Talking about Art Eleanor Heartney
Like the rest of us, works of art do not thrive in isolation. They acquire meaning from their contexts and surroundings – from the hum of the world into which they are midwifed, from the chatter of other artists and art works, from history, literature, from religion and mythology and from the imaginations of the diverse audiences that come to see them. Set alongside each other, art works can’t help but interact. In the process, each becomes larger than the sum of its parts.
Contemporary Conversations, drawn from the collection of the South Carolina Arts Commission, spans five decades and represents many of the most prominent artists who have lived and worked in the state. One can find everything from gestural expressionism and hard edge geometric abstraction to surrealist tinged dreamscapes and searing social commentaries. Works are inspired by social issues, memory, local and national history, imagination, art of the past and aesthetic theory. They take the forms of sculpture, painting, craft, photography, and graphic art. As the title of the exhibition suggests, together these objects engage in a series of conversations about art, life, beauty, society and creativity. They bounce off each other, making connections that open our eyes to the complexity of the world around us.
Consider for instance, the dialogue suggested by the work of Jasper Johns and
Merton Simpson. Roughly the same age, both discovered art after difficult childhoods, made their way from South Carolina to New York in 1949, enlisted in the military and subsequently immersed themselves in New York’s heady postwar art world. Both eventually gained great renown as abstract painters. But their differences are as important as their similarities. Johns found a home among the avant-garde circle promoted by Leo Castelli and is known for enigmatic paintings that detach iconic symbols like maps, numbers, targets and American flags from their ostensible meanings. Simpson made his way as an African American artist at a time when segregation was still rampant in the art world and cultivated friendships with fellow African
American artists like Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney, Norman Lewis and John
Biggers. While working as a painter, he also promoted African and tribal art through his activities as a collector and dealer. The works in the South Carolina Arts
Commission State Art Collection by Johns and Simpson suggest their divergent approaches to art and life. Johns’ 1970 lead relief 0 Through 9 is a model of restraint, presenting an overlay of numerals that renders each digit nearly abstract. Simpson’s 1968 Confrontation #20, is a welter of wild brushstrokes, part of a series of paintings inspired by the racial strife of the 1960s in Harlem. Johns pulls back from the world and Simpson plunges into it. Jesse Guinyard’s White Flag / Refugee 2 adds a third voice to this conversation. This work by a younger African American artist challenges the neutrality of one of Johns’ signature symbols. Guinyard takes Johns’
American flag, paints it white and perforates the canvas with the sculpted ebony head of an African refugee.
This is only one of many conversations
that can be discerned in this exhibition.
One can also follow a dialogue about
the nature of craft and its relation to
“fine art.” The interlocutors include
several artists who are helping
preserve traditional art forms. Mary
Jackson’s Two Lips is an elegant basket woven of bulrush, sweetgrass, pine
needles & palmetto. The technique for
creating such tightly woven baskets
came to South Carolina in the 17th century by way of West African slaves who were brought to America to work on plantations. Earl Robbins and Sara Ayers were master potters using techniques practiced for thousands of years by the Catawba, an aboriginal people native to South Carolina. Ayers’ Jar with Heads features a pair of chief’s heads, complete with traditional headdresses. Robbins Snake Bowl uses the Catawba motif of the sacred black snake. Both pots are hand formed in the traditional manner out of clay from the banks of the Catawba River. However, in one respect Robbins departs from tradition, in that most Catawba master potters are women.
While these artists adhere closely to time honored forms and techniques, other artists rework traditional craft practices to produce new forms and meanings. The show includes a number of ceramists who straddle the lines between vessel and sculpture and mingle function and pure form. Jeri Burdick’s hand thrown pots draw promiscuously on
African, Native American and Asian prototypes.
Elizabeth Keller fashions clay into sculptural objects, while retaining a reference to the vessel form. Alice Ballard shapes clay into plant forms that suggest fertility and transformation. Also in the exhibition are artists who adapt other craft traditions for their own purposes.
Leo Twiggs employs batik, a traditional African method for decorating fabric using dye and wax to create works that draw on darker currents in Southern history, or as here, comprise an Extended Family Portrait. Lee Malerich wields thread, appliqué and fabric the way other artists use paint to create tapestries that present personal chronicles. Artists like these carry on conversations that reveal the continuity between tradition and modernity as they pair the preservation of history with personal expression.
