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While a well-focused curatorial feat, Desperate Times doesn’t force a thesis. About a year ago I would have demanded a stricter approach from a curator, a collection of works that expressly advances a single idea. Now I’m not sure such a show is possible since works of art can’t be reduced and subordinated to language in that way. Rather than advancing a thesis, group shows work around a theme. The critically aimed group show is not an ideological regime but rather a plurality of ideas.
This is not to say that plurality is an end in itself, but a diversity of responses allows for a more circumspect articulation of the problem. The catalog essay for Desperate Times, written by Stephen Doolittle, a recent graduate of Maryland Institute College of Art’s Mount Royal School of Art (all the artists in the show but one are also graduates of the Mount Royal school), addresses this directly. He talks about a “collective cultural response” that results from “several people spit-balling, perhaps unwittingly and not necessarily together, at various aspects of the problem”, a problem whose exact parameters are not entirely clear but which starts to cohere as various proposed solutions arrive. This may seem counter intuitive, like the cart before the horse, but it’s actually a fine approach to building a group show.
Of the works present, Graham Coreil-Allen’s work gave me the most trouble.In recent work Coreil-Allen leads tours where he seeks to convert his audience into what he calls “radical pedestrians.” Apparently he has written a book entitled New Public Sites, and he leads his guests to no-where places– the space beneath highways, deserted lots, squalid alleys – and quotes from his book. It is optimistic work that encourages an active and critical engagement with urban space for a greater awareness of the status quo and to imagine how it could be transformed.
In Desperate Times he presents a steel, pyramid-shaped structure and four poster-sized, xerox quality photographs of the neighborhood around gallery. The pictures are hung on lines suspended with cinder-block weights. The blocks and the pyramid, these raw building materials and this basic structure, lend the installation a provisional look, like an emergency structure. Text is imposed on the photographs and more text is placed beneath the photos, on the floor. Coreil-Allen’s sculpture, like his walking tours, is like a site-specific poetry reading. He engages the public, demands that they stop, look and listen, and, using language, transforms the surrounding space.
Photos by Peter Boyce
Desperate Times
Curated by Jason Irla
September 11 through October 8, 2010
Subbasement Studios
118 North Howard Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
http://www.subbasementartiststudios.com
Thanks Peter!
September 20, 2010 9:25 pm