Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
News From Nowhere
Richard Zimmerman at Sam Wellers
by Hikmet Sidney Loe | photos by Shalee Cooper
In downtown Salt Lake, at Sam Weller's book store, past the temptation of eye candy and the brilliantly installed Coffee Garden lies a gem of an exhibition currently on view on the Mezzanine. Artist Richard Zimmerman has taken modern forms – the shopping bag and the book – and turned them into signifiers of forms ancient and eternal.
News from Nowhere spans two sections of the store: the mezzanine on the north and the stairwell leading downstairs on the south.|1| Lining the wall of the mezzanine are striking collages that immediately bring to mind pictographs.|0| My first association was with the Abstract Expressionist artist Adolph Gottlieb and his Pictographs from the 1940s. Zimmerman's collages have the same feeling of a secret language, of partial and newly created letters waiting to be uncovered. The alphabet is new yet also archetypal.
The formalistic quality of the collages is striking – while holding hidden mysteries of language, their design is bold. Zimmerman made use of typographic designs found on brown bags while living in New York City. My association with Gottlieb made sense at first, but delving deeper into the meaning of the show, I kept in mind the title: News From Nowhere. That nowhere is in fact the somewhere we call home, Utah. In this context, Native American pictographs come immediately to mind and the resonance of our place and our history.
Moving to the stairwell for the second part of the exhibition adds another formal punch. Zimmerman's collages line the walls, and straight on at the stairwell's landing is a display of small, bound, red books.|2| The vellum binding sports the same pictographs Zimmerman established in his two-dimensional works. The book's cover reads UTAH CODEX.
Zimmerman's book is actually an artists' book serving as a formal installation and also as a purchasable object (for a mere $25). This multiplicity is brilliant. Not only can you enjoy the exhibition, you can take part of it home. Artists' books are works of art in the form of a book. The history of artists' books can be traced back to the Dadaist art movement and the avant-garde rebellion against academic art establishments. Usually produced in small editions, they speak to the ideals of the making the practice and dissemination of art a democratic one. Many artists and artistic movements through the twentieth century have turned to artists' books as an innovative way to experiment with typography, photography, shape, and form.
Zimmerman's artist's statement informs us: "His books are hand bound and comprised of images taken while traveling through Utah…the pictographs are painted on the images with correction fluid."|3| At first I was a bit disappointed that all images are in black-and-white, but after thumbing through the book, the disappointment evaporated as I found I recognized many of the locations Zimmerman chose to include. Yup, there's Spiral Jetty, there's the plane used in the film Con Air, grounded at the air base in Wendover. There's Salt Lake City's Main Library and up the road, Eagle Gate. The night shots of Salt Lake valley, in their linear and abstracted depictions of a city grown enormous, are wonderful. There is a rhythm established in the book of alternating abject empty land with equally abject congestion, yet it all makes visual sense. Not all pages have correction fluid markings, or pictographs, overlaid on the photographs. The economy of means used is elegant and delightful each time you see a new sign on the page.|4 - 5|
Define the word "nowhere." Most of us would not consider our grown-up City as such nor the state, with its influx of transplants making Utah their home. Including Zimmerman. Yet by reducing words to mere signs, we are nowhere, free to create our own meaning and language. By stripping the book of text except for the title, we can roam through pages, through landscapes, and feel equally free to inhabit all the forms of nowhere Zimmerman's camera has captured. The result is minimal, elegant, satisfying, and immensely thought provoking.
Zimmerman lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and in Salt Lake City. This exhibition is a great cross-over of the influences found in these two geographically and culturally diverse locations. Within Sam Weller's space, it works brilliantly, giving the book browser yet another way to "read." Zimmerman's exhibit is Weller's first hanging of a solo show. Check it out, it's worth the journey.
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John O'Connell
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As part of his Daily Documentary series, Dallas Graham interviewed Salt Lake John O'Connell whose exhibit Image/Object opens May 15 at A Gallery. The University of Utah professor of art talks about his personal story, his art making process, his cultural heritage, teaching art, new strategies in digital art and the upcoming show. Below are images by Graham as well as a segment of the interview. For the complete interview, visit Montage-Creative.
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Warhol on the High Seas . . . from page 1
Recently, after nearly three years of others' planning, many months of my hoping the whole thing would just fade away, and a few quick minutes of packing, I went on my first cruise.[1] With my in-laws. All thirteen of them.
Applying my late grandfather's advice about marriage (a marriage counselor for years, he said all marital problems could be reduced to one essential problem: unmet expectations; the key to a happy marriage, he told me, was to lower one's expectations, something I've been helping my wife do for close to 14 years), I lowered my expectations for the cruise to zero. I expected to have nothing to do, to be surrounded by my in-laws and to be completely bored.