Another conversation touches on the relationship of art and religion. Both Peter
Lenzo and Jean Grosser have borrowed the triptych format of the Christian altarpiece, but they use this artifact in very different ways. In Smoking by Pregnant Women, Grosser critiques advertising’s manipulation of our destructive desires by lining the interior of an altarpiece with the alluring imagery of Camel brand cigarette packs. Peter Lenzo’s Altar to Virgin & Child provides a more personal take. The centerpiece of his folding altarpiece is a representation of himself clutching his infant daughter in the manner of a traditional Virgin and child, surrounded by
drawers filled with objects of personal
significance. David Voros also borrows from
spiritual traditions in his painting series “Dance of Death: We all Fall Down.” The title references
medieval allegories about the universality of
death, while the individual paintings are his
personalized versions of figures from the Tarot.
This exhibition includes his figure of Justice – a little girl who brandishes a candle against the
darkness.
There is also a conversation here about contrasting approaches to sculpture. Arthur
Rose was a painter, sculptor and educator who worked tirelessly to open doors for other African American artists. He was also deeply influenced by African folklore, creating sculptures of animals like this exhibition’s Killer Whale. This rather fearsome creature is welded together from scraps of rough edged steel. If Killer Whale presents sculpture as an additive process, John Acorn’s V.W. Resurrected takes the opposite approach. It begins with an act of subtraction. Created from the parts of a disassembled Volkswagen engine block, it rises from a pedestal like a strange alien personage. Winston Wingo studied with Acorn before going to Italy to learn the lost wax bronze casting and hand modeling techniques of the old masters.
His Technocratic Head mixes the aesthetics of classical sculpture and the machine age. Going in the opposite direction, Dan Robert Miller was a self-taught artist who took up woodcarving after a difficult life. He produced works like this exhibition’s whimsical Man and Woman whose twisting forms follow the undulating contours of the pieces of wood from which they were fashioned.
Many of the works carry on a running conversation about the way that art expresses a sense of place. Aspects of South
Carolina’s history, landscape and people pervade this exhibition. One sees these concerns in Ed Rice’s Mausoleum, a painting that evokes the austere classical beauty of the region’s antebellum architecture. Mike Williams’ Revolution is a watery abstraction that offers a fisherman’s eye view of the landscape of the South Carolina low country. Anna Redwine turns her attention to South Carolina’s native fauna, in her words literally “drawing life” in delicate renderings of small animals made from direct observation in nature. Sam Wang’s suite of dramatic black and white photographs find patterns of light and shadow in South Carolina’s woods, waterfalls and marshes. Other photographers turn to history and society. Cecil Williams’ photograph from the 1960s document the marches and protests of the early civil rights movement. With her photograph of school girls playing boisterously on the grounds of Faith Memorial School on Pawleys Island, Alice Boyle reveals a world that seems frozen in time. There is a similar nostalgic quality in Phil Moody’s photograph of white uniformed workers on a break and in Robert Silance’s
photograph of a worn and graffitied
bench curving beneath the windows of
an empty waiting room.
A more satirical take on South
Carolina life appears in Tarleton
Blackwell’s Hog Series. These works play on his memories from his rural
childhood of the butchering of hogs.
But the hogs in his works also suggest
surrogates for various social types. In some paintings, Nosedive I, they play on stereotypes from classic children’s stories in which pigs appear as both victims and perpetrators. Hogs reappear in Sheri
Moore-Change photo collages. In Time for Dreamers she creates fractured tableaux in which fragments of images of farm laborers, African sculptures, hog pens, cotton fields and weather-beaten farm houses are pieced together to suggest a consciousness that oscillates between gritty reality and fantasies of a better life.
These are only a few of the conversations suggested by this diverse group of works.
But in the end, such interactions are only meaningful if they engage the viewers’ imaginations. Contemporary Conversations is an invitation to join in the discussion, to discover unexpected affinities and to ask questions about what art is and what it can and cannot do.
Eleanor Heartney is a New York-based art critic, curator and author of numerous books and articles about contemporary art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, the Washington Post and the New York Times.