Life Imitating Art Imitating Life

Sixty years ago art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that Jackson Pollock had “transformed painting into an existential drama” in which "what was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Pollock’s seminal painting “Mural” arrived in Des Moines earlier this month as both big event and existential drama in this, the 100th anniversary of Pollock’s birth.

To celebrate Iowa’s prime spot in the art world, Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) invited members to a pre-launch party for the unveiling of “Mural,” which is on sabbatical from the University of Iowa floodplain. Over 500 people returned RSVP’s. Many more showed up as super star art patrons John and Mary Pappajohn hosted the bona fide gala. Three cops patrolled the parking lots. Cars were parked all the way to the old Science Center. Shrimp were super sized and booze was top shelf.

Pollock was an All American cultural meteor on a crash course with destiny in real life and myth. He was born in Cody, Wyoming, a town named after Buffalo Bill whose life and mythology resembled Pollock’s in many ways. Expelled from two high schools, Pollock tagged along on surveying missions with his father to Native American reservations. A long time alcoholic, he coped with his addiction through Jungian therapy but died at age 44. Before his final fatal fling with drunken driving, Pollock also stole Abstract Expressionism from the Germans, remodeled it in epic proportions, Americanized it by synthesizing Navajo sand paintings with Jungian motifs, and shifted the axis of the art world from Paris to New York City. Those are just the non controversial highlights of his legacy.

“Mural” is usually considered the work that jump started all that transformational art stuff. DMAC Director Jeff Fleming explained. “It changed the way Americans painted pictures and in turn changed the way that western visual culture operated after World War II. A part of that was in its scale. In contradiction to easel sized painting, it was on a grand scale, full of energy, vitality and emotion. It changed what painting could be, particularly what American painting could be. And this is the painting that started all that,” he said. University of Iowa President Sally Mason focused on encouraging DMAC patrons to oppose any legislative moves to sell the painting to raise money for scholarships, or new buildings.

“Mural” is estimated to be worth around $150 million. The proposal to sell it (publicly articulated by Michael Gartner who is both a former President of the Iowa Board of Regents and an owner of this newspaper’s parent company) has garnered enough support to worry many folks who attended the Pollock party.

Everyone speaking at the gala seemed rather passionate about keeping “Mural” in Iowa, for several reasons: The painting was given to the university in large part to recognize the incredible talent that made its art school famous, including Grant Wood and Philip Guston; The University pioneered the concept of making painters into teachers; Pollock’s parents grew up in Iowa; The painting is a Hawkeye heirloom.

Art Touts

A retrospective of paintings by Byron Burford plays at Olson-Larsen Galleries through May 26. Burford came to the University of Iowa to study with Grant Wood. He left only to serve in World War II, teaching several generations of grateful students. Jazz and the circus motifs show off his lyrical perspective of 20th century America… Chris Vance, Des Moines’ most collected painter, is featured at Moberg Gallery through May 11. His paintings have been selling so briskly that this entire show might be re-hung with new works before it’s over… Former University of Iowa art school icons Mauricio Lasansky and Elizabeth Catlett died in April, just days apart from each other, and each just weeks one side or the other from their 97th birthdays.

Des Moines arts - a 25 years review

Twenty five years ago I became an arts writer, accidentally. I published a whimsical editorial (“I’ve seen the future of the arts - it looks like baseball”) in The Washington International Arts Letter (WIAL). That publication was the main guide for information about funding in the arts before the internet rendered it obsolete. My piece proposed that symphonies, operas, art museums, ballets and such would all benefit by adopting the structure of baseball’s farm system. Des Moines’ arts organization could become AAA affiliates of Chicago‘s, tutoring young prospects while increasing the marketing clout of both.

Arts non profits were becoming desperate back then. Attendance was down and so was earned income as a percentage of operating budgets. Their devoted fans and donors were aging and younger generations cared more about sports, rock bands and Broadway shows. In that climate, my idea was taken seriously. It was republished in major newspapers around the country. I was invited to speak at arts seminars and to become editor of the WIAL.

