Dec. 30–Jan. 5, 2006

Digital Distortion

by Jeffry Cudlin

I’ve been told that I’m not a very nice critic. This may be true. I have a penchant for mixed reviews, for trying to find fault even with shows that I’ve otherwise thoroughly enjoyed. “That guy doesn’t like anything,” one curator told an artist friend of mine recently. “What a menace.”

Let me explain myself: For me, part of art criticism should be an investigation into the difference between what a work claims to be and what it actually is, to the best of my approximation. So many artists make a career out of positioning and public relations, making their art as much an attempt to shape perceptions of their connections to the art world as an attempt to shape our perceptions of the world at large. Untangling the misdirection and hubris that’s often attached to that pursuit can be a messy business. Add that to the usual critical duties of judging skill, evaluating ideas, and teasing out meaning, and a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down becomes pretty difficult to bestow.

Making a year’s-end top-10 list is even tougher—maybe even a little embarrassing. Could I subtitle my feature “Ten Shows I Didn’t Completely Savage”? How about “Ten Shows That Very Nearly Rose to My Impossibly High Standards” or “Ten Shows a Nicer, Stupider Critic Might Have Liked?” My editor says no.

What I can do is list the exhibitions and artworks that held my attention most, misdirection and hubris included. Good art delays your understanding and poses as many questions as it asks. Sometimes, it leads you to discover something new—about how you look at art or the world or yourself. I discovered something with each of these shows—which isn’t quite the same thing as liking them, or even believing in the artists responsible.

There were general trends, of course. Pastiche was big, as it has been for decades. A sense of the end of times hung over much of this year’s production, possibly with more weight than it has in the past. Some curators tried to tie this to media images of terror and torture, but really, if anything was being forecast, it was the end of art—or at least art’s capacity to speak to an audience. Again, something that’s been big for decades.

In G Fine Art’s “Blasts” show, curator Paul Brewer picked a number of artists who use pop-culture artifacts from the recent past to imagine disasters yet to come. Louis Cameron borrowed the graphic from a DJ Spooky album cover to create an animated digital projection. The result, Warfare Riddim, was a pixellated, slow-motion video-game explosion—the apocalypse as seen on an Atari 2600. From the same show, Christoph Draeger’s Last News broadcast looked like low-rent cable-news satire, with a flustered announcer hamming it up in front of footage of explosions obviously taken from Independence Day and other disaster movies. The end is nigh, and we apparently lack the faculties to envision it in any terms other than Hollywood’s—or even to take it seriously.

Not taking things seriously is something Ian Whitmore knows all about. The paintings in his Fusebox show, “Mirror Mirror,” married passages of urgent, Cecily Brown–esque paint-smearing to faux-rococo imagery. Though Whitmore often adopted the look of 18th-century art, he used none of the period techniques, resorting to slapdash alla prima construction and a palette of murky browns, powder blues, and flamingo pinks. The artist apparently thinks that painting is an unredeemable anachronism, and he sent it up with tacky, facile pastiches. Of course, if these really are his beliefs and intentions, why is he still painting? One reason might be that, every once in a while, he jiggers up something as resonant as Bridge, which contained allusions to both the early-20th-century arrested-motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge and Rogier van der Weyden’s 15th-century Portrait of a Lady. Here Whitmore offered a quiet memorial to the perceptual revolution that caused countless artists to rethink how a moving subject could be represented in a static medium. Instead of inviting us to smirk at the death of painting, this piece actually made us feel the loss.

New York artist Kehinde Wiley’s show at Conner Contemporary Art, “White,” suffered from similar problems of construction not quite matching concept. Wiley put contemporary African-American males in the postures of saints from Old Master paintings, but the results didn’t have the lusciousness of the pieces he referenced. Wiley’s paint was opaque, cartoonish—more reminiscent of a cheap graphic novel than a prized museum holding. But at least Wiley’s pieces weren’t a simple appropriation of white art for blacks; instead, the paintings in “White” were subtly subversive jabs at all status symbols and systems of ornamentation—gilt frames, bling, or otherwise.

