Paul
Felder
A Guide for Viewing Sheltered
What
does some of this work have to do with shelter?
Many
of the works provide direct experiences of physical shelter: a
tenement, nest, ceramic object that could have housed primitive
peoples or seekers of some sort of futurist utopia. They are here
because I found them in a way beautiful, or satisfying, and responsive
to the chosen theme.
Others
are more problematic: an ironing board with needles, an orifice
within which one may drop a confession, a headless torso. These
address not shelter itself, but our need for it. We must defend
it. We must have a place of refuge, not just for our bodies, but
for our sins. If we are naked and exposed, we are vulnerable;
perhaps we are in danger.
Or
maybe I have everything backwards. Maybe the tenement is about
menace, about who is lurking on the third-floor stairs, and the
ironing board is as good a place as any to hide under, if it’s
raining. Physical shelter, psychological shelter—maybe there’s
not that much difference.
Should I try to understand the works
before I read the artist’s statement?
Let’s
be honest here: sometimes the artist’s statement is better
than the work. Besides, if the artist has written a statement
and the curator has put it in the exhibit, isn’t it part
of the work itself? When Ven Voissey writes in the proposal for
A Blanket of Self-Defilement, “I would like to burn this
piece at the end of the exhibition,” isn’t he adding
immeasurably to the experience of looking at his blanket?
Blaise
Tobia’s elegant
conceptual work is similarly enhanced by the written word. Assembled
Images: Alpha and Omega may be visually satisfying in itself,
yet how much richer is the experience of viewing it with an understanding
of what it represents: one of the oldest and one of the most recent
human habitations on earth.
We
need the words, sometimes. If this exhibit has an underlying message,
it is that shelter is best appreciated when both hemispheres of
our brains are engaged.
Art,
like life itself, is frequently inscrutable, and too often meaningless.
You can put the pieces together however you like, but if someone
provides an instruction manual, shouldn’t you look at it
before starting to assemble?
What
am I to make of Giampaolo Has a Cold and It Is Raining On and
Off?
These
paintings, Matthew Daub writes, recall my experiences while “sheltered”
in an Italian hotel during a week-long rainstorm…Like
memory, the paintings become a connection of fragmented elements;
some obscure and some concrete.
Not
unlike memory, perhaps, our notion of shelter may become a connection
of fragmented elements; some physical and some psychological,
and some, without question, more obscure than others.
P.F.
Easton, Pennsylvania
January 2005 |
