Taylor Davis, @DodgeGallery, thanks for the sculpture master class.
So many sculptors fail to recognize the potential for their work to give us a new way to experience space. Taylor Davis isn’t one of them.
Every time I experience (not just look, but experience) new works by the artist, I can’t not think about how their length, width, and height affect my perception, and her latest works at Dodge Gallery were no exception.
Tbox 1, 2012 birch plywood and oil paint, 14 x 16.5 x 16.5 inches
By definition, these works could be formalism. We can enjoy them for their formal qualities; they’re made of playfully placed, fastidiously milled planks of wood, but Davis doesn’t stop there. She stencils text, paints arrows according to the grain, and drops subtle hints about her works’ construction. Her latest box-like works are an evolution from earlier works, which, because of their slick craftsmanship, looked like wooden replicas of abstract CAD drawings.
Five fingers and a thumb, 2012, milled white pine, 43 x 43 x 43 inches
Davis augered each one of these planks, essentially adding more sides to each piece, and from their ends their shape looks like a Modern painting. Ellsworth Kelly, perhaps?
Five fingers and a thumb, detail. Photo by author.
Davis added a fourth dimension to four of her her works at Dodge Gallery by wrapping sentences or phrases around cylindrical works that forcing the viewer to circle each sculpture four or five times to take in the entire work.
Installation view, 2012.
“This is not a walk and chew gum moment,” Davis wrote in a statement for the show, “it’s a proposal that understanding a thing in its entirety is a difficult, if not impossible, endeavor.”
Poet Anselm Berrigan wrote a four-part poem titled “Because reading is a physical act” that describes Davis’ work. He begins with his experience of the cylinders:
As a person who reads when walking / I get what the cylinders are getting at
making bodies move in circles to see / them. You can’t be stationary and read
the full sentence, but that brief regi- / stration of a part of a thing in motion
is built-in to reading’s relative time. / (Click here to continue reading)
Davis’ works are complicated and formal, but absorbing. I can’t have a conversation about them without debating or discovering something new about their intricate topological and geometrical features.
All photos by Carly Gaebe unless otherwise noted, courtesy of Dodge Gallery.
Former Bain Capital managing director Edward Conard reminds me of Joseph Stalin
Edward Conard, Former Bain Capital managing director, Mitt Romney partner, and newly published author, has an economic philosophy similar to that of Joseph Stalin’s.
Conard’s widely reported - and derided - attitude towards anyone with the capacity “to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism [of the economy] but who chose[s] instead a less competitive life,” whom Conard scorns as “art-history majors,” should be troubling for anyone mindful of the supposed moral underpinnings of authoritarian political philosophies.
In a May 14 2012 interview to discuss his new book about economics and innovation with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Conard was given a chance to clarify statements he made about “art-history majors,” which appeared in a New York Times Magazine article by Adam Davidson.
“The book has a moral component to it,” he told Lehrer. “It says that talented people have an obligation to get the training that’s required to produce innovation and that they need to take the risks that are necessary to produce it.”
I’m sure we’ve all been annoyed during our humanities classes by hairsplitting cultural criticism esoterica that only seems to serve to re-categorize the previous generations’ isms, but to write off any academic pursuit that seeks to better understand society, past or present, is tantamount to book-burning.
I’m not a political historian, but statements like Conard’s make me shudder. The idea that U.S. citizens have a “moral obligation” to pursue educations, careers, etc. that only support the growth of the economy harkens back to authoritarian philosophies like fascism and Stalinism.
In 1945, Russian-born British philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin visited Russia as an official of the British Foreign Office and penned a nearly 10,000-word memorandum titled “A Note on Literature and the Arts in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in the Closing Months of 1945.”
“The main engagement of the early and middle 1920s was fought between the free and somewhat anarchist literary experimenters and the Bolshevik zealots…” he wrote.
“There followed, during the period of “pacification” and stabilization organized by Stalin and his practical-minded collaborators, a new orthodoxy, directed principally against the emergence of any ideas likely to disturb and so divert attention from the economic tasks ahead.”
