Milwaukee rocks on gallery night!

Lake in Catskill Mountains (Woman throws crutches), Joel Meyerowitz

January is a gamble in Milwaukee. We all know that below zero temperatures and blizzard conditions could have killed any desire to go out on a Friday evening. Gallery night also is a bit of a gamble. There are a great many venues from which to choose and wide variability in the types of art being proffered by them. The very success of the venture can lead to crushing crowds in a few of the more popular locations and more of a carnival atmosphere than one conducive to art appreciation.

Last night, however, the stars must have been in alignment. Everything seemed to click, at least for me. I hope it did for you as well, if you went out. Every gallery my wife and I visited had healthy but not bruising crowds along with a wealth of wonderful art from the well established to the unfamiliar. The remarkable 40° temps earlier in the day left a balmy feeling that helped keep my spirits lifted between venues.

If Milwaukee is indeed one of the top 12 “art places” in the U.S., as recently reported, then gallery night was supportive evidence. (I attended a listening session on Monday hosted by ArtPlace, the consortium of foundations, gov’t. agencies, and banks that awarded the designation. The designation specified East Town and the Third Ward rather than Milwaukee as a whole, which neglects the overall fabric of a city that supports those arts districts as well as overlooking other significant places to find art in the area. But, mea culpa, I spent most of gallery night in East Town and the Third Ward!)

I don’t have time to do more than provide a taste of what we saw last night. Almost everything we saw was just opening and is ongoing, so check them out at your leisure.

We started with the trio of new shows at the Haggerty Museumof Art. Dark Blue: The Water as Protagonist sprawls through several of the galleries. As the name indicates, everything in this show of both contemporary and vintage photography relates somehow to water. Like the subject, it is a tenuous, fluid connection that assembles and juxtaposes conceptual with documentary, monumentality with banality. We raised our eyebrows now and then, but agreed that overall it’s a strong show. (And, hey, it includes my favorite Misrach image. How cool is that?! The Meyerowitz image at the top is also from this show.)

Swamp and Pipeline, Richard Misrach

Compressed within the tight space of a side gallery, local photographer Kevin Miyazaki has created a kind of chapel devoted to Lake Michigan. In a two-week period, Miyazaki drove 1,800 miles and circled the lake. One wall features portraits of people he met along the way and the facing wall is a grid of lake views in which the horizons are precisely aligned. The result is a surprising mediation on the not-so-subtle variations in color and texture of the water and sky. The two sides of the room suggest the interconnectedness of the human and natural aspects of the environment. 

Perimeter, Kevin Miyazaki

Gallery M at the Intercontinental Hotel is hosting the finalists in the Pfister Hotel’s artist in residency for the coming year. Once again there are a few surprising choices among the contenders and it will be interesting to see who is selected.

After that we headed to the Third Ward and lucked into one of precious few free parking spaces on the street, not far from Translator, a design firm that is hosting a show called Art in Unexpected Places. The work in this show was all done by participants in the Alzheimer’s Association’s Memories in the Making program. The watercolors are unpretentious and fresh. Each is accompanied by a short story about its creator. It is a fitting reminder not only that life is short and memory unpredictable, but that genuine art doesn’t have to be about marketplace values. 

Although we had other places on our to-see list, we ended up spending the rest of the evening in the Marshall Building, which was humming from top to bottom. Quick hits, descending from the top:

Plaid Tuba, the arts incubator created and led by Reginald Baylor, has moved from its first floor digs to an expanded suite of studios on the sixth floor. If any place can “manufacture creativity” as its motto insists, this is a good candidate.

Every year in January the Portrait Society Gallery commissions a local artist to create a “Winter Chapel.” This year Kevin Giese has installed a grove of hollow birch bark tree trunks culled from the northwoods near Bayfield, stripped and then carefully stitched back together. It provided a magical, quiet interlude in the midst of the clamoring crowds.

Sculptor James Toth has returned to the art scene after a long stint as Director of Exhibits at Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. His evocative abstractions made of polished “cementitious” materials with the appearance of marble grace a pop-up gallery on the third floor.

