life's work. They don't ask doctors for free services, do they?"

Well, yes, in fact they do. Visit the St. Joseph's Neighborhood Clinic entirely staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses and dentists. And not all retired either! Somehow they make time to spend a few hours a week with the poor and uninsured. For years, an accountant in town kept a few artists as clients without ever charging them for his time and a Park Avenue chef fed a local painter for years when he was "between commissions."

For mind-blowing altruism, I know two artists eligible for social security incomes who still do not collect because, they answer, "I don't need the money and if I take it, maybe the government will run out of money faster and people who truly depend on that to live will be forced to do without." They restore my faith with their generous spirit - even if it's misplaced.

So I'm back where I started with the question of the gift of art. I guess I come down to this: why not? who cares? Go wait tables or teach a class if you need to earn a living but spread the art EVERYWHERE BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE. (And I hope the couple likes my collage but if they don't, I'll get over it.)

Graffiti, Art or Vandalism?

I admit it: I am in a conundrum about graffiti. The show at Rochester Contemporary Art Center includes real-life graffiti painted directly on the walls by one of Rochester's noted tag teams. The art reviewer in City Newspaper writes blisteringly about those who don't understand how inspired this work is (that would be me) and how narrow the perspective of all who don't embrace the legitimacy of this work (me again).

Please don't misunderstand. I've seen some enchanting paintings on the most unlikely surfaces and in fact, I'm fully aware that when some of these pieces are translated onto canvas, their creators have become A-one, big-time, money-making art superstars. And you can ask an obvious question: if the Berlin Wall had NOT been covered by layers of scrawling spray paint - if instead it had remained pristinely clean gray concrete - would chunks now be ensconced in galleries, museums and Bausch & Lombs lobby?

However, I spent years studying urban sociology and repeatedly, scientists found that the harbinger of urban neighborhood decay came with small visual clues - among them, "tags." (I can find sources and quotes upon request.) And caring neighbors were NOT excited to see spray painted art springing up on decaying walls. (You may rightly ask which comes first: decaying or spray painted walls? I would answer they are interlocked - a bit like poverty and poor schools.)

So what separates spray paint art from mere property defacement? Perhaps it's size. Someone said that one pink flamingo on a lawn is tacky but 100 is an art installation. Is it the same with graffiti? If an entire building - or wall - or train - is covered, does that transcend anti-social behavior and become "art"? Or does intent of the creator make the difference? In other words, are you a kid running around spraying "fuck you" on every bridge in town or are you attempting to comment on social class, injustice or the state of contemporary art itself? Is the painter a folk artist or a delinquent?

These are questions that get answered too suavely by art insiders and that may be a big reason why so many "regular people" have no use for us/them.

Outdoor Art Shows

I walked through the outdoor art sale at Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaiqua this morning. This must be year #5 for that show? It's gotten a little bigger but I'm not so sure the quality has kept up. Several decent crafters were there. About seventy percent of the show was photography (now that everybody has a color computer, images can be made quick, cheap and with as many copies as anybody could want. One result: photographers have become big-time greeting card makers.) But very few painters rose to take the bait. I guess it's hard to compete with the photographer/greeting card czars.

When I first started as a crafter doing outdoor art shows, most of us loaded our wares inside the family station wagon, tied some wonky make-shift shelving on top, pushed the kids into the back seat with lunch and off we went. I didn't see any little kids tied to "Mom, the artist" this morning. Come to think of it, most of the exhibitors were "mature." Nor did I see a single station wagon! The exhibitor's parking spaces were filled with vans or variations and every "set up" seemed ordered from the same catalog - pristine white complete with water proof roofs and roll-down side shields.

It would be easy to romanticize those early days and certainly I met some interesting people - some that remain friends nearly thirty years later. But it was hard work. Never mind making the stuff to show and sell. Packing it up was a nightmare, setting it all up in some farmer's field, nightmare, second act. Then there was weather. Cold or hot could be dealt with but rain and wind was something else again. The sound of crashing glass or pottery sent us all to the church altar: "Please God, don't let that happen to me!"

Then came the hours of sitting (or standing) and meeting the public, smiling, chatting - tap dancing to make the sale. Shoppers seemed to fit in one of three clumps. Members in one club wanted to be your very best friend. They talked about seeing you "when..." , loved, loved, loved all the new work, and needed you the artist to recognize their status in the public forum among all who were around to witness.

