Eye Level Art is closing

I hear that Eye Level Art is closing its doors after December. Mike Elder, who owns the gallery, says he's not making any money so he's closing the place and moving to New York.

I interned at ELA when I first moved to Charleston, when they had a warehouse space on Heriot Street and gallery space on Queen. It was a good way to get a handle on a new art scene and meet some people. Back then Adrienne Antonson was the art director, and she had a gift for networking, creating an art/fashion community that formed one of several hubs or cliques that seem to make up the Charleston art scene. I guess REDUX will fill ELA's place? Or Scoop Gallery?

They're having an event tonight, Dec. 16 from 7-9 that will be their last show. I'd go but I have a million bajillion portraits to finish before Christmas.

Re-Nude: Part 3 (collages n stuff)

These may look like drippy paintings but they are collages by Conrad Guevara. The top one is called, "Rear Action," and the one on bottom is "Make It Rain." The fact that I don't get excited about exploring the History and Meaning of Painting through art that fetishizes painting makes me a really bad postmodernist (or a great post-post-modernist?) But where I fail Guevara steps up, and he seems to pose an intriguing question:

Lichtenstein famously made a gigantic steel sculpture that represented an Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, presented in Lichtenstein's famous cartoon-dot-and-outline style. It was a sculpture of a cartoon of the ideal painterly expression, oh-so-ironic. What if he had conceived of that piece today, informed by punk graphic art, Tokyo pop art, the Etsy marketplace, and feminist art?

While Lichtenstein was making art for galleries, public squares and modern mansions, many artists today are designing artwork for ease of shipping, for digital sharing, and for a young, middle-class, apartment-dwelling crowd. The contrast is similar to the difference between Northern (German/Dutch) and Southern (Italian) Renaissance painting. While Michelangelo and da Vinci were making theatrical, larger-than-life murals and sculpture for the tombs of royalty and to decorate the Church and the villas of great families, in the North painters like Durer, Vermeer and van Eyck were supplying the newly-created middle class with art. Their paintings were much smaller, often of domestic themes that ordinary people could relate to, and more affordable. They were more contemplative as well. Durer even had great success as a print-maker because because he could make simple artwork that was even more affordable to the middle-class.

To answer the question, Lichtenstein's commentary on the state of painting today may have looked more like these collages. The materials are (I think) colored paper and magazine pages on an acrylic background, affixed to a canvas (as in "Make It Rain") or framed ("Rear Action"). The size is appropriate for a small house or apartment, and the materials (photographic magazine pages) are familiar to an audience of ordinary people, as are the pretty candy colors and references (banal pornography and now-familiar drippy Abstract Expressionist art like that of Jackson Pollock).

The use of materials is very witty, too: printed magazines and photography have largely replaced painting and hand-made or -printed illustrations as a mode of mass artistic expression. Using a magazine to mimic paint is balls-to-the-wall ironic. But my favorite critique of "The Brushstroke" is the comparison to a spray of semen. My mind immediately went there with the "drips" covering the face of the model in "Rear Action." It is SUCH an accurate way to describe the macho post-war culture of Abstract Expressionism. I always wondered why critics like Lichtenstein stopped so short of the obvious: the Big Ideal Painterly Expression championed by Clement Greenburg and New York AbEx collectors was a sublimation of male orgasm, full stop.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go down the "Is Painting Dead?" rabbit hole.

Here's another collage. It's called, " I Love You, I Know," by Angela Chvarak. The title immediately reminded me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back with Han Solo and Leia right before he gets frozen. Then the hands in the collage reminded me of Luke's hand that gets severed, since my mind had already gone down that road. But I re-grouped and took another look.

It bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece I did in art school:

We were supposed to work along the theme, "God or Goddess," if I recall. That may be Mila Kunis' head, but I didn't know that at the time so ignore that and don't think of Meg Griffin or Black Swan.

Anyhow, Chvarak's piece looks like a flower in full bloom with arms for stamens, with a background of collage and graffiti-like paint radiating outward from the flower. In this context, "I Love You, I Know," makes sense because flowers can pollinate themselves. The piece could be a metaphor, then, for loving one's self (or, more literally, masturbation, since we cannot impregnate ourselves). It seems like more of a female construction of masturbation or sexytimes not only because flowers are symbolic of women but because women's "alone time" is often portrayed as special, sensual, an indulgent retreat from the world complete with lit candles and a bubble-bath; whereas men's "alone time" is usually portrayed as a gross, thoughtless indulgence, the way you might eat your way through an entire bag of chips out of boredom.

