Let's face it, an artist's opinions about geopolitics or the environment or whatever aren't likely to be better than anybody else's. In fact, they're probably worse: after all, we reward these guys and gals for getting all touchy-feely and emotional about stuff, which pretty much disqualifies them from making the dispassionately balanced risk assessments and cost/benefit analyses needed to deal rationally with the big questions of life. If I need someone to backstop me on some crucial real-world decision and my only choices are a typical artist and a typical back-alley wino, I'll go with the wino almost every time.
Which makes it odd that I liked Dan Bruggeman's new show at Jackson Artworks as much as I did.
At first pop, Bruggeman's hard-edged, precisely-detailed, modestly-sized paintings look pretty much alike. We're looking at a Japanesely sparse grove of birch trees, and in the middle of the grove there's something kind of weird and stupid: a cluster of aquariums on pedestals, with duck decoys floating in them; or fans; or cuckoo clocks; or other man-made stuff that doesn't belong in a grove of Japanesely sparse birch trees. And whoever had the dumb idea of putting the stuff there obviously hasn't been keeping up with the maintenance: the decoys are falling over, the fans are unplugged, basically nothing is working. Who's the moron?
That would be us, baby. The title labels, also all pretty much the same, explain that these broken-down little scenes all depict unsatisfactory substitutes for the real thing. In other words, naughty Man is being mean to lovely, touchy, feely Mother Nature again, and Bruggeman doesn't like it, and we ought to see the Error of our Ways, wak wak wak yadda yadda. Ptui.
But not really. This is one of those rare times when didactic art doesn't reek, and I think that's for three reasons:
1. The theme isn't all that controversial. I mean, everybody from liberal tree-huggers to conservative Ducks Unlimited members (who cough up huge amounts of their own money for conservation) agrees that when it comes to Nature, there ain't no substitute for the real thing, so Bruggeman doesn't need to beat us black and blue with his thesis; he can afford to keep it subtle and engaging.
2. The way he makes his point is clever enough to reward paying attention. If you skip reading the wall labels (always an acid test for didactic art) you can still enjoy a sense of discovery in each painting, playing "what's wrong with this picture" as you try to work out what the heck each of the unsatisfactory substitutes is supposed to do.
3. There's a wry, deadpan amusement in the lame nature-substitute mechanisms Bruggeman devises, which is a stuffy way of saying his goofy contraptions make me laugh. I enjoyed looking at the paintings in the same way I enjoy watching the Mythbusters build some cockamamie gizmo that urban legend says will defy gravity or control thoughts or something -- I mean, we all know it's not going to work, and so do they, but watching them go through the motions of building and testing it is still a hoot.
Incidentally, Bruggeman's paintings share wall space in this show with an array of small abstract paintings by Dan O'Kane (could he be the same Dan O'Kane who used to be in charge of sucking up grant money at the Bemis Center of Tediously Contemporary Arts?) While his paintings decorate the wall nicely, they're so much alike that I'd be hard-pressed to decide which one to save first if, say, lightning should strike the gallery - and hey, at the Jackson, that's a possibility...
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