ARTPAPERS.ORG 61an index to contemporary art’s imminent history

ABOVE, LEFT TO RIGHT: Cathy Wilkes, installation view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011, mixed media (courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow; photo: Tom Little);Adrian Kellard, Lovers, 1986, latex on wood with trouble lamps (collection of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, Saint Louis University; photo: Jeffrey Vaughn)

The patient, attentive touch of Irish artist Cathy Wilkeshas always transformed mundane objects into disarm-ingly vulnerable artifacts. These seem to herald from aparadoxical realm where unmasked intimacy is the onlypossible mode of relationship, yet all intimacies remaintotally remote. A number of these artifacts populateWilkes’ current installation at the Carnegie Museum ofArt [November 12, 2011—February 26, 2012]. Someare stupefyingly powerful. Yet the show’s most surprisingrevelation is a group of small, harrowingly wroughtcanvases. These punctuate the exhibition with uncannyvistas onto spaces, textures, and colors.

Wilkes uses three low, broad-surfaced display tablesto loosely define zones associated with particular experi-ences or identities in the cool, stone-floored gallery. Onthe table closest to the entrance, objects and imagesrelated to World War I “doughboys” draw the visitor intoa consideration of that international conflagration, whichushered in a century of bloody conflict and atrocity. Aswe approach the one-hundredth anniversary of that war,Wilkes fashions her own doughboys from mannequinswith papier-mâché heads pinched and poked to resem-ble the stuff of their nickname. Loose-fitting civilianclothes hang on their skeletal frames, and their vacantexpressions are among the show’s most affectingimages. Those faces, with tiny, weak eyes and sparse,brittle hair, embody more fully than most actors’ portray-als the ways in which mechanized warfare prevents itsagents from returning to anything resembling healthyhuman existence.

Another zone seems devoted to the intimate belong-ings and activities of a young girl, with distressed dolls,carefully cut-up rags, and other remnants gathered neara female figure that bends forward convulsively. Thegrotesque figure may be the girl herself, now grown up,an adult presence remembered from childhood, or amonstrous fabrication. This table, like the others, carriesa few small canvases with images so belabored, eroded,and fragile that they seem not to have been painted, but

CATHY WILKESPITTSBURGH

rather excavated in a mysterious process parallel to thereal archaeology by which the artist unearthed at theSomme battlefield many of the objects on display.

The objects on and around the remaining table seemintended to bridge the other two zones, and are moreresistant to association. The overall effect is an effortlesslink between the impossible horror of trench warfare andthe quotidian processes of enculturation, memory andrelationship. As she has been lauded for doing in thepast, Wilkes establishes these connections without rely-ing on cliché or formula. Her stumbling veterans insistwith startling clarity that, in the end, war always makesits way into the very homes it was supposed to protect.And the table of tortured mementos at which themonstrous woman bows insists that far from evaporatinginto metaphor, war remains a real presence in thosehomes for generations.

Merging these ruminations on the legacies of war,domesticity, and childhood, the small paintings resonateon a frequency distinct from all of the other works. Theircracked, flaking surfaces seem to betray a current ofself-annihilation that harmonizes perfectly with thetheme of war. And yet their forms are clearly the result ofintense consideration and revision. In some, the familiarbell-curve of the doughboy’s helmet transmutes into ahero’s bower, an abstract cipher, and a reclining beerbelly, while remaining just a helmet, as well. In another,a ghostly bunny seems transfixed by an abyss where theimage of which he is a part simply dissolves intounpainted linen. All of these paintings, unframed andwith their tack-heads and canvas edges exposed, retaina resolute objecthood, especially when presented on thetabletops. When hung, their smallness emphasizesfragility and vulnerability against the vast expanses ofwall, while puncturing those expanses like gunshots inthe distance.

