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Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake steps to the podium to address the assembled crowd at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She smiles, is in good humor and much more charming than I have seen her in past public addresses. Tonight is simple and fun for her. No pesky questions about her running for reelection. She is here to announce the winner of the 2011 Sondheim Prize. The five potential candidates sit fidgeting in the front row, along with a guest of their choice. One will get the Prize, the others will have to clap, endure being friendly and then probably split as soon as possible. The Mayor blathers on like a mayor running for reelection, giving some shout outs and reminding people of the upcoming Artscape. Then she gets down to business. In her hands is the sealed envelope with the winner’s name on it. She congratulates them all first and then opens it. She looks at the paper and then after a long pause says “I feel like this is one of those TV shows, and so now I should cut to break….” The crowd laughs.
1. Flashback— a week earlier. pre·view [pree-vyoo]: anything that gives an advance idea or impression of something to come.
It is early morning. Groggy from little sleep, I’m heading into the Baltimore Museum of Art upon invitation. The staff is prepared—we are offered coffee and cookies (I decline due to a distaste for sugar and caffeine) and then we are ushered upstairs to the main gallery. There is a brief introduction by BMA director Doreen Bolger, followed by a word by Helene Grawbow, the director of installation. I’m not really listening. In we go to rooms full of art, guards languid, doing time. Each artist stands in their section, where there is an expanse of their work. They are eager—ready and willing to answer questions. We are all getting our first glimpse of the 2011 Sondheim Prize exhibition.
This is typical press preview protocol. These are always strange sometimes-artificial affairs. We see the usual suspects from local publications, all with either camera or old school with notepad and pen in hand. I too snap a few reference photos, but I don’t take notes—I don’t really look much at the work either, unless an artist guides me to something. I don’t read anything written, none of the carefully prepared wall text, titles, explanations. I stuff handouts into my back pockets, save for later if needed. To me, I am here for one thing, to connect with the artists. How have they came to this place in life, who they are, what is their personal narrative. This takes time. Artists have a standard pitch. We all have our shtick. The trick is to cut through that and attempt a more authentic conversation. I am searching less for explanations or stated meaning, than a light bulb moment, an illumination. Some unknown, something new, something to say that isn’t a cliché. This is work. I know I will visit the exhibition again in the future after it opens and make a quiet stroll on my own as an authentic audience member, to look at the work in detail, to see what I feel, not what I am told to feel.
Turning visual work into words is always a troublesome yet important affair.
2. Standing on Ceremony
It is summer, the heat is kicking in—The Sondheim Prize is Baltimore’s version of the Academy Awards. A glamorous event, something one does not often associate with Mobtown and its plethora of dressed-down scallywags, vying for each other’s attention. No, this is professional, baby. Big time. And the long awaited finalist exhibition is given much buzz. Early word is this year’s show is strong, though some feel the show is a bit conservative. Regardless, the viewer won’t be disappointed. The big gossipy question is the same as always: who will win the coveted BIG prize along with its jackpot of twenty-five grand. The winner will be announced Saturday June 10, coming right up.
The annual Sondheim Prize is now in its sixth year and well established. Organized by the tireless Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, the awards involve an extensive process that includes decisions made by established out of town jurors. The first round consists of a selection of a wide variety of artists chosen as potential contenders, then the judges, artist Polly Apfelbaum and curators Tina Kukielski and Isolde Brielmaier, pare it down to the small group of finalists— this year five. The finalists’ work is exhibited at the BMA in a large show that kicks off Artscape. The Semi-Finalists are exhibited in a large well-done show smack dab in the center of Artscape at MICA’s Fox and Bunting buildings.
The diverse Baltimore and DC art scene, often segregated by group affiliation and an hour drive, all turn out for this night together, dressed in their finery (Lets face it D.C. art scene always dresses much better—why this is I am not sure. Most artists are not from the working class, so why that tradition of the non-dandy lives on I don’t know.). Moving through the galleries they whisper praise, argue and gossip. During this celebration the artists go through what must be a harrowing last-minute interview with the judges. The judges then huddle alone in some back room of the BMA and hash out who gets the award. Then the dramatic announcement. It is one big hot dogging wham bam fun event.
And Baltimore is the better for it. BOPA deserves big credit for pulling this off for the past six years. Alongside the newer Baker Artist Awards it invigorates the city’s art scene. The potential for twenty-five grand with no strings attached—well damn, that’s near unprecedented these days! That this occurs in Baltimore gets folks’ attention across the country and shows what a strong art scene currently thrives in the city. For the winners the exhibition can be a game changer career wise.
