Art-Professional Profile: Salt Lake City
The Writing on the Wall: The Salt Lake Art Center's Jay Heuman
by Shawn Rossiter
If you’ve been to see the Robert Motherwell: Te Quiero exhibit at the Salt Lake Art Center, you’ll have noticed the ubiquitous writing on the wall – quotes from the artist, historical perspectives and cultural commentary. The man responsible for the writing is Jay Heuman |0|, who just celebrated his first year as the Center’s Curator of Education. Heuman was born and raised in Toronto, where he also attended University, graduating with a BA in Visual Arts (Art History) and MA in Art History from York University. His graduate research focused on postwar American Modernist abstraction and the subsequent splintering of art trends into the “postmodern” and thus he comes well prepared for his involvement in the Motherwell exhibition.
Heuman’s particular interest during his studies was in the work of Barnett Newman, one of Motherwell’s contemporaries in the New York School. Heuman’s interest in Newmman began when one of his professors mentioned, rather off-handedly, Newman’s allusion to the Hebrew Bible and mystical tradition of the Kabbalah. “ This bewildered me,” says Heuman, “as I’d previously taken Newman’s artwork as a con-man attempt to market art babble. This was misinformed dismissal, influenced by Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word (1975) which is a rant by a disgruntled cynic, long-ago transformed into a caricature of itself. This triggered five years of intense research during which I found Newman’s intentions had been misinterpreted and his references mistranslated. With my characteristic stubbornness, twelve years of Hebrew school, and methodical collection and reading of every word in print by or about Newman, I discovered a few missing links.”
Heuman has brought his enthusiastic scholarly interests, his detailed methodology and his desire to dispel misconceptions with him to Utah. He came west to the Beehive State via Nebraska, where he worked for three years as the Visitor & Volunteer Services Coordinator at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha. In August 2003, he took a job as the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art’s Assistant Curator of Programs & Exhibitions and remained in the position until accepting the position at the Art Center in January of last year.
He says that initially the relocation to Utah seemed a "gargantuan sacrifice." "But my partner and I discovered Utah’s positive qualities, belying most outsiders’ perceptions: the diversity in Salt Lake City and Ogden; the stunning geography, both north and south; and world-class culture, often emerging from the fringe.”
At the Art Center, Heuman is in charge of educational programming – which includes guided discussions for diverse community groups, youth art-making programs (KidsmART and ArtWORKS), the Center’s newsletter (three annually), Art Talks (lecture series) |1|, and exhibition related educational resources (or, in other words, the writing on the wall). As you'll see in the accompanying essay, Heuman also sees his role as providing an opportunity for the community to discuss various aesthetic issues, network with each other and spur creative activity.
Personal Essay
Random Thoughts of a Cross-Disciplinarian
by Jay Heuman
I have a sense of being “citizen-victim” of politiculture, recently enduring the politibabble of the Governor’s “State of the State” address and the President’s “State of the Union” address – both evocative of Orwell’s “double speak,” the Cold War, the McCarthy witch-hunt for “Unamericans,” the Watergate break-in and break-down, and Clinton’s struggle to define words like “is” and “sex”. But perhaps life is even more complicated today by . Postmodern lacunae, shifters and technologies? I can’t help but think some artists who feel disaffected might turn toward (neo-)dada/(neo-)surrealist methods to explore ‘the absurd’ for its expressive potential, if not for consolation.
And then, Shawn Rossiter reminded me of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, on view through March 15th at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (Utah State University, Logan). This is a refreshing exhibition for its reintroduction of pivotal figures in American cultural production as counter-production. The Beat Generation of the 1950s, predominantly West Coast rebels in poetry and visual art, were precursors to the 1960s Hippies. Of the Beats, Wallace Berman held particular distinction (despite less publicity than poet Ginsberg or novelist Kerouac) because of his freely distributed, free-form, privately published journal titled Semina. |2| Each issue, printed in small number, was consumed and passed around from friend to friend. Like zines of today, Semina appealed to a specific circle, a loosely defined aesthetic. It is hard to imagine that just nine issues of Semina, published between 1955 and 1964, should be considered influential – but each issue included contributions from artists in the-then “anti-establishment” who are now considered “establishment.”
Fresh from celebrating my one-year anniversary working in Salt Lake City, the contrasts between Beatniks and Utah artists are striking. My linear (il)logic spun out of control. The discourse about “establishment versus anti-establishment” has been a turbulent undercurrent in my exploring SLC’s art (demi)monde. An anti-anything requires a pro-something. Naturally, the process of categorization is facile, but useless unless the categories are defined and agreed upon. In 1663, Charles Le Brun was appointed Director of the French Academy by King Louis XIV, with authority to devise and impose standards of representation, subject matter, style. This imposition of standards implies that artists scattered throughout the land were doing much as they pleased; yet Le Brun’s duty was to impose compliance with the Academy’s standards. So is “establishment” a response to anarchy, renamed “anti-establishment” after “establishment” is, uhm, established?
Truthfully, these were, remain, and will forever be co-existent (and complementary) phenomena. There were tensions between Leonardo’s scientific naturalism and Michelangelo’s superhero musculature of the early 16th century, William Adolphe Bouguerreau’s Romanticism and Edouard Manet’s jarring realism of the mid-18th century, Auguste Rodin’s late 19th century realism and Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th century conceptualism, Thomas Hart Benton’s 1930s Regionalism and Jackson Pollock’s late-1940s abstract expressionism. Today, can one identify tension between, say, Kenny Scharf’s ‘Pop sensibility’ and Damien Hirst’s graphic materiality? Closer to home, Salt Lake and Utah are home to numerous art venues, each with a “look,” responsive to each other, none more “right.” (Though some may hold strong opinions about what constitutes “good” or “bad” art.)
