Michael and his Tricycle

Michael is a dreamer. Some young boys want to be firemen, or cowboys; Michael wanted to be a world class cyclist. This dream began when Michael was only three. While he watched television, he saw something that made him dream big. Michael saw on the television an amazing group of men, racing down a hill on something that Michael had never seen before because he was just three. Michael loved his toy cars and the machine that he saw on the television with men going fast down a hill was a little like a car but it was not. It had wheels and went down the road, fast, very fast, but this was something different and new. This machine had two wheels, not four, and, like a car, went fast, very fast. It was the speed that really caught Michael’s attention. This made Michael very excited. Michael had a new dream now, to be like one of these men, speeding down a hill with the world flying by him. He asked what that amazing machine was and his parents told him it was called a bicycle.
It was only a few weeks before Christmas and all that Michael could think about was what he asked, and asked and asked for- a bicycle like the one he saw on the television. Then he could go as fast as the men he saw on the TV. When Christmas morning came, racing downstairs to see what Santa had brought them, who do you think was first to see his presents. Michael because Michael ran fast, as fast as he could down the stairs, knowing that when he got there he would see that wonderful new shiny bicycle that would let him fly down the hill like the men he saw on the television. But, when Michael went into the living room, he saw something that looked a little like the bicycle, but it definitely was not like the one he had seen on TV.
What Michael found next to the Christmas tree had three wheels, not two; it was the same color as the one he saw on TV, had a handle like the one on the TV, but it had three wheels! Michael was confused. How could he go fast on that? Michael started to cry. He had wanted to be that man so much, to feel what he felt, and to go fast. Michael did not want to even look at this “thing”, which was definitely NOT a bicycle. His parents called it a tricycle and Michael did not like what Santa had brought him.
Day after day, the tricycle sat outside the back door. Michael became, day by day, little by little more and more curious till one day Michael thought he would look closer at the “thing” brought by Santa. He looked closely at it, the three wheels, the red frame, the shiny handle bars; Michael started to like his new present from Santa. His heart started to pump a little faster and then faster still. Faster till he touched the handle bars, then grabbed them, and as he grabbed those strong handle bars, he threw his leg over the seat and get on the new tricycle.
The first thing Michael saw, like the man on TV, was that his legs were long enough to turn the pedals. Then he noticed his arms reached to the handle bars like the man on the television. Maybe this tricycle was not such a bad thing after all. Michael suddenly had an exciting thought. “Maybe, maybe, with three wheels I can go even faster” he said to himself! He called to his mother to see if she would let him drive along the sidewalk. He did not even notice that because it had three wheels he did not have to learn how to ride this tricycle, but suddenly he felt his dream might come true!
Michael started slowly and then peddled harder and then harder and even harder till he felt the wind on his face, saw the world go by and he felt he WAS that man on the TV! But for Michael, he thought he could go even faster. He had THREE wheels, not two! He did not know that the next year he would get a two wheeled bicycle with training wheels. The year after that the training wheels would be gone. Who knows, maybe someday Michael really will race down the hill with the world flying by him, going fast, very fast.