My fifteen minutes lasted less than a year. The farm system analogy sounded good in theory but died hopelessly in the real world, where unions and insurers squashed it. I continued writing about the arts for a quarter century. These were the biggest agents of change that I noticed:

Big corporate donors reorganized the way money was distributed to non profits by putting marketing departments in charge of those decisions. They demanded quid pro quo, so non profits had to convince donors that they were getting some positive return. This led to silly things like naming rights for drinking fountains and toilets, but also to far more educational services. Those programs and events recruited a future fan base and earned income rose.

Robert Maplethorpe and Andres Serrano offended social conservatives with erotic and profane art that had indirectly received grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This led to the creation of new levels of bureaucracy, both public and private, to build walls between big donors and ultimate consequences of their largess. The Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs was our state version, BRAVO and Greater Des Moines Music Coalition (DMMC) regional ones, Metro Arts Alliance a civic one.

Sociologist Richard Florida published “Rise of the Creative Class” in 2002. He theorized that successful cities of the future must pander to a new class of workers who hate suburban sprawl and love bike trails, sports arenas, skate board ramps, historic old buildings, cheap rent, trendy cafés & boutiques, multiculturalism, and, above all, a lively contemporary music scene. Florida’s theories were discredited soon after they were published - his ten “most creative cities” barely created more jobs than his “ten least creative cities.” It didn’t matter, every town was afraid they‘d be left behind if they didn‘t build to Florida‘s models. Iowa hired him in 2005 to brand its Great Places program. Every seminar or focus group I attended the last decade was filled with drinkers of Florida Kool-Aid. Most artists and arts organization seeking grant money claimed to be an essential part of the Florida vision. Des Moines’ creative class - of administrators - grew again.

More interesting work was done by impresarios doing business the old fashioned way - making money by developing talent. A lively music scene arose here because club and bar owners took risks that live music, from near and far, would pay off. New gallery owners and art makers (Sticks) gave young artists a place to test the market for their talent. Some developed farm system-like alliances with galleries in Chicago, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

The role these people played has been underestimated, at least by the administrative class. Last month, a DMMO awards ceremony honored a marketing administrator, a board member, a band leader, a radio personality and a guitar maker but presented nothing to any promoter, club or bar owner. Those people made it possible for musicians to make a living here, rather than leaving town. I doubt any of them ever read Richard Florida.

You can take the boy out of the mountains…

Miguel Angel Rios grew up in Argentina’s Calchaqui Valley of Catamarca. Wielding boleadores like an experienced gaucho, he became an expert hunter by the age of 10.

“We would chase wild burros and ostriches for sport. They were experts at running through sand dunes, so we would chase them until my father sensed they were tired. Then he would look at me to signal to move in and lasso them. I was also expert at the slingshot. (Partridges) would fly in straight lines so we would chase them to the river, then line up to take shots where our dogs could retrieve them,” he recalled.

Rios left the Andes to attend the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires and to teach at the National University of Buenos Aires. Then the mountains called him home to a job at the National University of Tucuman until, at age 30, he had an epiphany.

“I realized I wanted to be an artist, not an art professor. I had to leave the Andes to do that. So I moved to New York City,” he confessed.

Artistically, Rios never left. All his work, from early collages about colonialism to his latest videos have been rooted in Andean wistfulness.

“Because of where I come from, I work with wide open spaces, not walled in spaces like Europeans. That makes sense - Catamarca is larger than Spain,” Rios explained.

Curator Gilbert Vicario titled Rios’ current Des Moines Art Center exhibition “Walkabout,” after Nicolas Roeg’s film.

“In that film, Australian school children become lost in the desert and are rescued by an aborigine boy on his walkabout. Miguel’s work provides similar guidance, to cultures that have been spiritually lost since 9-11,” Vicario explained.

In “Rooom, Rooom” Rios returns to Catamarca to observe the slings of boleadores, some wielded by his childhood friends and their offspring.

