The Art of Annoyance

Sometimes the only thing art does for me is annoy me -- and last weekend, I discovered that can be a good thing.

It's spring, when - if you believe Tennyson - a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

I'm middle-aged, paunchy, drab, and colorless, so thinking about love does me about as much good as it does a Shetland pony to think about winning the Preakness. I was out trying to think about art instead.

Specifically, I was at Jackson Artworks for the grand re-opening of the gallery itself, and the opening of "Journeys 4 Revisited," a group show by usual Jackson suspects Kat Moser, Rebecca Hermann, Kris Waldherr, Karen Zuegner, Jim Butkus and Jim Moser.

The "grand re-opening" part is because the gallery had been closed for repairs for nearly a year after a fairly spectacular bang. Uh-huh... If your art gallery, surrounded by much taller, more-conductive buildings in downtown Omaha, had nonetheless been singled out to get struck by lightning and have a hole blasted in its roof, damaging many of the artworks within... might you have gotten the idea that maybe God was trying to tell you something? Well, the artists who run the Jackson are much too pleased with themselves to take that sort of thing personally, so they've had the joint fixed up and are now back in place.

It's a better place, too, to my eye. They've gotten rid of all the weird little side rooms that used to clog the traffic flow at openings like inflamed diverticula, combining everything into a large, L-shaped open space broken up only by a few free-standing partitions. There may be trouble ahead if they ever host shows that need to be more segmented... but for co-equal group shows like the current one, it's perfect.

In fact, it's so perfect -- from the lofty boho-chic look of the space, to the elegant way the artworks fit into it, to the effortlessly hip fabulousness of the crowd (tip: if all you want from a gallery opening is to see a high concentration of coolly-dressed, sensationally attractive art babes of both sexes, don't bother with the Joslyn or the Bemis; head straight for the Jackson) -- that the whole place looks almost as if some Hollywood designer had ordered it built as a set for shooting the art-gallery segment, the one just before the heroine finds the body. After a while, it kind of started to bug me.

Karen Zuegner's paintings were bugging me, too. Disclosure: I was acquainted with Zuegner back when we were both spotty teenagers; maybe that's why I had never really looked at her paintings before, even though she's now a successful adult artist, with a degree and a resumé full of individual and group exhibitions and everything. (You never really expect your teenage companions to amount to anything, do you?... especially when you haven't amounted to anything yourself.)

Anyway, I was looking at her paintings now, and they were irritating me. It's easy to dismiss these not-very-designed-looking canvases as mere blurry abstractions, the kind every art-school student turns out at some stage just to say s/he did it. At first glance there are some squiggly thin little curlicue things, and some darker blobby things, and that seems to be about it.

But now, marooned on this outcrop of the fashionable art world with no one to talk to, I was having to look, and it was looking to me as if there's more going on here. Scowling at Zuegner's paintings from up close, across the room, and in the middle, I noticed that they seem to have two distinct spaces in them. There's a flat front plane and a deeper plane behind it -- kind of like looking into a room through a dirty window on which some kid has been drawing. The thin little squiggles I mentioned -- some of them are vaguely representational: little umbrella shapes, linked rings; others are just squiggles -- are on the front "window." The darker, blobbier, more three-dimensional shapes form the "room" behind.

So, we're trying to see into this room, only we can't quite because the window is dirty and some dratted kid has been scribbling on it... but what if the kid is trying to tell us something? Do the scribbles relate in any way to the space behind them? Does the exhibit title, "Journeys 4," provide any clues? (The title, quoth the PR material, comes from the fact that several of these artists enjoy taking trips together -- well, isn't that just lovely? Maybe you thought artists spend all their leisure time starving in garrets, but that's soooo 20th century.)

I was wracking my brain trying to crack the case, but I wasn't making much headway. Too many distractions: the Hollywood-perfect space, Bruce Springsteen's moronic political maunderings on the sound system, even the fabulous art-babes-of-both-sexes. I was getting seriously annoyed.

It was at this point, suddenly, that I realized that compared to the mildly stupefied way I shuffle through a lot of gallery shows, I sort of like this kind of annoyance. At least my brain is fully engaged in fighting with the artwork. It's like the way you feel (least I do) when having one of those crackling cocktail-party arguments with somebody you don't care enough about to be nice. Maybe, for some kinds of art, annoyance is a fair part of the game.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know we all want viewing an artwork to be a gorgeous brain-orgasm experience, the kind some people claim they get when they see a Monet water lily. But I can't help remembering what insurance executive/major poet Wallace Stevens wrote:

The poem must resist the intelligence

Almost successfully.

That kind of resistance is going to be annoying, right? Sure -- but it's better than nothing, and to see that I didn't need to look any farther than over to Jim Butkus' non-annoying but non-resisting photographs.

Lately, Butkus' work has fallen into a fairly specific shtick:

• He photographs unpeopled scenes in what sound, from the wall labels, like pretty nice places -- French resort towns and such.
• He shoots with a panoramic camera, which uses curved film and a revolving lens to produce images with cylindrical perspective: objects close to the camera bulge out pregnantly, while straight lines in the background converge off in spaghetti-like loops.
• He produces color prints in which the tones have a slightly lurid glow; I don't know whether he uses this specific technique or not, but the effect is much like that of HDR (high dynamic range) photography.

