art•rant•omaha

Kansas City Ballet Spring Rep: No Runts in This Litter

2010-05-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

In past mixed reps, KCB sometimes seemed to spread itself too thin: one piece would be top-notch, others merely okay, and one or two runts in the litter.

Not yesterday, though: This was a strong program from start to finish. When Balanchine's Who Cares? does NOT put everything else in the shade, you know you're onto something good.

Not that Who Cares? wasn't delightful. Of all Balanchine's moods, this is the one I like best: the work of the master craftsman who doesn't think it beneath him to entertain his audience. And of course it's hard to go wrong in the entertainment department when you've got George Gershwin tunes, played by a full orchestra, for backup. Judith Fugate staged it for KCB, and seems to have done a great job of fine-tuning the dancers to an ideal balance of correctness and joyousness.

Nobody else was taking a back seat, though. The program featured the premieres of two beautiful newly-commissioned works: Concerto Grosso, by Eugene Ballet's Toni Pimble, and A Solo in Nine Parts, by Jessica Lang (who, incidentally, is NOT Jessica Lange, the actress!)

Pimble's abstract ballet is large in scale and takes some time to get moving -- but once it's got momentum, there's no stopping it. I'd call its appeal cinematic: Pimble excels in creating a breathtaking "stage picture" and then animating it vividly.

Lang, whose previous KCB work Splendid Isolations had struck me as somewhat contrived in its details, struggles a bit with the same problem early in A Solo in Nine Parts (flippy arms are only cute if you don't overdo them) but shakes it off quickly and delivers a fast-paced, charming brew of quick, deft movements and plotless but personality-filled interactions among the dancers. Doris Humphrey famously opined that all dances are too long... but when Nine Parts snapped smartly into its finishing pose, many of us were left asking, "Hey, wait, is that all?!?"

My fave, though, was "Donizetti Pas De Deux," an excerpt from a 1966 ballet by the late Todd Bolender, KCB's long-time artistic director. Like all Bolender's best works, this one exudes self-confidence: you get the sense he knew he didn't have to prove anything to anybody, so felt totally free to blend art, entertainment, and a few winks and surprises exactly as the mood took him.

Better yet, I was lucky to see it danced by Kimberly Cowen: the last Bolender-hired dancer still with the company, so I've read, and one who obviously "gets" the Bolender vibe right down to her toenails. She's at the absolute peak of mature artistry, able to fuse flawless technique with the mischievous sense that all she's doing up there onstage is screwing around having the best damn time ever. With partner Michael Eaton as her strong, good-natured foil -- William Powell to her Carole Lombard -- the whole thing played out brilliantly: a screwball comedy seamlessly woven into a virtuosic classical showpiece, and equally successful on both levels.

If angels goof around -- and now that Bolender's with them, they probably do -- I suspect the results look like "Donizetti Pas de Deux." Damn, that guy was good.

Glass Houses

2008-06-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

Glass mirrors, glass sculptures, glass panels, even a glass house. I couldn't help thinking this would be a fabulous place to stage a fight scene in a Jackie Chan movie. But I guess you're not supposed to think stuff like that.

I was at the Bemis Center for What They Say is Contemporary Art to see Nascita, Therman Statom's "installation artwork,"which World-Herald art scribe Dane Stickney seems to think takes the viewer on some kind of transcendentally marvelous journey of self-discovery.

I wouldn't go that far, but I'll admit to thinking it was moderately cool.

"Installation artwork" means that an artist takes over an entire gallery and fills it with stuff to create a unified environment that you experience by walking through it. Statom's installation is mainly glass, and lots of it: there are even a couple of glass snakes, a smaller frosted-glass one and a bigger one made of mirrors and hanging from the ceiling. There's paint, too: glass panels painted in fruit motifs, and big fruit-shaped color fields on some of the walls. Lots of shiny surfaces, lots of scattered light, lots of places to be surprised by your own reflection coming at you from unexpected angles. As I said, moderately cool.

