Entertainment :: Fine Arts
Atlantic Works Gallery Presents ’Unsuitable Content’by Kilian MelloyFriday Jul 11, 2008Peter Pizzi, a Boston-area filmmaker an artists, shows me around at the opening of Unsuitable Content, the exhibition now on display at the Atlantic Works gallery, located on the top floor of a large, vintage brick building in East Boston.
Pizzi is the chair of the current exhibition, and he explains that about six months ago the artists who belong to Atlantic Works were deliberating on ideas for themes for a new show.
When these artists tackle a theme, as they did with last year’s exploration of the word "Gay," the results are electric, challenging, and take the form of various media. Pizzi conducts me to a painting by Joan Ryan. Titled "Hannah," it’s of a young girl who lies on her side, her lower half nude, her eyes half-closed with a tranquil, sensuous expression. "This piece has already been turned down by a few shows," he tells me. "Go figure."
Next is a startlingly crisp photo of a wet spot on asphalt; a daub of red stains one end of the splotch, and a pair of shoes, decorated with silver and gold bands, perch on the edge of the shot. Obviously, the artist--Todd Fairchild--is taking a picture of something at his own feet, but what? Why is this image especially ’unsuitable?’
In this case, it’s the absence of the thing that’s the focus of the work. Pizzi explains that Fairchild had seen a cat get run over in the street. "He went to get his camera," Pizzi relates, "but when he got back, the cat was gone. All that was left was the wet spot."
Okay, these images are provocative, but that’s the province of art. What makes these images ’unsuitable?’ Is it the sheer sexuality of some of the images, such as Nude Candidates, a collection of slides (each one mounted into its own viewer) that Pizzi has created, using nude models wearing masks of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama?
"That’s the question," Pizzi says. "Why would people come to a show billed as ’unsuitable?’ One reason is: for the content!"
As we approach the cluster of viewers--most of them are red, white, or blue--several women are snatching them up, one at a time, and gazing into them with delight.
"Here’s another one of Barack!" says one woman to her friends.
"Barack is hot!" agrees another.
Fellow artist Eric Hess stops by the collection of viewers and picks one up himself. "I didn’t know that the Democratic candidate had such a great ass," he says appreciatively.
Pizzi explains that the concept for this collection of slides was a matter of serendipity: he was out shopping for art supplies and happened upon a cache of masks of political figures, at which point the idea materialized of its own accord. He found the models, he said, on Craig’s List--the same resource he’d used when he cast his short gay film Sucker, screened a couple of months ago at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of a GLBT film festival.
"Actually, I did have someone tell me that these images were unacceptable," Pizzi recounts. "They thought it was disrespectful--he thought these people were worthy of our respect."
Sure, it’s a little mocking to portray public figures sprawling nude in various sultry poses, but is it any more abhorrent than the orator’s trick of defeating public speaking anxiety by imagining everyone in the audience to be naked?
My eye is caught by a collection of images of people having sex, with others or with themselves. It takes a moment to realize that the faces of various Atlantic Works artists have been superimposed, mostly seamlessly, onto the writhing bodies--sometimes without regard to gender: a grinning man’s head tops a woman’s nude form; a woman’s face glances toward the camera above a male torso and, below that, a generously endowed male member. A young man with a blissful look penetrates a woman whose facial features are those of a white haired, more mature gentleman. What is going on here?
Eric Hess, the creator of the piece, explains its title: This Is Beneath You. You Are Compromising Yourself As An Artist. You Have Gone Too Far This Time.
As it turns out, the title is a quote from Hess’ partner, who was shocked at the collection of images, which Hess had found on the Internet (and presumably even more shocked at the way Hess manipulated the images).
"He really said that to me," Hess relates. "Though, once he saw the piece hung here in the gallery, he kind of changed his mind. He said that he got it now."
Okay, the images of sexuality are going to disturb some people, especially people with fragile and parochial notions of gender. But as Pizzi guides me around the exhibit’s thirty-five works of artistic expression, more deeply disturbing things begin to register, work that takes aim at the surfaces of polite conduct and the hazy nightmare images lurking just beneath.
A sinuous, muscular shape, bright red and suggestive both of an anaconda and a penis, rises from a nest of shredded paper (or pubic hair) and presses mightily against the plexiglass box that pens it up in Richard Dorff’s In Vitrine.
A large family group, their faces blurred into nothingness, pose for a portrait in Joan Ryan’s painting American Family; across the room, a similar family gathering is taking place: faceless father and faceless children look forward to generic food served in a TV dinner tray, while another picture is placed like a hot provocation just beneath: a vagina, wellspring of family life, depicted in detail as though in defiant contrast to the faceless family unit above, in Ryan’s charcoal rendition titled, Ho, Hum...
