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The Sarasota Biennial displays the works of Florida artists in a comprehensive and diverse manner, but a little background would be in order.
By MARY ANN MARGER
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 3, 2000
SARASOTA -- If there's a message in the melange at the Ringling Museum's current Sarasota Biennial, it could be this: Get into it.
Not all of it. With 75 works by 63 artists from throughout Florida, that would be difficult and unnecessary. Just fasten your focus on what beckons to you and deepen your understanding of what's happening in the art of our state.
There's not a lot here to love, to take home to impress your friends. Display Westen Charles' The Lintball Project, a real clothes dryer amid piles of lint balls, in your living room, and your friends may think you've lost more than the laundry.
So how do you get a handle on what's here? Grab a catalog (gift shop, $3.95) and don't get too frustrated over curator Mark Ormond's two-page essay. It suffers from brevity and a lack of easy cross-reference to the art, either alphabetically or by gallery placement. There you stand, looking at Lynne Gelfman's abstract and scouring the text for the solitary sentence that hints inadequately as to why her work is different from several other abstracts-sans-focal-point in the show.
Ormond's intent was to focus less on the artist-viewer relationship than on the show itself, and for that he deserves considerable credit. With the goal of presenting "not only the state of fine arts in Florida, but also ... a diversity of work that is reflecting the concerns of artists at this moment," he has assembled the most comprehensive Sarasota Biennial to date. Key to its success was inviting specific artists: Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, John Chamberlain and Jerry Uelsmann all responded to Ormond's request.
Another key to success was Ormond's background. Having served as both director of the Center for the Fine Arts, Miami (now the Miami Art Museum) and curator at the Ringling, he has a rare familiarity with art throughout the state.
All the works have been created since 1997. Most artists are represented by just one work.
Several pieces incorporate the gallery into their work. Roxie Thomas paints a huge blue rectangle directly on the wall as background for about 30 tiny bronze abstracts, each projecting forward on its own steel ledge. John Espinosa pairs photos of 18 people wearing each others' clothes; they are unified by the green background painted on the wall. Glexis Novoa's drawing starts on canvas and extends beyond; unfortunately, it reduces his study in perspective to gimmickry.
From the floor, Carol K. Brown builds three long stairways of miniature steps leading to closed doors, along with windows carved into the wall, accompanied by faint voices uttering too-familiar cliches ("Don't you turn your back on me!" ... "You've got a lot of nerve!" ... "Shut up!")
There's more humor in Elizabeth Withstandley's high-tech poking of fun at the stay-at-home life, in Cooper's (no first name) dogs puzzling over walking boxes and in Bill West's random arrangement of dead love bugs.
Abstracts range from Gerald Winter's triptych with its tiny ship embedded in a "storm" to Paul Youngblood's refracted reality as reflected in a chrome bumper.
Tim Curtis takes up an entire partition in the second gallery with shelves of wood and sand, holding dozens of irregularly shaped porcelain platters that a production potter would toss in the discard pile. What does this say of the market's demand for symmetry, of waste, of size?
In Scylla, Sandy Winters applies oil so thick that it takes a second to realize that real little girls' dresses are affixed to this vulgar, biomorphic composition meant to connect us to the mythological theme of sea-nymph-turned-fleeing-monster.
As if to prove that art is still valid for expression of serious ideas, Barbara Neijna addresses environmental concerns in her photograph of tempting but polluted green water. John Bailly reminds us of the horror of Rosewood. Adam Kowalsky gives us a life-size young woman, dismal and dejected, in a bath "room."
On a loftier theme, Elena Presser's Partita in G Major is no casual tribute to Bach but part of many years' dedication to translating all of the baroque master's music into visual expression, but you won't read that, or highlights from her resume, at the show. Wouldn't we admire her work more and stay with it longer if we knew more?
Text panels would have helped a lot, and, lest anyone think that a little insight is cheating, London's dazzling new Tate Modern has an illuminating few sentences beside every work.
John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, West Galleries, 5401 Bay Shore Road (off U.S. 41), Sarasota. Open 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily through Nov. 5. Admission: $9 adults, $8 for 55 and over, free for 12 and younger and Florida students and teachers with IDs. Tickets include access to the entire complex. (Ringling's home closed for restoration; may use ticket on return trip). Art museum only is free on Saturdays. Call (941) 351-1660 (recording) or (941) 359-5723, or check http://www.ringling.org.