Walk into the back room of Tip Toland's exhibition at the Bellevue Arts Museum, where the walls are pitch-black, and there's a naked old woman lying on her side on the floor, her back to the entrance.
It's impossible to stand over her. One is compelled to drop to a squat, where this is the view.
And then it is impossible not to move closer.
This woman is not alive. She is a work of art. She is called Milk for the Butter Thief and made of stoneware, paint, and pastel; her hair is sheep's wool. It is tempting to say, rather than "not alive," that this woman is not real, but she is. She has unbelievable presence. Docents at the gallery say that visitors—especially women—stand over her and cry.
Yes. Coming across this woman is surely one of the great Northwest museum moments of 2008-2009. Nothing is beautified, but everything about her is beautiful. The way her nipple is submerged in her own sagging flesh; the gently prayerful position of the hands; the twin hollows in the cheek and the hip; labia barely appearing between her legs on her back side. She is as alive as deathly. She could be the only object on display at Bellevue Arts Museum right now. She could carry an entire museum on her sleeping weight.
The whole exhibition, called Melt, The Figure in Clay, contains six figures made between 2007 and 2008 by the artist, who herself is a slender older woman (age 58) who often uses her own body in her work. (Here is a double self-portrait sculpture and also a photograph of the artist working on front of her other sculptures-in-progress; the sculpture of the man with the spread legs in the photograph, called Death Is Like Taking Off a Tight Shoe and made in 2005, is a jolt every time I see it.) I shortlisted her for a Genius Award in 2007. When she's on, the art is ferocious. Nothing else I've seen quite touches Milk for the Butter Thief, but Toland regularly produces incredibly brave, terribly skilled, and utterly unacademic work. (Hyperrealist sculptors like Ron Mueck and Duane Hanson seem gimmicky and coldly theoretical, respectively, by comparison.)
Pulse is a naked woman on a moving swing. (Here is my video of her.) She is unnerving—ecstatic and robotic at once. Her dentures are real, listed on the wall label. In a way she is over the top. But there's also something about her that makes you, uncomfortably, take her completely seriously.
Toland's subjects are the very old and the very young, subjects that are commonly sentimentalized. And Toland can be unpleasantly sentimental, too. A young boy with his hands down his pants and an old man playing a child's violin at BAM are so sweet that they veer almost into kitsch; they aren't half the works of the others in the exhibition. But ultimately Toland is redeemed—by a strange young girl with ancient-looking eyes wearing big red wax lips and waiting awkwardly to go off the diving board; or by the gray-toned bust of an old woman preparing to dive into the water, her otherwise dead-looking skin marked by only one point of color: a red dot on her forehead. (This last sculpture also brings to mind black-and-white photography, and punctures the predictable way it gets associated with what's old.)
Toland's sculptures are a reassurance to those who are made uncomfortable by skill in art. Skill can be obnoxious; it can be shallow. But great skill is invisible. And at that point, where Toland's working with Milk for the Butter Thief, all the world falls away from the art as you look at it. There is nothing else.