We observe only their shadows, dramatically elongated by filming at sunrise and sunset. The sound of the slings mesmerizes a black and white world, like the songlines of an aboriginal walkabout. Three videos provide the exhibition’s focus. They employ wide open spaces, and South American sports, to scrutinize human attraction to both spirituality and violence.
In “Ni me busques…No me encuentras” (Don’t look for me, you won’t find me), Rios and his cinematographer take an hallucinogenic voyage on peyote through a Mexican desert. After observing a seven piece band and escaping a train, the artist enters an adode house like the one he grew up in. He hears “the sound of my mother baking bread” before the house divides itself elusively.

“Mecha” (Fuse) observes the game “tejos,” popular in the barrios of Bogota. To an Iowan’s eyes, it looks like bocce ball with bombs. Courts are walled off within empty factories, then youthful players toss specially constructed balls at clay tablets, some of which explode when their gunpowder fuses are hit.

We never see people, just running legs and throwing arms. Explosions are beautiful in slow motion. Continuous action becomes an allegory for war lust. Hand held cameras transmit the point of view of war journalists in combat. An accompanying cutout paper drawing appears to be an abstraction until one sees that all its shapes are gun barrels.

Rios admits a nostalgic attachment to the works in the show. “I have always felt a longing guilt for leaving,” he confessed. “Walkabout” plays at the Art Center till April 22 and moves to Museo de Art Carillo Gil in Mexico City in September.

Touts

Michael Watson’s “Familiar Faces,” at Fluxx Gallery, includes 100 portraits… Yoshitomo Nara’s “White Ghost” in Pappajohn Sculpture Park was named a “Top 20 Acquisition of 2011” in Antiques and Fine Arts… Dario Robleto’s exhibition at Des Moines Art Center was named “Top 2011 Exhibition New Yorkers Won’t See” by Guernica.

The Art of 2011

A Year of Unexpected Strangeness

“The unexpected strangeness of the moment.” Artist Dario Robleto used those words to explain the qualities he sought in his art, exhibited in the Des Moines Art Center’s (DMAC) “Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens.” His phrase works just as well though as an explanation of the year 2011 in Des Moines’ art scene. It was a year in which unexpected media such as dirt, projected light and neon often stood in for paints, when green eggs and lasers became sculpture, when worldly artists like Bill Luchsinger unexpectedly turned their visions upon local subjects, and when Stephanie Brunia’s girls in white underwear, Tom Jackson’s children with guns and Jeremiah Elebl’s decapitated humans became subjects of exceptional exhibitions.

The year ended with an unexpectedly strange controversy. Half a century after Andy Warhol placed low culture’s signage (Campbell‘s) on the walls of high culture’s grandest palaces, local paragons of elite culture raised a public fuss about Subway’s signage on Subway’s own venues, at least when they were visible from the perspectives of high culture. Still excellence stood out amidst the strangeness:

Artist of the Year - Sarah Grant’s exhibition at Olson-Larsen demonstrated a new clarity, as if the artist simply intuited when less had become more. Her new work was also more narrative and less abstract than in past years. A ten year retrospective of Paintpushers, almost all artists who were recruited here and employed by Grant, further demonstrated her extraordinary influence on the city’s entire art scene.

People of the Year - TJ and Jackie Moberg nearly doubled the number of artists in their Moberg Gallery stable, salvaged the defunct Art Store’s inventory, saved all the jobs of that company’s employees, opened Moberg Framing, Moberg Editions (an online gallery selling inexpensive art) and Moberg Consultations (a full service firm that directs clients from design to installation of artworks). TJ also worked on a major installation at Prairie Meadows.

Painter of the Year - Matthew Kluber’s series of abstract “paintings” in his DMAC exhibition fused color, line, digital formations, and projected light to create dramatic visual spaces that embraced new technologies.

Exhibition of the Year (museum) - German Anselm Reyle’s exhibition at DMAC introduced Iowans to the contemporary German scene, where in the artist’s words “Cologne is the past. Berlin is the future.” Chrome, bronze, piano lacquer, plinth, aluminum, glass, neon, electric cables, rust, plastic, LED lights, and wood veneer hung out with more traditional Modernist media.

