Painter Painter pt 1 of 3, Walker Art Center

Painter Painter

Walker Art Center

Minneapolis, Minnesota

02 Feb – 27 Oct, 2013

Part 1:  the process

Painter Painter has the potential of being both theoretically progressive and informative in terms of content (the works and artists displayed), and I was privileged to be attendance as Michelle Grabner, Jan Verwoert and Bruce Hainley led participating artists and the Center’s members in presentations and group discussion of the meaning behind the show. 

    For me, it was my first time in the new Walker Auditorium.  The room was cozy, intimate and perfectly theatrical – we could easily have been in any one of thousands of commercial theatre venues across America – only then we would have had sodas, popcorn and even more cushy seats.  This thought was to stay with me throughout the event – an interfering static.  The discussion resembled a business conference or trades meeting in a busy airport, complete with schedules, overhead announcements and stewardesses (my apologies to the volunteer ushers).

    The students and audience were professionally engaged and polite (and non-native), and we could leave the event with mandatory cookies and cocoa and a receipt for having attended a continuing ed seminar.  We were re-assured that our city has made its mark on the visual arts scene without forcing us to accept any major influence on our own more pedestrian life-styles.

Jonesing for Depth

Quinn's Planet, courtesy London Telegraph

Jonathan Jones Joneses for Artistic Depth

    In his 21 January review, Jonathan Jones, arts and culture critic for London’s The Guardian Newspaper, dropped the gauntlet over popular British artist Marc Quinn’s giant baby sculpture, Planet, and its installation in Singapore’s scenic Gardens by the Sea.

    Jones’ criticism is direct rather than rhetorical.  Does art need to be deep?  Inaccessible?  Clever?  Challenging?  How is it that we will choose to determine what is or is not considered art in a foundation-less (stated positively) Postmodern global culture? 

    I do enjoy The Guardian’s often thoughtful criticism, and appreciate Jones’ perspective in this case, but too often, I also wonder if The Guardian is not merely the UK’s contra-cultural, anti-establishment perspective – often appearing disagreeable merely to disagree. 

Quinn and Planet at Singapore installation, courtesy Artnews.com

    Indeed, there appears to be some disagreement with Jones’ perception.  Artnews.com confidently judges, “Planet is one of Marc Quinn’s most important works. The sculpture, which is a depiction of the artist’s infant son, appears to float above the ground and is a technical tour-de-force,” (Artnews, below).

    I think that in consideration of today’s cultural norms, Jones is being a bit hypercritical.  Consider the fate and present veneration of The Pearl, formerly at the heart of Manama, Bahrain. 

Shag: Press Your Luck

Shag Is Smokin’

    Tired of Antismoking laws and contemporary “lofts” that seem a b it too much like old apartments?  Perhaps you need to get Shagged.

    Shaf, aka Josh Agle, takes us back to when American was cool – way cool.  Mod was hot, monkeys were funny, and style was everything.  The world not only loved us – it wanted to be us.

    Educated in the Visual arts at Long Beach State in California, Shag combines a classical sense of space and narrative with the native humor and visual communication skills of a commercial illustrator.

    Shag (think JoSH AGle) jumped off the covers of classic jazz records and modern magazine designs – is it my imagination, or do I see a little Bing Crosby and Audry Hepburn film influence also?  -- into the postmodern world.

    A Shag differs from many contemporary retro pieces in that it is not merely a classic mod pose. 

    Rather, the images are, as Shag puts it, “set in the middle of a story or situation – characters are interacting and reacting to each other and to outside events.”

    Part of the Shag narrative depends on the strong differentiation between foreground and background, render in large spaces of flat color.  The eye skims across the background, registering the action denoted by the figure as in a carton panel.

    Shag’s classical training is readily apparent, and perhaps that’s what makes the pieces so great.  The line of each figure flows into a dialogue with another image, other lines, and pools of color.

    Even a six on the Kinsey scale will follow the legs of a Shag vixen to see where they are going.

    Shag’s other trick is the building of context. 

    Take Twelve Stations of Ptolemy.  Based on the traditional horoscope, each image contains symbols, colors, activities, and often animals, related to each sign.

    They are a smoothed-over, cooled-down, and [Pf]attened-up update of the Medieval Bestiary or Book of Days.

    The same attention to narrative symbolism imbues all Shag’s series, whether in the Genesis cycles of Before the Eviction; the more classical Heroes and Monsters, based on Greco-Roman mythology; or Holidays on Ice, straight from the Madison Avenue-Hollywood reader.

