Diversity at 450
Vivek Narayanan
small works – by David Adamo, Paul Yates, Christine Krol or Rocco Alberico –
and this suggested, for me, a certain level of maturity. Small works tend not
to impress us; they refuse spectacle and require a decision on the viewer’s
part to come closer. Nevertheless, they can be very engaging, either because a
lot of care and thought has been compressed in them, or because they cheekily
insist on being “minor.” Adamo’s photographs (Big and Far
style=’font-family:Verdana’>and Up and Down
style=’font-family:Verdana’>), for instance, were sly twists on the tourist
snap – they used dolls and action figures against real landscapes to play with
perspective, calling attention to their own staging. Similarly, Alberico’s
works in the show (his installation Sleepless Night #1
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, 2000, as well as Mind Control Tower
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, 2003, and There’s Something About Mary
style=’font-family:Verdana’>, 2003) navigated the ambiguous terrain – via
American landscapes and urban myth iconology – between natural and artificial,
“real” and “unreal” in naughty, intriguing and ultimately disturbing ways. At
the other end of the art world (but here as close as the opposite wall), one
found works by Siri Berg, Susan Melikian Steinsieck and Po Kim, very much
concerned with virtuosity, pure expression, draftsmanship and the painter’s
trained brush. Siri Berg’s work, a minute, patient, stroke-by-stroke
enunciation of unreal color palettes, continues to be striking. The work of Kim
and Steinsieck, and that of the young Turkish painter Bur�u Percin, by
contrast, drew its sense of abstraction more directly from the natural world,
and relied on earthy colors.
In the center of the
gallery, it was hard to not encounter Charlie Hecht’s sharp, intricate, and
somewhat scary sculptures, which fuse and fragment glass and metal. Wings of
Victory and Big Mumsa
style=’font-family:Verdana’> are ostensibly reconstructed from coral reefs seen
on diving trips. They recreate well, in abstract form, the teeth and danger of
the sea world, but also its fluidity, motion and squishiness, its way of being
darkly inviting.
If we were to look at this
show as a suggestion of what can and is being done in 2004, we would be
thankful to have entered an age where all the other ages of art are open to us
like cross-sections of a tree: that is, an age when no one style or critique is
dominant, when painting is not considered obsolete and conceptualism has not
run out of ideas, when we are finally becoming at ease with both classicism and
technology, and when we are turning more and more to small truths, small
projects, and intense and humble feeling, art that is not made too distant by
an overdose of cynicism or irony. The only thing that worries me a little about
the new pluralism so far is its apparent lack of great ambition: one hopes
that, as we become more comfortable with the current inclusiveness, we will
also begin, once again, to take big risks with those new wings.