Exhibition of the Year (gallery) - Travis Rice’s “Contamination” became the largest one person show ever at Moberg, taking up the entire gallery plus an outdoor wall. It was inspired by a sci fi film was about alcoholism, green eggs and coffee, in which the green eggs plotted to take over the world.

Exhibition of the Year (non-traditional venue) - “Jeremiah Elbel” at Mars Coffeehouse exhibited a monstrously talented young artist’s black and white, tar and charcoal portraits of decapitated humans - some Mexican drug war victims, some victims of Islamic terrorists, others of Shari'a, or French law.

Design of the Year - InVision’s two story, glass and steel addition to the Iowa State Veterinary Teaching Hospital glowed like a sanctuary on a storm-plagued prairie. It finally presented a coming home platform for Christian Peterson’s iconic statue “The Good Doctor.”

New Artist of the Year - Madai Taylor painted with earth, red dirt of the South and black loam of Iowa, mixed with gesso. That paint was applied in layers on which he scratched while they were drying, much like the plows of agriculture scratch at the same dirt in its natural environment. He process becomes a unique form of shorthand - a primitive scripture.

Rising Star - Stephanie Brunia, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, became DMAC curator Gilbert Vicario’s latest discovery. That museum showed a series of her prints that mimicked classics like Leonardo‘s “The Last Supper,” Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” and John Everette Millais’ “Ophelia” with decidedly modern, edgy takes of young girls in white underwear.

Sarah Grant

Des Moines’ Art Mama

Sarah Grant is the mother of Des Moines‘ ar scene. More than any person, agency or organization, she gave birth to it, bestowed an identity on it and nurtured its growth. When Grant started Sticks in 1985, as a one person studio, committed artists in Des Moines had to choose whether they wanted to be artists, or to live here. Her company let them do both, by giving full time jobs to some 100 artists at a time. They formed the creative core that snowballed into a legitimate art scene. Sticks makes furniture and art that is now sold in fine galleries and art museums all over the country. Its design work has become as recognizable as an icon, making it easy for tourists from Des Moines to spot it in Los Angeles or New York and feel some local pride.

Grant’s personal art career is also best known in large scale. She constructed, with Michigan architect Stephen Fry, a 30,000 pound kitchen table atop downtown Grand Rapids’ Blue Bridge.

Her giant murals “What I Love About Iowa State,” “We Shall Know Iowa State University by Its Myriad Parts,” and “My World Is So Full of Many Things,” grace Iowa State’s campus. She won an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Grant has also chronicled her emotional life in abstract paintings. Her annual shows at Olson-Larsen Galleries have been distinguished by moody colors that have made her fans either happy or sad for her. Whether dark or sunny, Grant’s paintings have always been characterized by heavy layering. Even in gay years, they revealed a compulsiveness that almost seemed penitent. One fan called it “the yin to the carefree yang of Sticks.”

Her current exhibition of new work is remarkably restrained. I’m tempted to say it’s better edited. However, painters don’t have an editor’s luxury of going back and subtracting the superfluous. So it’s more as if Grant has attained a new clarity and now simply intuits when less is more. This year’s work is also more narrative and less abstract. She even pushes narratives with playful Sticks-like titles such as “With Bloodhounds, Band-aids Don’t Work,” “Is It Good News?,” “Four Guys in Sports Coats & Ties.”

Most of the new pieces focus through frames within frames, as if the artist is looking reflectively through windows of perspective. “Just an Old Printmaker,” a painting added to the show at the last minute, is autobiographical. (Grant holds an MFA in intaglio printmaking from the University of Iowa.) It is also the most restrained work in the show. All Grant’s work begins as black on white. This painting adds little additional color and yet makes a most dramatic impact.
This exhibition plays through Nov. 26 along with shows of new works by printmaker Paula Schuette Kraemer and painter Thomas Jewell-Vitale. Kraemer exhibits visual prayers, for nurseries and kennels, that have long distinguished her career. Jewell-Vitale reveals a dramatically different palette within his familiar medium of oil and wax. He deserts his trademark cool colors for a sunny excursion to new emotional territory.

