Stop making sense: Three Santa Fe art shows that prove you can love art you don’t understand

“I don’t get it.” How many times have I heard someone say that about a piece of art? One of the main objections to contemporary art, in general, is that it’s hard to understand. And that’s a reasonable objection. After all, no one likes to feel stupid. But if I say, “There’s nothing to get; you can create your own meaning,” that usually upsets people even more. “So, art is meaningless?” they say. “Is contemporary art just a con job?”

It’s hard to explain why I like art I don’t understand, but that’s the theme of my reviews this week. From a show about optics and physics at Pie Projects to a trash art show at Big Happy Gallery to a cryptic, Zen-influenced show at 5. (pronounced “five point”) Gallery, these three Santa Fe exhibitions puzzle me for different reasons, but I still love them.

My hope is that by sharing my enthusiasm for art I don’t fully “get,” you, too, can learn to enjoy things you don’t understand.

Oli Sihvonen and Signe Stuart at Pie Projects

“Oli Sihvonen and Signe Stuart: After the Responsive Eye” pairs op art pioneer Sihvonen’s geometric paintings from the 1960s and ’70s with Stuart’s hand-sewn abstract paintings from the 1980s to today.

Sihvonen’s paintings are easy enough to understand. Basically, they’re about color relationships, like how, if you put red next to green, it vibrates. Sihvonen studied under the painter and color theorist Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in the 1940s, and Albers wrote the book on color, literally. His now-classic “Interaction of Color” lays out 20 or so neat tricks painters can do with colors. Besides making them vibrate, the book shows how to create afterimages, how to make opposite colors look like each other and so on. 

Albers painted nothing but concentric squares for his entire career. Sihvonen has painted circles, rectangles and curves. But both of them were concerned with optics to the exclusion of almost all other content. And both of them bragged that they never used stencils or masking tape, but created their near-perfect shapes by applying their paint directly to the canvas with a palette knife. Does that matter? If it looks like you used tape or a stencil, what’s the difference? At best, it’s a party trick, like tying a cherry stem in a knot with your tongue.

My problem with Sihvonen’s art, and Albers’, is that it’s too easy to understand. Each painting seems to illustrate a different color theory concept, but there’s no deeper emotion, philosophy or phenomenological experience beyond that — at least not for me. I don’t feel the same way about other “color” painters. Mark Rothko’s hazy, stacked rectangles use the same tricks, but they catapult me into the sublime.

This brings us to Stuart’s art, which I barely understand, but love. Pie Projects owner and curator Alina Borsa told me Stuart’s art deals with ideas from quantum mechanics, which is a subject that’s never particularly interested me. Whenever people try to talk to me about wave-particle duality, superposition and quantum entanglement, my eyes glaze over. I recognize it’s an important field of study, and I’m glad other people are pursuing it, but the actions of subatomic particles, no matter how weird, have little bearing on my day-to-day life. So, why bother to read a lot of dense books to try to understand stuff that doesn’t really affect me? Well, I guess someone could say the same thing about contemporary art.

The difference is that I don’t have to understand art to be moved by it. 

Anyone who visits Pie Projects will notice similarities and differences between Sihvonen’s and Stuart’s art. They’re both interested in color relationships, so that’s one similarity. More specifically, Sihvonen uses a curved magenta shape in one of his paintings, which Stuart turns into a more complex pattern of rippling magenta shapes. One of Sihvonen’s paintings in the show is on loan from Stuart’s personal art collection, so we know there’s a direct influence, even though Stuart never studied with Sihvonen and the two were never close.

In terms of differences, Sihvonen uses relatively simple shapes and colors, whereas Stuart uses hard-to-describe curved lines and gradients that appear to change hue as you move closer or further away. She uses sewing to create dimensionality, and she often paints the top edges of her canvases a different color than what’s on the front, which creates a colorful glow on the wall above them. I don’t need to know much about quantum physics to tell that Stuart’s paintings are more complex than Sihvonen’s.

One of the few things I do know about quantum physics is that it replaced the old model of an atom — electron “planets” orbiting a nucleus — with what’s called the electron cloud model. Visually, the old model looked like billiard balls, and the new one looks like fog. Sihvonen’s flat circles remind me of the old, pre-quantum world, whereas Stuart’s foggy, undulating gradients are the painterly equivalents of electron clouds. In Sihvonen’s paintings, color behaves predictably, according to the rules laid down by Albers. In Stuart’s work, it behaves quite unpredictably. Sometimes, the colors change so much from one particle of pigment to the next, that I don’t even know what words to use to describe the colors I’m seeing. But I don’t need to understand why or how the colors do what they do to relish the experience.

“After the Responsive Eye” is on view through Jan. 3 at Pie Projects, 924B Shoofly St., Santa Fe. For hours and information, visit pieprojects.org.

Brandon Behning at Big Happy Gallery

Brandon Behning is not the first artist to present ordinary objects as art and give them titles that sound like riddles. The Dada artist Marcel Duchamp did that in the first decades of the 20th century, and many artists have done so since.

Personally, I love this kind of art — “conceptual found object sculpture,” it’s usually called — although I understand why a lot of people don’t. To many people, it must seem incredibly pretentious to stick a scrap piece of Christmas garland on a ledge above a door frame, as Behning does, and call it, “if he wanted to, he could get up and run away.”

When money gets involved, the pretention factor amps up considerably. Is it ridiculous that someone paid $6.2 million for Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana? Sure. But Behning is an emerging artist whose prices are nowhere near that. And I can assure you, if his, or his gallery’s, primary motivation were profit, he wouldn’t be making art like this, and Big Happy Gallery wouldn’t be showing it. Behning is a visual poet who transforms the detritus of his everyday life into assemblages that are, by turns, weird, whimsical, thought-provoking and tender.