—Grant Johnson

Adrian Kellard’s wall-hanging tableaux and freestandingsculptures are carved and painted wood assemblages ofpalpable physicality. Kellard (1959–1991) synthesizedan astonishingly disparate range of histories, personalrealities, and modes of art-making in his uniquelymasterful and fearless craft. Adrian Kellard: The LearnedArt of Compassion provides an intimate and affectingretrospective of the brief career of this working-class,Irish-Italian, gay, devoutly Catholic artist [Museum ofContemporary Religious Art, St. Louis University; Sept-ember 24—December 11, 2011]. The exhibition revealsa singular artist who could hold at bay the deficiencies ofidentity politics and institutional religion to produce un-compromising, exuberant, and radically faith-driven work.

Poised to mark the twentieth anniversary of Kellard’sdeath at age 32 to AIDS-related causes, this exhibit alsoallows us to revisit a lost strain of inquiry begun in theheady froth of the Reagan-era art world. Echoing the titleof MOCRA founder and curator Fr. Terrence Dempsey’sdissertation, that research examined the “reemergenceof spiritual and religious concerns in American art of the1980s.” Dempsey first discovered Kellard’s work whileconducting his dissertation research. It had beenincluded in the capacious 1985 group exhibit Precious:An American Cottage Industry of the Eighties, curated byThomas W. Sokolowski for New York University’s Grey ArtGallery. Sokolowski put Dempsey in contact with Kellardas well as Kellard’s mentor, the pioneering artist ThomasLanigan-Schmidt—also a working-class, gay, devoutCatholic included in Precious. Arguing for a new sense ofovert religiosity in an adamantly secular age, Kellard andLanigan-Schmidt, along with other artists, pursued anantidote to what they perceived as spiritually-bereftmarket-driven art as well as twentieth-century Modern-ism’s more oblique and perhaps rarified evocations ofthe nebulously sublime.

Over two decades later, in this exhibition, Kellard notonly resurfaces as a key part of this significant alternativehistory—whose momentum, directly and indirectly, was

ADRIAN KELLARDST. LOUIS

Future Anterior: an index to contemporary art’s imminent history62 ART PAPERS

radically hampered by the AIDS pandemic—but alsoappears freshly as a remarkable artist in his own right. InPrayer of the Faithful in Ordinary Time, 1988, a red-and-white checker pattern curtain parts to reveal Jesus,haloed in bright yellow and orange beams, praying underthe star-riddled light of the full moon. Characteristicallyintegrating the everyday with the otherwise lofty, themoon is in fact a store-bought plastic clock, its handsmarking the agitated passing of earthly time. Lovers,1986, deploys a similarly hybrid approach. Jesusappears again, now cradling a portrait of the recumbentartist, while a looming Christ-figure, crucified, danglestwo construction-grade floodlights from his palms. Thecentral scene is brightly lit, while a populous, nighttimecity spreads around them: a finely etched series of high-rises, tenements, and neighborhood churches, renderedin the manner of a woodblock printer—as with all ofKellard’s imagery—framing the couple and scaffoldingthe crucified form. Each row of windows is an intricatepattern piled on top of other patterns. Dimly primary-hued, it recalls newspaper-printed comics. Time isalways of concern: a reminder of something fundamen-tally common and a critical exigency to heed. In thehinged room-divider St. Francis Screen, 1985, the saintis carved in a pose quoted from Giotto’s fresco St.Francis Preaching to the Birds, 1297–1299. The thirdpanel of this piece is a functioning calendar. Not onlywere Kellard’s days marked by this piece, his apartmentwas bisected by it: his art, so closely linked to his faith,was hand-etched in the stuff of daily life. It also formeda space for him to live fully.

Kellard’s was an eight-year, compactly meteoriccareer. Since his death, however, his work has rarelybeen shown. What is its importance here? Irascible, irre-pressible, and boldly honest, the work not only commu-nicates a plain sense of humanity but a brave and un-cluttered sense of self. Our current moment may well bemarked by as much conflict with identity and meaning—spiritual and otherwise—as Kellard’s not-so-distant era,making his story as pertinent as ever.

