[ lean to ]

For Young Artists, a Show With Just the Right Slant
— “Lean To” brings a hip urbanity to Hartford

By Benjamin Genocchio
Reprinted from The New York Times
Sunday March 30, 2003

The people at Real Art Ways in Hartford have been pestering me for weeks to come see this show. Now I know why, for it’s a corker. Eungie Joo, the curator, has assembled, under the shady title “Lean To,” a compelling array of works by seven young and emerging artists. All but one are from New York City.

A lean-to is a temporary shelter, either free-standing or supported by one wall of a larger building. It is usually makeshift, economical and provisionary. The same goes for the works in this show, which exude a hip urbanity. Herein lies their appeal.

Take Mark Bradford’s “Burn Baby Burn” (2002), a whopper of a painting made from strips of color copier paper, chunks of metal and singed squares of industrial tissue, the kind used for perm rollers in hairdressing salons, embedded in gesso, then covered in a light lacquer glaze. The overall effect is reminiscent of those big, coolly expressive New York abstracts of the 1960’s, yet with a vernacular quality that hints at the curbside grittiness of Pop.

“ Double Stretch,” made this year also by Mr. Bradford, is similarly beguiling. A casual glance at this pot-au-feu of a painting on mesh yields a dizzying array of optical effects. After more prolonged viewing, what appeared at first to be a random accretion of colors and shapes begins to cohere into a solid picture. Although only 40, Mr. Bradford is set to pass slower traffic on the road to fame.

Deborah Grant’s paintings have the playful, cartoonish quality of Pop art. But her imagery is laced with angst, deriving mostly from painful memories of school dormitories, mental wards, crack dwellings, dead end bars and the people she met there. Imagine Roy Lichtenstein channeling Jean-Michel Basquiat, and you’ve got an idea of the ferocious graphic quality of these works. Imagine Raymond Pettibon meets Marilyn Manson, and you’ve got an idea of the content. Yikes!

Over in the far room is a video by Paul Chan, a new media artist from New York City. Mr. Chan is best known for his placard-waving, political/aesthetic web page for longhairs, National Philistine, and recently spent a month in Baghdad as a member of a group working to end sanctions against Iraq. His video samples radio broadcasts and television news footage to satirize the Bush cabinet and its policy on Iraq. Although mischievous, it’s a hoot.

The public to which Mr. Chan’s video speaks is mostly anti-war, although whatever your views on the conflict, you cannot help laughing at what appears to be the voice of Colin Powell reading from the writings of Michel Foucault on the inevitability of history, or Condoleeza Rice at the front line dictating a letter to her family back home. My favorite is a voice sample of Donald Rumsfeld saying, “We must learn to live with low-density hope.”

One can find all manner of references to other artists in the works in this show. Perhaps the most obvious are Andrew Rogers’ snapshots of mundane urban landscapes. There’s been so much of this dimly lighted, painfully banal photography over the last few years that the entire genre is starting to wear a little thin. Much of this sort of work will surely sink like a stone in the next few years.

Out on his own, working in three dimensions, is Isami Ching. His contribution consists of a huge plastic funnel hanging from the ceiling beneath a skylight. Aside from being beautiful, its design and placement reveal a keen formal and conceptual intelligence. Light streams through the skylight to illuminate the vessel. At other, rather more rare, moments, it begins to glow.

Just as young artists get ahead by showing whenever and wherever they can, young curators get to be players in the art world by also adopting a scattergun approach. The logic goes something like this: The more shows you do, the more you get your name about town, build up your curriculum vitae and have a shot at a coveted museum post.

Perhaps that’s what Ms. Joo was thinking when she was selecting a theme and artists for “Lean To,” while at the same time arranging another exhibition, “Lean,” at the ISE Cultural Foundation in New York City. The inspiration for both shows is pretty much the same, as are a bunch of the artists. Hartford is some was from New York, but it’s not so far that nobody will notice.

“Lean To” is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor Street, Hartford, through April 27. Information: www.realartways.org or (860) 232-1006.

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