This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Atlanta Art Workers Coalition newspaper. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1978-1980 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1980)
REVIEWS contrived by the arrangement of a show for local “avant-garde” artists in The High Museum. Talley’s, Fen ton’s, and Cone-Skelton’s pieces seem to define a continuum extending from the psyche, through the body politic, to society, their work expressing their own existential orientation to this ex hibition. In Some Short Essays, Dan Talley presented the viewer with six panels of very dense copy, occasionally illus trated with photographs and objects. Talley’s subject in these essays is him self; he offers us a play by play de scription of his thought processes as an artist thinking about this show. He tells us in the first essay: “I spent several months thinking about the im plications of this particular exhibition and my responsibilities to it.” After considering carefully what he feels is his situation in this group show, as well as “possibilities for several dif ferent works,” Talley, in the conclu sion to the first essay, writes that his ultimate choice of the essay format was designed “to make a statement that would force me to deal directly and clearly with some particular issues and provide the viewer with informa tion in the least confrontational man ner possible.” In Talley’s conception of the piece, self-service is really pub lic service. This ostensible tension be tween self and society continues throughout the essay series. In the second essay, Talley writes: “What ultimately I’m doing with this series is attempting to clarify some of my own thoughts.” Two sentences later, how ever, he is addressing the audience, telling us he has presented us “with a current point in my time, a point in my development.” According to the art ist, we have been allowed a look around in his head through the medi um of these mediations. Finally, in three of the essays Talley has organ ized and presented some of his early working notes and drawings for the piece; to him, and he assumes to us, they “reveal a lot about my process of working.” Yet here too the tension between self-service and public ser vice is clearly visible, but this tension, for those who have patiently read through five dense essays (and I sus pect this group of people to be quite small) is seemingly resolved in the conclusion to the sixth: “Taking a sec ond look at what I’ve written I decid ed that I was on the right track. I con sidered if it will be of any use to you and then I wondered if it even matters what you think.” While Talley ultimately adopted an onanistic orientation to this show, Julia Fenton, in taking the same socio political situation as her subject mat ter, chose to address the body politic. Other Considerations consisted of ten questions typed on separate sheets of 8V) x 11 paper and posted on the wall. Her considerations here are clearly and overtly political; for example, the questions: “At what point does state- supported art become the art of the state? Do government grants to the arts ever conjoin with payment for po litical services rendered by the arts to specific politicians? Are definitions of esthetic quality politically motivat ed?” Thus, asked to contribute a piece for this show at the High Museum, Fenton chose to present what she felt were ten distilled and important ques tions which engage the current state of the relationship between artists and society, or between herself as an art ist and the art politics of Atlanta. Although Annette Cone-Skelton’s untitled piece consisting of two con structed walls duplicating the gallery walls and enclosing her allotted space can be seen as a logical outgrowth of her earlier work, as she suggests in her catalogue statement, one would prefer to believe she doesn’t really think the entelechy of her type of mini malism is to disappear. Her piece has reduced the specific set of socio-politi cal circumstances of this show to a spatial situation, which to most of the audience was probably aesthetically invisible. We learned from the video tape which was produced to accompa ny the show and make the work more “accessible,” that Cone-Skelton at one point in her planning for the show thought about hanging tightly packed ropes in her corner and later about en closing these ropes in walls with an opening to allow viewing but not phy sical access. Unlike Talley’s piece, these preliminary thoughts qua thoughts are not apparent in the final presentation. She has literally walled off her private thoughts from society in her final existential orientation to the show. If she has teased a few un initiated to think about the boundaries between art and life, she may have confirmed more suspicions that avant garde art in Atlanta really doesn’t exist. For each of these three artists, the opportunity offered by the avant garde show was also a predicament; each tried to turn this predicament into art, but the ironies of this socio-political situation managed to muffle the muse in each case. Hopefully now Talley has clarified some of his own thoughts and will again treat us to some art, Fenton will either sharpen, extend, and order her political analysis or cease trying to make political art, and Cone- Skelton will turn back from the brink of aesthetic extinction. Howett in his catalogue essay writes, “the true political nature of avant-garde art, it seems to me, is never in its content. The political power of avant-garde art resides in its radical form, its alienated aloofness and innovation, its metaphorical chal lenge to society’s value.” If Howett is right, by taking this socio-political ex perience as a primary subject matter and incorporating it directly into the work, at least three of the artists have demonstrated that the socio-political realities for true avant garde art in At lanta have yet to be realized in “The Avant-Garde: 12 in Atlanta” exhibi tion. Lynda Benglis, cast paper form from Recent Works exhibition at Georgia State University Art Gallery, October 26-November 16 (Photo: Neal Higgins). Lynda Benglis: Recent Work Georgia State University Art Gallery October 26-November 16 By George Warren Lynda Benglis first achieved “star” status in the early seventies, riding a media wave which propelled such art ists as Chris Burden to the front of the American avant garde. While Burden used the media to publicize his violent acts against his own body, Benglis achieved notoriety through her infa mous full-page Artforum advertise ment in which she posed naked while holding a monstrous dildo between her legs. This hermaphroditic image is characteristic of the themes of sexual ity, organic imagery and sensuality she employs in her paintings, sculp-* ture and video pieces. While her past use of free flowing material, such as wax, poured latex and polyurethane foam, have embodied these themes, her new work points to an apparent ossification of this process. Benglis’ show at Georgia State Uni versity was composed of three groups of totem-shaped wall sculptures, made of papier mache applied over a chick en-wire backing. These pieces were either pinched in at the middle and flared at the ends, giving them the ap pearance of bow ties, or pinched at the end to resemble a pregnant joint. While in the past Benglis has used variations of this shape as in her lozenge-shaped wax paintings or in the knotted pole-shaped sculpture series, these recent pieces have a dis turbingly finished look which contra dicts the more process-as-product ap pearance of the earlier work. The Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Newspaper, January/February, 1980 14