I don't have much to say about Chvarak's piece but it is one of my favorites. It's very fun to look at.

*If you enjoyed this work you might also like Wangechi Mutu, Robert Rauschenberg

Re-Nude: Part 2

*My apologies for the shitty photography.

Continuing what I loved about Re-Nude, here is part of Jenna Lyles' series, "Fempire / Night Vision."



I didn't immediately love this. Actually, when I first saw this hasty-looking display, I exclaimed, "What the crap?" But then I was drawn in by this glittery weirdness:


You're looking at strips of holographic stretch fabric that you might have seen on an ice-dancing or stripper costume from 1994, sewn down only on the top edge and hanging in loose strips. Above that is black fabric with a chain-mail-type texture exposing a grid of sheer black mesh beneath vinyl-type overlay. Mounted over that is a developed Polaroid with a blank image. To the left, between the fabric sections, are three repeated copies of a photo of a woman in a red wig and cosplay-esque purple lingerie, in a cartoonish "sneaking" pose. The photos are sewn on with orderly zig-zag machine stitching. The whole piece is sewn down to a raw-edged irregular scrap of canvas about the size of a notebook page and stapled to the wall on the top edge only.

The piece is obviously very playful and flashy, like a toy. But it isn't candy-colored and well-packaged like a lot of neo-Pop art and Tokyo Pop. It looks like a kid made it (sort of), but it doesn't fall into the category of cutesy childhood fetish hipster art, like the endearingly awkward, big-eyed, wolf-hide-wearing, lost-little-girl illustrations on Etsy. It incorporates crafty elements, like exaggerated stitching and use of cloth but seems divorced from homemaking, stuffed sculpture or clothing design.

What we have, then, feels very uneasy. My first instinct was to suggest that the artist either make the pieces smaller and more precious/sculptural, or large and numerous enough that they feel like a visual assault. But I keep coming back to the size and presentation because they don't resolve themselves and that experience feels challenging and fresh. And although the fabrics are wonky and unfinished, and the photos look homemade, the regular stripes and grids anchor the piece while the repetition of the colorful photos create an exciting rhythm. The small size also makes the piece seem half-hidden and private, like a radical fantasy told in a quiet voice. Functionally, the canvas is a tiny playground for the tiny redheaded heroine.

She shows up in all the pieces in the series, usually duplicated:


"Fempire:" I take it to mean, "female empire." So the canvases, as her playground, could be that empire. She could be suggesting that a woman's empire is an imaginary realm that she crafts for herself and rules like a superhero. Totally empowerful, right? But why the stripper clothes and fabrics, and why the implied male gaze? Why does she repeat the images of the woman, which usually serves to cheapen the image and efface the original, a la Andy Warhol's Marilyn? Could she be taking the opposite approach, that repetition glorifies the individual through syndicating and branding oneself? From a marketing perspective, the model has put her best foot forward by decorating herself, then has reproduced that image and displayed it in a dazzling peacock-like array.

What's more, the woman doesn't seem to rule the space, exactly. She seems to be involved in some sort of covert guerrilla tactics, which would imply oppression and fighting back. Is she trying to take back her own psychic space? Is she experiencing conflict about her own sexual fantasy? The fabrics-- purple lame, sparkly black fishnet and black lace-- suggest sexuality that caters to a male gaze. Is this the "fempire," the power of pleasing others? And is this the conflict she is engaged in? The other fabric, canvas, at first suggests a traditional artist's canvas. But in the context of covert guerrilla tactics it suggests military warfare as well. The juxtaposition of the sparkly fabric and the canvas, then, brings to mind the quote, "love is a battlefield," but also suggests common realities in which female sexuality and sex work incur violence, and where warfare breeds prostitution and sexual violence toward women.


"Night Vision." She actually wears what could be night vision goggles here. I also think the title, "night vision," refers to the nighttime fabrics that would be seen in a club or bedroom. The split title seems to reinforce the notion of conflict between female sexual domain and violence. It could simply be a reference to the conflicting urges to be vulnerable and open, versus guarded and strong when it comes to sex.