3. Can You See the Real Me? — the Finalists and Their Work
The showboating awards ceremony and sideshow hoopla aside it is what is in the galleries that counts– that and who made it and what their intent is. Then there is the viewer reaction, which is often at odds with the artist’s stated intent. The distillation of artists from a field of so many talents is always of interest, too. This years winners are a diverse lot, and true, rather more conservative than in the past— but more mature might be a better way of perceiving it all and thus of better quality.
Rachel Rotenberg
One enters the space and is immediately confronted by a roomful of large sculptures deftly carved from wood, some with light touches of paint, others entirely raw. The work while somewhat traditional is visceral, its power derived from the seamless melding of the formal with the emotional. It is biomorphic and somewhat psychosexual. It lends itself to Jungian analysis if one wished. I found it similar to work from Eastern Texas and Houston— where there is an expanse of The Great Piney Woods. In particular James Surls comes to mind. My guess was the artist lived in some such surrounding; Chesapeake Bay in origin and the work was a result of the exaltation of the surrounding nature they experienced and something we tend to forget.
I was totally mistaken. Ms Rotenberg in fact grew up in Toronto, and the work has none of the romantic “back into the mystic” nature I had projected on it. The artist starts with small drawings on paper, which derive from some personal emotional content or thought, then become transformed in the process of making them three dimensional—working with chunks of wood cobbled together, hacking into them, smoothing them out, a bit of color here and there. She tells me she is led by the material and lets whatever is meant to happen happen. Improvising until the work reaches a point where it is something new, something fresh that stands alone and radiates its own sense of mystery. She says she does not know what they are about in the end. At that point they are finished. There is something both contemporary and ancient here. This experience the artist describes so honestly is actually the way most artists I know work, but they are afraid to admit it. With the demand for artist statements and resumes, art school crits and the like, this fact of mystery gets lost, handed over to unnecessary and unreliable verbiage. This body of work stands up and reveals itself as one spends more time with it. On my return visit I found it utterly compelling and warmly human. A sort of shamanistic artifact.
When I ask about the origins of her creativity she says simply she comes from a family that always makes things. She grew up doing this, she and her husband raised five kids (kudos to that project) and now she is really focused on her work. She states she’s very grateful that she gets to lead her current life—this may be part of the key to understanding this work. It is clearly mature and operates on many levels. It is not out to please and has none of the trappings of the local art scene.
Mark Paraascendola
Next room is the work of a photographer who hails from Aimeria, Spain but lives here. Paraascendola’s parents fled to the States during Franco’s occupation. His vibrant wide-screen photos of ghost towns ricochet between several ideas. The photos are beautiful but their merit lies in the way the subject matter addresses the artist’s sense of desire and disconnection. The act of photographing itself brings Paraascendola back to his homeland (where he still has family). But even though the process of documentation brings Paraascendola home in a literal sense, his photos speak about the universal displacement of a world moving at hyper-speed.
The most arresting consist of ghost towns that appear to be from the western United Sates— they are old movie sets created for the “spaghetti westerns” of the sixties that were actually filmed in Spain, including the iconic film of the genre The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. They make me long for home and remind me I am but a tourist here on the East coast, as I grew up in Colorado and am always hoping to see the mountains when I glace to the west. But of course the old west these films portray is a mythic and unreal echo of history, and Paraascendola’s photographs speak about this layered seductive fiction that stands in for our past.
Other bigger and more intricate images are of small, vibrant industrial cities built during a recent economic boom. But upon closer inspection they too have been abandoned. The economy went belly up with the financial crisis, and these simply were left behind. The idea that whole industrial cities are constructed so quickly and abandoned even quicker is astonishing but very timely. Here may be the real seed of anxiety, fear and discontent the artist is seeking to portray. Everything is ephemeral, you can be prosperous one minute and on the streets the next. And no amount of pie in the sky religiosity is going to protect you. This a gut wrenching angst portrayed in all its ironic beauty through these digitally enhanced prints stitched together seamlessly to provide Panavision view. All are striking and quite beautiful in their melancholy, fiction-piled-on fact way—left standing as a contemporary archeological record of one time human occupation. Though these we experience the immigrants existential displacement. These are dream like chimera akin to cinema, in that they transport us back into a dreamland of the “directors” making—where all things are controlled, scripted and while quickly left abandoned and adrift, they are, like the artist, awaiting new occupation and another go at new reality.
