Overview
The Susquehanna Art Museum has long looked to New York’s art scene for inspiration, and we are not alone in our tendency to do that. As a cultural magnetic pole, New York draws every eye of the art world, if there is such a thing. Museums, galleries, artists, dealers, auction houses, critics, publishers, art handlers, and technicians working in every niche in the trade – New York has it all. Art collectors, students, patrons, artists, and the culturally engaged in every Western community look to New York like a businessman checking his watch. Am I on time? Am I late? Have I missed something? Where must I be right now?
We also look to the major publications of the art world as a barometer of our own work, exhibitions, and programs. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst recently graced the cover of ARTnews for an issue focusing on the art market. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst may be the most loved and hated artists of our time. They have secured, through powerful and savvy production and marketing machines, significant shares of a limited market. On a monumental scale, Hirst and Koons show us all of the faults and shortcomings of humanity and the futility of struggling to be better. Critics have called the work of both artists “banal.” So how does an artist get to be Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst? What’s the point? There is a young British artist, Banksy, sneakily installing his own paintings on the walls of museums in England and New York. He left his own version of a cave painting in a museum not long ago. He says, “The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something.” This is exactly the predictable result of art superpowers like Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. Their success makes Banksy angry enough to risk real consequences like prison, and it drives him to articulate his love/hate relationship with fame in mixed tones of denial, envy, longing, and infatuation.
Mark Billy and Andrew Hurst, the curators of Report from NYC, are part of their own show as artists in their own right. Billy and Hurst have stepped halfway out of the world of artists and halfway into the world of the audience to show us what they are about and what they know from the artists in their circle. Three years ago, the artists included in Report from NYC were showing work at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in MFA shows. These exhibits are a common art school practice, and they are the cumulative presentation of work honed by peer critiques, celebrated faculty, and deep studies into techniques, history, and the work of other artists as it is presented in galleries and museums. There is often a sad quality to an MFA exhibit – it is sometimes the last show that an artist gets. Mark Billy’s Damien Hirst and My Dad is the fastest way to say it all about art. Who are your influences? Who are your heroes? Do you envy your father or your mentor or your favorite artist? Is painting an Oedipal struggle? Why won’t a gallery represent your work? Are you still able to laugh – at your family, your friends, yourself? Are you in direct and mortal competition with your friends who are artists?
Andy Piedelato strikes an imposing impression with his large, abstract paintings. His artist statement, well-written, thoughtful, and humbly optimistic regarding his attempt to express an idea, collides head-on with his frenetic personality. He says that if you think you see something in his painting, like a unicorn or a man smoking a cigarette, that you are way off base. He is physical to the point of almost being comical, like watching a boxer in the ring. Conversation is punctuated by his inability to sit still; he must be working. He must show you another painting ten times bigger than he is. He moves these things around like an ant carrying a huge leaf up a stalk of wheat. Rap music in his studio is blaring threatening messages. None of this is shocking or meant to shock. To have completed his MFA, Piedelato no doubt endured long critiques of his work, and he is sticking to his guns the only way he knows how. Do not talk about his work. Feel his work.
John Hawke’s paintings, abstract en plein air (meaning painted outdoors) landscapes, have taken the backseat recently to art activism and installation. This latter realm is very difficult for museums to present; hanging a painting is easier than presenting something that happened and has a narrative that only relates to painting. What performance art is all about is experience and the work’s documented visual quality. Painting abstractly as a plein air painter is almost performance art in and of itself; people expect Bob Ross and his “happy little clouds” and get something they have to struggle to see or understand. From that experience, Hawke became interested in public involvement with art, art’s place in public spaces and other environments, and the possibility that ideas expressed in art could contribute to change. This is something that Banksy’s guerrilla art also addresses – What is meaningful to make? What does the art establishment do to encourage and discourage artists? Is there a price on everything? How can it be worth something if it has no price tag? How can it have value if it’s free? Conversely, if a work of art costs so much that only a millionaire can afford it, what is the point of that?
Crossing over from one art form to another makes perfect sense to artists, and the artists in Report from NYC grew up with the distinction between artists, performers, writers and celebrities blurring and morphing. Patti Smith’s music has made her name, but her artwork is just as good. Is Madonna an actress or a pop singer? What are all of these video monitors doing in galleries these days? Reality television shows create stars from scratch with a sensibility that both transcends and avoids qualitative traditions. In the midst of this, Andrew Hurst approaches art as a musician, visual artist, and poet. He strives for his work to have a narrative, lyrical quality. That the narrative or lyric is incomplete or contrived is less important to him than the way viewers or listeners are drawn to the rhythm of his work, by seeing or hearing. Tempting the viewer out of passive engagement, Hurst invites us to examine our memories and loosely associate them with his own.
There are undercurrents in Report from NYC. From the title, we understand this undertaking has something to do with the New York gallery scene. Most of us think of New York as Times Square, the Village, or other landmarks of Manhattan. Brooklyn is where many artists are living and working now because rents in Manhattan have driven them there. The galleries have mostly located to Chelsea from SOHO, and that landscape is ever-changing. However, the galleries remain the establishment. They are the places to make your name as an artist. Some of the artists in Report from NYC are gaining ground in becoming represented by New York galleries, or they are starting to be included in museum exhibitions. The Report from NYC artists are all acquainted; they have been friends and have influenced one another in a number of ways. They are as different sometimes as one can imagine, and they are very much the same in that they are sticking together, showing together, and working together.
Rusty Baker
Executive Director
Susquehanna Art Museum