Jiha Moon’s show at Curator’s Office, “Symbioland,” didn’t really offer anything new in the Century-Hopping Stylistic Mash-Up category. But Moon’s Japanese-pop-culture-tweaking works on paper were a treat for their sheer exuberance and visual inventiveness. Clouds morphed suddenly into fantastic animals; showers of rain resolved themselves into knotlike bundles of string. In Cardinal, red ink dripped down the page—sometimes as actual drips, sometimes as a cutie-pied symbol for dripping paint. Even given such opportunities for self-indulgence, Moon somehow kept her balance, never overdoing it.

Ed Ruscha’s works-on-paper retrospective at the National Gallery of Art, “Cotton Puffs, Q-Tips, Smoke and Mirrors: The Drawings of Ed Ruscha,” was hardly exuberant. Indeed, it seemed bent on keeping secrets. Aside from indicating the National Gallery’s continuing preference for contemporary artists who are at least superficially traditional—think of last year’s retrospective of Jim “He Can Draw!” Dine—the Ruscha show was, as promised by its title, an epic display of reticence and obfuscation. Rather than revealing the world in his work, Ruscha holds it at arm’s length. In the 1997 piece The End #20, the titular phrase appeared in red ink and a fuzzed-out Gothic script, centered in a pinched white rectangle meant to recall a movie screen. Little representations of scratches, hairs, and dust activated the rest of the space, implying aging media and unspooled narratives—and, naturally, the end of a purpose for traditional art-making. In Ruscha’s world, the gods have fled both the studio and the museum, yet the faithful apparently still remain, waiting for more magic—no matter how worn-out or disingenuous it might be. The artist either wants to sustain the illusion or is trapped by it, unable to help himself at this late date. Whichever is the case, he’s not telling.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, like the subject of its current retrospective, Sam Gilliam, opted to turn a blind eye to any breaking down or involution in the arts. Gilliam, despite coming onto the scene in the late ’60s, a time of significant change in the visual arts, has for decades stubbornly continued to do what he pleases: paint. Somehow, his single-minded pursuit has produced results, and though much of his early work—his drape paintings, his Rorschach-like acrylic blotches on raw canvas—looks pretty dated, his late stuff shows real inventiveness, real expressive power, and the authority of economy.

If work in traditional media has long tended to look trapped by its own heavy history, new-media artists apparently feel license to be playful. One of the year’s more surprising projects involved digital sound art, and despite being installed in a set of Porta Pottis—making the whole work into a sort of bathroom joke—several of the entries managed to be more serious than silly. The Pottis were installed at various locations around the city and included contributions from artists Richard Chartier, Joseph Grigely, Alberto Gaitán, Jennie C. Jones, Helmut Kopetzky, Brandon Morse, Robin Rose, and Alex Van Oss. Morse’s was one of the clear winners: Stationed outside Conner Contemporary in Dupont Circle, his piece took found street sounds, gathered in real time by a microphone a couple of floors above the booth, and shaped them into a beautifully textured soundscape—a contemplative space created through the manipulation of noise pollution.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden also gave us newish media, opting to distract us with the pretty colors and flashing lights of “Visual Music.” Nominally about synesthesia, the show really explored the lost possibilities and failures of modernist painting—even if all of the gee-whiz activity of the countless animations, light shows, and digital installations tended to shut down viewers’ impulse to analyze the art. Many of the artists in the show tried to purify visual language of illusions, using simple geometric forms and pure colors. Most notable about the show, however, was the way that works made in different decades looked nearly the same—for example, Thomas Wilfred’s colored-bulb-and-mirrored-cylinder contraption Study in Depth, Opus 152 (1959) and Leo Villareal’s computer-controlled-LED sculpture Lightscape (2002). The results, rather than revealing great metaphysical truths, tended to distance themselves from actual human life in reliable, predictable ways. But even that, I suppose, reflects something essential about art: that the best of it will look like what it looks like—and, in the end, mean what it means—no matter which age’s rhetoric surrounds it. To that, I give an unreserved thumbs-up. CP