TAMMY VITALE

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Garden_goddess_in_the_cucumber_vine_top_ Tara, hand-built clay sculpture, by Tammy Vitale.

Tara today and Io yesterday are sculptures that have been out and about and that I decided to put in my garden at the bottom of my back deck steps instead of bringing inside.  I don’t know why they haven’t found their own homes.  Maybe they want to live in the garden with some other sculptures that have been out for about 2 years now.  I like the way they look, so for the time being, they’ll be fine.

Yesterday I gallery sat at the Gallery at Friday’s Creek.  Slow but a great time to relax and read the paper.  Browsing through the Washington Post Weekend,  I came across an article, Sculpture in Very Uncertain Terms by Michael O’Sulivan (page 50, Nove 3 2006) on an exhibit that I first came across in ArtDaily, then again on Sunday, Oct 29 in The Washington Post Arts section, page one, Unambiguously Uncertain by Blake Gopnik ( my favorite hated art critic.  What a pompous little rooster he is).  The first two times I was baffled about, yes, but is it art?  (see oct 23 blog here, which won’t link for some reason)(sorry for the general links on the Post and ArtDaily, but I can’t get specific link backs to come up on any of these either)

Here’s Gopnik:  "To the extent that the art world has a dirction, this is it:  At first glance, at least, these artists’ works are cheery, colorful, brash and peculiar….Slightedness is this art’s reigning principle, as the only principle that’s left.  It’s a brave stand that rejects the possibility of courage.  That’s why this show is so important. There’s a crucial ‘what if’ here – ‘What if art and meaning are dead ends?" – that cannot be ignored…..in a world void of ideas or originality, there’s no good reason not to be derivative.  In fact, copying becomes a strong statement of how impossible original creation is – at least in a medium with as long and venerable a history as sculpture…These sculptures have the nerve to hold up a mirror to that world, even as they willfuly – or will-lessly – refuse to reflect it.  Reflection, they seem to say, was for eras when there was still a difference to be made – in the world or in art."  I wish I could import pictures but I can’t.  Go to The Washington Post  site and I hope the on-line articles have the pictures.

Here’s a descriptin of one:  "Empire Vampire V(c):  Wooden pedestal, acrylic metal ladder, two polyester turtles, china figures, two acrylic metal photo holders, lacquer, spray, plastic foil festoon, silk flowers, plastic grass."  And the comment:  [Isa} Genzken’s work seems to hide angst behind its cheery accumulation.  It could provide a new framework for reading this whole show:  Maybe all its work reveals a throw-away society, with art as the ultimate recylcing of waste.

Ok.  So I hung onto that thinking to blog about it.  And then along comes Michael O’Sullivan yesterday reviewing the same exhibit with even more photos.  But THIS is a REAL review!  for REAL people (do people actually buy this stuff?  or is it all vanity/ego?). 

"What you will see in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s ‘The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas:  Recent Sculpture’ – or, rather, what you are expected to see by several of its nine exhibiting artists, at least according to curator Anne Ellegood – are the following items:  The ever-changing systems and random encounters we experience every day.  Thought itself.  The beauty and horror of life.  What neuroses would look like if you could see them.

"And what does all this physically look like?  For the most part, – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – a huge pile of crap."

You hafta smile.  Well, you don’t hafta.  But I sure do.  BIG SMILE.

"Along with poking holes in the assumption that interpretation is possible, or even valid, the works pull the rug out from under the expectation that we’re supposed to feel something, other than a creeping sense of unease.  How can you know what emotional response is appropriate when you don’t even know what to think?  What’s the point in making something, ‘Uncertainty’ seems to ask, when points don’t even matter?  ….Humor, maybe, but it’s of a smirking, self-referential sort and not too much fun….If there’s an anomie these days about how and why artists still make stuff – and precisely what we in the audience are to make of it – ‘Uncertainty’ would have us believe that it’s due to the problematic state of contemporary art and not the callowness of its practitioners…."

Well deserved skewering.

If it doesn’t make you feel, it isn’t art by my definition.  Of course I’m hopelessly old fashioned and can’t get into the "good" galleries in D.C. (darling – figurative just DOESN’t sell in D.C) – and you know what (and this isn’t sour grapes), if that work is what it takes, I’ll just keep on building my little retail art business, making work that people (women especially) fall in love with and decide they can’t live without.  My art is meant to evoke a connection and response and a space for stories to be born and be revised and retold.  So sue me and call me a crafter.  That’s okay too.  As long as you buy the work because you love it.

Here’s today’s "art" for November (for more, click on Kat’s Paws over in the upper left hand column and check out what everyone is doing – she has a list of participants in her side bar).Nove_4_art_fish_soup   It’s called Fishing Hole (which is a surprise to me since I had it labled Fish Soup – but hey, it can have whatever name it wants) and is a collage of two different watercolors – one very very old and never finished, one made last month while thinking about this whole art a day thing.  Here’s the kicker – the fish aren’t attached.  I plan to make more work and rework the 18 x 24 inch background over the term of this month for days I don’t have a lot of time or am just feeling lazy (I really really HAVE to get in the studio and pack, including making sure I have enough containers, and then come make tags for everything).

thought for the day:  art should make you feel something.  The something is up to you.  But to be art, it should create a space where something new is born, thus by it’s very nature, changing you and the world around you and who knows where the ripples stop?

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