A second exhibit in St. Petersburg with a London genesis features avant-garde artists who nevertheless share aesthetic and expressive ties with painters from an earlier time.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published January 20, 2005
[Images from the Arts Center]
David Harrison, On Some Far Away Hill, 2002, oil on canvas.
Emi Avora, Opera, 2004, oil on canvas.
ST. PETERSBURG - Whether it's coincidence or something about the turn of a century, London, so vibrant when Claude Monet and others camped there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is again a happening place for artists. "London Now: Are You In Love Yet?" at the Arts Center proves that point and acts as a great rejoinder to "Monet's London" a few blocks east at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Both are fin-de-siecle exhibits even though a century, more or less, separates the artists shown at the museum and those on view at the Arts Center.
Director Evelyn Craft and curator Amanda Cooper have gathered a fine cross-section of work that represents what young artists are up to across the pond and alludes also to broader trends.
Bear in mind that these artists are about the same age as Claude Monet when he first visited London, before he was rich and famous. Like the young Monet, these artists are part of an emerging avant-garde, looking at new forms of visual expression and fresh ways to interpret traditional media. Thank goodness they are not subscribing to the "shock" art of a previous generation that included Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers, whose art is beginning to look passe.
The eight artists of "London Now" were selected from a larger group exhibiting in the prestigious "East End Academy" show at London's Whitechapel Gallery, a venue that has introduced cutting-edge art for more than a century. Pable Picasso's Guernica made a visit there in 1938. The gallery organized shows that featured Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Miro, Jackson Pollock, Lucien Freud, Frieda Kahlo and David Hockney before they were celebrated artists. A spot on its gallery walls confers status, so Craft was quick to grab her favorites from last summer's show. (Some participants had to substitute art because much in that exhibition sold out.)
Craft's initial idea for a tie-in with "Monet's London" was to feature a big-name British artist, but she decided to continue the center's tradition of showcasing emerging artists.
"We wanted to represent what the Arts Center is, and what better way than to go to this gallery, that's also a nonprofit, in the East End of London?" she said.
But put aside the neat fit. "London Now" works on its own merits.
Zatorski and Zatorski, a husband and wife team who don't use their first names, have four outstanding works, one a wall installation, the others, videos. Lily, the shortest at 5 minutes, is deliriously clever and witty. In it, Mrs. Z. appears as a Stargazer lily, her face invisible except for her lips, around which the flower petals and leaves have been attached. A little weird, sure, but one actually begins to think of this assemblage as a real thing. In take after take, she begins to sing along with Edith Piaf performing Je Ne Regrette Rien. Her husband, the director, has to interrupt her again and again, to fiddle with the sound, to adjust petals which, by take 25 are becoming tired-looking. By the time she finally completes the song, her exhaustion and the absurdity of her getup are palpable, even though we never see her face.
Zatorski and Zatorski's other two videos are much longer but share the same close focus on something absurd and trivial that becomes important, even noble, because we are bearing witness to it. In Kokoro, two butterflies perch on Mrs. Z's bare stomach (we mostly see only her navel, filled with what is probably sugar water to attract the insects). One butterfly seems far more aggressive; the other crouches passively. It could be a National Geographic moment except for the inclusion of Bernard Herrmann's dramatic score, which functions as a narrator, alerting us to shifts in the butterflies' dynamic while tension mounts and the passive butterfly suddenly becomes aggressor. Riveting and disturbing stuff.
In The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp, they do what I would have thought impossible, move me almost to tears over the death of, yes, a wasp. Like Kokoro, it plays as a story unfolding, this time to Phillip Glass' piano staccato. The bug lies belly up on a beautifully painted surface of flowers, like a bier. Its breathing becomes more labored, its writhing less dramatic as the hour goes by. By the time it rests in peace, it has been imbued with human dignity.
Sarah Carne's videos are a light-hearted riff after that mournful experience. In You in Love? You Gonna Be, she sets up her camera on a city street and films commuters as they walk by. We never see or hear her as Nina Simone sings The Look of Love, but she elicits a smile from every passer-by, making a connection with each anonymous one.
Carne uses a similar ploy in another smile-inducing installation, High Noon, in which she corraled strangers to read the script of the classic Gary Cooper-Grace Kelly Western. Some of them really embrace their parts - the Gary Cooper reader emotes his lines; others stumble through their cue cards. It's wacky and delightful.
Paintings are strong, too. The artists' themes are very different - didactic in the case of David Harrison, for example, and decorative in Emi Avora's work - but all seem to share a similar aesthetic that combines the banal and representational with an element of fantasy or caricature. It's a natural way to acknowledge the influence of the pop art movement without being redundant and derivative, the fate of too many local artists.
Harrison paints with the naive style of the self-taught "outsider" artist, which belies his formal training. His canvases are filled with sweetly rendered animals juxtaposed with that which threatens them - usually man-made. Accompanying sculptures are made from twigs and balls of twine wrapped to look like nests with birds perching on them, all encased in layers of sticky cellophane tape, like shrouds. An interesting biographical note: Harrison's father was a manual laborer who worked in a warehouse and brought home rolls of the stuff when Harrison was a child.
Louise Brierley's virtuoso landscapes are the closest to Monet homages in the show - moody and atmospheric, brushstrokes blending and modulating on the smooth surfaces of her canvas. An overpass curving around a grain elevator that sits in a field is a meditation on isolation. She tweaks the fairy tale genre with her Naughty Puppies series, panels painted like Old Master illustrations from a rather dark children's book. Fantastical creatures go about their activities (which include copulating) with the unselfconsciousness of animals. They would be innocent jokes except for the edgy prurience and voyeurism suggested by the human limbs attached to their dog and bunny heads.
The large-scale photographs of Mandy Lee Jandrell are composed with painterly elegance and ironic detachment. They're the visual equivalent of a Henry James essay, revealing much by saying little of consequence, whether she records a moment in a large food court in Cape Town, South Africa, or the Giant Panda Habitat in Hong Kong. Olivia Plender's multipanel Masterpiece series acknowledges the popularity of sequential art. Emi Avori's splendidly baroque interiors salute the old battle cry of the aesthetic movement and harken, again, back to Monet, Whistler et al.: Art for art's sake!
"London Now: Are We In Love Yet?" is at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through March 27. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free. (727) 822-7872.
