Art New England
Regional Reviews 1984
By Roger Baldwin
John Slade Ely House/New Haven
Points of View:
Kari Nordstrom, Wes Goforth, and Blair Cook
Buy and Sell: Beverly Richey, Paul Rutkovsky, and Jack Harriett
These two shows are quite different in there content and goals-the first a collection of graphics and constructions executed by architects, and the second a wry assemblage of simulated advertising literature, photographs, and installations.
Kari Nordstrom works primarily with wood creating unlikely chairs that seem to hover between utility and sculpture. They are composed of wood slats which exaggerate length or height, and suggest a delicate balancing act of their parts to achieve stability. Blair Cook exhibits low, massive tables composed of thick glass and concrete.
The three-dimensional vision of the architect is reduced to two in Wes Goforth's prints, executed in various techniques. Some feature single lonely buildings, rendered in thick blacks, their elements reduced to a minimum and abruptly geometric. Many of his works are in small series, one motif reworked with different with different colorations, different emphases of structure, mass, and light. As a whole the show lacked a central theme or thrust. Since its participants are practicing architects, comparison of this work to their architectural work could have provided considerable into both, had such a comparison pointed been made.
The thematic looseness here was opposed by the unequivocally singular point of the show in the upstairs galleries. Buy and Sell was an indictment of consumer culture, and more important, the political and economic bases for its rise in contemporary American society. The tenor of the exhibition was sometimes propagandistic, sometimes caustic.
The installations, first of all, defied the notion of "fine art" (itself a captive of that culture). The work was there for its message-verbal more than graphic. The logic of the show was carried through to the hilt; a promotional flyer noted the "Grand Opening," and, continuing the parody "Free Admission with This Coupon." A calendar of events (this show evolved as a continued activity) boasted "Double Coupons Today," "10% OFF everything," and the like, just like the grocery store adds in a Sunday paper. Since the show was to a large degree about media promotion, these cheap Xerox flyers were fully part of it, not accessories.
Beverly Richey's Army Man Series typifies the concept. Tiny plastic packets contained plastic toy soldiers and other tawdry items kids get for a quarter from the vending machines in discount store entrance ways, each object (plastic American flags, for instance) a symbol ready to be read in terms of political economic relationships. These pseudotoys could be bought (another handout) was an ironic, mocking order form) and we were guaranteed that each was "Hand Collected and Hand Packaged."
Richey's humor might seem light and innocent, if she did not force the viewer to make the connection between the tokens of promotion and the sinister and devastating forces that lie behind them. The room was lined with Xerox posters: "Army: Be All You Can Be," They read again and again, with images of tanks destroying a wooden shack. With these, myriad identical images of a soldier, fallen, with a tank beyond. One was strongly brought to realize that especially in light of events in the last few months, consumer capitalism is tied to military aggression, both supported by the state, each feeding the other. Thus the parody of blaring broadsides deepened to an ethical revelation of genuine seriousness, so that Buy and Sell could be seen as life and death.
Jack Harriett's suite of photographs, technically superb large-format studies of furniture for sale in shop windows, roadside antique stalls, and such. approached the consumer theme more subtly, and with a far less overtly political stance. These weary, gross, and often ugly objects the photographer singled out seemed as tired, directionless, and adrift in the world as those people one imagines might buy and use them.
The conceptual direction in which these two artists are working may have been brought into focus by Paul Rutkovsky, the founder of New Haven's Papier-Mache Institute, with which Harriett and Richey are allied. Rutkovsky's contribution to this show was a series of highly colored shaped pieces, each incorporating a commercially loaded word ("Tax," "Get"). For all its exuberance and art-world iconoclasm, Buy and Sell was a dead-serious exhibition. Rarely has the network of forces so devastating to peace, human dignity and simple sanity been so forcefully excoriated.
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