The Tears of Things

Stinky Skool

by Jerome du Bois

Anyone puzzled by the continuing stagnant immaturity of the downtown Phoenix visual arts dumbmunity will find the outlines of a key in a tiny recent story in the local paper. It's a simple key: the downtown arts structure is just school writ a bit larger, its cozy communal assumptions and slack standards transferred intact and functioning to the world of real life, and still partially supported by our tax dollars (Mike Goodwin, for example, and any five15 member who teaches or prepares at a public school, university, or art institution).

The three stigmata of this school-inflicted affliction show clearly in the piece:

(1) a narrow theme --as in a school assignment;

(2) a skanky narrow theme --to conform to middle-school mentality, which is the intellectual level of the current culture, sadly;

(3) pairing off --as if it takes two to create one idea, plus the essential communal comfort.

Here is Kerry Lengel's squib, written with typical uncritical supinity:

"That stinks" is not the response artists are usually hoping for on opening night, but for this month's First Fridays tour, the five15 Gallery is throwing caution to the wind.

"What Smells So Bad?" is a group show in which member artists have paired up to offer their interpretation of the theme.

"It could be taken literally, or it could be interpreted in a political manner," Travis Janssen says.

Or both, in his case.

He and teammate Mike Goodwin have created a set of four scratch-and-sniff prints commenting on pop culture. For example, "A rose by any other name would smell sweeter" features a black-and-white Paris Hilton and Britney Spears with a bright red blossom. Scratch it and smell manure.

Mary Shindell is just as pointed in her artistic commentary. Her piece with Kathy Pinto, "The Lazy Double Bling," uses two dollar signs as a cattle brand. The message: "At what point does art become nothing more than another form of bling?" Shindell says.

To underline her point about the "branding" of high-dollar art, another piece takes aim at the Cowboy Artists of America, the men-only Western-art cartel that holds its annual sale in October at the Phoenix Art Museum.

"I used the invitation from the CAA show and I cut the artist's face out and made a drawing of a bola tie, and it's tied like a hangman's noose," Shindell says.

With 11 members working in a variety of media, the "odors" in this show should be equally diverse.

"Someone's even using the bathroom (to display their work), which I think is really funny," Shindell says.

I think it's pathetic that a woman in her fifties thinks that it's "really funny." Trying to impress other fools half her age. I, and Catherine, will have more to say about Ms. Shindell after the jump. On five15's website now, the announcement graphic for the show is a skunk in the lower right corner of a nauseous yellow rectangular background, the animal's flatulence forming the title words in floating bilious green cloud shapes.

Now we know how low the bar can go --I think. It may go lower: since five15 won't post any images of the exhibition, I rely on Lengel's descriptions of three items, which, as I mentioned above, are enough to outline the key to this downtown crew. School's never out for them.

Okay then. Class is in session.

Lengel begins:

"That stinks" is not the response artists are usually hoping for on opening night, but for this month's First Fridays tour, the five15 Gallery is throwing caution to the wind.

"What Smells So Bad?" is a group show in which member artists have paired up to offer their interpretation of the theme.

In my experience and research, serious artists until the last two generations or so pursued their own paths, often working on several distinct "themes" at once --but those themes were theirs, organically grown from the contending interests in their active brains. It would seem odd (and insulting) to invite one to participate in a "theme" show which might have nothing to do with the artist's preoccupations or body of work. As if one would ask the mature Marcel Duchamp to make a painting of one's favorite horse.

That sounds quaint, I know, since themes have been all the rage for years now, and the artists coming out of the schools (are there any other kind?) have learned to be good little whores, and they're entirely comfortable extending their student identities for as long as possible. They like assignments; they need assignments, because they came to school without worthy ideas, found none there, and developed none themselves, even after graduation. With peurile results: school-style curating, and school-style artists, and school-style art.

Time was that a curator really worked the seams of art history, based on a vast, largely self-taught inventory of images and ideas culled from years of passionate study. And not just in art, but history, anthropology, archaelogy, and psychology as well. Picture a desk, and chairs, and a whole room scattered and piled with open books, white pages glowing like a flock of birds frozen in flight, and someone in the middle of it all, thinking, looking, reading. But not today. Today, any bozo with a BFA can fake-curate. That's how you get shows about umbrellas, dry heat, and The New American City.

