Tim Conlon @ Arlington Arts Center.
There's conversations here and here about a City Paper review I wrote on "Collectors Select" at Arlington Arts Center. Specifically, the chatter's about the parts that deal with Philippa Hughes and Tim Conlon (and counting). Here's what I wrote:
[Daniel] Lavinas shows [the work of León Ferrari] without pretension: His biggest intervention is to have the gallery painted a deep shade of cherry-lambic red to match the heliographs. Philippa Hughes went further. The least experienced collector in the group, Hughes invited some graffiti artists—Tim Conlon, Bryan Conner, RAMS, and the Soviet—to tag her room. The intervention is the work here. But Hughes is bursting through a door that's been open for nearly three decades. There's still room for innovation in graffiti, but graffiti in a room isn't innovative alone (even if it shares the room with floor-to-ceiling Tiffany windows, as it does here). Context notwithstanding, the work by Conlon (which takes up most of the room) is dull in any formal sense. As tags, they're not particularly intricate or witty; as abstraction, they don't offer much.I encourage you to "read the whole thing" because that's what we writers always say, but also because my estimation of Hughes's show fits in against my estimation of the other exhibits. There are several curating strategies on display, some more successful than others, and that's not something to ignore when the shows are set in contradistinction to one another.
The entire show consists of six smaller shows—it's a federal showcase of smaller independent showcases. Hughes's room might be more independent than the rest, though. For example, she's hosting "Wreckfast @ Tiffany's", a closing party for her room. In a sense, that adds as much context to consider as the Tiffany glass does. If her argument is that the show succeeds because the audience it's designed to attract will benefit from it, then you get into questions about whether and to what extent young, hip, gallery-party attendees will be exposed already to the notion of graffiti in a gallery—or, on the other hand, whether they'll be prepared to accept that.
Hughes is staking a Roberta Smith claim, that there is a responsibility to increase visual literacy. (I put Roberta Smith on a continuum with Peter Schjeldahl, who says if people don't like art, bully for them. And those two are talking about art criticism and its purpose, of course, but let's project laterally to curating.) I don't believe that a work's instrumental value to the audience merits its inclusion in a show.
One way or the other it's a context-driven piece. I think, though, that the intended context isn't the only context that the critic needs to consider. On the other hand, Cudlin says, "Complaining that it isn't succeeding at something it doesn't set out to do just isn't productive."
But I'm on the verge of writing ex ante about the show and I don't want to do that. It's odd to have this public conversation with the show's curator and administrator—well, I'll back up and say it's novel, not odd. Transparency is for the best in criticism, particularly in new media, and I do as much (I hope) to put the negative feedback I receive out there as I do to put my work out there.
Posted by Kriston at March 27, 2008 11:40 AM