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Friday, March 18, 2011

Fantastical Vignettes Works pose questions about operating in today's art world

By Malin Wilson Powell
For the Journal
          If you go to SITE Santa Fe for their three solo exhibitions of currently fashionable women artists — a painter, a sculptor, a filmmaker — most of the viewers are congregating in the Amy Cutler installation. Visitors "ooh" and "ah" to each other with heads together, noses close to the artworks, eyes squinting at details, and fingers pointing to teensy oddities. A magnifying glass would certainly come in handy for the aging demographic that frequents art exhibitions (a thoughtful museum practice sometimes deployed for displays of Persian miniatures).
        On view are 26 gouache works-on-paper from 2001 to 2009 that demonstrate Cutler's facility for meticulously drawing fantastical quasi-narratives. Born in 1974, she first came to prominence in 2000 — at a time when post-modern strategies seemed largely exhausted — when acres of white gallery spaces were filled with art that offered little by way of pleasure and beauty. The pleasure Cutler offers is close viewing and engagement. The beauty is delicate line and color.
        Cutler's finely rendered vignettes advertise her skillful hand and loaded content and something to talk about. The works also do what young artists have done now for generations — revive a modus operandi that is dismissed or considered outré by the preceding generation, their teachers.
        In many ways Cutler's work mirrors her entry point. All of her women are exhausted by unlikely, absurd labors; they wear similar clothing and participate without joy or engagement in seemingly senseless, repetitive tasks. Many of her images — especially "Plot Line" women in little black dresses bent under the burden of carrying trees to plant on their backs — remind me of watching visitors at the Venice Biennale in 2001. That was the year the uniform for women in the art world was Prada, including unstable, uncomfortable high heeled sandals. Long lines waited at pavilions or arsenale installations to — in one extreme case — crawl through a brutally reconfigured house. Just as in most of Cutler's preposterous scenarios of women at work, everyone looked beaten and bewildered.
        SITE's gallery guide claims "Cutler's compositions invoke fantasy worlds, while being grounded in the exploration of interior states and inspired by the complex web of emotions generated by real life situations." Yet, none of these works feels grounded except by the tedium of their tasks. As noted, Cutler's centrally placed imagery floats in a trackless sea of white paper. In a number of compositions, gravity — the one constant unifying force on planet earth — has no purchase. Pigs fly, figures recline in or row wooden boats upside down. In the piece titled "Row," the women's arms have morphed into elongated and awkwardly bent oars.
        Regarding "the complex web of emotions." Where are they? The expression on every face is deadpan. Each figure, whether expending effort on her own or in a group toward the same incongruous end, is utterly isolated and alone.
        Formally, the works pose a few basic questions about operating in the art world now. Cutler relies on a craft fussy about minute pictorial details after decades of artists' reliance on commercially fabricated or computer-generated objects. This anachronistic emphasis on Victorian handmade execution is in service to her depictions of inscrutable activities. For all their finesse, the works are dissonant. A flock of birds isn't a graceful swarm but a chaotic multidirectional internal rumble. Sinuous curving lines are confined to compositions that are sharp, jutting, and piercing at their edges and overall outlines.
        There are no stories here. We only see scraps. In each vignette, there is no beginning; there is no end; only the same-old loop of polymorphously perverse action repeating itself. Things will never change, no matter how ridiculous.
        Is the empty space, the lack of context, a mechanism of fantasy as in children's book illustration or does it reflect the sensibility of those who live in cyberspace? How do you get grounded when you are habituated to a world oblivious of mundane realities and real consequences? Ungrounded. Where gravity means nothing.
        Cutler's work is often described as dreamlike, uncanny, existing in a realm of fairy tales, if mostly Grimm's brand of fairy tales. In Cutler's world it is all work and no play. And there are no fairies.
        Cutler's paintings are presented in an installation that appears arbitrary. The paintings are jumbled and not grouped in any discernible relationship to advance a curatorial point of view, unless the curatorial assertion is that sequence, subject matter and date don't matter. The gallery guide lists the paintings in reverse chronological order from the most recent to the earliest. Displaying them this way would have revealed that Cutler has been filling in more of the surroundings as the decade progressed. From the jousting figures in the pure white paper-space of "Umbrage" (2001) through mid-2000 suggestions of field, forest, ravine and mountain to the rolling seascape of "Zephyr" (2006) and the rolling landscape of "Burden of Proof" (2008).
        The press release contends there is a strong visual resonance in the juxtaposition of the three distinct artists — painter Cutler, sculptor Ruth Claxton and filmmaker Runa Islam. The statement: "Their shared interest in form, color, line, phenomenological engagement, and, in some cases, the employment of similar motifs, creates a suggestive visual conversation" is generic art-speak that really doesn't clarify anything. These are clearly transitional projects until SITE's new director Irene Hoffman begins her programming in the space.
       

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