And even without Jackie Chan, I did get to see some action sequences: The day I happened to visit, some dancers from the Omaha Modern Dance Collective (disclaimer: yeah, I know all those people) were there to rehearse some site-specific choreography for the Bemis Creativity Festival.

The space looked sensational with all those trained bodies flitting around in it. It's too bad the Bemis can't afford to keep it staffed with dancers all the time.

Minus dancers, though, and just wandering around on your lonesome, you're bound to start wondering what it all means. Nascita is a nice place to be on a sunny day, but is there more to it? For example, just inside the entrance there's a big terra-cotta head that looks as if it had fallen off its body; what's up with that? Is Statom trying to tell us something?

Well, of course he is, you doofus. You don't fill up a big room with fallen heads and mirrors and fruit and snakes -- and name it nascita, an Italian word that means birth -- unless you've got something particular in mind. But what?

Wait, I think I'm getting it. Birth, the Fall, suddenly seeing yourself, snakes, temptation, fruit... airy space, track lighting, concrete floors, glass panels, fruit... wait, I've got it!

The whole thing is a room-size pun. Statom is re-imagining the Garden of Eden as the original Apple Store.

(Village Pointe Apple Store - photo pilfered from Apple's website)

You're probably not supposed to think stuff like that, either. But I did, and it's a hoot. Statom has built a hip palace of light and glass and filled it with symbols of temptation, just like Apple did at Village Pointe. You can't walk into Nascita and buy a new iPhone, but other than that the parallel is just about perfect. If Statom didn't do this on purpose, he frickin' well should have.

And as mythbuster Jamie Hyneman likes to say: "Well, there's your problem."

If the aesthetic flavor of Nascita is pretty much interchangeable with the aesthetic flavor of any modern, upscale retail space, and if Statom is basically doing the same job as the talented and artistic folks who design those spaces... then why shouldn't he be doing what he's doing for upscale retail spaces, and raking in big bucks? And if he did, then why would we need places like the Bemis?

Whoa, you're really not supposed to think stuff like that.

A Few Shots at the Bar

2008-06-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

Go to a bar for an art show? Sounds weird, but I think it's a great idea.

Let's face it, I've seen a lot of stuff in shows that would be easier to take if you were looped a bit. (In fact, I've seen stuff at, say, the Bemis Underground that wouldn't have been palatable on anything short of a full-on bender.)

And why settle for sipping vin du carton at the typical gallery opening, when instead you could be knocking back hard stuff mixed by professionals?

So it made perfect sense to me that Thursday evening I was heading for the Nomad Lounge to check out photographs by Tony Bonacci, an Omaha-based shooter who specializes in photos of musicians. (Don't get too excited by the link to his website, by the way – a lot of the dynamic stuff doesn't seem to work yet, and most of the rest is still "coming soon." But you can see some examples on his MySpace page.)

Even though it seems to be a pretty artsy joint, I've never been the Nomad type; it bills itself as an "ultra lounge," and my tastes in lounging run more toward infra than ultra. In fact, the only thing that's ever tempted me to visit until now was the fact that The Fabulous Kelly O'Donnell used to be a cocktail waitress there.

And I've got to admit that the pix on Bonacci's invitation weren't exactly an inducement. Taxonomically speaking, photographs of local rock bands seem to fall into a narrowly-defined phenotype, which is BS-ese for "any one of 'em looks a lot like any other."

I mean, you gather your aspiring young artistes of rock, have them put on their weirdest thrift-store clothes, find a funkily decayed building for a backdrop, stick a wide-angle lens on your camera so everything looks like it's falling over backward, and then have the subjects glare angstfully while you snap away. So does everybody. I hear next year Samsung is going to come out with a phone cam that's programmed to do all that automatically.

But once I actually got to the Nomad – and got over my lingering regret that The F. K. O'D. isn't there anymore – I took a look at the actual show, and guess what? I liked it.

The refreshing thing about Bonacci is that when it comes to the time-honored, Ansel Adams-inspired craft of fine photography, he basically doesn't seem to give a crap. He pushes the envelope. His prints have a garish, bleached-out, acid-dipped tonal range that looks as if they had been shot through a hangover filter.