Remember: The history of art is a product of Modern university scholarship emphasizing the cyclical process of the “establishment” of the “anti-establishment.” But these are not exclusive and pure endeavors. Those who are “established” integrate new ideas and technologies. Those who are “anti-establishment” are collected, win awards and commissions, and become “established.” This evolution is not new, is not unexpected, and must be nourished.
A fine example of this evolution from anti- to anti-anti (as a double negative ought to be positive?) is Dada. The artists who, in 1915, founded Dada – first in Zurich, then in Berlin, Paris, New York – were of varied artistic disciplines, mostly visual artists and writers. They reacted to World War I with irony, cynicism, and anarchical nihilism. The human civilization experiment ran out of control. The illogical and the absurd, combined with the role of chance in artistic creation, were exaggerated.
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Their “performances” at the Café Voltaire would have poetic recitations obscured by loud music, dancing obscured behind painted curtains, music played without musical instruments, and other farcical acts. This was a mirror of (self-)judgment, intended to inspire an analytical examination of one’s self, one’s actions, one’s production. But imagine their dismay when some – the longer-lived of the Dada collaborators – realized they had evolved from [1] artists revolted by and revolting against the disjunction between the artifice of civility and the underlying human instinct for irrationality (esp. the chaos of the First World War) to become [2] celebrated cultural icons who had, unwittingly, produced much sought after collectible commodities!
With hindsight, we understand the revolutionary becomes mundane once a new revolutionary banner is raised high. [This is yet another way to say the “anti-establishment” wolf often becomes the “establishment” sheep.]
The current banner is the Postmodern (or Post-Pop?). I won’t bother trying to define it; as I wrote above: “the process of categorization is facile, but useless unless the categories are defined and agreed upon.” But I can point to three contributing factors that have shaped our Postmodern sensibility , whether we are conscious participants, subconscious victims, or flat-out unconscious. The three factors: lacunae, shifters and technologies. These are, in order, the gaps existing in our discourse, the words that have no fixed meaning that are (ab)used in our discourse, and the skills (and tools) with which we engage in discourse.
With that, I return to Semina Culture, a thought-provoking and timely exhibition at the NEH Museum of Art at Utah State University. Wallace Berman and his circle seized opportunity before the establishment invited them. They were honest and open, leaving little to the imagination – as you’ll see in the explicit commentary, nakedness (or nudity?), and sexual reference. No lacunae (gaps) in their discourse. Their words were definite and precise, igniting passion, gouging into raw flesh. No shifters in their discourse. Their technologies were critical eyes, drawing, writing/typing, photographs, and Berman’s small hand press. No fanciful technologies, as this predated the refinement of binary mathematics into the multiplicity of the Internet Age.
The Beat Generation did what they did, made what they made, with and without complaint. But they knew to whom and about what to complain, all the while cognizant of the value of rejection. At least s/he of the “anti-establishment” who is rejected has attracted the attention of and received (or obligated) response from the “establishment.” (Better bad press than no press?) Is it better to be shooed away like a fly buzzing around a reader’s head than squashed under the weight of the reader’s tome? A rite of passage? A necessary step of the anti-establishment toward becoming establishment? Perhaps the pains of evolutionary “becoming” are more symptomatic of real life than the comfortable ideal of static “being”?
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely wondering what’s the point of this stream of commentary in constant flux? This is an invitation for contact by like-minded individuals prepared for action in an open forum for [1] discussion (practical, theoretical, socio-political, etc.) and [2] artful activities (spoken word, performance, musical improvisation, automatist drawing, group collage, etc.) to engender a collaborative spirit in Salt Lake and Utah. Emailing jayh@slartcenter.org is the best technology.
Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
Koichi Yamamoto at Art Access
by Stefanie Dykes
Walter Benjamin laments, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility", that modern works of art have lost their “aura.” Modern images, Benjamin states, no longer have the ability to inspire or create awe in their viewers. . . and I was beginning to believe that he was right until Koichi Yamamoto’s current exhibition at the Art Access Gallery. With every print, Yamamoto mingles seriousness with play, and monumental forms with a sense of intimacy. His series of monotype prints all started with an impulse that his singular creative vision immediately recognized.
In the beginning there was a “mountain of garbage.” There is a 1980’s poster Koichi remembers from Osaka, Japan, promoting paper recycling. The title was “A Mountain of Garbage is a Mountain of Resources.” Since then, Koichi has adapted this habit of searching for an idea from many different garbage cans. "I consider that ‘idea’ as the fundamental element for making art pieces. Often I do discover it from other people’s discarded, unwanted byproducts in waste bins at print studios.”
The monotypes presented at the Art Access Gallery are examples of Koichi’s work that started from those abandoned, almost unlimited resources found in the waste cans. Being efficient is ideal, if I can utilize these byproducts of maintenance into complete art works, I would minimize waste.”
Koichi began cleaning rollers on printing paper, simultaneously creating works of art from the “byproducts of maintenance.” Monotype printmaking is the closest process that a printmaker gets to painting. The image is drawn, painted, scrapped, rolled, wiped, etc. etc. onto a plexiglass surface and run through the press transferring the image up to the paper. Koichi states that his monotypes represent an artistic investigation into the subject of “waste management.” Out of the rubbish, he has created imposing landscapes of the imagination and images filled with motion and chaos. Yamamoto has restored my faith that artists still have the ability to inspire.
The Art Access exhibit, which also features ceramicist Dan Murphy, continues through March 10th. May 19th & 20th Koichi Yamamoto will hold a Master Class and Artist talk at Saltgrass Printmakers (click for details). More examples of the artist's work can be seen here.
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