It's a late Friday afternoon, and I don't know whether it's just spring fever or a supermodel convention at the Radisson, but for some reason the Old Market is thick with knockout girls who, by net weight, all seem to be wearing a lot more eye makeup than skirt.
Not that I'd kick, normally – but a guy's got a job to do, so I ducked into the comfy old barn of the Artists' Cooperative Gallery (disclosure: I used to be a member back around the Bronze Age) to check out the current featured show.
There are five suspects in this lineup – Susan Sutherland Barnes, Anne Goddard, Pam King, Mary Kolar, and Bob Schipper – and oddly enough, their works all have three things in common with the girls-on-legs that were thronging the Market that evening: (a) they're attractive; (b) they're desirable; and (c) if I got to take one of them home with me, I wouldn't have a clue what to do next.
Not that I wouldn't have ideas. Would I ever have ideas. But real-world, it's tough to get sociable with a dame whose dress is so slinky she can't even sit down. Or who's tightly-wound enough that she breaks up the furniture, or is too exotic to tolerate your pals. Oh, yeah, it could be fabulous while it lasted, but for the long haul, the wiser guy might think twice.
It can be the same with artworks: Sure, that first night of possession might be sensational, but would the new piece be too intense to live with every day? Would it hang out companionably with the old friends already occupying your walls, or would it get high-hattish and demand the whole place to itself?
Phew, I think I smell the acrid stench of an over-cooked metaphor... but you get the idea. There are some artworks that look terrific in a gallery, but are just a little too off-the-wall to be at home on your wall. I'm not saying for sure that the works at the Co-op fall into this category, but I am saying you might want to bring your Nomex shopping bag if you decide to go home with one of these pocket rockets.
Anne Goddard's cloisonné works make a great example. Cloisonné produces pieces that are deep, shiny, richly colored and jewelescent. In fact, Goddard shows some small ones that she's made into luscious jewelry: if I had a gorgeous girlfriend and a sackful of cash, I'd happily score the lot of them just for the pleasure of seeing them around the GGF's neck.
Goddard's also got some larger cloisonnés that hang on the wall, like plaques – some stylized cityscapes and some with musical motifs, for instance. They're every bit as pretty as the small ones – but they're such concentrated bundles of visual energy that you couldn't just slap one up any old where without driving yourself crazy. To get the full value out of it, you'd need to plan a neutral zone around it where its intensity could radiate safely.
Then again, that's part of the fun of owning a piece of art, and it's exactly the same kind of fun as owning a stick of dynamite: you want to make sure you set it off in precisely the right place.
The same goes for Susan Sutherland Barnes' leaf-inspired ceramics. If I lived in a huge, airy, white-walled loft – the kind of place that actually exists only in Bang & Olufsen ads – then a few of these tightly-focused slices of sheer beauty would make an ideal counterpoint. But just buying one and throwing it down on the coffee table with the old magazines and TV remotes... nah. It deserves more staging than that.
I'm not going to say much about Bob Schipper's glass pieces or Pam King's Southwest-themed Polaroid transfers, but basically they're different verses of the same tune: they're not the visual firecrackers that Goddard's and Barnes' works are, but they've got an integrity of idea and execution that creates its own little gravity field.
Mary Kolar's masks, made of surprising combinations of found-object industrial junk, have the same kind of coherence, but gravity isn't their thing – fortunately. Scroll back up a sec and look at the one pictured on the upper-left corner of the invitation. If that thing were just a little more somber, a little more serious... well, can you imagine some guy coming home drunk and meeting it face-to-face? Code blue for sure.
But Kolar has been making these masks for a long time, and she's mastered the act of balancing between too-goofy and too-weird. The perfectly-executed color harmonies and surface finishes say, "Take me seriously," and yet the inner gadget-geek can enjoy recognizing that those googly eyeballs used to be garage-door springs or whatever. If you had a Kolar collection, you'd need to decorate a whole room around it... but it probably would be your friends' favorite room for wild parties.
So maybe my opening rant was all wet. If a piece of artwork grabs your eye and won't let go, maybe you should just say what the hell, take it home, and see what happens. At least with artwork there's no risk of catching weird diseases. And if it turns into a lifetime commitment, you won't need a pre-nup, so you don't have to hire a lawyer. You might need a decorator, though...
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