This up-yours approach to technique doesn't do much for the few black-and-white images in the show: they just look muddy.

But most of the prints are in color, and their raw energy is exhilarating. And while it would be easy to push the I-don't-care schtick too far and just start spewing out garbage, Bonacci seems to have a finely calibrated sense of when enough is enough: he knows how to run right up to the redline without blowing the motor.

Bonacci's also pleasingly non-obvious about what he puts into his images. Yeah, the show includes a few of the standard-band-photo-cliché shots I slammed earlier, but most of it is 'way better. If his website's @#$% online portfolio worked, I'd link a few here.

Since it doesn't, just take my word for it: at his best (his portrait of porno-entrepreneur Doctor John holding a valentine box and grinning cherubically, for example) Bonacci's content has an impish sense of humor that plays off perfectly against his sicko color palette and edgy imaging style.

If you like contemporary photography at all – and even more if you dislike most of the tedious, joyless dreck that populates contemporary photography – it'll be worth your while to belly up to the Nomad and knock back a few of these shots.

Caught in Didact

2008-05-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

In general I decry didacticism in art, which is a toffee-nosed way of saying I don't like it when some artist starts whacking me over the head with his sociopolitical agenda.

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...

Off-the-wall and on the wall

2008-05-14T11:34:00.001-07:00

Suddenly I'm surrounded by an arsenal of weaponized legs.

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...

Why I Do It

2008-05-09T20:58:00.000-07:00

"Why do you do it, Johnny?" The blonde's voice was strained as she twirled the stem of her martini glass between manicured fingers. "Pounding the pavement from gallery to gallery... knocking back cheap cheese cubes at opening-night receptions... duking it out with every punk painter and two-bit conceptualist you meet. Do you think it makes you some kind of hero? Or do you just..." – her hands shook a little – "...do you just hate art?"

"Come on, Velma, you know it's not like that." Johnny Gossamer scowled into his Scotch. "I love art. It's just that sometimes... sometimes art needs to be slapped around a little."

The saloon door slammed open and a shadow fell across the table. Johnny looked up into the angry eyes of Gulch Lonergan, the rising neo-realist painter whose newly-opened solo show Johnny had just panned. But the Chicago piano clutched in his sweaty fists showed that right now, painting was the last thing on Lonergan's mind...

... "Go on, Lonergan, sit down before you fall down," Johnny Gossamer said carelessly, kicking a spare chair out from the table. "And stop waving that typewriter around. You're not scaring anybody. I know you can't shoot any better than you can sling paint."

"Geez, Johnny, cut me some slack fer once," said Lonergan, slumping into the chair and letting the submachine gun slide to the floor with a thunk. Nobody took any notice; it was that kind of joint. "Bring this pale aesthete a shot of whatever the hell it is that I'm drinking," Johnny called out to the bartender, and turned to the painter again.

"I mean it," Lonergan said. "Why are you riding me so hard? First you write in that @#$% blog of yours that my brushwork is insipid and my approach to pictorial space is derivative, and now you go and insult me in front of your girl."

"I'm not his..." started Velma, eyes blazing, but Johnny cut her off with a gesture.

"Don't you get it?" he said to Lonergan, almost bitterly. "Don't any of you palookas get it yet? You think I enjoy insulting people? You think this kind of life is fun for me?"

"Yes," said Velma under her breath, but Johnny Gossamer ignored her.

"I'm doing this for you, ya dumb dornick," he barked at the painter. "All of you. How long has it been since you heard regular people talking about art? How many Joe Schmoes do you see biting the ends off strawberries at your la-de-da openings?"

"Uh, dunno," said the painter, looking at his shoes. "Not many, I guess."

"You guess right. And why should they? All the art world has ever done for them is BS them and talk down to them and tell them it's all over their heads. Somebody's got to show them that art is for them – and the only way to do that is to show them it's okay to feel, to get passionate, to have crazy opinions. And you know what? Once they get that, then maybe they'll be brave enough to go to a gallery and say, 'Ah, that Johnny Gossamer is full of baloney. I don't think this Gulch Lonergan's paintings are half bad.'

