To be an artist in Kansas City
is not the same as being an artist in Berlin, New York, Los
Angeles or Sarajevo. There is little weltschmerz of artistic
angst to hide behind; you can't pretend to be a victim, or
a social outcast struggling against bourgeois complacency.
To be an artist in KC is to not be a player in an endless
trumping game, a scene shifting of clique and coterie. There
is less voguesish shmoozing and no overnight stardom or bubble
reputation. There is work. Respect comes slowly. Reputations
take time. The art scene is like a midwestern spring storm.
Thunder that slowly rumbles away for days, the sky filled
with a restrained fireworks display every night, and you begin
to think that this is how it will always be before it changes.
Too romantic perhaps, but what I know of art in Kansas City
is its honesty. That all five artists chosen by The Charlotte Street Foundation in 1998 live and work in KC is perhaps the only
thing they have in common. The work of Patrick Clancy, Archie
Scott Gobber, Anne Lindberg, Judi Ross and Judith Sanazaro
is diverse. Any attempt to link what they do by any other
theme would be a conceit. It is material of the very worst
type of art scribble that claims a superior knowledge, gathering
any group under a rubric of its own invention.
Archie Scott Gobber
Of the five, Gobber seems the most conspicuous Midwesterner.
His aesthetic lies somewhere between the Sunday morning swap-meet
at an abandoned drive-in, the flaking paint of an old hot-dog
stand in whatever is left of Downtown and the pages of a browning
copy of the Saturday Post. There is a European myth about
America: that it is far too young to have a history and that
its sentimental reading of its own recent past therefore unauthentic
and mawkish. This misses the point, that what is longed for
is not some lost original but an already romanced longing.
It is nostalgia for the nostalgic, Frost's "two village
cultures faded into each other" bucolic, but not without
irony. Gobber's work is unapologetic nostalgia perhaps, but
it is also sly—Marlboro and Camel cigarettes, cowboys,
pinups, barbed with gentle social satire. It is white—bread
stuff to be sure. But, like Rockwell's cartoons, Benchley's
prose or Warhol's glitz, Gobber seems well aware that the
heart of parody is self mockery and that to move from a sorry
lampoon to something more, it must relish its object almost
to the point of affection.
Anne Lindberg
If Gobber's work is unashamedly nostalgic, then Anne Lindberg's
verges on being unabashedly sybaritic. There is no disguise
to the sensual pleasure she takes in what she does. Repeated
gestures of layering, scraping away, marking and erasing,
the acts of voluptuary and devoted excess. Her subjects—the
body, the earth—are the same. Her work is tactile, the
sensuous touch, our first developed sense, skin, surface,
its detail, this curve, that hollow, its tracing. The materials:
a sheen of slate, pliable beeswax, cloth, sanded wood. First
handled. Like all hedonists, there is for Lindberg a discipline
of pleasure. Each work the consequence of laborious diligence,
made and remade. It can not stop at one sense—it must
arouse the whole sensorium. Everything must be pushed almost
too far, to the point of danger, the erotic charge. As the
title of one recent series work reveals, Pellicle,
a thin membrane of skin, a delicate film, but also scum and
spume.
Judith Sanazaro
Judith Sanazaro's work is also tactile but of a very different
touch. Her paintings are the literal limit of her reach: she
paints directly with her hands, the canvas as wide as her
outstretched arms. Life size, vigorous gestures, something
of Krasner, Twombly or Gorky, but more violent. One might
think that this would lead her to using a semi-circular or
circular ground, but she seems to have rejected this as too
theatrical, and instead retains a rectangular picture
plane. Her work is not about the physiological act of painting
or gesture, rather each canvas is part of many attempts to
find the eloquence of a movement in the limited vocabulary
she has set herself The recent black and white series seems
the most revealing. She gives herself little to hide behind
and returns repeatedly to a particular inventory of mark—making,
testing their limits. There is a dogged determination about
her work, a refusal of indulgence and an unrepentant investigation
of the edge between control and unrestraint.
Judi Ross
To imagine some of Judi Ross' recent sculptures in motion,
spinning, careening like unwieldy circus props might seem
improbable, but move they do. Toys, the type that defy the
forces of nature, tops, gyroscopes, yo-yos and diabolos, but
they are on an uncompromising scale. Despite their bulk, these
unwieldy gargantuan playthings can be activated by the viewer.
Using a construction technique similar to one that coopers
have used for centuries to make barrels, her works are surprisingly
light. The conical tip of Chase can become its point
of precarious balance, the wheels of Couple can turn
in exaggerated revolutions. The Midwest seems almost unbearably
big at times, some huge vista stretching to the horizon interrupted
by the fantastic forms of water towers and grain silos. Driving
across Kansas can feel like moving through the landscape of
a child's train set, distance telescoped. There is something
of this reversal of scale in Ross' work; it is larger than
life, the viewer like Swift's Gulliver encountering a Brobdingnagian
kid's playroom, filled with the still working parts of a fantastic
mechanism, abandoned gears of some implausible giant toy—motor.
Patrick Clancy
Patrick Clancy presents a parable of the Midwestern artist:
deep—rooted in its soil, the landscape of distant horizon
lines, the point mapped directly on its surface and fixed
while simultaneously, perhaps schizophrenic, the unbound site,
the virtual space, the limitless province of distant communication.
He is at once arch conceptualist and local painter. The reference
is always doubled—the limits of language, holes in representation,
and parallel, the very thing itself, its presence and verisimilitude.
Like Borges' imagined map, the one so large, so detailed,
it is the same size, as the terrain it pictures, only a few
fragments left of curling parchment in the deepest deserts.
Clancy's work employs both the phantasms of technological
artifice and the palpability of the tangible—digital
image manipulation and hot metal. A moment of disquiet—you
stop on the highway heading West to catch the view from a
scenic outlook, the smell of sage, the dust in your
throat, you raise your digital camera and know that the picture
has already been taken.
—William Easton (Stockholm)