Touts

Paintpushers, a group of past and present Sticks artists, are holding their tenth anniversary retrospective at Heritage Gallery through December 1… Jeremiah Elbel, a Des Moines artist who won England’s Saatchi Prize, is exhibiting in Iowa State University’s Memorial Union Pioneer Room through Dec. 5. An artist reception will be held Nov. 30, 5 p.m. - 8 p.m.… Robyn O’Neil, who rocked the Des Moines Art Center two years ago with her black & white visions of Armageddon, is currently exhibiting a single drawing, “Hell,” which took two years to complete and includes 65,000 characters, at New York City’s Susan Inglett Gallery… Des Moines painter Alex Brown has begun work on next year’s return exhibition at Feature Inc., a renowned New York City gallery. He will show drawings as well as paintings this time and a new, retro style.

In the Details, or Not

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive." Albert Einstein

Houston scientist-artist-disc jockey Dario Robleto hangs out near “the boundaries of life - those strange places where the longest of odds are defied.” There he seeks the world’s oldest living humans, curators for The Guinness Book of World Records, survivors of lightening strikes, and scholars of antiquated medical practices, defiant gardens (built by soldiers in combat zones) and trench art (found object art built during combat). Robleto spends much of each year with scientists who study glaciers, collecting the flotsam of their melting masses - things like cave bear claws and wooly mammoth tusks. He also kicks around with North Sea fishermen, wounded soldiers and admirers of anything bizarre.

“I want to find the unexpected strangeness of a moment,” he explained.
A casual walk through the Des Moines Art Center’s exhibition “Dario Robleto: Survival Does Not Like in the Heavens” might reveal nothing more spectacular than “another Day of the Dead memorial” as one opening night visitor described it. Like Einstein though, Robleto finds his inspiration in slight details. Just consider the media with which he works. In “No One Has Monopoly Over Sorrow,” he built of basket out of the skeletons of human soldiers’ ring fingers, covered with lead from melted bullets. The rest of that piece consisted of shrapnel, waxed dipped bridal bouquets, flowers of human hair that was braided by a a Civil War widow, and fragments of a mourning dress.

In “Defiant Gardens” Robleto used paper he made from letters exchanged between soldiers and their wives or sweethearts, the skeletons of carrier pigeons, carrier pigeon message capsules, dried flowers collected on famous battlefields, mourning dress fabric, bullets and shrapnel, seeds, seashells, silk, gold leaf and glass. Even the small letters folded into carrier pigeons’ message capsules were from actual battlefield correspondences. This work could be mistaken for a funeral wreath, but only before the slight details are perceived. “Some Longings Survive Death” uses 50,000 year old wooly mammoth tusks, hair flowers that intertwined hair of various 19th century lovers with that of mammoths, plus ivory, bone, ribbon and typeset. That work was enshrined in a case made of bocote, an endangered wood.

“The Common Denominator of Existence Is Loss” is the most dramatic piece in the show. A spotlight shines through a showcase, also made of bocote, which holds the paws of cave bear skeletons which have been extinct for 50,000. They are intertwined with human hand skeletons around a braid of audiotape which holds the first human recording in history. Shadows move under the showcase.
Other pieces in the exhibition are considerably more whimsical, mostly sweet parodies of music album covers and historical signs. Everything though is far more than the sum of its extraordinary parts. This exhibition plays through Jan. 15.

At Moberg Gallery, Mary Kline-Misol unveiled her two year series “Awakenings: The Journey from Pain to Empowerment.” Painting portraits of Des Moines’ homeless became therapeutic for Kline-Misol whose husband, artist and surgeon Sinesio Misol, killed himself in 2010. The portraits in this exhibition leave faces poignantly unfinished, missing the fine details in Kline-Misol’s other portrait series (including a pair of Mahatma Gandhi and George Washington Carver that were unveiled last week at World Food Prize headquarters), or even in marvelous head studies of the same subjects included in the Moberg show. Sometimes the devil is in the detail, sometimes in their detachment.