"And by the way, I didn't say your brushwork was insipid. I said it was crap."

The painter twisted restlessly in his chair. "He gets this way," Velma said to him. "Thinking he's saving the world. Don't pay too much attention to him."

"I'm not," said Lonergan, grinning sourly. "It almost kinda makes some sense. But I'm still not sure I'm buying it."

"You don't have to," Gossamer said. "I'm not sure I buy it myself. But down these mean streets a man must go."

Velma leaned over to toward Lonergan and whispered: "He stole that gag from Raymond Chandler."

Blown Away

2008-05-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

Once, long ago in a past plane of existence, an Italian ballerina unexpectedly kissed me in the foyer of a Lincoln restaurant, and somewhat more recently I got cocky going through the esses at Mid-America Motorplex and spun right in front of the pit-lane exit.

I'm not saying these have been the absolute peak experiences of my life – but in terms of sudden adrenaline rush, they've always been at the top of the scorecard.

At least they were until this past Sunday, when I got to see Phillip Schrager's private collection of contemporary art.

I was blown away. When it comes to art, I like to think of myself as tough, cynical and jaded. But post-Schrager, it took 20 minutes for my breathing to return to normal.

Schrager has made a pile of money in various phases of the home improvement business, and since the 1980s he's been spending chunks of it buying significant works by big-name contemporary artists – mostly painters, although there's some photography and 3-D work in his collection as well. He's got a New York dealer to help him look for it, and a big, austerely handsome gallery space behind his firm's offices to house and display it.

And better yet, he's got his own on-staff curator – the brilliant Janet Farber, previously of Joslyn – to help bring order to it all. Farber is intelligent, highly educated, sincere, enthusiastic, and apparently completely immune to the kind of craniorectal inversion that makes some art academics so tedious.

Combine her smarts with Schrager's taste, money, and business-honed competitive instincts (necessary because a lot of other rich people are constantly stalking this stuff) and you've got at least the potential for something pretty spectacular to happen.

Done deal. Sunday marked the first time Schrager has ever opened his private gallery to the general public, and my walk-through left me gasping. The whole thing – the artworks, the space, the way the artworks are presented in the space – is just stellar. If this collection were open to the public all the time, Omaha would be crawling with art buffs every week the way it crawls with capitalist wannabees during the Berkshire-Hathaway meeting.

Schrager's collecting taste runs toward big canvases – 10 x 12 feet would be a good guess at an average – and heavily textured surfaces; for example, he owns one of Julian Schnabel's "plate" paintings, executed on a ground not of flat canvas but of broken thrift-store crockery. The display space is divided up into smaller roomlets that give each painting its own wall to dominate, and each artwork is accompanied by a wall label (Farber's work, I suspect) that explains its importance and points of interest in a crisp, informative, BS-free style.

I'm not even going to write about individual works here – partly because I can't compete with those excellent wall labels, but mostly because I don't think that's the point. What zings me about the Schrager collection is how personal it is.

When you think about it, most of us only get to see artworks in a marketing context: brought together in a gallery because the owner thinks they'll sell, or brought together in a museum exhibit because the organizers think they'll draw the public. It's a completely different experience to see artworks that have been brought together solely because they all trip one guy's personal trigger.

Last fall I had a good time reading Danielle Ganek's Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him (okay, it's a chick novel, but 200 years ago they probably said the same thing about Pride and Prejudice.) It depicts art-collecting, basically, as a way for obnoxious rich people to one-up their equally-obnoxious rich friends.

But I didn't get that feeling from Schrager's stash. I got a whiff of one guy's real passion for art – a passion you don't always sense in museum collections.

Sunday's open house was a one-off, but the website says the collection is "open by appointment to arts & educational groups." All I can say is that if you missed the public viewing, find one of those groups and join it. If getting in requires, say, donating a kidney, go for it – it'll be a good investment.

