I finally decided to toil my way through the frozen Chicago tundra to make my way to the Swimming Pool Project Space and catch a glance of their last exhibition before succeeding to an untimely death. The exhibition titled A Healthy Skepticism was curated by Josh Reames – a current graduate candidate at SAIC – and featured his incised canvases and “art ladders” (my quotes) along with the medium-scaled quasi-narrative landscape panels of Carl Baratta and the sly dick-in-cheek paintings of Joshua Abelow. The image on the postcard just so happened to be the same image confronting me as I walked through the door, an innocuously slathered store-bought canvas depicting what could be seen as a Dubuffet-esque figure donning a geometric rainbow parachute jumpsuit – implicative of an early 70’s Frank Stella with an ecstasy hangover – celebrating the artist’s epiphany spelled out in thick black letters that yes, in fact, “ART IS SO GAY.” While the painting did seem to flaunt a ‘diversity rainbow’ palette, the boorishness of the depiction and resonating memory of the show title led me away from the homosexual reference and back to the semantic coinage of being jovial, lively, ostentatious, and licentious. Perhaps this image could be seen as “happy,” but c’mon let’s not be coy, for we all know that “gay” is here being evoked in the school yard colloquial pejorative, as a general term of disparagement. “Art is so gay” like “homophobia is gay:” it’s a lame duck, a load of rubbish, a farce, a sick joke. In a word, it sucks.
As an artist myself I feel every creative fiber in my body contract and contort to this sentiment, and on numerous plateaus of consideration. Firstly, if this attitude is received as being in any way authentic or sincere in it’s sentiment permeating out into the ether, then it must be necessarily rejected as offensive and violent to the accolades upon which our culture is founded or at best as a moronically childish prod at the sophisticated mechanisms that lubricate the upper echelons of contemporary thought. This is of course assuming that the reader can acquiesce in recognizing a seriousness and diligence in the pursuits of objective truth and subjective becoming in our historico-philosophical continuum worth revisiting, analyzing, and assimilating rather than merely taking a shit upon. Secondly, if we consider this visual-textual-symbolic statement as merely a sardonic self-reflexivity of inherent frivolity or pettiness – an allegorical gesture representing the hallowed ruins of a quondam utopian idealism digesting itself from the inside out – then how does one maintain their motivation in continuing to contemplate it? Indeed, what is there to contemplate beyond this ironic deprecatory self-mutilation? Thirdly, you might be saying “well geez man, like, whoa that’s harsh bro, like, why don’t you just lighten up a bit, smoke a j, totes.” So maybe I should attempt to regain my sense of humor? Perhaps I’m taking this flippant pantomime of a painting a little too seriously for your taste? Well fuck that. Skepticism is serious, rooted in a philosophical tradition that goes back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists, and while they may have been obsessed with pitting one dogmatic epistemology against another in order to ultimately subvert event their own methodology, the foundation to their beliefs were still completely phenomenological much like these vacuous paintings on the wall; they rested upon the laurels of those that came before. Skepticism is the beginning of an indispensable ontology, the birth of a nagging and elemental epistemological legacy, and an important tool that yields a dubious power of influence and creative destruction. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
The works of Josh Reames have a different execution of skepticism altogether. Two small paintings on the wall offer delicately incised and torn back canvas skins revealing nonobjective abstract surfaces of gray streaked sedimentation and thick gold impasto, respectively. These pictures seem to comment on the untrustworthy nature of the picture plane, of art objects in general, and the imagistic conventions of painting in particular. Like pajama-clad toddlers struggling to unbutton their butt flaps before a voyeuristic audience of parents drunk on the cuteness of their helpless progeny, the wall works appear laughably helpless in their attempt to defecate their gooey insides into the sterilized porcelain arena of the gallery. A utility ladder is presented with a fresh new coat of cosmic patina collaged into it’s crevices, leaned against a wall alongside a diagrammatic image describing it’s potential of unfolding. Reames’ work imbues a muted poeticism of concrete blankness with a tinge of futility, a potent metaphor that I would like to read as a reference to the empirical prodding’s of a tabula rasa psyche or perhaps as provisional landscapes depicting humanities vain attempts to understand the great nothingness lying “out there” somewhere. Still, the works also leave a mildly sour aftertaste of ontological violence ala Lucio Fontana and stomach-aching sterility in their slick presentation.
Carl Baratta’s panels are yet another beast of swirling voids and celestial nhilism, radiating a vivid orange glow from the opposing wall that sucks in my gaze like a tractor beam from the gravitational center of nowhere. While reminiscent of a mélange of Eastern manuscript paintings in their flattened perspective, the pristine sublime of the Hudson river school caught in a firestorm, or the darker psychologies of German expressionist painters like Munch or Nolde, those references are perhaps overly gratuitous when examing the insipid homogeneity of painted marks and surface or the nauseatingly reductive palate. The colorful squares are certainly a complex delight in visual textures and potent citations, though I wonder if they would have fared better through the languages of printmedia like screen or block prints. In contemplating their function in relation to the auspices of the show’s title, I found myself taking up the role of skeptic; I don’t believe the paintings to be without their own charm but are grossly out of their element in association with the artifice erected by Abelow and Reames. Any potential for poetic jouissance or charismatic paint handling is thrown out the window by the behemothic elephant in the room led in by the other artists, namely the questioning of the pedagogies of artistic practice and the suspended disbelief in the voyeuristic theatrics circumventing the edifice of contemporary painting.
For the ancient skeptics, the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions that could not be said to be either true or false without relying on further propositions. This state of infinite regress, whereby every proposition must rely on other propositions in order to maintain its validity, was thus an inadequate measure of truth and could create as many problems as it claimed to have solved. Truth was not, however, necessarily unobtainable, but rather an idea which did not yet exist in a pure form. Although skepticism was accused of denying the possibility of truth, in fact it appears to have mainly been a critical school proclaiming that logicians had not discovered truth. The artists presented in A Healthy Skepticism may have found a place within this ancestry of debunkers, but have made no headway in the amaranthine struggle to uncover a concrete conception of our being, nor do they seem to entertain any desire to do so. And why not I ask? For it is this reviewer’s humble belief that if anyone is capable of uncovering the maxims of the unfathomable nature of our reality it is the unencumbered, inquisitive, and zealous artist, and that it is even their responsibility to do so. But that’s another discussion…
Travis Wyche
1.3.11
