Maybe it's just me — but when I hear the phrase "lift and separate," I can only think of one thing. (Well, OK, a pair of things, but you get my drift.)
The image comes to mind unbidden — yet another victory for Madison Avenue's carefully orchestrated psy-ops, this time in the form of a classic bra ad that, frankly, I'm not even old enough to have seen the first time around. Nevertheless, when I look at a trio of photographs by Mitchell Syrop that juxtapose the memorable slogan with three very different objects, I know something is not right.
None of the objects — a man's shaving razor, a scotch on the rocks, and a puzzled monkey with paparazzi — even remotely resembles what I'm thinking of, nor do any of them make a whole lot of sense in the context of the words' literal meaning. That doesn't stop my brain from trying to make those disparate elements relate to each other, instigating a cognitive ménage a trois between the caption, the image the caption makes me think of, and the picture I actually see in front of me.
This persistent need to interpret — the compulsion to construct a story that makes sense of what we see — provides the foundation for an exhibit at the Tampa Museum of Art that showcases works from the permanent collection. Plenty of contemporary prints and photography, along with some paintings, sculptures, a video installation and antiquities mixed in, engage the urge to tell — and be told — stories in a plethora of ways.
People — it's no secret — love a good yarn. We surround ourselves with stories, from conversations that begin with an optimistic hey-you'll-never-believe-what-just-happened-to-me to feature films and newspaper articles. Sure, the quality of our pop cultural storytelling has tanked recently (see: Reality Television), but that doesn't mean our capacity for subtle, masterfully wrought narrative is permanently damaged — I prefer to think of the present moment as a temporary lapse in our collective critical capacity.
An exhibit like the one at the TMA threatens to remedy all that by slowing us down — sometimes even stopping us in our tracks — to question how and why we see things (and make sense of them) the way we do. Rest assured, however, that the experience is not a didactic one. If there's medicine here, it's offered with more than a spoonful of aesthetic pleasure.
Some works in the exhibit, like the triptych that borrows the slogan from a classic bra ad, question the way we perceive and process information. Jim Campbell's digital prints amalgamate minutes of video footage of moving objects into a single blurry image of each. From afar, they resemble coherent wholes; at close range, it becomes clear how much interpretive work our minds and eyes do to make sense of a whirling bicycle wheel or a zooming car.
In David Hockney's photo collage, the viewer fills in the gaps to recreate the events of an afternoon. Hockney incorporates a sense of time into the collage by snapping pictures of a conversation as it takes place; pieced together, they show individual actions, like a sip of tea or a gesture, that tell a story.
Other works take a questioning stance toward an external narrative — political or symbolic — like a photograph by Carrie Mae Weems that draws attention to the absence of black women as ideals of beauty in the narrative of European art history, or a linocut by William Kentridge that compares the psychological toll of living in apartheid South Africa to turning from a man into a gnarled tree.
Irreverently, some pieces challenge the very context that gives them meaning, like a photograph by Richard Ross that gently mocks the sacred authority of museums even as it hangs in one. In the image, a stuffed polar bear's ridiculous, glass-bound captivity in an outdated natural history museum raises the question — why is this worth looking at?
On the other hand, some works build on a story that already exists in art or literature, paying homage while imparting a new spin. Joel-Peter Witkin's Guernica-inspired photograph borrows stylistically from Picasso's painting of the same theme, but Witkin takes it one creepier step into the zone of contemporary gothic. A freaky, disembodied head looks like it might spring to life and bounce out of the frame.
Leslie Dill gives poignant visual dimension to an Emily Dickinson poem, printing the deep blue stain of a life-like heart and words on a handmade paper dress. Kiki Smith references an ancient text by Parmenides to celebrate the body and its vicissitudes, encompassing extremes from fierce to delicate, solid to permeable — like the fragile, fibrous pages of a book she embellishes with black type, cutouts, and line drawings.
Rites of passage play on the ambiguous moment of transition between innocence and experience. In a photograph by Nic Nicosia, a young boy clutches a gas can that implicates him and two co-conspirators in an act of backyard arson; as the three children stand rapt before a burning tree (itself merely a sapling), the central figure, a girl, looks back over her shoulder at the viewer as if to say, too late.
Justine Kurland stages a slumber party amidst a gritty construction site, the colorful sleeping bags and languid bodies of slumbering teenage girls a stark contrast against the gray sand. As the girls sleep, a much younger child — a toddler — wanders away from the group to an uncertain fate.
Other artists channel the uninhibited storytelling abilities of childhood by playing with really big dolls and dressing up. Cindy Sherman, artistic chameleon par excellence, here appears in the guise of an eye-patched, puffy-faced villain. Simone Gad's painted mannequin turns swimming and cinematic legend Esther Williams into a pop Venus on a half-shell. And Tony Oursler is represented by one of his rag dolls with video playback for a face — she cycles through a series of emotions (audible throughout the gallery) that range from agony to ecstasy as she contemplates an invisible object of desire.
Most importantly, the stories these works tell are not the kind you sit down, click on with the remote, and passively watch fly by, but the kind you puzzle over, talk about — even learn something from. The TMA exhibit offers all those adventures and more — call it required reading.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2006.