    So, put on some Esquivel; pour yourself a gin; and go ahead, light up – it’s your life, after all.

    And go Shag-a-delic with OX-OP Arts’ return to style.

Shag:  Press Your Luck

Through June 20

OX-OP Arts

1111 Washington Avenue. S.

Minneapolis, MN  55415

(612) 259-0085

 Originally appeared as "Shag is Smokin' " Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 10-23 June, 2005, p 142.

Art with a Twist

An Interview with Perry Ingli

  KNOWN INTERNATIONALLY FOR his landscapes and abstract tornado series, Perry Ingli is one of seven artists who have exhibited all 10 years of Art-A-Whirl.

How did you become a painter?

    In Aspen, in 1967, I was introduced to plein air drawing.  John Powers, principal of the Aspen Design Festival, had created a lifestyle environment with the Aspen School of Contemporary Art, where students were brought into contact with now-blue-chip artists like Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg.

    I couldn’t get into MCAD [Minneapolis College of Art and Design], because I didn’t have the money, but my drawing instructor at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls was Larry Rosing, a graduate of MCAD.

    Larry is also where the Asian influence comes into my art – he was one of the first American artists to go into China under Nixon in 1971.

    I received my BS in Fine Art at River Falls in 1974.  As part of their program, I studied abroad in London and Vienna.  In London, I began working with printmakers, greats like Michael Rothenstein and David Hockney.

    I had studied filmmaking, but found that it was out of my socioeconomic class.  Printmaking appealed to me – it is affordable and accessible to regular people.  I bought into that.

    I studied woodcuts with Rothenstein.  You know, after a while, you come to a point that you admit who you are.  You can try to become something, but after a point, you realize that you are already a wealth of permutations that can be expressed.  I was a farm kid from Wisconsin, and I was used to wood.  It made sense to me.

How has being queer affected your art?

    My work is more related to Modernism than to Stonewall.  There are thousands of gay artists.  You can meet them and not even know it.

    The tornadoes probably relate most to my gay consciousness.  They are a subliminal thing – when HIV arrived on the scene is when I started doing tornadoes.

So, the tornadoes are your reaction to the AIDS crisis?

    No, but the terror of the tornado is similar to the terror of the early AIDS epidemic.

    Realize that your peer group [20s and 30s] is the first group where there are all of these creative people still alive.  My colleagues who were creative are dead.  Several generations of creative died.

    A tornado does not equal HIV.  A tornado is the violence of nature, the power and unpredictability of nature.

    My work is not about the obvious message – it is about what happens before the stop sign and after.  It looks like something, but people always get their own message from my work.  This is a conscious effort on my part. 

    I do not fill in the blanks.  The audience has to fill in the blanks.  That is why my work is so successful, because the audience is allowed to see their message in my work.

However, your later tornado series seems to be influenced by stress in your life, such as the art-market crash in the late 1990s.

    Tornadoes give you the ability to display stress or action, conflict or the sublime – the terrible beauty of the sublime.  It’s really my first mature image.

    It helps me to see landscape art not as the English painter John Constable does – not as a pictorial place – but as a scientific view where you can depict aspects of the landscape.  The direct relationship is not pictorial.  It is psychological.

 Is that where the energy from your images and your landscapes comes from?

    One of the things that artists say about my landscapes is that my work is not plein air.  They are psychological representations, like gestalt.  But even this is off.  My work is really informed by my passion.

    My painting is a sort of Zen practice.  What is represented is the process of targeting for an image, not a specific target.  It’s not really an abstract expressionism, either, but rather, that point where psychology meets Zen.

    I’ve learned how to position the medium and myself in regards to the world, and how to unify this experience, or rather how to record an experience of the moment.

    My artwork is more of a documentation of a perspective in time – not the perspective itself, but a product of time and the process of creating.

Where can we see your work?

    My studio at 759 Pierce St. NE. is open during the entire Art-A-Whirl festival.  My artist reception, featuring solo jazz guitarist David Roos, is May 21, 4-7 PM.  Also, every Thursday, 5-9 PM, and by appointment.

    My work is on public display at various locations, including the River Gallery and Discovery Gallery at the New Science Museum of Minnesota in St Paul, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Wells Fargo, the Gateway Center at the University of Minnesota, and the Minnesota State Historical Society (including its GLBT collection).

originally appeared as "Art with a Twist:  An Interview with Perry Ingli," Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 13-26, 2005, p 32.