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Marquis, Myers, and Statom: Picking Up the Pieces, uh, huh, from Genre to
Personality, Objects to Aesthetics
Viewing the amazing glass art show at Maureen Littleton's Gallery, I am
reminded of what a ripe and fertile time we are experiencing right now in
the world of visual arts. Printmaking and photography have shouldered up
alongside drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture as legitimate
mediums. Folk art is drawing significant interest-and gaining significant
standing-because of its "subversive" origins outside of the formal, learned,
commercial and/or institutionalized arts. And the canonical masters continue
to bring record prices in the auctions houses of New York and Paris, while
at the same time, new mediums for expression are rapidly emerging and
attaining status under the formerly elitist but increasingly liberal rubric
known as the "fine arts."
What's going on here?
Quite a bit, actually. First, the old masters remain properly situated in
canonical art history and thus command increasingly high prices as a
function of respect and, more obviously, supply and demand. Second,
canonical forms of art are being challenged and redefined as never before.
Much of this redefinition is ideologically motivated, but some of it is the
result of rapid advances in technology which create new mediums of
expression as never before. And, finally, because art history and canonical
forms of expression are being challenged and redefined, the term fine arts
is understood more widely and more liberally than ever before.
It is the latter of these phenomena which I would like to dwell on for just
a moment. As I've already indicated, radical ideological and technological
changes have much to do with the liberalization of the term fine arts, but
there is also a concomitant force at play here, and that is the degree to
which aesthetics-or, more accurately, "aesthetic experience"-is the
determining factor in our understanding of what constitutes fine art.
Aesthetics, as we know, can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy and
has been variously understood, usually depending upon the communication
models which logically spring from the respective philosophical systems. For
the purposes of this review, I will understand aesthetics as aesthetic
experience, rejecting Schopenhaurer's notion that aesthetic experience
involves the suspension of the will and embracing the opposite notion that
aesthetic experience readily engages-no, requires-the unique involvement of
the viewer situated in his/her place in consciousness, time, history, and
culture. Thus understood, aesthetic experience is the complex reciprocal and
experiential relationship which occurs between an object and its viewer.
As Vicki Halper once observed, "Richard Marquis's work is meticulous,
outrageous, compulsive, iconoclastic, elegant, and wacky." It's also highly
provocative art that rarely yields to simple interaction. Borrowing from
ceramics and sculpture, Marquis is a technically sophisticated, genre
bending, and joyfully irreverent glass artist who produces, cars, potatoes,
dishes, teapots, cups, eggs, and toys using glass-blowing techniques
informed by his study of murrine in Murano, Italy. And yet it his "Dust Pan"
I find most affecting. Using hot slab construction, Marquis creates a
candy-colored blue and yellow striped dust pan that is masterfully
constructed and still looks like it could have been made out of play dough
by some dandy schoolboy who gave up recess to relentlessly finish his art
project. Normally relegated to hooks in closets or nails in garage walls,
this "Dust Pan" wants to strut its stuff on dining room tables, book
shelves, or fireplace mantels! And it's candy-colored assemblage conjures
all sorts of associations when one considers the jobs dust pans typically
undertake!
Compared to Richard Marquis's work, that of Joel Myers is reflective,
philosophical, and formal. Myers is undoubtedly a seminal figure in studio
art who in his early work produced the Continuous Fragments series which won
him his acclaim. Those early works, interested in color and form, Myers
would later deconstruct in the 1990's when he began to disjoint and pin
prick his figures in installation sized displays concerned not with
fragments of beauty but rather with pain and decay. In his current
exhibition, Myers has taken yet another remarkable step. This work is
iconoclastic and erudite. The "canvases" as he calls them, are really
classical forms upon which Myers paints, engraves, and emblazons archetypes
which variously feel primitive, mimetic, and multicultural. They resist the
constraints of time and place to both invite and prolong contemplation of
the object and the (de)contextualized self.
If Richard Marquis is the boy who gave up recess to work on his art, then
Therman Statom is the boy who went out to recess and spent his time
collecting myriad objects out of which he would fuse his own jazz-like
assemblages. Part collector, furniture maker, ceramicist, painter, sculptor,
and, oh yeah, glass artist, Statom is obviously more interested in the
process of creating than in the beautiful artifacts he creates. His most
recent works in glass and paint are like moments of reflection within a
larger compositional process that is halted only long enough to contemplate
the myriad possibilities of color, form, figure, medium, history, and
culture before the art-making begins again. On the other hand, the terrazzos
with glass, marble, aluminum, and pigment never stop evolving, never wear
out their internal mechanisms for compositional possibility. The former are
like plot points in the process of art coming into being; the latter are
entirely generative.
Daughter of Harvey Littleton, Maurine obviously learned much about fine art
and the art of keeping it fresh. Marquis, Myers, and Statom-schoolboy, poet,
and jazzman--these men, in ways that are entirely unique to themselves and
to their own ideas of what art is and might yet be, have done much more than
to create beautiful physical objects; rather, with these objects, they have
created opportunities for unbounded aesthetic experience. In this important
show, Maurine Littleton has brought together three titans of glass. I think
she thinks it's okay to throw stones.
John A. Haslem, Jr. PhD
artlinePlus art critic
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