A World Without Art
The concept seems frightening when it is considered. What would the world be like without art? What would the world be like without music, without film and other media, without literature? Yes, this would be frightful, a desert. This is not simply rhetoric, but a reality which is averted by artists who are responsible for making the world vibrant, cultural, colorful, interesting, enjoyable as well as provocative, meaningful, insightful and interesting.
When the artist is not patronized, what is the result? The result is that society falls short of where it could be- a place where free expression is allowed to prosper and grow. The world is not only beautified but new ideas are allowed to cultivate and challenge norms; in short…progression. The arts allow a society to progress through painting, sculpture, video, song, performance, film, all creating a dialogue, a forum by which those whose calling it is to be an artist might be understood and heard while making life worth living, through beauty.
When a community gravitates around a few select “celebrity” artists who are revered and paid mass sums, where do others, countless others with as much to say through their art as their abundance of talent, find an outlet where their art might be seen and “heard?”
Sadly, in most communities this is the case. There is a monopoly on art by the few and a recession for many. This by no means implies that those monopolists are anything greater than the others, they are not. Art may be compared to a corporation where the “giants” leave main street deserted. In our community there are giants and they need not be mentioned as they are so well known. But as galleries such as OneTen are faced with closure and the spectrum of quality art is ignored as degenerate, there is something wrong with this situation.
The exhibition, “A World Without Art” was created to challenge the thinking of a community who sees little or no value in art aside from that which they are accustomed to and feel comfortable with. This show is a pro-active statement against such norms in our community. It is an opportunity where many artists have been given the chance to say what they think about the inequality which is the art world in our town. We will not sit lazily around and complain, but show the population of this area that there is more out there, there are more artists worth considering than the few that monopolize the attention and revenue which could be more evenly dispersed…if only the public is willing to stop, consider and think!
Much time and talent has gone into this exhibition, placed directly on Center Street in stores that have closed down due to similar circumstances. Many members of the community pass by this location every day. Many will notice it, and sadly many will not take even take a first look. Regardless, this is an opportunity for those who have worked on the show, artists with much talent and creativity who center their lives around art, live and breathe by it, to show what they can do. This is not fantasy art or fairy tale art which belongs in children’s books, or art that should be used for religious purposes.
To patronize such art is fine, but don’t stop there! There is more to see, more to think about and experience. If the world were left only with the Walmarts of the art world, people might stop and realize what they have missed out on. If the world was left without art, it would cease to be.

The current exhibition at the Salt Lake City Art Center: “Printmaking by Four American Masters- Pop Art through the End of the Century” combines collage, drawings and painting from four exceptional and ground-breaking artists: Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Brice Marden, and Tony Fitzpatrick in four narrative cycles of prints. Each cycle is unique in character and poignancy of form and meaning, representing each artist’s approach to their medium and their approach to their subject matter within a narrative cycle.
Brice Marden’s prints, “Ten Day Series 1971” has arguably the least representational subject matter, yet is charged in content. Marden’s prints are highly minimal, exploring the relationships between space, shape and color. The pieces work together and not individually. One may categorize the works into shape- rectangular or square, and how Marden approaches the spaces within the forms using color. The profundity of his approach is how he contrasts the shapes and the spaces within the shapes using variations of shade: white, grey or black, and the nuances, brought out by these. A harmonious whole in the cycle is achieved which gives an ethereal and contemplative effect to the narrative.
Frank Stella, a pioneer of Minimalism, steps outside of his roots in his narrative cycle “Had Gadya: A Response to Yiddish Passover Song, 1982-84.” These lithographs focus on form and color, each substantiating the other in unified compositions. Unlike Marden, these works are highly expressionistic, uniting recognizable geometric shapes in the style of Leger, and colorful abstractions similar to that of De Kooning. The product is a Modernist use of shape and color to create a flat plane through juxtapositions. Each has its own unique palate of color and form, which gives holistic cohesion to the individual work and together as a narrative a homogenous whole.
Tony Fitzpatrick’s ‘Infinite Wager’ is a more capricious cycle, using a multiplicity of visual puns- iconography of playing cards, astrological symbols, tarot cards, etc., in a collage-like manner creating unique compositions: “Moth of Clubs”, “The King of the Penny Poker”, etc., incorporated into a cycle, which is purely banal or high art. It is the nature of his collage (visual puns) and their relationships within the cycle that makes this high art.
Certainly the ultimate usurper of the everyday to fine art was Andy Warhol. The exhibition shows the silk-screen prints of the artist’s, not merely a pastiche of his work, but a specific cycle documenting prominent Jews from the twentieth-century. Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Gertrude Stein, Golda Meir, Franz Kafka are but a few. This is the ultimate example in the exhibit of the strength of the cycle, here not only formal but ideological. Warhol, unlike many of his other recognizable works gives each individual portrait a varied, skewed and quilt-like coloring, each unique and seemingly fit to the individual. For example the Kafka portrait has fields of varied blues with a flash of yellow, where as the Stein portrait incorporates softer, pastel fields of hue.
The exhibition is one worth seeing, not merely for the purposes of viewing great artists such as Warhol or a Stella, but to examine and appreciate how each artist approaches a unique concept within a narrative context, and how the relationships of prints in the cycle are articulated. The strength of each can be seen and all may be appreciated as each are considered.

