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Downtown exhibit features woodcuts by J. Noel Reifel
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic
Published on Sunday, Aug 31, 2008
Andy Warhol was such a suck-up. The Pop Art master always wanted to schmooze with the ''beautiful people'' and wanted everyone who mattered to know he'd been there, in person, close enough to take a picture. So Warhol carried a Polaroid camera with him wherever he went.
The Polaroid, the instant image of its day, became one of Warhol's signature formats, one he often translated into his celebrity silk-screens, a Pop Art form that he introduced and that eventually became even more desirable than his Brillo Boxes or Campbell Soup Cans.
Through Sept. 19, the Kent State University School of Art Gallery is exhibiting 156 images from an immense collection of Warhol's Polaroid images.
The images have been given to the school from the Andy Warhol Foundation as part of its 20th Anniversary Photo Legacy Program.
Kent State's is one of four college art galleries in the area to receive Warhol Polaroids, the other three being the College of Wooster, the University of Akron Emily Davis Gallery and Oberlin College's Allen Art Museum. In all, the foundation has given 183 college art museums across the United States 28,543 original Warhol photographs, valued in excess of $28 million.
The aim of this gift, according to Joel Wachs, Warhol Foundation president, is to ''provide greater access to Warhol's artwork and process, and to enable a wide range of people from communities across the country to view and study this important, yet relatively unknown, body of Warhol's work.''
His work is among the most popular of the 20th century, as is the entire Pop Art genre. From him, we get the notion of everyday items as works of art, the commodification of art and the phrase ''15 minutes of fame.''
Warhol's work is both influential and underestimated. It's been said that the way in which we view the world was fundamentally changed through his vision: The ordinary is glorified while the glamorous is reduced to commonplace. One might even lay at his feet the current spate of reality shows, in which ordinary people achieve their 15 minutes by making fools of themselves.
He certainly raised the achievement of celebrity from humble beginnings to an art form. Few artists have achieved recognition through the pursuit of the famous and inspired discussion, gossip and side-taking as much as Warhol.
Yet Warhol's apparent single-mindedness in his pursuit of celebrities has often obscured his results.
''Through his rigorous — though almost unconscious — consistency in shooting, the true idiosyncrasies of his subjects were revealed,'' said Jenny Moore, curator of the Photographic Legacy Program.
''Often, he would shoot a person or event with both cameras, cropping one in Polaroid color as a 'photograph' and snapping the other in black and white as a 'picture.'
''By presenting both kinds of images side by side, the Photographic Legacy Program allows viewers to move back and forth between moments of Warhol's art, work and life — inseparable parts of a fascinating whole.''
The School of Art Gallery has taken an innovative approach to displaying the images by painting a band of repeating CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) colors favored by Warhol. This band is placed on the gallery wall at eye level and Warhol's Polaroids are interspersed along it.
By doing this, the gallery has solved the problem of how to display such small images in such a large space.
The band also references Warhol's preference for the commercial medium and its relatively cold spectrum, which distanced the work from the artist. Also included in the display scheme is a lighthearted scattering of Warholesque flowers and a strategically placed banana. Warhol couldn't have done it better himself.
As KSU Galleries Director Anderson Turner notes, ''These are all the people from the 'scene.' ''
''His work is today's Facebook and My Space, and all the things we have become used to with the Internet,'' Turner added. ''Warhol would have really jived with that because he was always snapping, snapping, snapping.''
While the Warhol works are something we can all relate to, those by Noel Reifel at the Downtown Gallery take a bit more work.
The exhibit, J. Noel Reifel: Woodcuts is on view through Sept. 27 and consists of Reifel's characteristically spare, elegant images, nicely displayed by Turner. The works range from small sections of wood printed in geometric shapes, to a pinwheel of blocks of wood, to a large block of wood into which typewriter keys have been pounded.
Reifel heads the Kent State University School of Art printmaking program. His work focuses primarily on the methods known as relief and intaglio printmaking and his approach ranges from traditional to experimental.
We are being asked in this exhibit not only to become engaged with the printmaking processes and ephemera, but also the grains of the various woods and the chainlike loop that not only connects the various shapes of woods in the Catenary series but repeats again in the two halves of the rubbings of the typewriter-key-impressed woodblocks.
Like any artist with a scientific bent, he has a fondness for certain mathematical and engineering forms. Hence his use of the form and term catenary, which has a long and venerable history.
Catenary, from the Latin word for chain, is the curve a hanging flexible wire or chain assumes when hung by its ends and acted on by gravity.
So why are these curves important to Reifel? Probably for the same reason he dotes on such printmaking ephemera as the stain that often results from printing with oil-based inks on certain papers. It's gravity that drags the stain into a shadowlike form below the ink. And it's gravity that drags the chain into a steep loop to create the catenary.
Jasper Johns did a series of prints, paintings and drawings in 2005 that contained visual clues and themes, among them the catenary. Reifel shares with Johns a need to fill his works with mysterious personal and art-related codes, which Reifel hints at in his statement accompanying this show, wherein he repeats the word ''oscillate'' and its variations nine times.
''The prints may seem planned,'' Reifel writes, ''and they are, but they rarely come out the way I first envision them, because the process of making tends to become a process of exploring.
''Sometimes I am exploring the formal implications of the print. Sometimes I am exploring the nature of printmaking itself. . . . The single most important fact about prints is that they may be printed many times, either in editions of identical impressions, or, as here, in editions in which the impressions are all different.
''Both approaches have their virtues. I oscillate between the two.''
Details
Show: Selections From the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy program and J. Noel Reifel: Woodcuts.
When: Through Sept. 19 and Sept. 27, respectively.
Where: Warhol at Kent State University School of Art Gallery, Campus Center Drive (11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday); Reifel at Kent State University School of Art Downtown Gallery, 223 N. Water St., Kent (noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday)
Information: 330-672-7853 or http://dept.kent.edu/art/galleries/index.html
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.
Andy Warhol was such a suck-up. The Pop Art master always wanted to schmooze with the ''beautiful people'' and wanted everyone who mattered to know he'd been there, in person, close enough to take a picture. So Warhol carried a Polaroid camera with him wherever he went.
Get the full article here.
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