Fine. French resort towns are scenic, and cylindrical perspective and HDR are interesting looking... at least the first two or three million times you see them. The question I'd have to ask Butkus is, "What else ya got?" -- and unless I'm missing something (always a possibility) the answer here seems to be "Uhhh..." Looking at them, I don't have much reaction other than, "Big woop, here's another Jim Butkus fine-art photograph."

Same story for the work of Jim Moser, who cuts up gears and shafts and other industrial cast-offs and reassembles them into metal sculptures. To do this kind of work you need mad welding skills, something which certainly deserves respect. And for a gearhead like me it's kind of fun to contemplate the difference between what the metal chunks did in their working life and what they're doing now in their retirement career as art objects. Beyond that, though, no lights on upstairs.

Fortunately, the rest of the show is brimming with constructive annoyance of one kind or another.

Kris Waldherr, for example, annoys successfully by being small. Okay, a lot of her share of the exhibit consists of books (fictionalized historical narratives on feminist themes, and if you like that sort of thing, you can have it) but what got my attention was a wall-full of tiny drawings, no more than three inches square.

These little icon-like images, all portraying goddesses that Waldherr either researched or made up (I don't care which, and you don't need to) are decorative without getting too kitschy. But the real kicker is that they're tiny -- maybe 3 x 3 inches, give or take a tick. You got it -- in an era when galleries in general tend to be filled with billboard-size inventory (a big-rep Berlin art photographer in an interview I read said quite sensibly that it's easier to fill up the space that way) Waldherr has bucked the trend by producing works that you've got to confront nose-to-nose.

The drawings themselves are a bit too pallid for my taste, but the way they pester you for intimacy (we all know people who do that, right?... just never the people we wish would do it) is both charming and somewhat annoying... but hey, that's our Word for the Day.

Kat Moser's big black-and-white photographs struck me at first like a certain type of hot chick you might meet at parties: you figure, yeah, probably her teeth are bleached and her boobs are augmented and her conversation is all memorized out of trash magazines... but cripes, she's still hot, and that bad reptilian part of your brain still wants to take her home. (Female and/or gay readers: feel free to interpolate preceding metaphor as desired.)

Which is another way of saying I suspect I shouldn't like these photographs as much as I do. Cripes: hazy, gauzy pictures of palely beautiful, nearly-nude female models, all pale pearly skin and filmy fabric, draped languorously over dreamy land- and water-scapes. I should hate that cheesy stuff -- right?

The pics could just as well be ad-photo outtakes for Nouvelle Eve (the Old Market fashion boutique that Moser owns) except that the models aren't wearing enough clothes to be worth selling -- right?

They're like images transmitted back from the NASA probe to the Pretty People Planet, where no human can breathe the atmosphere -- right?

Not. Moser has stretched herself a tightrope above the terrain of David-Hamiltonesque hokum (aptly skewered by some '80s wiseguy as "soft-pore cornography") but she never falls off into the abyss.

Two reasons:

• She has a razor-sharp eye for geometry; her models' languid limbs and their surrounding environments interact in a way that's rigorous without being overstated. 
• Her sense of style gives her scenes a persuasive consistency; seeing them, you can just about believe in the Pretty People Planet.

Going back to my earlier hot-chick-at-a-party metaphor, this underlying structure is like unexpectedly hearing the hot chick inject an acidic Jane Austen quip into the general chitchat: holy kack, you might think, there's a penetrating intelligence behind those false eyelashes.

Then again, I may just be rationalizing, because the bad reptilian part of my brain still wants to take a lot of these irritatingly attractive prints home...

But I've saved the most infuriatingly challenging pieces for last: Rebecca Hermann's paintings, specifically the three on the back wall of the gallery. I've been thinking about the dratted things all week, and I still don't feel as if I've peeled all the layers off them.

Hermann (disclosure: I used to be acquainted with her when she shared an apartment with my pal Cornelia Cook, back when we were all twentysomethings) has been working Wallace Stevens' badger game for years with her paintings.

Typically they're dark, rich, heavily textured, and built up out of varying sizes and densities of abstract patterns -- some unique and random, others repeating. She combines these elements so that when you look at the painting up close, one type of element dominates... then, as you step back, the painting seems to "shift gears" with an almost tangible thunk, and you're looking at something different. It's a slick trick, and the show contains several interesting examples.

The three new paintings in back, though, are a bit different. They're brighter, more colorful, more sharp-edged, and more representational; much more cheerful tchotchkes for the kind of affluent art-enthusiast lady who can spring for a few $850-a-whack paintings to brighten up her breakfast nook.

If such a lady snaffles Hermann's trio from this show, more power to her and I hope she invites me over for breakfast, because I'd like to have a look at those paintings again. Hermann seems to have something new going on here: instead of using sizes and scales to layer her canvases, she seems to be using opacity and transparency. Each has a complex base pattern mixing abstract and sort-of-recognizable elements... with a different complex pattern as a sort of transparent overlay.

Like Zuegner's paintings, these kept taunting me to try to unravel the relationships, if any, among the patterns and layers. They resist my intelligence, and not just almost successfully -- so far, they've still got me stumped. But they're so first-glance accessible and so engaging that I want to keep trying. It's still bugging me.

Drat you, Wallace Stevens, why didn't you stick to the insurance business?