A hypodermic needle lies nested in a collection of wet lollipops in Charlene Liska’s mixed media piece My Little Sweeties.
Antique dolls with china heads lay suspended in large vintage sample jars, submerged in some sort of petroleum jelly that looks like semen in Lorin Hesse’s Posterity Jar Group and Posterity Jar #7.
A collection of hilariously rude greeting cards devastate the Hallmark sensibility with frank expressions of contempt: "Thank fucking God someone woke up and realized you were an office nightmare," reads one card, the text spelled out in a jovial font; another card greets, "Thanks for the attitude, Mom." The message inside follows up with, "Happy birthday--and fuck you!"
Tucked away in a corner, almost hidden, is an old-fashioned coin-operated gumball machine. Only there are no gumballs here: instead, plastic bulbs house Chinese fortune cookies that annihilate the vacuous messages of the fortune cookies you get in restaurants by actually offering a fortune, in this case, foretelling the circumstances of your death. It’s a privilege you pay for: I shell out fifty cents to discover that, "You will achieve fame and glory, then be stabbed to death by a stalker." Uh... well, we’ll see, I suppose.
Guest artist Chris Spuglio lets fly, literally, in a painting titled New Release that shows a man pissing blood against a backdrop of textured beige. It could be a cry of rage, or a moan of despair, or a self-abnegating look by the artist at his own trade.
The other Chris Spuglio piece in the show suggests the former interpretation. Titled My Bloody Conspiracy, it’s a painting that depicts a frame from video footage posted on the Internet of Iraqi terrorists preparing to decapitate an American journalist. The painting is done in a realistic vein, but it’s presented as a DVD menu: across the top is the question, "Do we have your attention?," while across the bottom are a series of choices: "Play - Scene Selection - Bonus Footage - Alternate Ending - Director Cut."
It’s by far one of the most shocking and pointed of the works on display. Spuglio, who grew up only a short distance from the gallery, explains the painting, saying, "I don’t usually work in that style. I prefer to work with abstract textures. But people were telling me about how they had seen footage on the Internet of an American journalist being decapitated, and how they regretted seeing it. But what did they expect? We don’t know the difference any more. If it’s on the screen, it’s entertainment."
"Okay, the images of sexuality are going to disturb some people, especially people with fragile and parochial notions of gender." There are blackly humorous pieces among the more boldly challenging ones, such as the Palmer Penmanship exercise book in which a hypothetical 8-year-old girl mis-copies the model paragraphs, a series of bland descriptions of life in different societies around the world: "Eskimos are savages. They don’t even live in real houses the way people are supposed to," the carefully formed words read on one page, beneath a much more chipper and cheery sample sentence about life Up North.
As for those who dwell in more southern climes, "Pedro is a greasy wet back," the perfectly calligraphed text reads; "When he grows up he will sneak into our country on the back of a truck, and take my daddy’s job." As for the dull polemic of "Desert Life," the exercise is rendered thus: "Omar is a rag head who wants to come to America and blow up my school and my church and turn me and my little sister into harem sluts."
Bo Petran’s series of photos, Seven Days of Creation, gets back at art reviewers by displaying seven images of a toilet bowl: in some, the bowl contains human waste; in others, fish heads or skeins of bright colors. Paired with the pictures are cuttings Petran took from actual art reviews. The juxtaposition is hilarious, and biting.
Pizzi conducts me into one of the gallery’s restrooms, which, with just a few flourishes, he has rendered into functional art of a scatological sort: a picture of Sen. Larry Craig is placed on a stand next to the toilet, and a recording of Craig’s nine-minute police interrogation plays. "You can do number one or number two as you listen to the Senator," Pizzi says. "Though I’m not sure I’m ready to embrace him as gay."
But Spuglio’s DVD Menu painting haunts me, and nothing displaces its scorching image until I encounter Anna Salmeron’s video piece, which I imagine most people would find even more unsuitable than the show’s sexual content. If there’s one thing people are more sensitive about than sex, it’s food; and most of us would enjoy a nice steak dinner; but perhaps if we knew more about where that steak came from, that knowledge would take the edge off our appetites. But who wants to know? Who wants to hear about the loathsome practices that put meat on the table?
This is the message behind Salmeron’s piece, titled If... Vegetarian, a video installation that shows cattle being ushered into a slaughterhouse and butchered. The full text from which the title derives is scrawled across the wooden case that houses the installation, written out in Salmeron’s own blood: "If slaughter houses had glass everyone would be a vegetarian," declares the text. The words are set off with a hand print, again in blood.