Consequently, when we had to stay in Miami a day prior to the cruise I didn't try to fulfill my own desires, running around town visiting museums and galleries or family art collections. Mine would be an art-free vacation, which, the more I thought about it, didn't seem such a bad idea anyway.
What happened on the cruise, then, came as a surprise. The next day, waiting for our room to be prepared and our luggage delivered, I sat in the Celebrity Century's Island Café. When my eyes, performing what is now an involuntary reaction, scanned the walls for visuals (poorly decorated walls can make me nauseated but bare walls can make me positively claustophobic) they landed on a long, colorful, oversized work hanging above the already-sunburned faces of a middle age couple in leisureware. Rather than a badly reproduced poster of a badly executed painting (what I think of as visual muzak and what you find in most hotels), behind this couple about to embark upon "the cruise of a lifetime" appeared to be a six-foot long reproduction of a James Rosenquist. When a smartly dressed waiter quickly and deftly removed trays and glasses after the departure of the aforementioned couple, I idled over for a closer work. It wasn't a Rosenquist reproduction afterall. It was an original.
I assumed this quirk of interior decorating must be some strange anomaly, possibly the result of the ship's captain having inherited the work from an eccentric relative and, not knowing what it was, and not wanting to hang it in his own stateroom, having placed it in the café. As I entered the formal restaurant for dinner that evening, however, I saw that the foyer was graced with a Rauschenberg. And when I exited dinner, I noted two Warhols standing guard on either end of the aft stairs. For the next three days I spent spare moments (between the six meals a day, two quick shore excursions, a few unsatisfying games of ping-pong and quick dips in the two, small, salt-watered pools shared by over a thousand people) swaying from aft to fore and starboard to port, checking out the art. Which was everywhere, from the tenement housing on deck 4, where my own stateroom was located, to the Penthouse on deck 12. Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Frankenthaler, Rosenquist. [2] Most of them, admittedly, works on paper.[3] From what I could tell, though, all of this art was going unnoticed. During the four days at sea I saw not one of my cruisemates stopping to take a closer look at a work.
These same cruisemates sat annoyed,and eventually indignant, when delays caused by the United States Navy meant that we could only spend a few hours in our first stop, Key West, a place whose principal attractions seem to be looking at the inbred cats at Ernest Hemingway's house, eating overpriced key-lime pie and going to what-was-once-but-hasn't-been-for-half-a-century, the southernmost point of the United Sates. I imagine that had the ship's art collection been on display at the Key West Museum of Art and History, [4] located a few paces from our ship's point of disembarkation, many of my cruisemates would have waited in line and shelled out $20 to see the pieces. They would have been quiet, would have read the carefully prepared exhibition materials and would have returned home feeling cultured.
When I came home (pleasantly surprised by the outcome of the cruise -- thank you grandpa), I stopped by to see Travis Tanner at Tanner Frames. While there, Trent Alvey, fairly recently returned from her own travels, walked in and the three of us discussed the upcoming exhibition of works by Namibian sign painter William Daniel, organized by Trent and hosted by Tanner Frames (opening Friday, May 16). Trent met Daniel, who specializes in barbershop signs, when she went to Africa a few years ago. Their friendship has grown during Trent's annual visits to the country with her husband, Dennis. This year, the couple brought back paintings by Daniel for an exhibition of folk or outsider art, in hopes of raising money for his college fund.
In an art age overloaded with concept, the outsider artist appeals to us for their simple, unpretentious, unadulterated enthusiasm for making images. That's not to say that Daniel is some sort of compulsive visual idiot savant, the type of outsider artist the art world tends to embrace. He is a craftsman, making commercial products typical of his culture (much like the guild artists of the early Renaissance). He lives in a poor country. He wants to go to college, and Trent and Dennis want to help him. Originally created for commercial purposes and generally appearing on ramshackle huts, or hung from a tree, barber shop signs like Daniels' have received attention in museums and galleries in the United States. And now Daniels' paintings will be measured, hung and straightened on freshly painted walls and under spotlights.
Once under those spotlights, these works will demand a closer (different) look. They will ask the question, "Are we art?" They do have a certain charm. Picasso famously appropriated the artifacts of Africa and made them part of his own personal style. The stylistic elements that charmed Picasso, can still be found in Africa, even in these barbershop signs by Daniel and others like him. Look at the almond eyes, the multiple perspectives. In one piece you see the face from at least two angles. It looks straight on, but at the same time, we can see the lines on the back of the neck. Luckily these stylistic elements are not hindered by the self-consciousness of an art-school grad.
These pieces will not enter the canon (if, indeed there will be one in the future). They are not part of the contemporary "conversation." They weren't even made as "art." But in an art world, where, in Arthur Danto's words, "everything goes," sign paintings like these become art. As long as they are hung in the right place. And a Rosenquist or a Warhol, hung in the wrong place, becomes visual muzak.
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