Exhibition Review: Salt Lake
An Innermost Journey
The Paintings of Shauna Cook Clinger at the UMFA
by Geoff Wichert
An Innermost Journey: The Art of Shauna Cook Clinger, in the main gallery at the UMFA through February 15, 2009, raises old questions about the relative importance of content versus form. The museum's guidebook, Quarterly, credits Cook Clinger with "great artistic skill," but such assertions are always subjective. Too often they come down to a viewer's asserting, "It works for me and so it must be good art." Does conveying content well in itself constitute proof of artistic quality? Regardless of the answer to that question, half an hour in the gallery is enough to make clear that the content, and specifically the narrative content, of these paintings totally trumps such painterly virtues as composition, drama, brushwork, and the rendering of almost everything but the subject's faces.
The hanging staff of the Museum seems to agree on this point, since they've placed a spotlight on each of those faces, causing them to don haloes in addition to their other evident spiritual qualities. Have someone stand close and cover the light with a hand and a different painting emerges. Nevertheless, Cook Clinger does possess a skill that, based on uncounted encounters with college art majors, is coveted and pursued by young women: capturing the countenance. Compared to the tight control seen in rendering the heads and some admirable necks—evidently self-portraits—everywhere else is loosely brushed color. In some early works, even the bodies and background blur. Apparently the flesh represents the struggling and immortal soul, the one fixed thing. Everything else is negotiable.
The exhibit begins near the front entrance, in the first of three segments. Hung up the wall, as the UMFA tends to do in this room, but also apart, as though their subjects are withholding their endorsement, are some of her formal portraits. Many in the Utah audience argue that the goal of painting, because it's most difficult, is duplicating the retinal impression of the original object. Cook Clinger does this in her portraits, which achieve the conviction of augmented photographs. In the corner at the bottom of the stairs, like footnotes to a visual text, a number of drawings, including some sequential studies for the paintings, show how she arrives at such verisimilitude. They're all figure studies, and on their testimony anatomy means less to Clinger Cook that it does, for example, to V. Kim Martinez in her Mujeres de Colores (see our October edition). Neither is there anything like the drapery studies so characteristic of medieval and Renaissance artists, or preparatory sketches for the occasional accessory or companion animal. Of course this, too, may be a curatorial choice.
The central portion of the show extends around three walls between the portraits and the drawings, and consists primarily of full-length, life-sized figures in solo poses that attempt to show, through a combination of posture, expression, and non–representational elements like geometry and color, the journey referred to in the show's overall title: a voyage of self–examination that leads to a resolution in which ideology and expectation play a major part. It is this sense of pre-ordained destination, as much as the truncation of the exploratory power of paint, that puts off a certain kind of viewer—even those who share the ideology but remain convinced that this journey ought to take them to a place they can't so readily recognize from the starting point.
There are at least two possible ways to see growth within this series, but, unlike digital examples, the actual paintings can only be hung so as to point up one of them. Two self-portrait busts near the entrance, one Cezanne-like and the other marked by Post-Modernist text, assert the artist's awareness of and connection to art history. Chronologically, the arc of the main series begins kitty-corner from the entrance, and moves clockwise to follow her gradual movement from ethereal, insubstantial forms towards more solid figures in context. The setting for the figures in blue cannot be fixed more precisely than invocation and prayer.|0| By the end, the arrival of the Martin Handcart Company and the artist's ancestor signal significant change.|1| In addition to the narrative that takes place within each work, especially the multiple panel paintings that represent transformation, there is a narrative, a story told in time, that crosses the large wall as the artist moves from the depiction of an emotionally intense but vague epiphany to grappling with specifically spiritual topics that she allegorizes in ways that stretch her art. Near the end she seems to back away again, substituting dance-like gestures for struggle. It may be that this order is meant to represent—moving in either direction—the rising and falling arc of a dramatic confrontation.