Behning makes art out of anything from used socks to piñata eye stickers to ripped-up plastic bags. And if you’re expecting him to transform such trash into art through technical virtuosity — creating realistic replicas of the Eiffel Tower, or that sort of thing — you’ve got another thing coming. His trash still looks like trash. But the simple assemblages, when paired with beguiling titles, beckon us to enter a world of private wonderment.

“Jock sneeze” is a floor piece consisting of — among other things — a spiky gray massage ball and a duct-tape-wrapped Pringles tube, both of which rest on a set of pest-repelling plastic spikes. Although the assemblage serves no function, it resembles a Rube Goldberg-esque mousetrap — goofy and absurd.

Does the “jock” in the title mean Behning is saying something about masculinity? Probably. And the word “sneeze” might be a reference to Duchamp’s playfully cryptic 1921 assemblage, “Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?,” which also deals with gender. In fact, I bet someone could write a full doctoral dissertation comparing the ideas of gender in “jock sneeze” versus “Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy?” But what’s great about Behning’s work is that you don’t have to approach it intellectually. Playing with trash and creating little stories activates that part of the mind that many grown-ups rarely use: the imagination.

My favorite pieces by Behning are the collaborations he did with his 22-year-old red-fronted parrot, named Dgiba. One is simply a 5-inch length of sisal rope, which the parrot ripped apart, and which Behning stood on its end, so it looks like a forked bolt of lightning. I could imagine a future gallery show of nothing but chewed-up parrot toys.

Come to think of it, the relationship between pets and people is good analogy for my relationship to found-object conceptual art like this, which I tend to love even when I don’t understand it. Pet toys, sometimes called enrichments, keep pets entertained, preventing boredom and staving off depression. Behning’s artworks are like enrichments for people. If you’re someone who doesn’t normally gravitate toward conceptual art, see if it helps to think of it that way. Give it a shot. If you allow yourself to enter this exhibition in a spirit of play, without cynicism, you just might be surprised by how much you enjoy it.

“Although we are pleased, we are also upset …” by Brandon Behning is on view through Jan. 17 at Big Happy Gallery, 1300 Luisa St., Suite 3A, Santa Fe. For hours and information, visit bighappygallery.com.

Johnny Ortiz-Concha and Allan Graham (Toadhouse) at 5. Gallery

Johnny Ortiz-Concha (Taos Pueblo and Spanish) is a chef, ceramicist and the founder of Shed Project, an organization which views the sharing of food as a form of experiential art. His matte black pottery is simple and self-effacing, bearing no signature style, but marked by a Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic of cracks and imperfections. Allan Graham, aka Toadhouse (1943–2019), was an artist whose intentionally distressed, scratched-up paintings of mostly monosyllabic words were deliberately cryptic. Neither artist is particularly commercial, which is why 5. Gallery owner Max Baseman’s curation is so inspired. By juxtaposing Ortiz-Concha’s pottery and Toadhouse’s paintings, he highlights the formal similarities between the two artists’ work and makes it easy to imagine both in an elegant contemporary home with white walls and black furniture. Again, this is not commercial art. This is not “interior design” art. But it looks amazing.

There was a time — the 1940s and ’50s — when art criticism was dominated by one man, Clement Greenberg, who reduced all art to form alone. It was an incredibly reductive and myopic way to look at art, and thankfully we’ve moved on from that. But formalism still has its uses, particularly when it comes to curation. A show like this, curated by someone with a good eye for the similarities in shape and surface texture in work by two seemingly unrelated artists helps us see the inherent beauty in both artists’ work. And we experience that beauty all at once, instantaneously, as soon as we walk into the gallery — or at least I did. In formalist theory, we’d call that the “gestalt” experience — experiencing the beauty of the exhibition as a unified whole. After we see the art as beautiful, we can then think about why it’s beautiful. Then, after that, we can think about what it means.

I don’t have to know what the art means to find it beautiful. Both artists care about more than beauty, though, which is what makes it “art.”

Toadhouse gave himself that name, apparently, after he dug a meditation chamber in his backyard, which a family of toads coopted for themselves. Taking that failed attempt at transcendence as his artistic identity was a humorous way of embracing imperfection in all things, which Ortiz-Concha does, too, with his chipped and cracked ceramic vessels.

The only spot of color in this elegant black-and-white show is a large work on paper by Toadhouse that reads “etc” in fuzzy drab green letters, followed by an apostrophe instead of a period. I think the letters are fuzzy because he made them by scrawling “etc” over and over until the parts created the whole — or at least that’s the technique he used in other, similar works. But why does he use an apostrophe instead of a period? I don’t know, but I do know the effect it has on me. It disturbs me. If I were to make a typo like that in this art review, I would hope that one of my editors would catch it. But if I had to live with that giant typo staring back at me every day from a wall in my living room — I don’t know — would the unease ever go away? Would I eventually learn to see the beauty in the imperfection of a typo? Would its insistent wrongness slowly peck away at my rational brain like a Zen koan — a riddle designed to defeat my thinking mind and open me up to pure consciousness?

If I were to see Toadhouse’s word paintings by themselves, I might get too distracted by the challenge of trying to decipher their latent linguistic meanings that I would miss their wabi-sabi beauty. If I were to see Ortiz-Concha’s ceramic vessels by themselves, their deceptively simple appearances might not hook me. But seeing them together made me fall in love with both. I don’t fully understand either artist yet, but I want to. Sometimes love happens in an instant — love at first sight — while understanding might take a lifetime.

 “Allan Graham/Johnny Ortiz-Concha” is on view through Dec. 31 at 5. Gallery, 2351 Fox Road, No. 700, Santa Fe. For hours and information, visit 5pointgallery.com.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.