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moRtAL Convictions
A h, late spnng, when university art departments across
the nation unloose freshly minted master of fine arts
• students onto a pub::; ill-prepared to make sense of
international pcst-postmodern art practices.
'Post-postmodernism,'' you ask? Yep. A modernist would
look at a 1910 Picasso collage and exult in its brilliant non-
illusionistic composition A conceptualist would groove on
Picasso s use of everyday stuff like playing cards and newspa
pers but would wish that Pablo had just pinned it alt to the
gallery wall A postmodernist would take a large-format
Polaroid of the collage and safety-pin it to a picture of B»g
Bud drawn on the National Enquirer. A multi-cultist would cre
ate an installation using the collage as evidence of all of
Picasso's nasty attitudes towards race, class and gender. The
post-postmodernist artist would probably do it all — all while
using her beeper, of course
All of these impulses are evident in the work of the master s
candidates at UGA's Lamar Dodd School of Art. one the largest
M.F.A -producing engines in the Southeast region — outsized
only by Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond Highly
competitive, only five out of 60 applicants were admitted to
the painting program last year, according to Bill Squires, direc
tor of graduate studies. To add to your appreciation of these
budding artists, below are outlines of the ideas and experi
ences invigorating their work. But don t take my word for it —
go experience their talents for yourself.
GKEG POnDs inventive, skin-flailing, motorized
sculptures hit a raw. cyberpunk nerve Zootrope's four flapping
deer skins are prodded into pseudo-life by
the jerks of cast-aluminum human femurs
doubling as crankshafts. These in turn prod
ded my cranium into ruminations on the
tragi-comic foolishness of our frantic run
through time, medicine's effort to artificially
extend lifespans, our dependency on Big
Agriculture to feed us (and the conse
quences of the chemicals it uses) and the
deeper insanity of our tinkering with global
nature systems. I'm sure your cranium will
be prodded into different nooks — a pretty
reliable litmus test for a successful contem
porary' artwork.
The hefty, trapezoidal steel bases add to
the sense of menace as their tumultuous
vibrations leave dark rub marks on the
bones. The vibrations also gnaw at the deer
skins, whose hairs accumulate below in
heaps. Each motor's spasms are randomly triggered during a
20-minute cycle, so be sure to 3sk the attendant to turn them
on fo r you when you arrive It may also add to your macabre
enjoyment knowing that Pond’s engineer dad hunted down
these very deer back in Oregon, and that Pond remembers
digesting a few of their forebears as a child.
Pond's Buffalo Table has a quiet, creepier, Victorian feel.
Red rubber tips travel the underside of a buffalo hide, causing
tender undulations and a slow trickle of leather shavings to
fall. The table's hoof-tipped legs add a colonialist subtext.
Pond wants to give you a visceral psychological experience,
a goal he accomplishes with Narrative, my favonte of his well-
crafted pieces An understated four-foot by four-foot cube of
neatly stitched-together rawhide, it twirls with the deliberate,
slow march of a department store watch display: long black
hair implants dangle off it in neat rows, recalling Hair Club For
Me-i ads. The implants also evoke those squirm inducing close-
up shots of mosquitoes penetrating our pores. It's as if an art-
hostile scientist raided a museum collection heavy in '60s min
imalism and decided that all those damn cubes would be bet
ter put to use as bactenal growth experiments.
Narrative's very weirdness makes you
laugh, exploiting modernist sculptures sim
ple forms while gently undercutting that
movement s naive worship of "pure form
(An exhibit of exceptionally banal work by
old-school modernist sculptor Larry Mohr
coincides with the M.F.A show, conveniently
providing samples.) Like many of his col-
legues. Pond is admirably up on contempo
rary works by artists who have set a prece
dent for his line of inquiry, like Bruce
Nauman and Chris Burden
1 M.ul from Buffalo TaNe by *«r<-i> I’ond
\t**H .md buffalo hid*- f>7xK4xi!i> iru hr*
RAtHLEEn WALKER
POtOtSRiY s wittily constructed
paintings are bold and ballsy. These 10-foot
by l?-foot megaliths could be used as material proof of Nexus
Center curator Teresa Bramlette s observa
tion that '90s artists have "metabolized the
lessons of postmodernism... work(ing) with
out the stnet agendas of [their] more doc-
tnnaire predecessors.”