It’s a dire observation, indeed, and surely unsuitable for a meal including beef. But Salmeron, while glad to provide material for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in her own studio, adjacent to the gallery, isn’t an angry sort: she has an interest in art as a comment on politics, but art, she says, ought to possess a sense of fun. In Salmeron’s studio, which she shares with her partner, the painter Bo Petran, Salmeron has mounted several political works by a young and talented artist, 23-year-old Rafael Ayala. "He does all kinds of art," Salmeron says. "I just picked out a few of the political pieces."
And they are political: jolting cases studies in innocence scorched by war. Newspaper articles about the war in Iraq are washed over with a canvas-wide smear of yellow paint, and tiny plastic Army soldiers are glued on top, dozens of them fighting and shooting one another: it’s a child’s game as therapy for post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Another piece shows a photo of George W. Bush, with a textured red swatch slicing across the frame and a wad of dollar bills sticking out, giving the piece dimensionality and grimly satirical punch.
"I tell him he ought to go to art school and join the gallery collective," Salmeron said, as young Ayala happened by, smiling and stopping to greet us.
Another friend of the collective has work up in Salmeron’s studio, which tonight serves as an addendum to the main event going on in the gallery space. Her work explores the feminine role in art: in a series of photos, a scowling man threatens a young woman. She cuts his arms in what looks like a ritual bloodletting; he then wraps his slashed and bleeding arm around her neck, catching her in a stranglehold.
"Are we [women] the creator [of art]?" asks Salmeron, gazing at the photos. "Are we the subject? Are we the victim?"
Artist Lorin Hesse stands nearby, swaddled in a fur coat and sporting a luxurious up-do of blonde hair. The idea, she explained, was to enhance the show by becoming something unsuitable herself: unsuitably dressed for the hot weather. Hesse points out the hair. "I told my stylist, ’Make me Dallas Republican debutante.’ I said to him, ’Did you see Charlie Wilson’s War? Did you notice the hairstyle worn by the Julia Roberts character? That’s what I want you to think of.’"
Dabbing at her eyes, Hesse adds, ’It’s so hot I expect my mascara to melt. I’m going to look like a drag queen. But hey," she says airily, "once you’re over 45, you’re going to look like a drag queen anyway."
Salmeron mentions that some of the artists have jokingly suggested hurling red paint onto Hesse’s fur.
"This genuine fur?" said Hesse. "It’s beaver. It cost $19.99 at the Salvation Army, so it wouldn’t be a big loss. It’s not grandma’s fur coat or anything. Just don’t get any paint on my shoes!" she laughs, pointing her toe to show off the magnificent red high heels she’s worn. "This is the first time I’ve worn these in public," she muses.
The collective itself is a means to art, Salmeron explains to me. "We have a lot of fun," she says. "We provoke each other. It pushes us to try new things."
It’s also freeing to work as a collective in a building like this, where the rent is low. "The fact that we don’t sell much doesn’t bother us," Salmeron says. "We don’t succeed or fail based on our sales."
That, in turn, allows the artists to be pure in their range and modes of expression, rather than being forced by the market (and the galleries) to return again and again to the same media, the same themes and messages simply because the public has decided it likes one sort of work from any given artist.
And anyway, says Salmeron, "Now and then we have sales. We’re happy."
As I’m making my way out of the gallery, my eyes ringing the same way my ears would be if I’d just been to a rockin’ concert, I encounter Pizzi in the corridor. He’s making sure there’s enough beer on ice and open bottles of wine; the opening-night crowd look like they could use a little liquid refreshment.
I ask Pizzi whether putting a show like this together was a lot of work.
"So much work," Pizzi exclaims. "And for a group of people that I love, adore, and respect... my god, at some point I just anted to grab and slap each one of them."
Then, realizing that he’s just given me an irresistible quote for the piece I was going to write, he reiterated, "Love, adore, and respect."
Pizzi issues one last invitation. "I’m going to have a show called Tea and Sympathy in October," he tells me. In the shorter term, he has a drawing class planned, as well: "Live male nude model drawing, on July 17. People can come draw a live, nude male model."
Mark your calendars!
’Unsuitable Content’ will show at Atlantic Works gallery through July 25, 2008. Gallery hours are Fridays and Saturdays 2:00-6:00 p.m., or by appointment. There will be a Third Thursday Celebration on Thursday, July 17, 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Atlantic Works is located at 80 Border Street, East Boston, MA, about a quarter mile from Maverick Station on the Blue Line. Visit online at www.atlanticworks.org/ for more information about the show, the artists, and Atlantic Works.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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