Then there always were a parade of people just walking through - rarely looking right or left nor slowing down to actually see any of the art work. Couldn't you and I think of a million other ways to spend Saturday afternoon? Maybe they just liked the smell of the hot dogs.

The group I personally disliked most were those that always knew how to do what you did - only better. And they never missed the opportunity to stop and explain to anybody around them why your work just wasn't any good. You,the artist, might just as well be invisible and you knew these people made every shop keeper crazy. They were the kind that probably bought the shoes, wore them three times and returned them for full refund.

I suspect nothing has changed drastically. Those artists this morning still tried to smile, be cheerful, start small talk even though I barely slowed down to see their artwork. And even with a fancy booth, I suspect they are all home tonight, tired as dirt and talking about the day's shoppers.

Finger Lakes Exhibition, Memorial Art Gallery, 2009

If ever an art show was bone crushingly boring, it is this year's Finger Lakes Exhibition at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY, my home town, and I fear I am partly to blame. I have nothing whatsoever to do with the current art scene - here, there or anywhere! But I DID and during the 1980s when I ran an art gallery and the 1990s when I wrote art criticism, I fought the battle for ART - capital letters. It looks to me a little like those aesthetes - me among them - won the war but lost the spirit along the way.

I remember one of the first Finger Lakes exhibits I ever saw in the early 1970s. The gallery bulged with the most remarkable collection of - EVERYTHING! Amazingly quilted and hand dyed jackets hung next to water color flowers that nearly knocked you off your feet, so real and detailed that they emitted flower smell. Furniture like I'd never seen before (nor had anybody else! Wendell Castle was still mostly unknown.) elbowed it's way into space between metal sculpture and lord almighty! the ceramics!
About a million prizes were awarded, a special one for ceramics, I think another for wood working, another for photography. Go down the media list then throw in some all-purpose, non-gender awards and you get the idea. It was a visual free-for-all and what fun it was. I was overwhelmed and in love and that experience helped shape how I would spend my adult life.

Then "we" started defining "art vs. craft" and "real art vs. hobbies" and so it went until we honed and polished our way to the level of sophistication I see now, a tiny collection of mediocre stuff that would never inspire anybody to do anything! I've written before that any judged show is merely a mirror of the taste of the judging team, yadda, yadda,yadda. And certainly, it would do none of us any good to see the gallery packed with junk - painted ducks et.al. But really folks, when you have somewhere over 500 artists entering the exhibit and only about 3 dozen accepted, exactly what are we out to prove?

An entire Year (Almost) later

I haven't felt like writing about the Rochester art scene this year. Instead, I've been licking my wounds, feeling old and forgotten and ....all those feelings that get exactly no sympathy and no attention and therefore, I guess it's time to abandon that direction and look for some new strategy to (1) use my brain (2) use my experience and (3) use my time - but leave my $$$ out of it!

First, dear readers, as for one of my last blogs, I was dis-invited to participate at MAG on the Women's Council panel discussing art in the 21st century. Unfortunately, nobody remembered to tell me about the change of plans until the week before when I telephoned the program chairwoman to ask what time to show up and ... well, you can guess the embarrassing conversation from there. The panel, instead, was Ron Netsky (from Nazareth), Rebecca Rafferty (grad. of Nazareth and current art critic for City Newspaper. I wonder how that happened?) and Bleu Cease, director of RoCo. What goes on here? I feel a bit like a leper but I do remember getting Bleu Cease thoroughly angry about a slap-in-the-face review I wrote for City (before I was invited to leave there too!) And I did continue to tweek the nose of MAG (out of love! I keep wanting more, better, the best and keep getting mediocre, convenient, easy listening art.). Perhaps I went about it the wrong way and should not have done my criticism in a public forum. Oh well...water over the bridge (along with my news career!)

So where are we now? It seems to me that RoCo made some good decisions this year (the 6 X 6 show became not only a hugely successful fund raiser but equally good community builder. So why is this - the 2nd year - the last for this event ? Ask Bleu.)

MAG has a glass show up that needs some seriously thoughtful analysis but I'm not doing that now. Time is getting short and I need to take my puppies to puppy school. Instead, I'll send out this question: What's going on with this flap about ArtWalk? I need to be brought up to speed from people who know. Will you help? Can I? Shirley