Arrows, yes. Points?

2008-05-05T05:30:00.000-07:00

I admit it: Driving out to the Anderson O'Brien Gallery, I was already pre-disliking Trajectory, its new exhibit of 300-some arrow-shaped paintings by Bart Vargas.

Reading World-Herald art scribe Dane Stickney's puff-intensive preview story about Vargas in last Thursday's Go Mag had left me snidely itching to ask, "So, you guys dating, or what?" (Later I realized Stickney had just been taking advantage of the show's expertly-written press materials, so no foul.)

What I had learned from Stickney about Vargas (the 'emerging artist' award, the fact that he did an O, the whole schmeer) had already given me a bad case of this-is-going-to-be-a-long-nightis.

But incredibly, once I stepped inside the gallery and saw the sheer impact of this amazing array of more than 300 arrow-shaped paintings, all finished in an impressive variety of patterns and surfaces, I...

...sorry, no Hollywood ending. I still didn't think much of it.

Slinking around the festive opening, where everyone seemed to be having a fabulous time except me, I thought of dozens of brilliantly snarky things to say about this show, but I've decided not to bother.

The arrows reminded me of the fake-quaint tchotchkes you might see on the wall at Applebee's, but no matter. They look nice in the gallery, he'll probably sell some of them, and other than that there just isn't a lot to say about them.

Besides, Vargas is a young guy – a recent UNO alumnus on his way to art graduate school, if I read the press material correctly – and obviously he's already mastered the technique of coming up with a plausible concept, convincing an important commercial gallery that it's salable, and promoting it to the news media. Successful professional artists need all those skills, so bravo to him and his UNO mentors.

Maybe in grad school somebody will teach him the difference between works of art and art-gallery merchandise, and then everything will be spiffy.

Old Market Artists: A Quick One-Two Punch

2008-05-02T20:20:00.000-07:00

It's a chilly, drizzly Friday evening, and the idea of a gallery cruise is about as appealing as the idea of a pub crawl on Alcatraz.

But the Old Market Artists gallery is trying hard to make the "First Fridays" thing work, and I'm trying to get with the program.

[What's First Fridays? The idea is that galleries collaborate to have receptions on the first Friday of each month, hoping to build a "destination" event that will draw bigger crowds. It's never gotten much traction in Omaha; if you want to see First Fridays that rock, check out Kansas City's version. Believe me, the slide show on this page doesn't do it justice.]

Okay, back to OMA. It isn't much bigger than the proverbial hole in the wall, so when it's crowded (and anything over a dozen is a crowd in this space) it can be hard to see the work. Because of that – and because let's face it, we all need a breather after last week's epic-length Jackson Artworks whackathon – I'm just going to pick on two artists who snagged my attention:

Zack Jones has a lot of works in the gallery, and frankly, most of them don't do a lot for me.

But I got a kick out of two paintings, apparently part of a series, of people looking at paintings. (Solitude, linked here from his own website, depicts the Chicago Art Institute; another is recognizably set at Joslyn.)

There's a fun, hall-of-mirrors vibe to the concept. Here's me, looking at a painting of other people looking at another painting; who knows, maybe Jones is behind me, painting me into another painting. Wooo, like, cosmic, man!

I've got to say that Jones' painting technique doesn't trip my trigger -- too generic for my taste. But his idea's got legs, and I'd enjoy seeing him take it farther and work some more angles on it.

Technique isn't the issue for photographer Andrew Baran -- his camera work and printing are knockout. Disclosure: Eons ago, Baran and I both were members of the Photographers' Gallery; it wasn't like we were buds or anything, but I admired his mad tech skills even then. It was his taste I sometimes questioned... and guess what? I still do.

You don't need to worry about clicking the link to Baran's elegantly-designed website -- it's reasonably "safe for work," unless you work for the Taliban. Be advised, though, that the images he's showing at OMA right now are considerably edgier: nude young women, erogenous zones, mildly kinky overtones of bondage and such.