This is an example of what Conard’s philosophy could be as manifested in governance: “Stalin and his practical-minded collaborators” have a severe aversion to “any ideas likely to disturb and so divert attention from the economic tasks ahead.”
In a 1946 discussion with creative leaders in the Soviet Union that covered topics such as the ideological dangers of art and literature, Stalin scoffs at anything short of socialist realism that doesn’t support his cause. His tone is remarkably similar to that of Conard’s:
“Today under the guise of innovation formalism is being induced in Soviet music and abstraction in painting. Once in a while a question can be heard ‘is it necessary for such great people as Bolsheviks and Leninists to be engaged in such petty things and spend time criticizing abstract painting and formalism. Let the psychiatrists deal with it.”
“There is no art for art’s sake. There are no, and cannot be, ‘free’ artists, writers, poets, dramatists, directors, and journalists, standing above the society. Nobody needs them. Such people don’t and can’t exist.”
Similarities between Conard and Stalin also exist in the narrow focus of their opinions about intellectual pursuits in the creative realm. Essentially, the moral component of their argument is the same: If it serves no economically measurable purpose, it has no use for our country.
In his interview with Lehrer, Conard goes on to say that he sees a “surplus” (notice his use of economic terminology) of smart people in the United States that aren’t getting the training needed to create innovation. “We don’t get to be art history majors for the sake of our own satisfaction,” he said, demeaning the choices of those whom Stalin might call the “creative intelligentsia,” who are - in the autocratic leader’s words - “completely dependent on the monetary support of the financial magnates in their creative endeavors.”
This makes me wonder what Conard’s hierarchy of college majors is according to their value towards innovation, or if he’s aware, for instance, that the late innovation of social media (he mentioned Facebook in his interview with Lehrer) is humming on the energy and creativity of the individuals educated through the humanities or other useless college majors. I also wonder what he thinks about Art History majors that study the art market or Economics majors that study history. I wonder if he’s ever read Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.
There are familiar political battles over arts education in public schools, but the fight typically involves the effects of the arts versus science and math in the intellectual and cognitive development in children. At this point, arts education advocates, who can make strong moral arguments for their cause, don’t typically need to defend the arts in public schools based on their long-term impact on the economy. However, if Conard’s philosophy begins to pervade the halls of our local and national governments, arts advocates will be facing much more politically potent weapons, especially in Tea Party-dominated legislatures.
Image of Conard via his website. Image of Stalin via the web.
Karen Kilimnik after Jean-Baptiste Oudry.
Over her three-decade career, Karen Kilimnik has used as source material everything from movie star headshots, to British manor houses, to Rococo paintings like Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Male Leopard, above. Her loose brush work, looking at times like hastily done paint-by-number, is an apt approach to her teen-fantasy subject matter, but her portraits also seem like the bright, true-to-life style of Sir Henry Raeburn via the flatness of Manet.
If you want to see the ocelot lost in hawaii (2008) in person and about 60 other works by Kilimnik, they’re up through September at The Brant Foundation in Greenwick, Conn. For Oudry’s Male Leopard, you’ll have to get to Schwerin, Germany.
The Brant, a 9,800-square-foot, appointment-only space, which primarily exhibits the works from its founder’s thousand-work collection, has supplied the following dates for potential tours:
May 10th at 11am
May 16th at 11am
May 18th at 2:30pm
May 22nd at 2:30pm
May 24th at 11am
May 29th at 12:30pm
May 30th at 1pm
June 5th at 12pm
June 8th at 10am
June 11th at 11am
June 13th at 1:30pm
June 18th at 2:30pm
June 20th at 10am
June 22nd at 12:30pm
June 25th at 1pm
June 27th at 11am
Anyone interested should contact the Brant at thebrantfoundation(at)gmail(dot)com or (203) 869-0611.
Images:
the ocelot lost in hawaii (2008)
Karen Kilimnik
American
Water soluble oil on canvas
24 x 30 in.
via The Brant Foundation
Male Leopard (1741)
Jean-Baptiste Oudry
French
Oil on canvas
51 9/16 x 63 in.
Staatliches Museum Schwerin
via Getty