Louie Paulu
Next room—medium scale photos, entirely different content. These deal directly with the current war being waged in Afghanistan. And after walking through you will, if you have any sense of humanity, reassess the cost, the carnage, the human suffering inflicted by man on his fellow beings through war. They are a far more powerful testament to what the war really is than any news story I have read or heard. Set out in a liner narrative fashion, from right to left, they draw the viewer in, then slowly take them down a path— a horrific journey into the Heart of Darkness. This is war journalism elevated to high art, no easy feat. Paulu felt that current war photography tends to keep a distance and portray its subjects with as much realism as possible. It is reporting. He set out to create stronger images that employed his training as a visual artist (he was a painter before becoming a photographer) that really capture and document the essence of war in a deeper, more profound way. He states he embarked on this to better inform audiences, especially future audiences.
Paulu trained as any soldier (he still stands in a straight muscular style as he speaks, like a member of the military) he marched with all the same gear, went on the same rounds. He was embedded in a unit, as all journalists are, He has spent the past five years on and off going to the most troublesome intense war zones and come back unscathed physically. (The psychological effects of such an experience are another matter….) He spoke of the near misses he repeatedly experienced and knows he is lucky to have made it out unharmed. The soldiers of his unit started to think of him as some sort of lucky charm, and began to put him at the back of the processions (blasts so often had often gone off behind him, he explained). When asked if he is going to return, he says emphatically he is done. A final experience let him know it was time; he could not handle it anymore. One’s heart goes out to the soldiers who must feel that way often but have no choice but continue.
I asked Paulu a total of two questions and got a half hour of some of the most powerful commentary I have heard about what this war (maybe any war) is like. He went into great detail about his experience in the field. His vivid and informed personal descriptions elevated the exhibition, and now when I walk in there I can’t help but consider his harrowing narrative. When asked, he takes no political side. To do so would be dishonorable he says— a disservice to those he has photographed, some in the throes of death.
Photos range in content but all have a humanity that far exceeds the usual photojournalist war reportage. They speak volumes, and I felt upon leaving that every person in this country should take a good look at these before uttering another opinion on the war. Paulu hopes to create a book of this work, and to potentially travel around by car with the images run through a projector that could be shown easily anywhere to a large audience. While his time in the war zone is over, he says, his work has just begun here.
Stephanie Barber
Barber’s space is a somewhat standard video artist studio format—an array of computers, recording equipment, musical instruments, a green screen backdrop. The artist has set up camp to create the work as it’s exhibited. But before I can ask about this or anything at all, she gently requests that I stand in front of a professional grade video camera, my back to the green screen wall and croon “I love you” three times—“Convincingly,” she prods. Immediately considering myself the method actor type, I simply thought of my young son and stated what I tell him everyday. While a bit disconcerting at first, I found it pleasurable and indeed wanted more camera time. (What does that say about me? That is another story.) I quickly surmised Barber was using this for a longer film where everyone mummers their love for the viewer, one after another, which she will most likely present at the end of her ambitious project Title. She promises to create one video each day throughout the duration of the show.
Barber’s practice defies categorization, she says. She dislikes talking about all the various works she produces, such as books, or simple everyday actions because she feels people will not take her seriously. But the truth is many artists now pursue several disciplines at once and have for many years. She simply works in a broad conceptual range that has strong ties to the Fluxus movement and its recent updates that take the entire life of the artist as a sort of work in and of itself. She agrees tentatively and notes how people don’t take Yoko Ono seriously or know nothing of Wallace Berman. This said, for this show her work is fairly traditional, it is created and shown in video. This work is by turns humorous, odd, and poignant, and seems it can go in any direction on any given day. She allows herself this freedom, a very admirable trait. Other critics have labeled her “process based” but that is not accurate, too simplistic. Here she is pulling back the curtain on the process all artists use, placed the working arena on display and let the audience in on the act. The result accumulates on the video screen set off to the right of her work area. The short films are mostly ciphers, juxtapositions that create a kind of video poem, full of trap doors and unexpected mash-ups. Some might say this is a gimmick, and it could be in less deft hands, but Barber knows what she is doing and is hard at work at all times. I went back to witness this for myself and to see her in action. I witnessed two older woman get placed in front of a microphone to read from a script that sounded like an cut-up out-take from I Love Lucy. The women gleefully participated and were wonderful in their roles. Here is the heart of Barber’s work. Everyone is an artist, everyone can participate, everyone can enjoy this work. And it isn’t dumbed down in any way. In fact it is elevated and very clever video work. There is an echo of Laurie Anderson in many of them. Hopefully Barber’s work from the show will be collected on DVD and made available after the exhibition. My conversation with her was fun; she is outgoing and clearly very dedicated to her art form. In pulling back the curtain she adds a level of collaboration and surprise to the conservative aspects of the exhibition
Mat Porterfield
Let me preface this portion by asserting that Porterfild is the premier filmmaker of the Baltimore region at this time. His two feature films, Hamilton and in particular Putty Hill, are the best works about Baltimore I have ever seen. There are no other young directors around that are nearly as good. Matt’s films wash the “Waters” away. Meaning we continually suffer a John Waters hangover here in Baltimore. His portrait of the city is etched in the world’s idea of Baltimore. But while Waters remains a strong cultural figure to be admired and while he has grown in his own portrayal of the city, his general satiric view is dated and rather troubling, especially to a younger group of artists and filmmakers out to make their mark.