Yeah, I know, there's nothing inherently wrong with that stuff and it's perfectly possible to make significant art about it. And I've got to say that while I sometimes think Baran is flirting a bit with the cliff-edge that separates figure photography from sleaze, he never actually goes over.

So that's not my kick. What gets me is that, fabulous technique or no, Baran's concepts sometimes strike me as, well, cheesy.

Take a look at Io, pictured here via a link to Baran's website (try to disregard the "watermark" type.) This is so, so close to being an image that would knock me loopy. I love the lighting, the tones, and the tautly athletic way Baran has fitted the figure into the frame (although it bugs me that he cropped off her fingers and toes to do it.)

But then, he screws it all up by decorating the model with automotive hose clamps. Hose clamps?!? What the...? They're not aesthetic, they're not organic to the situation, they don't resonate with any concept of either Io-the-mythological-hard-luck-girl or Io-the-moon-of-Jupiter... So why are they there? Okay, I can see Baran wanting to include something hard and shiny on his model to balance all that softly-glowing skin, but still... auto parts? There's a word for this kind of misdirected creativity, and that word is contrived.

Back in the '30s, possibly the most famous fine-art photographer in the world was William Mortensen. His reputation was huge, his writing was popular, his technical skills were legendary, and some of his ideas about the factual basis of photography (basically, he didn't give a kack about it) have only recently come back into the mainstream. But his work made some people nervous with its nubile nudes and hints of kinkiness, and when it came to taste he sometimes zigged when everybody else was zagging. The result was that sometime in the 1950s, he dropped almost completely off the art-world radar.

Baran's nudes remind me a bit of Mortensen's, but I'd hate to see his career go the same way. Which, really, is a polite way of saying: Lose the hose clamps, bunkie!

Google 'artist themes'?!? What the #$%&?!?!

2008-05-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

Heavens, I'm all agog at Cnet's breathless account of Google's unveiling of its new iGoogle Artist Themes, at a soirée chockablock with art-world celebrities.

Which is crap, but I figure you can't write about this kind of weirdness without using fru-fru words such as "agog," "soirée", and "chockablock."

What it comes down to is that now, you can decorate your personalized Google search page (did you even know you could have a personalized Google search page? I didn't) with graphics allegedly designed (or at least approved) by culture-celebs such as art-worlders Jeff Koons and Dale Chihuly, fashion somethingorothers Diane von Furstenberg and Oscar de la Renta, relentlessly kawaii babyographer Anne Geddes, and overrated choreographer/self-promotion genius Mark Morris.

(Once, at a modern-dance conference, I heard big-rep dance critic Mindy Aloff declare, with breathless sincerity, "I first became interested in Mark Morris because he had such beautiful hair!"... but that's a topic for another time, preferably a time when I'm packing heat.)

Okay, I shouldn't kick. The themes, generally, are at least pleasant – go ahead, be your own art critic by clicking this link and having a scroll-through. Personally, I'm partial to the insouciantly grayscale theme by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff.

But the whole thing still seems primarily like a branding exercise: we're supposed to think Theme X is cool because Culture-Celeb Y designed it, rather than the other way around. And the choice of what kinds of celebrity "brand names" to use seems stilted; I'd have loved to see some more adventurous choices of art-and-design celebs (how about, say, a Chip Foose theme?) Google's famous corporate motto is "Don't be evil," but apparently being flippin' obvious is still okay.

And wait a sec -- Isn't the Internet supposed to be the place where "nobody knows you're a dog"? Wasn't it supposed to be the Next Great Thing that breaks down barriers, annihilates distances, brings the whole world together within touchy-feely distance, and makes it possible to celebrate the artistic genius of everyone, not just a few big-name celebrities? Yeah, I know, nobody really believes that anymore -- but Google is making so much money off the whole funky fantasy that it ought to at least act as if it believes it.

In other words, how come I can't get an iGoogle a la Marcia Joffe-Bouska? She may live in Council Bluffs, Iowa, but I'll bet she'd come up with a better theme than Oscar de la fricking Renta's...

The Art of Annoyance

2008-04-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

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?