Leandro Erlich's Rain III (1999-2000) is, I promise you, a sculpture (or an installation, but whatever). You walk around it in real time, and it is a thing, physically present in three dimensions. But Rain III is also a clever bit of cinema. Between two windows installed on either side of a movable wall, a slender space offers a glimpse into an outside world. At least, it's a world that looks like it must be outside — though it is, paradoxically, inside the sculpture — because a steady rain drips there, and every few seconds a flash of lightning appears, followed by a clap of thunder.
Technically speaking, the illusion created by Erlich's piece isn't spectacularly convincing — after a few seconds, most viewers will realize that the too-regular lightning comes from a strobe light mounted inside the wall — but it doesn't need to be. Rain III brings to life an image each of us has already seen and believed when we think, "It was a dark and stormy night."
This good trick — the deployment of the fake to evoke the real, or is it the other way around? — is just one of the pleasures of Realism, an exhibit of contemporary art drawn from the Martin Z. Margulies Collection in Miami, now on view at the Tampa Museum of Art. The exhibition is the second in a series of collaborations between the Margulies and the TMA — a savvy partnership for a museum which must lure visitors through its doors without a permanent collection that includes the likes of Monet or Renoir.
Realism finds the TMA leveraging one of the finer pieces in its collection, Ralph Goings' 1986 painting Collins Diner, to impressive ends. Activating the painting — an awesome photorealist ode to the quotidian beauty of a mid-century diner — as a point of departure, the exhibit plays with the idea of realism and how it is achieved, or playfully upended, by specific artists' practices. It makes good sense, both historically and in locating an anchor for this inquiry in the TMA's holdings, to begin with photorealism in painting; it's an old saw that the brush and the camera represent rival arts, each with its unique ability to contrive the semblance of reality.
Goings' painting celebrates the deliciously perverse achievement of creating photographic effect — no, more real than photographic, even — in the medium of oil paint. The interior of his diner stands still in time at a single moment pregnant with humor and nostalgia: an old-timer fixes a younger man, who reaches into the back pocket of his blue jeans to pay the waitress at the register, with a frankly evaluative look. This hint of generational and class friction unfolds against the diner's backdrop of corrugated aluminum, which glimmers on nearly every visible surface.
Likewise, Davis Cone's paintings of the same period delight in fabricating a more-real-than-real vision of a particular America. Cone's milieu, though, is grittily urban. His Sam Eric and Raiders of the Lost Arc (1982) pays tribute to the Philadelphia movie theater better known as the Boyd; Greenwich Theater (1979) does the same for a Manhattan playhouse. Each canvas captures the theater and its surroundings in mesmerizing detail, down to the text on parking signs and reflections of neon light in sidewalk puddles. As a viewer, you can almost feel Cone's satisfaction in painting each tiny raindrop on the hood of a car.
Tony Oursler's Coo (2003) invites viewers to be convinced by a reality even more blatantly contrived. Oursler's outrageous sculptures — projections of talking video faces onto bulbous forms — never really fool anybody, and yet they do. From the moment you enter the TMA gallery where Realism is housed, you'll be aware of Coo's looping chatter. Two blinking eyeballs, never in tandem, top her green-painted face; below them, a feminine mouth opens to reveal a shockingly pink tongue and lips, which pronounce an endless stream of phonetically similar words (pink-puddle-huddle-hide-bigger) with exaggerated care. I wouldn't call Coo artificially intelligent, but she exudes a presence that somehow isn't entirely fake.
Will Ryman's Newscenter 2 (2005) sits at the apex of the so-fake-it's-hilariously-real arc in the exhibition. Like Erlich's rainy windows, Ryman's life-sized sculpture of a newsstand — the kind you patronize inside a subway station or on a street corner in Manhattan — serves as a reminder that the bar for achieving verisimilitude is set differently, and maybe lower, in three dimensions. The "joke" of the piece is that its components are rendered primitively, as if a gang of second graders had gotten together and crafted fake soda pop cans and issues of Cosmopolitan and Men's Health as an after school project. But standing in front of the plywood stand, it's the bizarre realness of it as an assembled whole — and the very grown-up wit of that paradox — that's so striking.
Finally, there's the garbage can that makes music. That's right — a Rubbermaid trashcan filled with junk that clinks and clanks to make music of sorts. (If your Uncle Dick from Omaha who totally doesn't get contemporary art is in town for the holidays, you've gotta take him to see this thing. Seriously.) 8 Million Stories (2009) by David Ellis and Roberto Carlos Lange might be the stealth genius work of the exhibition. Filled with cans and bottles that are activated as percussive instruments, the trashcan functions as an inanimate one-man band. An homage to the city of New York and to rapper Kurtis Blow, according to an interview with the artists online, the piece embodies the elusive goal of merging art with everyday life. And, like so much in Realism, it's just cool.
This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2010.