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Thursday, February 8, 2007

Love it or Hate It: Whiting Tennis’s Cow Trailer

posted by on February 8 at 9:13 AM

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Bovine, The Oregon Trail Reversed (2006) by Whiting Tennis

The latest Artnews is out today, and in it, the UW scholar Patricia Failing reviews Whiting Tennis’s show at Greg Kucera Gallery last year. She very much likes Bovine. I’ll type in the relevant parts of her piece, because there’s no way to link to the story on the web site of Artnews (grr):

Tennis finds a range of cues in used plywood. In Bovine (2006), a 14-foot-long crossbreed of a cow and an Airstream trailer, he refers to the saga of westward migration as depicted in B movies. The back of the wood trailer/cow is studded with an array of anecdotal, scene-setting objects—paint bucket, hammer, watering can, croquet mallet, harmonica, and books—often used in cinema to induce bonding with unseen characters. Bovine trumped the experience of cinema, however, with its olfactory addition: the sculpture infused the gallery with the musty smell of decaying wood.

Seattle Art Museum acquired this work, led by new contemporary curator Michael Darling. P-I critic Regina Hackett took this as a strike against Darling in her blog post on January 25. She dismisses Bovine this way:

It reeks of frontier nostalgia and trades in wild West stereotypes. It’s shabby chic without the chic.

I wasn’t convinced by Bovine, either, but I couldn’t enjoy my disconnection from it.

I simply felt disappointed that the artist’s very genuine expressive gesture did not reach me. Tennis spent an hour in the gallery with me before the show opened, and he declared that Bovine, The Oregon Trail Reversed (that surtitle often gets left off in reviews, but it’s relevant) was his line in the sand. “I don’t want any more change,” he told me.

As a 47-year-old single man, he had just bought his own first house, and many of these works were created using the objects he found in the garage, left there by the former owner, an elderly man. I was touched by what was clearly an homage to him staking a claim of sorts in his own life, but many of his other works seemed to be doing the same thing, only in a way that was more sly, more oblique—just more. That’s why I described those and left Bovine more or less alone in my original writing about the show back in October. I shouldn’t have done that.

Bovine is what Tennis intended as the centerpiece of his show, and now, thanks to SAM, we will be seeing it again. Will it work?

I am curious to see it up against the permanent collection, in a lineage that is going to, if I’m remembering correctly, push Morris Graves into fairly close proximity to the abstract expressionists. These seem to be salient touchstones for Bovine, which has a kind of softness, but also the brawn of a Di Suvero, the immense, brooding spirituality of a Kline, and, as Failing so aptly writes, the treacle and predictability of B movies. Is Tennis cutting off the grand gesture with an ironic slash? I don’t think so. Though I might change my mind about that if he makes smoke come out of the chimney, which he planned to do but couldn’t rig together for the opening at Kucera.

The funny thing is, Bovine is the piece Tennis worked hardest to make. Some of his other objects were very simple adaptations of found materials, extremely unprecious and grouped together in a family sort of way, instead of exhibited sparsely in the modernist vein.

Despite their simplicity—because of it? I’m really not sure—many of these resonated deeply. Throughout the show, Tennis complicated things with simple touches, simple actions. Even his paintings and collages made much of little. His marks didn’t feel overly plotted, or like he was opening a vein. But they way they came together was downright poignant. There was something I truly loved about that show.

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Drawing (2006) by Whiting Tennis (plaster and plywood)

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Elizabethan (2005) by Whiting Tennis (acrylic and collage on canvas)

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The First Thing (2006) by Whiting Tennis (acrylic on canvas)

RSS icon Comments

1

can't wait to see it!
it looks like the shed in my backyard.

Posted by maria | February 8, 2007 9:47 AM
2

She says "frontier nostalgia" like it's a bad thing.

Posted by Fnarf | February 8, 2007 1:38 PM
3

He's pretty hot though.

Posted by Los Sugarbritches | February 9, 2007 11:22 AM

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