Along with the regular fare in The Fine Art Gallery and Gallery 218, always worth a peek, Blutstein Brondino Fine Art is hosting artworks by the Grand Avenue Club. The club provides services for adults who have experienced mental illness and displays its members’ art regularly on its own walls at 210 E. Michigan Street. It’s nice to see it acknowledged by a commercial gallery. Kudos to BBFA!

Last but not least, Elaine Erickson has anointed two long time members of CoPA (Coalition of Photographic Arts) with her first ever show of photography, called Eye of the Beholder. George Sanquist and Yong-ran Zhu are an appropriate match, each following the tradition of classic black and white silver gelatin printing process, which has become far from common in this digital age.

Haggerty Museum of Art highlights a major donation

Robert Rauschenburg

When I think “art collector” I must admit the image that comes most readily to mind is one of a person with substantial means at his or her disposal; an Andrew Carnegie or Peggy Guggenheim. And certainly an “art collection” that includes large scale works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Chuck Close, and too many other major artists to list must confirm this stereotypical image, mustn’t it? Well, much to my surprise I had to park that bias at the doors of the Haggerty Art Museum when I went there to see the current exhibit, “Selections from the Mary and Michael J. Tatalovich Collection.”

What I found most sobering, however, was not simply the remarkably perceptive choices made by these two collectors that were acquired with limited resources. It was to be confronted with the unassailable notion that, but for some art world savvy and a healthy dose of persistence, I might have amassed a collection of similar proportions. A profound revelation in this large and exemplary exhibition of outstanding modern and contemporary artists was that Mary and Michael Tatalovich managed to collect it during their careers as teachers in the Milwaukee Public Schools.

Richard Serra

Please don’t misunderstand me: this exhibition needs no such compelling narrative. It stands on its own merits and can be fully appreciated without reading the wall text that reveals this personal tidbit of information. I particularly liked discovering Richard Serra’s enormous etching, called Bo Diddley, which I’d never seen before. Serra can leave me hot or cold, depending on the piece and the context. This one works for me - but you have to see in situ. The scale is essential.

If, like me, you haven’t been to see it before now, try to make it before it closes on August 5.

Tom Arndt

While you’re there, be sure to stop by the small galleries to see two more modest exhibits that feature the photography of Tom Arndt and Mark Ruwedel. All of these shows close August 5.

Mark Ruwedel

You can read more about all of these exhibits at Third CoastDigest. Reviewer Brian Jacobson was more on the ball than I and filed his piece in June. But you still have 6 days to get over there!

The Haggerty scores twice with Soth lecture and "The Truth is not in the Mirror"

Alec Soth began his talk in Marquette University’s lush new Eckstein Hall Wednesday night by quoting David Hockney: "photography is great if you're a paralyzed cyclops." Succinct and dramatic, that describes a common limitation of photography, which traditionally assumes a static viewpoint with a single lens. Many photographers have employed a variety of strategies to overcome this limitation, including Hockney himself who famously fragments his subjects with multiple images, evoking the analytic cubism of Picasso and Braque. Soth creates a body of work with a narrative arc that ties individual images together, albeit often rather tenuously.



David Hockney
Mother 1, Yorkshire Moors

Hockney and Soth are just two of the many photographers featured in the Haggerty's outstanding exhibit, "The Truth is not in the Mirror." The title of the exhibit refers to its theme of portraiture in contemporary photography and its thesis that many portraits today involve "highly constructed artifice." Formal portraiture, in which the gaze is direct and the pose deliberate, has always had to deal with artificiality, but, according to the catalogue essay, these photographers "challenge or trick the viewer into looking deeper into issues of identity, with those portrayed serving as ciphers for the photographer's point of view."