I just looked up Jenna Lyles after writing this post and it turns out she co-organized Tick Tock Blume, a small Kulture Klash type festival with the theme, "time," and her co-organizer was... Liz Vaughan, the subject of my last post and my other favorite artist from Re-Nude. Wow.

More on what I loved from Re-Nude coming up in another post!

*If you like the artwork above you might also enjoy work by Hannah Hoch, Wangechi Mutu

Edited to add: My husband has this to say about these pieces: "...I like it. It looks like a Trapper-Keeper."

Graffiti in Galleries

This past weekend notorious graffiti artist Ishmael enjoyed exposure at Kulture Klash 3 and his solo show opening at Eye Level Art in Charleston. This is his first show as a gallery artist working on canvas instead of illegal graffiti art as well as a major point of departure from recognizable graffiti to sinewy abstract forms that look, to me, to be inspired more by current graphic design than anything else. I thought the two influences, graffiti and commercial design, were interesting: two outside art forms, one delegitimized by money and commerce, the other deligitimized by lack thereof, both a form of branding and reinvention of oneself, both covering the outside world and signifying some sort of ownership over that small section of street. It seems natural that the two should meet in a gallery-- the traditional fault line between lands of Haves and Have-Nots.

In addition to artists like Keith Haring and Bansky, I'm reminded of a similar show by a notorious (and recently released from jail) graffiti artist and art student at the Corcoran who goes by "Borf," in Washington, DC., in 2006. It was a similar point of departure, from illegal art to big pop-punk canvases in a gallery. So was he selling out, or what? As a fellow art student at the time I thought so, but then again selling in a gallery was my eventual goal, too, so what does that make me? And of course I was happy for him because he was putting his reputation to use and getting, more or less, his "big break." But money definitely took the edge off his work. The undeniably raw, daring, desperate and authentic aspect of graffiti on the streets disappears once the work is in a gallery, no matter how much the artists and dealers try to preserve it.

So what's left? At both shows I saw intense dedication to craft, either through labyrinthine swirls of shape or immaculately detailed stencil work; brilliant color and strong graphic impact; sophisticated symbolism; political dissent; homage to the artist's community; and a sense of the artist's life as a mythic story complete with obscured origins, remembrance, and a prophecy of rebirth. Interesting, too, was the way the artist's sincerity shone through.

In my opinion, the currency of postmodernity is irony; is a work offensive, or ironically offensive? primitive or ironically so? traditional or merely quoting tradition in an ironic context? In effect, is it hopelessly old-fashioned and completely sincere, or has it broken through to a postmodern time, enlightened through obscurity and emboldened by doubt? I don't want to condemn this trend, in fact I think irony is a brilliant way of dealing with a post-Vietnam, post-Clement Greenberg, post-Joseph McCarthy world in which every inherited ideology must be regarded with doubt. But as all major trends are, it is limiting. Great masters of doubt like Richard Prince and Damien Hirst may be enjoying a zeitgeist, but plenty of artists still feel, deep-down, a starry-eyed belief in Genius, a modernist hope for the Universal Experience, a romantic quest for Truth.

In Borf's and Ishmael's work, as well as many graffiti artists, I get a different sense of the dynamic unity of pure sincerity with acrid anger. I wouldn't really classify either artist's work as angry work because they're full of symbols of hope and of secret worlds existing outside of reality that hint to me of religion and spirituality. But this straightforward human quality is always wrapped up in angry political dissent, bitter laughter at the betrayal of authority and society at large, and defiance that helps sincerity survive in reality. I think it's a really interesting contrast to the Art World's esteem of irony, one that will enable this work to hold its own in a contemporary gallery.

And what does a collector buy when they buy this work? Obviously, they're buying something they don't have; in a sense, I think many people buy an attitude or experience that their life doesn't afford them as a way of participating in and supporting a movement or a way of life they admire but cannot experience. So in this case, in addition to buying a very beautiful and sincere piece of work, they've bought into the defiance, subversiveness, and energy that undermines the very status that someone who can afford this art likely enjoys. It's an uneasy alliance, but maybe one with unexpected and worthwhile outcomes.