Exhibition Review: Salt Lake
Seeing Size
Exploring Scale at the GARFO
by Geoff WichertOn one wall, a stylishly mounted surgical clamp holds an origami crane—the folded 3-D figure of a bird—so small that a magnifying glass dangles nearby to help see it better. On the floor a few feet away sits another paper crane, identical in shape but with a wingspan of about eight feet. These two objects together comprise "Performance" by S. Matthew Jones, which is one artist's response to the exhibition prompt "MICRO/macro." Jones' is one of half a dozen contributions to the Visual Art Institute's exploration of the concept of scale.
For most of art history, professional artists benefited from an unbroken tradition of master-to-apprentice training. But with the arrival of Modernism, working under an established artist—the young Leonardo limning an angel on Verrocchio’s “Baptism of Christ”—became a suspect activity eventually replaced by autodidactic experimentation or the anonymity of art school. Repudiation of one’s teachers, in fact if not in words, became the norm, as Jackson Pollock demonstrated after studying with Thomas Hart Benton. Whatever advances the “perennial avant-garde” may have delivered in artistic individuality and innovation, though, must be measured against the loss of fundamental skills and understanding. Once upon a time young artists grasped on a cellular level, with their hands, so to speak, the differences between subject matter and content, function and purpose, silhouette and outline, and a host of similar “terms of art”— including size and scale.
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Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Weighty Matter
Is the Art of Collage Collapsing?
by Ehren Clark
Ever since the Cubists first starting gluing real life materials, like newspapers, onto their two-dimensional representations of the same materials, collage has become an increasingly dominant art practice. Throughout the twentieth- century, in movements like Dada, Arte Povera, Fluxus, the post-painterly Abstractionsists and Pop art, collage played an important role. In the age of manifestos collage was used for very specific aims, breaking from historic standards with projects that defied art logic and served inventive and experimental purposes. Today, though, the revolution has come to power, and collage no longer defies art logic, it is art logic.
The idea of collage is everywhere in art. Over the past century collage has come to mean much more than cutting and pasting. Now it is a ubiquitous term that refers to the assembling of materials or ideas, past and present, that are originally intended for a different context or purpose, now composited with other elements intended for other uses, creating an original visual and ideological composition. It is perfectly suited to the postmodern artist looking to define visually and ideologically elements of replication, appropriation, plurality, relativism, post-structuralism, and the post-historical.
One such postmodern artist who employs collage in his work is currently on display at Art Access through August 14. In this exhibit, photographer and digital artist Anthony Siciliano displays a large body of collage works that fit loosely into three “cycles,” each with a distinct visual language.
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