In his talk, Soth took up that last point directly, expressing his personal preference for situations in which he knows little about the subject he is photographing. He likes to project his own imagination onto them. This flies in the face of a conventional wisdom practiced by many photographers who often go to great lengths to know their subjects as intimately as possible. A personal favorite practitioner of this latter style is Mary Ellen Mark, who, for example, once spent three weeks living inside the maximum security section of a psychiatric hospital in order to establish personal relationships with the patients in Ward 81. Soth, by contrast, relishes brief interactions. The image below, which is in the exhibit, took 15 minutes, he said, and he knew nothing about the woman, except that on Ash Wednesday the mark on her forehead was made with cigarette ashes. Soth likes to create narratives, but he wants them to be his own ("artificially constructed") narratives. His subject is indeed a cipher for his point of view.

Alec Soth: Adelyn, Ash Wednesday

The complete title of Soth's talk was "The Paralyzed Cyclops in the Democratic Jungle." Showing a screen capture of the 2 billionth photo uploaded to flickr, he made a compelling case for the obsolescence of the idea of the "democratic jungle" explored by William Eggleston and since then countless people with cell phone cameras. In a book called "The Democratic Forest" Eggleston pointed his camera at anything and everything, the ordinary and the familiar, democratically. But, Soth says, it's been taken too far. If everything is interesting then nothing is. His solution is to cut through the democratic jungle with "the narrative machete," or images that point to a larger story. That his narratives are fabricated rather than journalistic is the reason his work fits so well into "The Truth is not in the Mirror."

The title of the show recalls "Mirrors and Windows," the legendary 1978 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski (which I still remember seeing when it came to what was then called the Milwaukee Art Center!) Szarkowski identified two strains of photography: it can be a mirror, reflecting the mind of the photographer, or a window, through which one sees the external world. The exemplary collection of images in this exhibit seem to take a more nuanced position, to challenge the distinction between mirror and window. They are windows into a kind of reality, but one that can't be trusted to represent anything other than the artist's intentions.



Alec Soth
Patrick, Palm Sunday

"The Truth is not in the Mirror” continues through May 22. There will be a panel discussion about the exhibit next Wednesday, Feb. 2 at 6 pm. Additional programming and other information available at Haggerty Museum of Art.

With two runs already in, the lineup at the Haggerty makes it look like they will score again.

Barbara Rose speaks about Omega Suites at Haggerty Museum of Art

Photo by Lucinda Devlin

Last night Barbara Rose, a prominent art critic, gave a talk at Marquette University in Milwaukee about the exhibit called Omega Suites by Lucinda Devlin. The exhibit is on display at the Haggerty Museum of Art. This is one of the pieces in the exhibit.

I think it is an excellent body of work and a lovely exhibit.

Rose gave a nice overview of Devlin's previous work and a brief intro to her next series. She also provided examples of other works of art to give Devlin's some cultural and historical context. Overall I'd give the talk a thumbs up.

However, in my opinion, Rose's worthwhile examination of the Omega Suites and Devlin's oeuvre was nearly overshadowed by an offhand comment she made early on. She said that "photojournalism is not art." During the public question and answer period that followed Rose was queried by several people in the audience about this comment. She not only held her opinion, but dug in her heels and reiterated it emphatically.

There is no doubt that the intentions of photojournalism are different than those of a fine art photographer like Devlin, who makes no claim to be a photojournalist. There is also no doubt in my mind that the practice of photojournalism takes place under completely different circumstances than fine art photography and their respective values reflect the circumstances.

However, it is disingenuous, I feel, to make the global claim that photojournalism is not art.

It is a fortunate coincidence that I attended this lecture and heard this comment at the moment of my inaugural post on this new blog. Arts Without Borders will be my effort to comment on my experiences and gleanings from the world of arts, letters, sciences, and, well, the world in general. I don't see such a clear distinction between art and photojournalism, to use the current example.

If photojournalists are doing their job, they are not trying to make art as would Lucinda Devlin or Andy Warhol (to use another artist mentioned in the lecture). But it is fairly easy to point to examples of photography that were originally done for journalistic purposes that are now considered masterpieces and collected as works of art. Indeed, Street Seen, the current show at the Milwaukee Art Museum includes such examples as Robert Capa's famous scenes from DDay.

Art exists on a continuum of creative endeavors. Categorical statements like "photojournalism is not art" will be challenged in this forum, for I don't believe it is either true or helpful to make such an assertion.

DDay, Robert Capa