Along with Water’s, there is director David Simon’s vision as manifested through the groundbreaking series The Wire. Though one cannot argue with the truths encased in Simon’s narratives, The Wire did not impact the way the world perceives Baltimore in a positive way. Simon is not a Baltimore native, but a long time newspaper reporter who chronicled Baltimore for years when The Baltimore Sun was still a newspaper to be reckoned with. His portrayal of the city in The Wire is an ongoing purgatory of a culture in decline, where the powerful jockey for position through hellish skirmishes while the powerless are used up and hung out to dry. His view of the blight of corruption and poverty offer a profound analysis of current urban America. But while Simon was speaking in broad terms– a sort of updated version of a Sam Peckinpah film– his work left viewers with a vision that was Baltimore specific. Suddenly people the world over were frightened to even come here. Porterfield instead portrays the Baltimore most of us know as fact. A city of struggling but proud individuals.
Topping both Waters and Simon, Porterfield created last years Putty Hill with a group of friends on a shoestring budget. It is a quiet film that most of all honors its working class characters with a much-deserved and realistic humanity, and its kids with a more accurate portrayal than I have seen in a long long time. This is realistic poetry with Raymond Carver bluntness and efficiency of frame. I enjoyed Putty Hill immensely; probably because it portrays the Baltimore I see every day. This is the essence of Matt’s work and it is masterful.
Does it deserve to be in the same show as these others? It is a conundrum. Film is a big collaborative work and it is almost outside what one thinks constitutes fine art in a museum. Maybe it should have been shown in the auditorium once a week during the show. Last year, when up for the same prize, he put up his film Hamilton in the gallery and let it run. He also was not awarded the Prize. Who was going to sit through an entire film in a gallery?
So, this year he put together an installation that echoes his films. But this portion of the exhibition feels subpar to most of the other work in the museum setting and somewhat forced. It is a cell phone-driven psychedelic mash-up of phone images on a video screen against a back wall of artifacts. The footage and the objects echo his film in a general way. At the same time the photos seem to attempt mild transgression, some happy spot between Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark, but they simply don’t work beyond giving us a sense of the director’s fine eye for detail and thoughtful composition. The exhibition gives the impression that his work is interested in portraying a slice-of-life cultural trangressiveness, but the great thing about his films is they are put in context and not sensationalized. Here in the Sondheim exhibit his work seems unfocused. It seems like he simply knew he needed a museum representation so put this together. But in terms of being a visual artist as opposed to a filmmaker, it feels he may not yet have the chops.
Maybe I am being a bit harsh. Truth is I enjoyed it, but maybe due to the power of his films, which are etched in my mind, it seemed diminished by comparison. Also, Porterfield was out of town so I had no chance to talk to him. Maybe a conversation would have made me more aware of his intent. But I doubt it. This just isn’t his finest work. It is like a sketch. And the flashing screen of images massed and repeating amid a psychedelic haze seem more like Jimmy Joe Roche’s work than Porterfield’s (turns out Roche had a some kind of hand in the production). Notwithstanding, the judges most likely had DVDs of his films in hand and thus his work was judged in full with the films taking the lead.
Fast forward back to the present:
The mayor has paused a little too long, the artists are nervous… she announces this year’s winner—Matt Porterfield. You can feel the excitement as the crowd erupts in cheers– Matt is the much-admired Baltimore hometown boy. He leaps to the stage, his arm bandaged from a recent fall (for which he told me he owes a lot of money, as he doesn’t have personal health insurance). He is in shock and beaming. I see a couple of his family members in tears. Of course if you chose based on the exhibition in the galleries this win would make no sense at all. And I state that as a fact. But Matt has two high quality poetic feature films made with next to no money. He is the hope of Baltimore cinema. So clearly the judges take into account each artist’s entire oeuvre. For his Putty Hill alone he deserves this award. So he gives his humble speech and thanks everyone and we quickly retire to the back gallery for some food and small talk, another year passed and all in all the correct choice made.
Exhibition award winner announcement by the Mayor.
Slideshow of the exhibition and opening.
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