The Art Tourist returns to see sculpture, painting and video at Site Santa Fe

Ugly animalistic works can be good

by Terry Talty

Santa Fe, NM – I’m not an emotional weenie. I can like movies that are scary, depressing, heavy, disturbing – but I don’t like messy art. Throwing more stuff at a work of art will not necessarily make it more interesting or any good. My companion and I walked into the opening night of SITE Santa Fe’s fall show --  -- and were confronted by the paintings of Dana Shutz. Big strokey – almost messy – backgrounds with emotional people who looked like mutants or monsters – some ghostlike because the painter’s paint was thin and the brush strokes apparent  -- like the Intelligent Designer wasn’t quite done making them. There were solidly painted monsters too, that stared out of the canvas with almost a plea for help. The paintings were beautifully compelling. These seemingly casual brush strokes all fit into their proper place and this made each painting appeared wild, energetic, and of it’s own personality, none was messy.

What a relief.

We made the trip to SITE because we were particularly interested in the sculptor who was another artist in this three-person show. We’d seen photos of the artist, Charles Long, in Art in America dragging his sculptures on a grocery-shopping cart in and out of the Los Angeles River. We like environmental art. 

What do you think of the sculptures? I asked my companion. “The white stuff? It was adequate. The shadows it cast were as interesting than the object.”

The sculptures are mostly white because they are made of plaster cloth draped around found object from the river near the artist’s studio. He baths them in the murky water to get them to look a little more like from whence they came. You can just imagine my hackles going up about how possibly messy they are – and yeah, they could very easily go over the edge, especially if too much of the found object is left revealed, but Long did a pretty good job making these object contained and worth a look. The light in the gallery was dim, and directed at each sculpture, and my companion is right. The shadows in the gallery make this work work. Each object in this room full of objects is a complicated form – basically dirty white and so the contrasts are somewhat downplayed when you outright look at it – which casts a shadow even more complicated by lengthening and shortening and emphasizing the open spaces by being a black form on a white wall – yeah, a shadow, and made even more beautiful because its unreal – yeah, a shadow. The white shapes inside the black shadows are different and piled on top of each other if multiple lights are set on the piece. These are the gems of the show. We have a friend who is a sculptor near Paris, Alex Labejof, and he says his stone sculpture is very cheap – it’s the holes he puts into each piece that are expensive.  Long can say the same thing – the openings are high priced in the bank of aesthetic currency.

Okay, you’re thinking. It’s not like the Art Tourist to like everything, and no surprise, I thought the video artist was lame. It annoys me to have to listen to another work when I’m looking at something else that is totally unrelated. Maybe you like it, but I don’t want to hear ads when I’m riding on a bus or shopping in the grocery store. I don’t really want to see them on television.

The piece I saw – and I admit I didn’t bother to see the other – oh, yes I did, it was just completely unmemorable except that the viewer was supposed to walk through a black room.  Please. Just because it’s new and its video doesn’t mean it’s any good. The piece I did look at in an effort to appreciate it, was supposed to be a crowd affected by what a speaker was saying from a podium. It was misproportioned and the people on the video facing and taunting or cheering the pretend speaker and the viewers were so obviously a loop video it was completely impersonal. It may have worked better as a sound only piece – in either case, I wish SITE had put it out in the boxcar they bought to isolate this type of work.

Please don’t start playing ads in the libraries. We need some contemplative spaces in modern American life.

This show is on until Dec 31, 2005. Visit sitesantafe.org information about hours, etc.

Terry Talty is the self-described art tourist, who writes contemporary art criticism in a postmodern world where anything could be good.