—Jessica Baran

No Limits, a mid-career survey of video works by JanetBiggs, turns most of the second floor at the TampaMuseum of Art into an ethereal theater [October 8,2011—January 8, 2012]. Throughout the darkenedspace, moving images on monitors with headphonesalternate with immersive room-sized single- and multi-ple-channel video projections. Evocative high fidelitysoundscapes—compositions of classical, gospel, androck music, and atmospheric recordings—elaborateeach display. A tightly choreographed spectacle, theexhibition features over a decade of Biggs’ performance-based videos and documents the fulfillment of a desireto expand her creative terrain.

Biggs looks at performance as a way to understandthe role of gender and power in defining the self.Exploring the psychology of control and release, she hassought out the testing grounds of synchronized swim-mers, wrestlers and equestrians, speed motorcyclistsand NASCAR racers, kayakers and coal miners. Theclaustrophobic space beneath the surface of a swim-ming pool is one realm in which the artist has contem-plated notions of resistance and constraint. A seminalproject, Flight, 1999, is an immersive four-channel,room-filling installation. Juxtaposing views of geriatricwomen striving to synchronize their underwater routineswith that of a white horse lying unconscious and quiver-ing on bare ground, the work depicts the struggle andtranscendence of aging. Two other aquatic videos showthe strength in a teenage performer’s graceful defianceof gravity, and empathize with polar bears that asserttheir power by swimming endless arcs in a tank at theChicago zoo.

Biggs explains that, initially, she focused on athletesin order to determine whether they lost or found theiridentity in the drive to excel at a sport. As performerslacking the freedom to choose a particular course,horses have played a parallel role in the artist’s portrayalof domination and submission. In this vein, as Biggssought to understand what happens to identity when theindividual’s own nature is the limitation, she looked intothe vacant eyes of her autistic, obsessive-compulsive

JANET BIGGSTAMPA

aunt. Life-sized projections of trotting horses with flarednostrils flank a full-on view of the elderly woman’s mind-less rocking motion in the three-channel BuSpar, 1999,which is part of a series of works exposing the use ofpharmaceuticals to normalize or enhance behavior. Incounterpoint, Like Tears in Rain, 2006, seeks to findbeauty in the rigors of complex militaristic performances.The freestanding two-channel video installation pairs ablind equestrian’s elegant, sound-coded dressage withthe perfectly executed drill of a silent rifle corps.

Fast cars and motorcycles are more recent signifiersof harnessed power. The most affecting work, VanishingPoint, 2009, invites us to follow a solitary motorcyclist inher race through the hot, dry heat of the Utah salt flats.In the video’s breathtaking finale, a gospel choir bearswitness as the motorcyclist’s speeding form evaporatesinto the wavering horizon—leaving us with an ecstaticsense of loss.

No Limits follows Biggs’ widening search for extremesas she submits herself to the physical demands ofincreasingly remote settings. Timed to alternate, thegiant projections of two adjacent works in the room atthe exhibition’s endpoint revel in the artist’s polar discov-eries. Fade to White, 2010, communicates the over-whelming awe of her first encounter with the High Arctic.An operatic elegy accompanies a kayaker as he paddlesacross a vast glacial tableau that Albert Bierstadt mighthave painted. Brightness All Around, 2011, gives testi-mony to the artist’s most recent reckoning with the arcticenvironment. Dramatic scenarios featuring a female coalminer as she wrestles with heavy drilling equipment inthe obscurity of an icy cave segue to an inky spacedominated by the wild rhythmic outbursts of thewoman’s alter ego, a dark-skinned, leather-clad musi-cian. The exuberant energy that marks this latest work isevidence that Biggs sees no boundaries to her practice.Indeed, she is more than ready to take on her nextprotagonist: the formidable character of an activevolcano in Indonesia.

—Cathy Byrd

ABOVE: Janet Biggs, production still from Brightness All Around, 2011, single-channel video with sound (courtesy of the artist, Conner Contemporary Art, Washington, D.C., and WinkelmanGallery, New York)