The several centerpieces of the long wall depict a kind of personal rebirth, described in feminine terms wherein the birth canal is represented by a tube or garment of fabric against which the figure struggles to be reborn.|2| Here the largely static compositions seen earlier are replaced by images that, while still centered, struggle physically. Instead of separate panels to represent before and after, the single subject is shown in multiple images, like stroboscopic photographs, and where the references to crucifixion—a body in a draped pose and a horizontal band— were abstract before, the hands of these figures palpably claw the symbolic fabric. They recall Michelangelo's slaves, struggling with every fiber of their massively muscled torsos to free themselves from the surrounding stone. But the emphasis remains on the faces. Nor is the fabric like that visible upstairs, on the Museum's John Singer Sargent: an hallucination that up close breaks down into slashed brushstrokes, but with distance turns magically into shimmering light. Cook Clinger's fabric remains a pattern of ornamentally colored brushstrokes.
The bodies do become more solid, the next two works featuring fully nude figures in recognizable, if sketchy settings and surrounded by totem animals. One, "All Flesh is Grass," takes the most chances.|3| Here the omnipresent light from no identifiable source disappears, leaving a figure in the dark. A window and a chair create a theatrical sense of interior space, while the nude woman, her flesh an eerie green, passively mouths a blade of grass. She is the only one who appears calm, and the only one who makes eye contact with the viewer.
At readings from her 1992 bestseller, Women Who Run With Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés used to tease the few men in her audience, suggesting they, too, would probably soon flee. Whether Cook Clinger similarly polarizes viewers can only be a topic for speculation, since there were almost none on the Saturday when 15 Bytes stopped by. It remains an open question how much painting is sexually dimorphic, but it is possible to argue that Shauna Cook Clinger is the oil-and-canvas equivalent of the current vogue for memoirs of struggle and transcendence that is sometimes labeled "Chick-Lit." But it would be a mistake to make her thereby the exemplar of women's art. Here, as throughout society, there are differing approaches to the missing half of the human story, even among those who live it. Olivia Mae Pendergast describes her own approach to painting in a way that stands in marked contrast to Cook Clinger's continual variations on her own likeness. In a video commentary on her recent sojourn to Malawi (see our blog), she says, "Basically, when I'm painting these paintings I'm painting myself, but they have Malawian faces…. It would just get really boring to continually paint myself…with this face and this body….” In other words, she acknowledges that art will always have a solipsistic quality. But she implies, and the example of Shauna Cook Clinger's foibles, even alongside her successes, may ironically agree, that art serves itself and us best when the artist seeks herself in others, and projects what she has to say about her own life into them.
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Exhibition Review: Salt Lake
Art Under Fire
Activist Art at the SL Art Center
by Ehren Clark
Art speaks with many voices. Historically, it has furthered authoritative needs (both secular and religious), strengthen cultural ties, and even served as a mouthpiece for its own sake. Since the sixties, art's activist voice has played an increasing role in the agenda of many artists, and today continues to be as loud as it is pervasive, covering walls of galleries and art fairs and filling the pages of art magazines. The current exhibition at the Salt Lake Art Center, Liberties Under Fire: The ACLU of Utah at 50, is a collection of five nationally-recognized artists whose voices speak boldly, angrily, heatedly, ironically about humanitarian aims the ACLU has fostered. The exhibit makes me wonder if now, after fifty years of crusading for civil liberties, the voice that demanded these liberties along with the ACLU demanding these liberties has become a cacophony of polemics.
The ACLU has, since WWI, sought "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the constitution and laws of the United States." It has successfully defended freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, abolition of capitol punishment, access to contraception and freedom of choice for abortion, civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, affirmative action, immigration rights and gun control, and done so peacefully and constructively. Art that incites strong emotion with an angry voice is a substantial part of art history's canon; it continues with full force in the post-modern post-structural art of the contemporary landscape. But is there not a point where an open forum of pro-active ideas and ideology, a forum where artists move ahead with work is more timely for the arts community and the community at large than art that incites more anger to the uninitiated than it promotes, closing minds instead of opening them?