Garrett Adkinson
Sometimes art pieces speak to the viewer. Sometimes you speak to them. Here, in Garrett Adkinson’s exhibit there is a dramatic tension as the art object and the observer are faced one with another. In a manner like Rauchenberg whom has been an influence in Adkinson's work, art as object is placed here in a certain rawness which begs its “artness” to be recognized. It seems that through the density of the leather “canvas” the “artness” from within is pushing itself, thrusts itself, forces itself through the medium, towards the viewer who is left to accept or reject the object. This is a limited proximity whose density pushes and thrusts the limit from the space which it occupies. The uniformness of the cycle of analogous objects, all with like dimension and structure, yet each with its own unique sense of “voice” as it pushes from within, gives the nature of the objects an individuality with sensuousness of that working from within. Only by the amorphous smudges of paint on the exterior of the forms does the viewer reconcile that this is merely a lifeless piece of art.

Brandy Gunnell
Rarely in this cluttered world do we have the opportunity to stop and see a life which is truly uninhabited- an existential experience where spaces we are so used to from day to day without much noticing them, show us what they would be without us. In Brandy Gunnell’s cycle and video, we find one analogous form, a construction of smaller pyramids, together forming a larger-itself a reference to life gone by, history, man extinct. This structure is cannily placed in a laundry mat, a parking garage, a library, a corridor, but this is not Richard Estes’ humanless world, this is more stark and uncanny. This is life which not only is devoid of humans, but so empty, so long since past, that there is a sense of something like you feel at the end of “planet of the Apes”. Only in the video do we find some forms of life- a statue of the virgin, a praying mantis, a cobra- all images of a mystical nature which add an eerie quality to the evocation of memory and loss. Maybe one could discern from all of this the impermanence which we all share.

Sri Whipple
If you were to combine Barnum and Baily with Xaviera Hollander, you would find a very sterile version that what we find in Sri Whipple. Whipple graduated in Fine Arts at the university of Utah and has proven himself to be one of the most imaginative minds to come from that institution. A few words come to mind when viewing his work, and, let it be stated first: pornographic is not one of them because it is not. Thoughts running through my head as I was lured into these images: comical nightmare, gloriously garish, teasing but overtly sensual, graceful corporeal shapes, Disney meets Henry Fuseli, Minnie and Micky on crack! Lyrical and confrontational. There is no simple way to define Whipple’s work and his lucid imagination, but he confronts, compels, provokes, even defies (as in the overtly sexual use of Jean Fouquet’s more subtle treatment of his Madonna). His forms are undefinable, something of a Heironomous Bosh grotesque for the millennium. But however you find this display, you just might be dazzled by a luscious display of some other world which Whipple has created for us which entertains and provokes and is not easily forgotten.

The work of Frida Kahlo, artist from Mexico who is known as a surrealist, through her life-long relationship with Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and her tendency to express her inner turmoil through self portraits which are highly symbolic, has only been popularized in the last ten years. Since then, her image is seen frequently- commercially and through a mass of contemporary literature which attempts to make sense of an artist whose art is as complex as her personality- and in large measure- due to it.
Kahlo, although having lived in Paris and worked with Duchamp and Breton, did not consider herself surrealist . She inherited surrealist associations from the dream like symbolism she used although she states “I never painted my dreams, I painted my reality”. She has publically given little importance to her own art although Rivera consistently supported it and asserted its value and importance as modern art.

