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KSU's 'Call & Response' uses text, code, symbols to stimulate discussion
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art and architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Nov 09, 2008
One of the primary aims of today's art school education is helping students understand abstract art and the language of abstraction.
Through Nov. 21, the Kent State School of Art Gallery is exhibiting Call & Response, a show curated by Gianna Commito, KSU assistant professor of art, to explore the uses and definitions of language in visual art.
The language of the visual arts is a rich and complex stew of contemporary and historical sources.
For instance, the five artists in this exhibit — Patrick Brennan, Mary Lum, Carrie Pollack, Suzanne Silver and J.D. Walsh — use text, codes and a variety of symbols and technical forms to explore art making.
The show places the viewer in the midst of a finely sifted and honed atmosphere of abstraction. Rather than obtaining meaning exclusively from the works themselves, Commito says that the interests of these artists ''lie on the periphery of understanding: Viewers do not simply read information. . . . Rather, they collect visual data that slowly fixes into meaning.''
This is a challenging show. It's meant to stimulate
discussion and question assumptions, and it may take the viewer some time to catch up. Thus some background is in order.
The original alphabet of abstraction was derived from the structures of art. Early 20th-century European painters, seeking to develop a language that was not based on its classical traditions, looked to the tools, rules, materials and support structures they used in the studio.
Artists of other mediums — sculptors, printmakers, photographers, ceramists, metalsmiths, fiber artists, even writers, composers and dancers — soon followed suit, using the particular syntax of their own mediums.
One of the issues of abstraction in painting became an examination of the canvas itself. As used in classical art, the canvas is both a mirror and a window. As a mirror, the canvas reveals the artist's world. As a window, it reveals as much of the outside world as the artist chooses.
But the issue of the canvas was also wrapped up in the politics and the history of the time. Europe had just emerged from World War I, a devastating conflict that exposed the duplicity and weaknesses of the old regimes.
As the body politic began to look for new forms of social order, many in the art world began to examine the rules and orders on which its traditions were based. The traditional forms of art that claimed to open a window upon or hold a mirror to nature became associated with the old regimes.
A similar association occurred after World War II and during the Cold War in this country, when ''history painting'' and heroic, realistic murals became associated with, first, fascism, then communism, and went so far out of fashion that many of the WPA murals, commissioned during the Depression to put artists to work, were covered over or destroyed.
Political and social illusion was what the public became fed up with. Illusion is foisted by language; thus language must change, become less metaphorical, more factual.
The correlation in art began with its main structure, canvas. How can a flat surface depict a three-dimensional scene? To make the attempt is to foist an illusion. Thus, the beginnings of abstraction, which explored the realities of art-making rather than illusory ''realities.''
Just as our current realities have become more complex, so, too, has the artist become more challenged to find new tools and languages to reflect that reality. The five artists in this show approach that task in various ways.
Silver focuses on ''language as a physical object.'' In Drawing a Blank, (2008) one of the seminal pieces in the show, Silver uses white neon tubing to create the shape of the words, ''Drawing a Blank.'' This creates not only a sign, but the reflection of an illuminated white rectangle on the wall. It thus becomes both a visual pun, as well as a reference to a historically important work, Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings of 1951.
Silver also explores the organizational strategies of the Talmud, the major book of Jewish law, modeling many of her drawings, paintings and sculptures on the system of cross-references, commentaries, embellishments and amplifications found there.
Pollack and Walsh use collage to explore the language of art.
Pollack photographs quiet, often ''accidental'' events in her Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood: graffiti blotted out with paint that doesn't quite match, droppings of discarded chewing gum on pavement. She then prints her photos on canvas and responds to them in paint. Her collection of found images amounts to a language of coded symbols, the key to which she hints at by the added paint marks.
''The way I like to think about it,'' Commito said, ''is that she's offering us many clues. A recurring diagonal or a repetition of form starts to make its own language, and you start to make some sense of what ordinarily would seem to be extremely abstract, minimal images that are almost recognizable but never quite give themselves away.''
Walsh writes computer programs that intersperse the liner notes from a Neil Young album with a text on witchcraft. These are then run through a digital projector and flashed on the wall at timed intervals. ''It never makes sense,'' Commito said. ''It becomes a surrealist game.''
Brennan's work is about the language of painting that art schools teach, and it goes back to the original inquiries into the language of abstraction. He looks at the rules, tools, materials and structures, then sets about to defy or expose most of them.
He exposes the canvas' stretcher; he cuts holes in the canvas; he glues paintings on paintings and doesn't clean up the smeared, oozing glue; he attaches craft materials to his canvas and often covers almost all of it with a black, tarry, high-gloss acrylic.
The other seminal image in the show is Lum's Genial (2008), a huge work created using silk screen, acrylic ink, found wrappers and glassine.
''She came out as a visiting artist, and she brought this,'' Commito said. ''It came in several pieces, and she worked with the gallery to install it.''
Commito said Lum has spent a lot of time in Paris, and the title of the work is based on objects she found there.
''The pieces that have the printing on them are wrappings for oranges,'' Commito said.
''Mary's a collector, and sometimes the things she collects make their way into her art work and sometimes they don't. She eventually realized that there was something inherent in the quality of the wrappings that couldn't be improved upon, so they are as she found them.''
Commito said the finished work falls into the Pop Art camp, because Lum ''appropriated the image and responded to it. She's not talking so much about mass production as she is about language, which is what this show really boils down to.''
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
One of the primary aims of today's art school education is helping students understand abstract art and the language of abstraction.
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