What smells so bad is the theme. But who can blame them, since the local Science Center did the artists' thinking for them, and booked record business with that stinky goop kid show. Besides, like true perpetual adolescents who even their art teachers never really criticized, they like grossing out the grown-ups. It's guaranteed to please the highschool fools who still make up the bulk of First Friday these days. Maybe one of the artists can dress up as the Stinky Cheese Man for the opening tonight.

[By the way, five15 was the gallery who created a different kind of stink with its $99 Only show during this year's Art Sewer tour. If Phoenix had a truly vibrant, active, burgeoning art scene, five15's show would have been easily absorbed in the general generous exchanges of money and goods, with much amused shrugging amid the abundance. But that isn't Phoenix, is it?]

"It could be taken literally, or it could be interpreted in a political manner," Travis Janssen says.

Or both, in his case.

But his no-brainer piece with "teammate" Mike Goodwin simply trashes two foolish women, easy joke targets, who are about as far from political as you can get. To ask, "Can these guys really be proud of this crap?" misses the point. Of course they're proud; they're just worried that the work isn't crappy enough.

Mike Goodwin, by the way, as the guy who schedules the zippy-wow Project Room for Mesa Contemporary Arts, seems to be going down the roster of five15 and getting his friends and gallerymates exhibitions there. Shindell, Martinez, now Richardson. Cozy.

Mary Shindell is just as pointed in her artistic commentary. Her piece with Kathy Pinto, "The Lazy Double Bling," uses two dollar signs as a cattle brand. The message: "At what point does art become nothing more than another form of bling?" Shindell says.

Answer: when Shindell and Pinto finally squeezed this one note out of their collaboration. But this stupid brand --yes, comes the heavy hand, like an advertising brand; thud-- didn't even start out as art, it never was art, it never will be art. "Bling" is superficial and often ostentatious display, and betrays an exaggerated envy of good taste while showing none of it. But this piece, just from its verbal description, doesn't even qualify as bling --it's not encrusted with diamonds, is it? or even CZs?-- so it's nothing more than a bland blunt brand, which could never heat up enough to hurt.

Apparently "inspired" by this cowboy-image collaboration, Shindell went after another well-worn target:

To underline her point about the "branding" of high-dollar art, another piece takes aim at the Cowboy Artists of America, the men-only Western-art cartel that holds its annual sale in October at the Phoenix Art Museum.

"I used the invitation from the CAA show and I cut the artist's face out and made a drawing of a bola tie, and it's tied like a hangman's noose," Shindell says.

Oh, man. "Johnny Johnny Johnny, did you see what I did to your yearbook picture? Nyah-na-na-na-na-na!" Grow up, lady. And consider the murderous and sociopathic overtones reverberating in your symbolic actions. Even if the sexist charge was true, is this the way a mature person responds to such a social imbalance? But then, you're not a mature person, so I withdraw the question.

Catherine responds:

We went to the last CAA show at PAM. Mary Shindell couldn't begin to approach the sheer talent of those men. Her work is flat, colorless, and with only minimal modelling. Can she paint a woolen saddle blanket in motion on a galloping horse, with red dust blowing by in front of it? A campfire in winter? A river encounter between red and white men? She can draw dessicated saguaros and bare mountains and then ignore the sky altogether --bare paper. These guys fill every corner with clouds and chapparal, with the rough elements of reality, and with human conflict and human dignity.

We don't know or care why the CAA is all men, but if there's a woman out there who wants to compete with them, there's nothing stopping her from painting so much better than them, in their style, that they would be begging her to join their group. But such a woman would have to have the chops, wouldn't she?

So Mary Shindell's little cruel stunt reveals only her childish whining, and the intellectual stuntedness that drags out the flyblown dead horse of sexism. She and the rest of the crew down there make appropriate lowbrow models for the young people streaming cluelessly through their doors, so they can take responsiblity when these same young people return five years later proudly bearing loads of the same kind of crap that already jams downtown like a landfill.

Yeah, that stinks.

Posted by Jerome at August 3, 2007 02:20 PM | TrackBack