Kahlo’s work has a general resemblance to Mexican folk art- in particular, a resemblance to small votive pictures known as retables which devout Catholics consider sacred in their churches. More than that, much of her imagery mirrors traditional Madonnas revered since the middle ages. Like the Madonna images which are frequently eluded to, Kahlo’s images are highly iconic- frontal, formal, serene, reverent, confrontational. More so she is an icon herself -timeless and monumental. She is stoic in expressing the inexpressible- her inner battles due in part to a bus accident which impaired her for life, her intense relationship with Rivera, her status as a Mexican artist, and as a woman. Kahlo is as much a work of art, herself, as her paintings.
However, beyond the symbolism exposing her struggles, beyond the iconic images that have become so familiar contemporaneously- especially to women- we know remarkably little about the “real” Frida Kahlo. Not the tragic Mexican icon in the shadow of Rivera, but thoughts she had, the emotions she experienced, her passions, her desires, her weaknesses. We know about her suffering well from her work, but who was this human being who suffered so greatly and worked so profoundly?
The exhibit “Her Spirit is Stronger than angels: Frida Kahlo Though the lens of Nicolas Muray”, unlocks mystery, reveals another side of Kahlo, through a candid relationship and intimacy which Kahlo and Muray shared, which we, as her audience, hitherto have seen none of in her works. Nicolas Muray, Hungarian, came to America in 1913 to train as a photographer, opened a studio in Greemwich Village, New York City, and through his relationship with artist Miguel Covarrubias, met Kahlo in 1931 and began a relationship that would last a decade.
Twenty-four photographs (some displayed in the United Sates for the first time), intimate letters, as well as pre-Columbian artifacts displayed in glass cases, which appear in some of the photos ( a passion of Kahlos) compose the exhibit. We see photographs which range from several black and whites, some snap shot style, and some more formal. These formal ones, which allow the viewer to see Muray’s virtuosity as a photographer, have a technical execution which is astounding. They are pure, bold and bright- deep colors and contrasts which reflect the vibrancy of Mexico in Frida’s clothing, and there is a clarity which makes her eyes and skin radiate.
They look fresh and new, but the remarkable aspect of this exhibit, these photos, is that these images are seen through the eyes of Muray, someone she knew, trusted, confided in- loved: not some faceless nameless audience. Three of the most technically remarkable images: “Frida with Hand Earrings”, “Frida with Pink and Green Blouse”, “Frida with Blue Satin Blouse”, offer a glimpse of the woman, real and human who has humor, inquisitiveness, vulnerability, coyness, sensitivity, and who is as vibrant as her own country.
Through these images of Frida seen through Muray’s eyes we see someone very human, laughing, emotional, bold, sensitive, sincere, loving, and more honest than we have ever seen her. For one moment, we see her as she lets down her shroud of the tragic figure and she is exposed in all her wonderful vicissitudes, her liveliness and her humanity.

“Nick
I love you like I would an angel
You are a lillie of the valley in my life
I will never forget you, never, never
You are my whole life
I hope you will never forget this
Frida”
May 31, 1931

