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Art Tourist
in
Sante Fe
Tradition slips into Avante Garde Holdout
by Terry Talty
SANTE FE - “It’s kind
of a traditional show, right?” I asked the guard who had just told me
not to touch the 5-foot tall plastic poppies.
He was offended that I said “traditional” because SITE Sante Fe is the
most contemporary of spaces in a little city filled with art shops,
many of which think it’s still the ’60s and Indian art is avante-garde.
SITE is a non-profit haute-contemporary “space” because it is a
renovated warehouse that doesn’t have a permanent collection like a
museum would. It has tall ceilings, big open rooms and walls that move.
No less than any contemporary museum needs, physically. Additionally,
the video is always nicely isolated, soundwise, from the viewers
contemplating silent or near silent art.
The current show at SITE, features the work of sculptor Roxy Paine,
action painter Karin Davie, and photography manipulator Susan Silton.
The latter two had framed rectangular media on the walls. “We don’t
usually have paintings,” the guard offended by the word ‘traditional’
said acquiescing a little to my prodding. Davie created the paintings
on site, each color with one stroke of the brush - a stroke so
curvaceous a horseshoe bending river would be jealous - colors lined up
next to colors. The colors however reminded my friend of candy you buy
on a cheesy, beach-town boardwalk. Davie uses paint right out of the
tubes that she strokes onto the canvas with one action moving up and
down ladders quickly to lay down the lines, that she repeats with
another active stroke of another color. “It’s like taffy,” my friend
said, “sweet.”
In another room, there was a silent video of colors going by fast, with
an unrelenting monotonous rhythm. Stills from the video were framed and
hung like “traditional” 2D work, were more visually interesting - a
smear of colors, combed horizontally like a TV screen - than the
one-stokers of Davie, and pretty. These, my friend - a book designer,
and a very careful, precise one - thought represented the speed of our
lives today, and she found them - the stills, not the
video -- satisfying enough for
home viewing, which is a criterion of good art to her.
But the sculpture - do not touch - was compelling. Paine’s biggest
pieces were stainless steel - bright machinery that makes art.
Programmed by various software driven scenarios, the machines came on
at intervals spaced far enough apart to make us, the art tourists, long
and wait for it. The Painting Manufacture Unit (PMU) gave a short pause
after getting its nozzle in position, as if thinking, and then moved
dramatically slow to the left side of an already paint- dripped-upon
vertical surface. It squirted various blasts of white paint at ten
positions on the gray stretched-linen. And then it quit.
Another art maker, the plastic squirting machine, was broken, the
attendant told us - just quit in the middle of making another blob-like
pile of plastic.
A third machine, the drawing machine, had finished it’s third piece
from this show and the show’s curators were so sick of its
temperamental behavior, they’d simply unplugged it. “When the show
first opened, it was like we had three artists working in here, and
they all had different personalities,” the attendant said. And no one
liked the drawing machine. They felt sorry for the blob-maker. “It’s
kind of morbid seeing it sitting there half-way finished with its last
piece. It entertained so many people.”
The blobs themselves, however, were less impressive than the blob-like
Michelangelo in Milan, the great artist’s last piece that he never
lived to finish. "It’s too bad the machines weren’t making machines,"
said my companion, a critical artist. “The machines are really
beautiful to look at. The art they make just isn’t very good.”
He is right. The art they made was terrible. The artist, Payne, had
also made some lame pieces of ready-to-look-at sculpture. We didn’t
have to wait for these, he’d done them a few years before. He’d made
rubber molds of “brush strokes.” The strokes were made with a
paintbrush dipped in thick plastic so they were clumsy and short --
seemed to peter out before they were the romantic “stroke of a
brush.” For some reason, he felt he needed the molds so he could
reproduce these blobs over and over again. Why? He then framed a
collection of these monochrome brush stroke reproductions, which lacked
the interest of my 4-H knot collection display at the county fair.
Maybe he had one of his Franken-artist machines make these, too, but I
don’t think so. Documentation is at least half the art nowadays and
there was no mention of a “Stroke Maker.” Shame, though, the machine
might have been interesting.
Paine did have some great “ready-to-see” sculptures. The poppies and
another sculpture of a patch of poison ivy were brilliant. Paine made
replicas out of plastic, painted realistically, of a 3 by 4-foot patch
of his garden of poppies. They were surprisingly tall when set in a
gallery. In another room, recreations of mushrooms poked out of the
wall. The field of mushroom popped out, at you, from the center of the
vertical wall, right in front of your eyes --- almost like a painting.
Terry Talty is an art tourist
from Colorado living near the pristine crest of the Continental Divide,
who thinks a great vacation is a trip to a nasty city to see art.
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More Out to Lunch
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