While touring two exhibits at the Morean Arts Center last week, I was reminded of the sometimes funny gap between works of art and the words we use to describe them. Critic Boris Groys has compared such descriptions to textual bikinis, placed strategically over the shocking nakedness of art. Consciously or not, these verbal fig leaves seem designed to protect viewers from the puzzling, multiple, disorienting and otherwise undefinable experiences that characterize art.
Elastic Authenticity, a dazzlingly weird show (that's meant as high praise) still left over from the NCECA onslaught of contemporary ceramic sculpture exhibitions, comes equipped with a statement by each artist, mounted to the wall as a label. In a way, each statement is delightfully illuminating. Susan Beiner's comments, for example, describe her pieces — explosive clusters of floral life, lusciously glazed in variegated greens, pinks and blues, that extend out foam flowers or plexiglass antennae — as "making what is organic synthetic." Right on. Megumi Naitoh puts the optical play generated by her screenprint-on-ceramic mosaic in the context of her interest in Ancient Roman art and Second Life. Very cool.
There's a sense, though, in which these textual bikinis — even as they grant certain insights — obscure the works' full-frontal strangeness. (Realizing that Naitoh's piece depicts a scene from Second Life doesn't quite explain the befuddled fun of moving back and forth in front of her mosaic to discern a surreal image printed on angled tiles.) Don't get me wrong — I'm a fan of artist's statements; I even prefer them to label texts by an anonymous voice that seems to tell viewers what to think. And, of course, reading them is optional.
There's something about this particular show, however — composed of artists working at an exhilaratingly indeterminate place between the concept-dominated canon of contemporary art and the history of ceramic practice — that deserves to remain a bit puzzling. Naked, even.
Dylan J. Beck's sculptures recalled for me Donald Judd's production of "specific objects" — minimal forms like wood cubes that, in their mundaneness, resisted transformation into the precious objects of art. Beck's installation, Microwave Safe, looks like a collection of blown-up electronics components arrayed on a plastic grid; another piece consists of a terracotta wall sconce and three ivory ceramic panels pierced with rubber receptacles. As sculptures, they are thingy, and not transcendent beyond their thingy-ness, in a way that feels odd or frustrating if we assume that art should clearly illustrate ideas.
Darien Johnson's painted porcelain pieces, too, are fantastic for the way they don't add up to an easy "What is this?" Crafted as flawlessly smooth bulbous forms, the sculptures wear a skin of trompe l'oeil painting that depicts a spatial world built with perspective-defying planks, beams and ribbons of matter. On top of this, the sculptures sprout wiry extensions that appear to make them joinable as devices to other forms. A statement discussing the artist's interest in human cognition and digital processing is food for thought, but not as nourishing as looking. By comparison, words are conspicuously absent from an adjoining solo exhibition of sculptures by Cristina Córdova. (An artist's statement is available as a paper flier.) This absence comes as a relief, as Córdova's figures — evocative of classical sculpture and mythological embodiments of victory, suffering and beauty — evince a carefully calibrated balance of strength and fragility. Through their mottled surfaces, incised with scratches and bearing patches of earthy color that deceptively suggest their survival as artifacts, the figures communicate quietly across time. Monumental in their presence though smaller than life-sized in their construction, Córdova's sculptures — like one of a man seated inside an abstracted boat mounted to a gallery wall at the Morean — hint at epic stories crafted in clay.
No words required.
This article appears in May 12-18, 2011.