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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Visual Art Currently Hanging

Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 12:52 PM

Yesterday I posted about art based on Moby Dick and dark American prophecies. Leo Saul Berk's cave sculptures focus on American disasters of information.

Now comes The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art at the Frye—more proof that artists right now are particularly preoccupied with what it means to be American, and with figuring out how art can contribute to the republic.

The artists in The Old, Weird America (full review coming out tomorrow) are pioneers of the past. The dark star of the show is Jeremy Blake's 18-minute video Winchester, which morphs historic photographs, psychedelic abstractions, and images of rifle-toting cowboys into butterflies and Rorschach patterns in an homage to the Winchester Mystery House. (The California mansion, with its endless doors and staircases to nowhere, was built by the widow of the Winchester gun magnate in a frantic effort to elude the ghosts of those who had been killed by the guns.) The pure products of America go crazy, indeed.

The history of violence is an especially irrepressible subject during wartime. But with his 2002 Blake was also expressing his own personal terror; in 2007, he and his girlfriend both committed suicide, believing they were being targeted by Scientologists and the CIA.

Here's a segment.

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You do seem to be busy (I understand), but when does Matthew Offenbacher get some words about his current Howard House hangings right next to that Moby Dicked stuff? Do Moby Dicks overwhelm that cool art talker represented in the other room? I know it's coming, coming, coming. That American Dick story gets attention a lot and maybe M didn't find such a symbolic high note to embrace.

Posted by Chetter Cheeze on October 7, 2009 at 2:06 PM