Co-Conspirators: Artist and Collector: Chelsea Museum, NY
Barbara Rosenthal
In discussing a group show, what is often of supreme interest is how the artists have interpreted whatever commonality caused the curator to hang them together, even if that thread had been unknown to them at the times of creation. If a show is organized around a subject or style, the links are obvious, but if culled from a private collection, the commonalities may not be so easy to spot. In looking at individual works to determine the values that led to their acquisition, viewers see work in a context not often present in gallery or museum curatorials. Thus, this show, "Co-Conspirators: Artist and Collector" is a collaboration in three ways:
1. Between the pair of collectors, James Cottrell and Joseph Lovett
2. Between the artists and the collectors
3. Between the aggregate and the viewer.
James Cottrell, an anesthesiologist interested in the human brain, and his partner, Joseph Lovett, interested in the lives of artists, were among the "top" 100 Collectors of 2001 named by Arts and Antiques magazine. They have assembled work throughout the career-spans of many of the artists they regard. Curator Sue Scott took the opportunity of their domicile renovation to assemble their trove, which then became a traveling show of paintings and works on paper that began at the Orlando Museum of Art, and is currently on view throughout two floors of the Chelsea Museum. Most of the pieces share several visual characteristics, and one definite, but more ephemeral aspect: methodology.
On the whole, they are energetic, bright, heavily textured, vigorously painted, visibly brush-stroked, highly colored. Most are of handsome size and scale, and abstract with partly recognizable subject matter or graphic symbols. In addition, almost all came into being through the execution of a program. That is to say the artist made a plan about what was going to be done, and then fulfilled it. This process contrasts with, for example, the paintings of an artist permanently on view in this museum, Jean Miotte, whose physical action of painting creates the painting. In "Co-Conspirators," Suzanne McClelland created visual representations of spoken words; Edouard Prulhiere assembled a high relief canvas construction; Deborah Kass appropriated elements of works by Picasso, Applebroog, Johns and Salle; Roland Flexner blew an ink bubble out of his mouth while saying a word; Barton Lidice Benes fashioned a grid of national commodities from the banknotes of their nations.
An enlightening talk about other aspects of individual artists and works in this collection was given in the museum May 11 by Art in America senior editor Raphael Rubinstein, who filled in for Dore Ashton, unexpectedly hospitalized the previous day. Rubinstein pointed out how certain artists expressed dichotomous aspects of their surroundings. Ray Smith, appropriating from Leger, he noted, balanced "refined modernist art and vernacular culture…using two different types of language…social mores and animal instincts." Miguel Barcelo, whose large work Donkey Soup, was the most complex, rich and fully sustained in the show, intended the "soup to equal paint," and "the many soup parts as a metaphor for cultural chaos."
Rubenstein’s comment about Jonathan Lasker could well have served for the entire exhibit. "The work invites thinking, like a Chinese philosopher’s rock."
