April 14, 2017
Review Panel
Reading some text recently, I came across a word I didn't understand, so I had to look it up. (The source might have been this one, but I haven't been able to recover it again there with a quick search. Oh well.) It was one of those words that I thought I wouldn't use even though I'm prone to salt my language with a vocabulary that is probably too rich for the average person. I've seen folks shift uncomfortably from time to time, as I drop certain terms that are probably more precious to me than them. I probably sound pretentious but I usually don't care. I credit the influence of my Filipino grandfather who was a lawyer and had a superior command of english that he was particularly proud of. I'll use a word no matter its' provenance if it rings true to the subject, if I calculate that it makes what I'm saying vivid. But this particular word seemed over the top, and I thought it was the kind I'd never have to use, so exotic or antiquated or overrefined it seemed.
That is what I had thought until it came time to post my notes for artcritical's April 4, 2017 Review Panel, hosted by David Cohen last week at the Dweck Cultural Center at the Brooklyn Public Library. I had let so much time pass in the reportage of it in this blog of that evening's critique that I felt compelled to write a short introduction and try to characterize what happened so as to compensate in this small way for the lag time.
As I thought of how to characterize what happened, I thought of that word. It's kind of funny, I thought I would never have to use it. The word is heteroclite. Heteroclite means abnormal or irregular. The selection of shows covered in this particular Review Panel was heteroclitic, compared to past critiques. There you go. I said -or wrote- it. Please don't don't think badly of me.
Past Review Panels seemed to select the exhibitions to be critiqued with a kind of logic or design. Conceptualist vs formalist. Sex. Race. This Review Panel is heteroclitic because it was irregular, not normal to a pattern, any pattern seemingly established in recent events. It was peculiar in that it defied any order or motif or structure. That is, unless not having a pattern is the pattern.
Checking my assumption: the line up was nearly all women... but it's not completely a group of women. The dice that throws three women and a man foils a feminist theme. The exception in question is Leonhard Hurzlmeier, who apparently paints only women. Could he possibly qualify as a "woman"??? Can an artists' subject be their own avatar? Perhaps it was the loud vocal protest and condemnation by a feminist sitting in the audience next to me that ruined that perception. She angrily detected a sign of salaciousness in the preoccupations of the artist and she also seemed indignant that identity lanes should not be crossed. There was no pushback from the moderator. No, this spoils any apperception of a feminist grouping.
The heteroclitic assortment in the group:1) slick, no visible hand, geometric, squared away, hypnotic, factured, spin paintings...
2) mediated, severe, almost neurotic verisimilitude by a legacy artist...
3) Pop, oral fixated, sloppy seconds paintings...
4) a surprising Deco figuration of curvy women whose color calibrations were performed with strict Germanic fastidousness down to a two-three decimal fraction of millimeters.
See a pattern here?
No, I don't either.
***
Anoka Faruqee at Koenig & Clinton Gallery
Vija Clemens at Matthew Marks Gallery
Jennifer Coates at Freight + Volume Gallery
Leonhard Hurzlmeier at Rachel Uffner Gallery
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