Pototskiy's work naturalizes postmod
ernism’s habitual pell-mell appropriation
from fine art and com
mercial sources: one
imagines her buzzing
around the studio like a
slightly tipsy cook in the
kitchen after some seri
ous love-making, fridqe
door aiar, building a
late-night Daqwood-style
sandwich, humming hap
pily as she plops a thick
slice of Barnett Newman-
ish hard-edged stripes
onto a hefty heap of earth-toned and
abstract Motherwellian shapes, sprinkles on
Twomblyesque pencil scrawls and erasures,
then tops the whole thing off with some
cartoony strokes a la Phillip Guston. But no
derivative dependency mars these canvases:
they are all confidence and pleasure, effort
lessly exhaling the history of modern painting, then burping
up a few chu *s of Barbie-bnght plastic pink and black-flecked
Formica orange.
Conceptual games abound Patches coated with just the
right shade of tan deceive the eye as raw scuff marked canvas.
The paintings are made of irregularly shaped strips of canvas
joined together with gooey black acrylic, and the black join-
lines contribute to the summer camp aura: think fabric paint
T-shirt projects on desiqner drugs.
This unusually physical approach to painting-making seems
somewhat less quirky if you take into account the fact that
Pototskiy is a former sculpture major who always enjoyed
throwing her entire body into the creative process The sturk-
together strips shift scale rhythmically, one suggesting a mag
nified sub atomic particle, the next an airplane eye view
of a Southwest canyon Pototskiy has studied
fractal pattern theory, and it shows However
you choose to explain it. this is the kind of
work whose comfortable, mature lines
announce that this is "Real Art." (It also
seems to whisper "saleable and dealer-
ready")
Couleu en< «• II
bv Kathl«***n VS.ilk**r l'otot«kiy
«*< r vti* on ranvas IZSxI L' ini h«**>
lift.»il from Mutual Interaction by
Kathlern Walker I’olotskiv
atrvlu on canvas HIxlM. inches
Like Pond. S A n j it SET H i „
another savvy sculptural researcher who
infuses the primary shapes of Drawing 101
with the messy specificity of humanity With
a lighter touch and brighter palette, Sethi s
use of powdered pigments reveals childhood
impressions of India, inevitably bringing to
mind the work of English-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor. But
whereas Kapoor's signature pigment-dusted forms are sugges
tively abstract. Sethi's are densely encrusted with recognizable
objects that cling to them as haphazardly as barnacles. For
instance, in Present Continuous, densely packed shoes create a
7-foot diameter spiraling Danish pastry smothered with red
Georgia clay and iron oxide
Passion and romance seep from this work, especially when
one learns how potently disagreeabl* a
symbol shoes are in India (Sethi wa>
admonished to keep his shoes apart from
books, beds and his head). But even with
out knowing that, this is captivatinq
imagery, redolent with each pair of shoes
unknowable comings and goings.
Sethi’s use of this unusual material
finds even more successful form in the
large cylinder that comprises lute’nvnaUie.
a conglomeration of shoes made powdery
soft with pale blue pigment. The mass
seems to hang in mid-air like a trash whirl
wind on a busy city street although it
weighs in at over 600 pounds! Some of the
shoes were attached to the virtually invisi
ble steel frame Others art* tethered to the
frame in a maniacal web of ragged laces
and old twine. (Interminable goes to
Atlanta’s Callanwolde Fine A^ts Center June
19 - July 24.)
Gathering, a 6-foot memorial rondo of Sikh turbans, was
created with the help of Sethi's father during a weekend of rit-
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□ FLAGPOLE JUNE 3,
1998