4,000 artists applied to be in the semi-open call “Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” but not me—I didn’t like their condescending tone.
Artists were invited to send one image and fill out a questionnaire designed to bring out their diversity.
And then, how long does it take to look at 4,000 images if you spend only 30 seconds on each one? Around 33 hours—a prodigious feat! And yet not a good way to curate a show.
Of the 216 artists chosen a third (72) were pre-selected by the curators. 144 were chosen by open call. So a 3.6% chance. The wall information trumpets how proud we should be that Brooklyn has so many artists. I suppose most artists wish there were fewer and maybe everybody else does too. But here we are—there must be some reason so many people want to be artists.
Signifying is a bore and the experience of looking at single works hung higgledy-piggledy is mind-numbing. Still, here are a few that made me look and all are artists with whom I was not familiar.
I’m delighted by Longing… The point of view is artfully constructed; shades of Ucello! In the immediate foreground, two children, one of whom we see just the feet and legs and an arm holding a skewer of marshmallows, the other tiny child—we are looking straight down on the top of her head as she holds the marshmallows to the fire. Two feral pigs are at their feet. I’m alarmed by this, pigs might really like marshmallows! Yet the boy in the middle ground is smiling and the adults in the background are chatting unworried. In the further distance, a river and the other side of the river. Every part of this painting is worth looking at individually; the fire swirls, so do the pigs and the palm and the river, there are many circular paths. This painting swings.
I was surprised by how long Popeye held my attention so I looked at Allen’s website. It is from a series of painted-over collages he made using Popeye comics that his troubled brother obsessively collected and is an attempt to understand the unfathomable pain of his brother’s condition. It is obsessively layered too. At first it appears to be a city, then a storage facility, then maybe? — a brain.
I was reminded of the question: Can the mind understand the brain?
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.” Emerson Pugh.
(Here is the hilarious AI answer:
“Yes, the mind can understand the brain, but the relationship between the two is complex and still being studied.”)
Allen proves that it is worth trying though.
In the city…contains many tiny landscapes that evoke a world of half- forgotten and half-understood memories, mysteries, fairy tales and fears. It has the immediacy of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist… and Robert Louis Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage:
“Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!”
There is an adult pain too—the dress is old and the edges are burnt. What happened at the birthday party? I think of the children in Gaza, the Ukraine and other places. Painful to look at and painful to look away.
Holding Spaces…fascinates. Joseph has appropriated cultural objects and familiar spaces: in this painting a den or living room. The objects are outlined and empty; it is the space around them that is defined.
This is how Joseph describes his work:
“The appropriated sources provide associative triggers and points of reorientation as they invoke dichotomies, interdependencies, and intrigue beyond the objects themselves. I seek to foster ‘subliminal reconciliation’ within viewers as they probe and parse the formal conundrums and contextual ambiguities I intertwine.”
I am confused by the idea of appropriation—all artists borrow and steal and share ideas from whatever they happen to see both consciously and unconsciously. Not all artists “make it their own” (the definition of appropriate) and that includes artists that are from the culture they are borrowing from.
Ligaya Mishan* has written the best article I have seen about the subject in The New York Times. (see below)
One thing she mentions is the idea that sources are not always attributed.
And as Max Lakin* described The Brooklyn Artists Show: “a disjointed, formless dip into very recent contemporary art that varies widely in discipline and makes no attempt to say anything that hasn’t been said elsewhere.”
And yet as I have looked into the artist’s statements, I see no acknowledgements of influences: artists from the past, teachers, artist friends—they seem to think they are working alone, possibly their main interest is in “expressing themselves,” whatever that means.
Last Wednesday was one of the worst days in American history, comparable in my mind to 9/11—do you remember how everybody was talking to each other in the following days? I was riding on the G train and was sorely tempted while exiting the car, to yell “Put down your fucking phones, you idiots!”
—CNQ
What Does Cultural Appropriation Really Mean?
By Ligaya Mishan, NYT, Sept. 30, 2022
Brooklyn’s Strivers and Those a Museum Spurned
Max Lakin, NYT Published Oct. 30, 2024Updated Nov. 3, 2024
Robert Louis Stevenson “From a Railway Carriage”