 |
Conceptual Realism
Rosenwald Wolf Gallery
333 S. Broad Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
|
Conceptual Realism is a show
for the mind, not the eye. In his essay, Sid Sachs, the director
of Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, suggests the exhibition may inspire others
to examine content. Letıs hope so. There is much to examine here.
Conceptual Realism investigates an under current within the art
of the past 40 years. Mr. Sachs casts a wide net and presents an
interesting survey of this concept-based "realism" where
works share sensiblity over any stylistic similarities. Although
the show serves as a veritable primer for earlier work of this type,
Conceptual Realism connects with much art practice today. Featuring
images from the 60's on, the show somehow ignores the difficult
demarcation between modernism (ie make it flat and abstract) and
post-modern appropriation. This is significant in itself in an exhibition.
Using secondary source "realism" rather than that derived
from direct observation, most of this work owes a debt to photography.
Key to this is the term "realism" which refers here to
re-presentation rather than any illusionistic rendering from life.
Other pieces rely on draftsmanship of different sorts but all these
myriad intentions and issues of content are connected for the sake
of comparison. It ends up a worth while lesson about how artists
have approached representation.
The curation here is similar is some ways to the reversals that
took place in last year's Temple Gallery show, Pictorial Abstraction,
(curated by Kevin Malchionne) which showed a tendency in current
abstract painting to allow pictoral images and real objects to infect
it's so-called "pure" confines. Conceptual Realism comes
from the opposite side of that equation. Where the ideas are abstract,
the images need not be? Each piece in it's own way demonstrates
it's own underlying concepts. Mr. Sachs began a similar investigation
into so-called contradictory overlaps such as this with his Pop
Abstraction show at the Academy of Fine Arts which showed a connection
between the prevailing abstract work of the time with pop art. In
Conceptual Realism the results are more complex and intriguing.
The subject here has more relevance since there is so much work
around now that owes a debt to this tradition. Perhaps also because
new technologies make more of these photographic/printing forms
possible. Indeed, there may be a return to the "real"
in a broader sense.
Mr Sach's begins his thesis with Jasper Johns who combined the "modern"
abstract expressionist paintwork of the time with a pure pop notion
of painting everyday cultural symbols, but upon seeing this eclectic
collection of "conceptual" pieces, I am left wondering
when this drift to "re-presenting" started. Who was the
first (Malcolm Morely?) photo-realist or, indeed, when was the first
use of photography as a basis for a painting? Certainly, pop art
made use of photographic imagery but painters made use of the photograph
to help freeze nature almost as soon as it appeared on the scene.
Illustrators caught on early in the last century using photos to
help create images with different intent for magazines. Think of
Norman Rockwell. Perhaps artists like Hopper shows signs of this
along with a number of ground breaking early modernists and Surrealists.
The Philadelphia artist contingent (Jane Irish and Thomas Chimes
etc...) makes an appearance here and noteably turns the painterly
academic approach to narrative on itıs head. These artists, obviously
concerned with painting's survival, use various strategies to link
this notion of injecting concept (the mind) into the visual (the
eye) or formal (painterly) elements of a piece. Could these artists
be even more aware of their "re-representation" than their
predecessors?
A perfect example of this keen attention to concept, process and
re-presenting is the piece by Joan Nelson, "Untitled"
(George Caleb Bingham 1995). The piece is savvy to it's own creation
complete with blotchy ink register. This offsets the air of historic
authenticity seen in the crackled paint surface. It goes as far
in this homage to Bingham as to borrow specific trees from several
different Bingham works from the 1840's. That is something for the
mind as well as the eye.
Although the show might have been broader and have included more
recent work which continues in this cerebral tradition, it does
go a distance to explain how these apparently opposite areas of
representation and concept art have found their way together after
much time apart. With the Grand Narratives gone, representation
by observation in painting clearly falls into the category of aberration
and, without any deeper conceptual basis, places itself firmly in
the past by not reflecting the present. What indeed does reflect
the present contemporary time? That is an interesting question.
İJames Rosenthal December 2000 |
|
