{"id":13864,"date":"2012-11-07T00:41:09","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T06:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=13864"},"modified":"2025-10-24T12:33:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:33:53","slug":"battleground-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/battleground-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Battleground States"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tobias Bernstrup, Body 5 Arrives, 2012. Courtesy ADN Galeria, Madrid.<\/p><\/div>\n

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When they make me president, I\u2019m going to ban all group shows.
\n\u2013 Dave Hickey
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Recently, two of Utah\u2019s best-known art centers underwent major changes. One lost its home, the other changed its name. Through the turmoil, both pledged to continue supporting a particular brand of art, which they somewhat counter-intuitively label \u2018Contemporary.\u2019 Many in the audience may have missed the drama in that commitment; after all, what\u2019s controversial or in need of defending about art made in the present day, rather than the past?\u00a0Battleground States,<\/em>\u00a0an ambitious and commendable showcase for 31 working artists\u2014some well known, others who are new or obscure\u2014challenges viewers to distinguish this brand from the more familiar, cozy work being done all over Utah at the same time, which in spite of being \u2018contemporary with\u2019 the work displayed here, is apparently not the same animal as that deliberately called Contemporary.<\/p>\n

One difference becomes clear at once. Contemporary art is thematically driven in a way that previous art wasn\u2019t, and the theme is posted at the door, then restated in smaller signs beside each work. Traditional exhibits employ categorical themes: the landscape, portraits, artists with some quality in common. It\u2019s not hard to imagine a single work appearing in quite a few such shows, because while a theme resonates with the art, it belongs to the exhibit. By contrast, Contemporary artists consciously imbue their works with thematic content\u2014a message\u2014which precedes making the work and displaces conventional aesthetics. A curator who has identified similar themes in disparate artists assembles them to show, instead of 31 subjective views of Mt. Olympus, 31 ways people today think about their lives. Hierarchies of technique and skill are dissolved in the democratic power of free speech. This goal was underscored for me by a curator who offered to explain any work I didn\u2019t understand. When I replied that I could decide for myself what I liked, he insisted: \u201cIt\u2019s not liking I\u2019m concerned about; it\u2019s understanding.\u201d In other words, the sensual pleasure of seeing is no longer the point. Although it arrives via the eye, this work must be grasped by the mind alone. Simply to witness the varieties of gender identity proposed by these artists would be to miss the point, which advances the belief that understanding others will lead us to accept them.<\/p>\n

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Of course the content of art has always been part of the experience, and most of us are quite used to searching for meaning. Trevor Southey, perhaps the best-loved \u2018Utah\u2019 artist today, cannot be fully appreciated without regard to the piercing appeal his paintings make, that we feel the connection between beauty and the places he finds it. His popularity is due in no small part to his place in a tradition scarcely broken since the Renaissance, in which sensitive renderings of families, farmers, familiar animals, and human flesh are delicately balanced between confectionary-surfaced illusions and iron-cored, undeniable reality. But no Renaissance painter ever made sexuality the theme of a painting. In fact, none painted so autobiographically. But just as literature has embraced the first person voice, so much Contemporary art relies on the authority of memoir. Thus Trishelle Jeffery\u2019s three auto-biographical comix hang confidently among Southey\u2019s five Slavic, full-frontal male nude portraits. Despite their differences in size and medium, in them both artists reveal intimate interior qualities at odds with mainstream conventions. A young woman\u2019s confusion and an old man\u2019s self-acceptance assert themselves as equally valid responses to life.<\/p>\n

A very different, no less valid response to life appears in Bas Jan Ader\u2019s video, \u201cI\u2019m Too Sad to Tell You,\u201d in which an unidentified man weeps inconsolably, without explanation.|1|<\/strong>\u00a0Robert Hughes blamed the loss of modern art\u2019s power on other media that subvert it, and indeed, the sight of unsustainable weeping is so common on television that the shock is lost. But Ader\u2019s withholding his subject\u2019s reason for crying makes it impossible to pigeonhole, to render remote or unthreatening to us, and so it penetrates our defenses. Fortunately, the words on the wall have nothing to add that might intercede and diminish this experience, though the nagging fear lingers that had Ader been less discreet, the alienating balm of a story would have eventually attached itself to, and essentially undermined, his video. This possibility gives a glimpse into what may well be Contemporary Art\u2019s Achilles\u2019 Heel.<\/p>\n

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Certainly there are other works that can be appreciated without yielding to the curators\u2019 need to explain. Brooklyn-based Nicole Eisenman\u2019s sailor casts a gimlet eye on the celebration of \u2018Fleet Week,\u2019 known in some ports-of-call as \u201cwhen the Navy comes upstream to spawn.\u201d|2|<\/strong>\u00a0Matt Lipps\u2019 re-photographed collages of women and men achieve a genuine sculptural quality, while reaching across time to distill purported feminine and masculine qualities.|3|\u00a0<\/strong>Dean Sameshima\u2019s giant dot-to-dot image may be lost on those too young to have practiced this graphic version of paint-by-numbers, but reinvigorates the old saw that the most powerful sex organ lies between the ears.|4|<\/strong>\u00a0The most moving static image is David Wojnarowicz\u2019s elegiac \u201cWhen I Put My Hands On Your Body,\u201d an eerie photo of excavated graves overlaid with text, the two media working together to recall how mortality underlies the urgency of sex.|5|<\/strong>\u00a0All these works are juxtaposed against cards that either overdetermine their meanings or else add nothing. The objects speak clearly for themselves, in a language that cannot be translated into words.<\/p>\n