Touts

After a year off, Metro Arts Expo will feature fine art by juried artists from across the United States, Nov. 4 and 5 at Capitol Square… Paintpusher’ s Ten Year Exhibition features 31 current and alumni artists of the influential Des Moines art collective. Through Dec. 1, with a reception Nov. 12… Olson-Larsen Galleries hosts new works by Sarah Grant, Thomas Jewell-Vitale and Paula Shuette-Kraemer, through Nov. 26.

A Sobering September

September is a virtual second Lent for Des Moines’ art scene, a sobering season that follows a Mardi Gras summer filled with big festivals and light entertainments. At the Des Moines Art Center “Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens” takes the Lenten theme to existential lengths. That major show of Texas conceptual artist Dario Robleto opens September 23 to explore longevity and extinction.

Metro Arts Alliance and Des Moines Social Club take the post Mardi Gras theme more literally with “Sweeping Up the Mess” opening this Friday at White Carpet Gallery at Hillyard (4267 109th St., Urbandale). That juried exhibition of painting, sculpture, poetry, and other art forms requires the use of custodial supplies and highlights Iowa’s refugee community. Rex Haussmann, Deb Seeger, Jennifer Rivera, Jason Barr, Katherine O'hara, and Yarn Dawgz will exhibit.

At Moberg Gallery, Thomas Jackson’s “Child’s Play” continues a forty days run providing an ironic look at the ambiguity of American character. For a decade now, Jackson has been composing stacked images that consider a subject from seemingly incongruous points of view. His choice of subjects has been influenced by Robert Frank’s mid - 1950’s series “The Americans.” That work, which reduced 28,000 images into a seminal look at the national character in mid century. Jackson has been trying to do the same thing for the new millennium. While most of his imagery began as a photographic safari, he now translates much of it into paintings and ink brush drawings. His most dramatic painting, “Photo Op,” stands on its own and translates a famous film image of George W. Bush hearing the news of the 9-11 disaster into giant pixels.

The dominant ambiguity of Jackson’s new show stacks images of child’s play with deadly serious stuff like hand guns, violence, sex and advertising. “American Cypher 40” places a doll house under the image of an actual row house that barely looks real. In another, a messed up hotel bed is stacked over another doll house. Clenched teeth of an anxious lady stand above symbolic ruby slippers. Several works use hand guns and rifles juxtaposed with the toys of little boys. Toy trucks collide in one ominous childhood scene while another toy truck graces a dashboard in an eerie dessert. Wedding cake figures of a bride and groom lurk over dancing senior citizens in another. One collage of photographic images compiles roadside attractions that fight for tourists’ attention. This show plays through October 1.

Other area artists have been busy with large public commissions. Frank Hansen’s three story mural on the side of a Des Moines Street building has been turning heads for much of the summer. People love it and people hate it with equal fervor. Des Moines artists Thomas Rosborough and William Barnes won commissions by the Army National Guard and the United States Army Reserve to paint a giant mural in the new Armed Forces Reserve Center in Middletown, Iowa, as part of Iowa’s Art in State Buildings program. Also in that program, Sarah Grant is currently in residence at Iowa State University creating an installation within the atrium of Horticulture Hall, as part of the Horticulture Teaching and Research Greenhouse Complex.

Locally works by William Barnes, Scott Charles Ross and John Preston will be shown at Olson-Larsen Gallery through October 8. New, more whimsical works by Jamie Navarro are on display at Pegasus Gallery, along with large paintings by the late Don Dunagan. Hilde DeBruyne-Verhofste and John Schwatzkopf are showing through at the Polk County Heritage Gallery. An opening reception will be held this Sunday.

Two Iowa artists are showing in America’s first and second cities. Anthony Pontius opened last week in “Shirts & Destroy,” a major group show at Tara Mcphearson’s “The Cotton Candy Machine” Gallery in New York City. Brent Houzenga’s show “Remixed Media” continues at Pawn Works in Chicago.