With the name Rembrandt van Rijn mentioned, certain connotations come to mind: “stuffy old master”, “someone from long ago with little or no importance”, “someone whose paintings are worth more than a 747.” Some may be familiar with his famous use of strong contrasts of light and dark (tenebrism), his mastery at portraits, maybe the Night Watch comes to mind or some other painting not given much attention to in an old gallery on a trip to some city in Europe. But most who know the name Rembrandt do not attach much importance to him and the works he created 350 years ago as relevant to society today. But maybe that doesn’t have to be so.
The LDS Church Art History Museum is running a show displaying 46 various small etchings completed by the artist at certain points in his career, gathered from the museum’s own collection, those at BYU and private lenders; etchings of a religious nature (something not common to the artist as he was a Dutch Protestant and the Protestants were adverse to images of a religious nature). But, as the exhibit reveals to us, these delightful pieces were near and dear to the artist and he created them regardless of the iconoclasism in Holland and represented his deep spirituality. They, despite their minuscule size, have a power and a simplicity and convey a full range of Rembrandt’s talents and a sensitivity which (arguably), is not as apparent in his larger works. There is much which can be learned by a careful viewing of these etching, reduced in their elements, and done at a more rudimentary level and because of this at times Rembrandt’s techniques are even more apparent in this simplicity.
As we have mentioned, tenebrism was something Rembrandt has been associated with throughout history (something seen earlier and probably influenced by Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio), but we can see it vividly here in the etchings, in the flourish of line and the quickness of handling. There is a full range of light and dark that we quickly become used to as we proceed throughout the exhibit. We see light emanating from Christ, divine light from above, natural lighting, lamps, candles, but what we do learn quickly is that Rembrandt’s use of lighting is not arbitrary. It is used symbolically. In the larger etching Christ on the Cross, there is a stark contrast between those figures on the right- Mary, the Magdalen, John the Baptist- bathed in light....those on the left- the Romans, Judas, etc., are cloaked in darkness. Such examples abound throughout the exhibit.
Something further which this exhibit is exceptional in revealing are the subsidiary figures. There are complicated groupings of figures such as peasants, merchants, beggars, old women, children, townspeople, etc., but all are done cursorily in a way (such as the Presentation at the Temple) which captures their simplicity, sensitivity, expression and pathos. More remarkable is the individuality with which these figures, in crowds, groups, literally thrown on top of each other, are given. The 21st century viewer may take this for granted, but in the early 1600's the idea of individuality in society, contrary to the general masses of the middle ages, was coming into being and Rembrandt’s treatment here is remarkable in this respect.
A small etching 3/4 of the way through the exhibit seems to capture what these etchings are about- the potency, the spirituality, the essence of these objects of veneration. This is a self portrait by Rembrandt. We see a man, unsure, humble, clothed in the garments of his century, whose treatment, like the other 45 etchings, handled with such sensitivity and care, invites us, like the other countless figures we have seen in the exhibit, to look closer, and we find a man whose deep pathos, spirituality and vision, gives our soul a bit of a boost. And we leave the exhibit into the open sunshine, back to our 21st century world, with a bit of gladness in our hearts and a little more air beneath our feet.

Bill Viola: Ascension

Bill Viola is not only one of the great video artists of our day but one of the truly great artists of our day. His installation at the Salt Lake City Art Center: “Ascension”, is an exhibition, while combining all of its elements, is not merely comprehensive or analytic but a true holistic experience. In Viola’s case, it is an experience into consciousness, both the conscious and the subconscious. In Viola’s words, these image “wash over you”, and the subject is “revealed on an unconscious level.” Bill Viola’s installation is a timeless narrative.
As one sits in the dark room, the first activity on the large video screen, out of the blackness is a cool blue followed by an underwater scene, not easily identifiable until the sudden plunge of a body from above shatters the darkness- immediately the screen is filled with a figure and a multitude of crystalline bubbles as the surface is broken.
Along with this anonymous figure, the viewer is drawn into this subterranean world, of sights and sounds. There is a serene quiet yet there are subtleties in sound produced in this underwater world, which lends an existential sensibility. We share the space along with this motionless figure, static and transcendent of his surroundings with no distraction than his suddenly felt self-conscious self. The figure seems almost comatose yet one feels the life, which he emanates in this environment.
There is no breath, no movement, and the viewer finds themselves at harmony with this body as he sinks slowly, watching this being sinking deeper into the darkness. The figure, in a cocoon of the crystalline bubbles of crisp light and incandescent blue, ascends once more, not breaking the surface, and then once again descends slowly to the unknown.
He is motionless yet he and we are in a state of flux. Temporality is suspended, yet not temporality of mind. The figure once again ascends to the top of the plane, never encroaching beyond the limits dividing the outside world, and then begins the final descent, ostensibly towards the subconscious. Slowly, with some anxiety from the viewer, the figure transgresses the depths and sinks from sight, below the frame of the imagery.
The viewer is left with an uncanny absence and recognition of their own consciousness- either conscious or subconscious. The frame is phased out and the viewer finds themselves, with neither surface nor depth, with the vague blue that initiated the sequence…and then blackness. The journey is complete and the viewer is left to pure contemplation.
Viola’s exposition is complete, but the viewer must ask, “What is the title ‘Ascension’ to mean? Certainly the figure descended into the abyss.” It may be that Viola’s inquiry is not to explore that, which we descend to on a conscious level, but that to which we ascend to on a subconscious one.