Kara Walker, one of America's most widely known and popular contemporary artists, bases much of her aesthetic on her identity as an African American woman. Equality in race relations, especially for the African American community, has occupied the ACLU's efforts from its roots. The issue of slavery has tarnished the history of numerous nations -- and many to a greater extent than our own. Walker has developed her grounding in the art world by ensuring that this once epidemic atrocity will never be forgotten. Her works from the series "Harpers Pictorial History of the World," earthy, stark silhouettes, imposed on historic lithographs, such as in the work "Crest of Pine Mountain: Where General Polk Fell," |1| create disturbing scenes. Walker places her silhouettes one over the other, using positive and negative spacing to great effect, in images of American slaves being brutalized.
Walker's art is charged with the drama and terror of a period that organizations such as the ACLU and the majority of Americans are trying to put behind in order to be an integrated, unified, culturally diverse and fully functional society. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed this could be done and we are seeing this with the success of Barrack Obama. Kara Walker, however, cannot seem to forgive injustices of the past and move towards a greater, positive optimistic and constructive future. An artist like young, internationally respected British artist, Chris Ofili, offers a counterpoint to Walker. From a country whose slave trade far surpassed our own, Ofili is embracing the beauty of his African heritage, opening minds and ears to his culture.
Despite efforts from the ACLU and various GLBT coalitions, and more realistic and positive portrayals of homosexuals in the media, homophobia has not been eradicated. Much of the stigma against homosexuality in the past has been from inaccurate portrayals and stereotyping and this has undergone a distinct change over the past few decades. John Trobaugh, in his series "Double Duty," |0| places Ken dolls of various races in stereotypical "gay" clothing, or lack of clothing, in poses juxtaposed against familiar sites such as the Grand Canyon. In one he even dresses two Ken dolls in drag in front of the County Building in Salt Lake.
Trobaugh raises some interesting commentary on environmental expectations that affect gender identity on children, male or female, playing with dolls having an effect on their persona. However, and I say this as a homosexual male myself, beyond this, I view his art as propagating gender bias and reinforcing gender identities rather than neutralizing gender stereotypes. To a less sympathetic audience, Trobaugh's irony has a tendency to close doors, not just to "insiders," but to those whose minds it is really trying to open.
Enrique Chagoya's catchy collages are bold, ironic, comic, idealistic, mocking. In his work, Chagoya uses and abuses icons and iconic figures, historic, contemporary, religious, and secular; nothing is sacred, all is profane. They are well-articulated, humorous and thoughtfully constructed visual puns with a blatantly blasphemous ideology: George W. Bush holding a stack of Bibles; Jesus Christ, Mohamed and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a single ballet tutu |2|; or more sobering statements on Christianity. These may strike some viewers as humorous, but some seem highly didactic, and some are just in bad taste. A monkey on a cross is pushing the limit, and, again, closes doors and minds.
Many contemporary artists, writers, and poets push political buttons, and appropriate to an exhibit about the ACLU, these appear in Liberties Under Fire. Sue Coen presents her statement on mass injustice in works like "Thousands Trying to Escape from the Superdome." |3| Jenny Holzer, another internationally recognized artist featured in this exhibit, draws her political pistols and aims them on abuses of power. She replicates, on oil and linen, an actual autopsy report and letters from parents of those who have been killed in the Iraq War in her series "Torture, Imprisonment and War."|4| Holzer's raised visual voice is no different in context than the inescapable polemics seen on CNN, network news, and talk radio, reminding listeners what a precarious situation we are in. Art that voices an alternative, more independently-thought ideological voice is unfortunately rare.
The ACLU has been prodigiously successful in legislating civil liberties. Liberties Under Fire is an honest exhibition with strong artists whose voices are raised alongside the efforts of the ACLU in Utah in the past 50 years. Viewing the exhibit may make you ask, as it did me, Does contemporary art that reflects these aims have to maintain an angry voice? Every voice should be heard, but is it necessary to always angrily focus on the past, or can we also use art to promote a more open, optimistic dialogue?
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