Yet many works depend on the texts not just to make them accessible, but to spell out otherwise inchoate meanings. Pushing this envelope are such merely clever works as Bertrand Planes \u201cLife Clock,\u201d which we learn from the card makes one complete rotation in an 84-year lifetime,|6|<\/strong>\u00a0and Guido van der Werve\u2019s video, from what we are told is the North Pole, where he supposedly rotates precisely opposite the earth\u2019s rotation, in sum (he thinks) remaining motionless.|7|<\/strong>\u00a0This kind of thing must look good on a grant proposal, but the clock could as well be broken, \u2018the Pole\u2019 anywhere. For anyone whose intelligence is not sufficiently insulted, a short walk leads to two empty picture frames, the \u2018artifact\u2019 of David Levine\u2019s \u2018invisible performance.\u2019 The story of the Emperor\u2019s New Clothes has waited a long time for a new chapter, and here it is: dress the naked emperor so that only the cognoscenti can tell which one he is.<\/p>\n

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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge\u2019s neon cross wants to symbolize a future human state, so it evokes nothing in the naive viewer\u2019s conscious or unconscious memory.|8|<\/strong>\u00a0Similar wishful works include Jonathan Horowitz\u2018s white-on-white critique of the ubiquitous ribbon worn by activists of every stripe: add all the colors together and it fades into the background. Along with Terence Koh\u2019s pink triangle and Felix Gonzalez Torres\u2019s silver rings\u00a0|9|<\/strong>\u00a0symbolizing coupling, these symbols have the relation to their intended topics that book jackets have to what\u2019s inside them.On the other hand, the works that fully explore those topics are the least accessible in a gallery setting. Carlos Motta\u2019s \u201cWe Who Feel Differently\u201d constitutes a portal to \u201can ongoing online archive of symposia and interviews.\u201d|10|<\/strong>\u00a0Takashi Murakami\u2019s evocation of Japanese popular arts and Matthew Barney\u2019s scrotum-centered mythologizing are equally impossible to fully appreciate on the basis of what are essentially trailers for larger projects.<\/p>\n

And this may be the ultimate shortcoming of this message-based approach to art. Too many of the works here overflow their space on the wall, not in the imagination of the viewer but outside the gallery, in the life of the artist. The films of Jack Smith, represented here by stills,|11|\u00a0<\/strong>and Tobias Bernstrup\u2019s \u2018practice,\u2019 glimpsed in a sculpture of an \u2018intersexual pop star,\u2019|12|\u00a0<\/strong>offer glimpses of a life\u2019s work not present. It\u2019s as if the exhibit has become just another marketing phenomenon in late-stage Capitalism. What we get for our money, time, or effort is just the first installment, offered at a bargain price in the hope that we will choose to purchase the entire set.<\/p>\n

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An artist I encountered in the gallery told me candidly what she thought of the works. She added that, if talking to her former art-school buddies, she would have spoken differently than she did to me. Specifically, she would have given them what she knows to be the \u2018right answers.\u2019 And I realized that, so far as that curator is concerned, the right answer may be the only answer. Failure to respond to the figurehead on the wall indicates inadequate preparation, a lack of familiarity with things not present, but to which it points.<\/p>\n

Battleground States<\/em>\u00a0contributes to a richer understanding of the range of gender possibilities. That said, it\u2019s unlikely to change anyone\u2019s mind. I returned to Trishelle Jeffery\u2019s enchanting \u2018I Just Want to Know What to Expect,\u2019 and to Trevor Southey\u2019s lovingly observed portraits. Working on very different aesthetic levels, each recalls a universal experience from life: the one of quotidian confusion, the other of how it feels to cherish another human being. I wonder if it\u2019s too much to hope that art will free itself from trying to do something a Facebook post does better, and instead do the thing it does best: shiver us to the soles of our lonely feet, and reacquaint us, however briefly, with our deeper selves.<\/p>\n

Battleground States,\u00a0<\/em>which brings together works from over thirty local and international artists, is at the\u00a0Utah Museum of Contemporary Art\u00a0through January 5, 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When they make me president, I\u2019m going to ban all group shows. \u2013 Dave Hickey Recently, two of Utah\u2019s best-known art centers underwent major changes. One lost its home, the other changed its name. Through the turmoil, both pledged to continue supporting a particular brand of art, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":14052,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/0bl45.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-04 06:50:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13864"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97423,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13864\/revisions\/97423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}