The Little Elephant’s Come a Long Way
Elwyn Palmerton
It was a beautiful weekend for an art fair–in this case a sprawling, heterogenous affair: a combination of open studios, galleries, flea markets, live music, and street festivals. Held in DUMBO in a space covering about 35 square blocks, the proceedings lasted for three days–ostensibly from 11-6, but it’s obvious that the festivities spilled over into the night as more performances, concerts and simple revelry. At any rate, there was more to take in than could possibly be traversed in one afternoon.
Even so, I made a good effort to see everything–not necessarily the best strategy in retrospect. I spent a whole afternoon walking, occasionally casting a sidelong glance or two at some art, and even then didn’t cover all of it. In the end though, it didn’t matter, with a couple notable exceptions, most of the art was generic or amateurish. The fact is, occasions like these, by which I mean art fairs, sprawling unfocused accumulations of art like open studios, biennials and the always-interminable Armory Show are simultaneously enervating and stultifying. Even when a lot of the average quality at hand is high, it can be hard to process the sheer undifferentiated quantity of art on display without a unifying curatorial premise. Maybe the best that you can hope for is lots of low-impact exercise punctuated by the occasionally aesthetic thrill (but only after navigating streets, elevators and/or long hallways). Still, the surprises here, in particular, were few and far between. Most of the art fell into one or another predictable niche: academic realism, all the predictable varieties of expressionist and formal abstraction, more abstract metal sculpture than one usually sees (or needs to), some typical hippy-dippy stuff, familiar varieties of photo-collage, and some photography (some of which was technically accomplished enough to look great in a magazine but hardly innovative). Most of the work you see here would look at home in a coffee shop or college art department hallway–varying in levels of technical competence and cheesiness, but most of it unoriginal.
Of course, trying to assimilate all the available art isn’t necessarily the best strategy. One’s well-advised to go with the flow, relax and take your pleasures as they come. It’s a fair, after all. One such moment came in the form of a Bluegrass band that I listened to while waiting in line for a beer. Here, in a triangular parking lot space next to the Brooklyn Bridge, one could buy hamburgers, some beer, and sit on hay bales to listen to (on Saturday) a day long rotation of Bluegrass bands; one could catch strains of their music in the studios of the adjacent building from above, surrounding the plaza. And this was part of the festival’s charm. The occasion had a generally amusing, festival-like atmosphere with live music and the occasional performance piece in the streets.
Still, though widely spaced, there was some good art to be seen. Smack Mellon and the festival’s home base at Dumbo Arts Center showed some respectable work. The text show at D.A.C. featured some A-list artists but, even so, still managed to bore in its own way: conceptually academic instead of figurative and academic. Mel Bochner, for his part, offered a paragraph-long text in large round letters covering an entire wall. I tried to read it, failed, and couldn’t help but think that the whole thing was a practical joke, on me. The highlight here was Mathew Higgs’ classic video Video Art, a static shot of a book titled "Video Art" in unadorned white lettering on black. The rest of this show served to demonstrate just how dull and academic this strategy (unadorned text in one medium or another) has become.
Near the river, in their cavernous industrial space, Smack Mellon offered the best art on view here: a group show of all video work. A selection of videos was shown (both projected and on monitors) throughout the large darkened space. Though it is usually quarantined in a curtained little room, video runs wild here: soundtracks are garbled and run into each other. It’s not ideal, but it is novel and interesting. It’s rare to see a big batch of video art like this and it’s amazing how well it benefits–time-based mediums are so phenomenologically different from static mediums that the trip into the token dark room of most exhibitions is usually quite jarring. It helps, of course, that some of this work was really engaging.
My favorite was Lynda Benglis’ 1973 video Female Sensibility. In it, two women kiss and stroke each other, one licks the other’s ear in one sequence and then sucks on the other’s finger–all in an extremely tight close-up. The show’s press release says that this isn’t erotic because "a radio plays in the background, broadcasting male chatter over the scene, and disrupting any romance in the overtly physical, if ultimately passionless, exchange," which is ridiculous. The video is incredibly sensuous and actually pretty hot–especially considering how little we actually see, just closely cropped faces and hands. Possibly, though, because of the exhibitions’ overlapping, noisy, garbled execution, I couldn’t really hear the supposedly eroticism-neutralizing dialogue. Perhaps the piece’s essence was distorted or obscured by the unusual installation. Whatever. It was more striking how closely the aesthetic of rigorous 70s video art resembles the over-exposed, grainy (not, incidentally, video) aesthetic of ultra-low-budget porn. It’d be a stretch to say it wasn’t "overtly physical" although the passion involved might be a deeply sublimated variety, it’s still erotic–and as rigorous and physically raw as Bruce Nauman’s videos (in which, come to think of it, maybe all that hopping around, yelping, and obsession with the body in his videos is just regular old male sexual frustration).
Anyway, here’s art. It isn’t crowds and noise, and walking 15 miles just to take everything in or stopping to drink beer and listen to live music under the Brooklyn Bridge (although these things can be marvelous); it’s these single moments, strange, memorable and rapturous encounters with objects or images–moments of pleasure which render the rest, hamburgers and all, irrelevant.
