"The Waning of Justice" by Charles Atlas at Columbus College of Art and Design

Charles Atlas, The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound.
Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

This Charles Atlas is not the one I grew up with, the grinning body-builder who defined the he-man. This one is the videographer whose career began filming for Merce Cunningham in the 1970s. Atlas expanded his work to develop dance explicitly for the camera rather than for live audiences. The Waning of Justice shows him working not in dance but with a melange of elements—landscapes of sunsets over the ocean, projected grids of numbers, a digital stop-watch ticking its urgent way to zero, enormous words splashed across the walls, replacing one another as if in esoteric  succession. Finally, all this ends by being a weighty, menacing introduction to a wildly upbeat performance by the drag queen Lady Bunny of "You Are the One," filmed close-up.

This massive work fills two high galleries at CCAD's freshly configured Contemporary Art Space. Atlas presents, edits, combines, and overlays video of several kinds into a work that staggers the viewer one way or the other. One either hastens through the room, shaking head  flashing cartoonish question marks; or one pauses with jaw dropped in bafflement. Some will decided to stay and try to answer the rhetorical question, "What the hell is this?"  

This is the question, I'll admit at once, that I asked myself when I encountered Atlas's installation. Had I not been accompanied by the curator, Michael Goodson; had I been in a sullen mood, it's easy to imagine myself as the visitor who decides that life is too short and then clears out quickly. Goodson's enthusiasm, based on his deep knowledge of contemporary art and acquaintance with this artist, held me. His excitement assured me that I should linger and think about this: Lucky me! Still, I lack a contemporary curator's acculturated comfort; each work is a new proposition for me, as it is for many gallery-goers. Trusting Goodson's informed eagerness, what was I to make of this?

Charles Atlas, The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound.
Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

Approaching contemporary art, I search for an interpretation, a way to "make sense" of it. I think that I know when to stop rationalizing, for there are works that yield nothing words can explain. Such art  transports us through feeling or sensation with minimal appeal to our verbal understanding. Some of the art that affects me the most deeply—that is indeed most meaningful to me—is of this sort. 

I think what made The Waning of Justice so disconcerting for me was that the installation is filled with the markers of interpretation: number grids, words related to the projected seascapes, a count-down clock, and, of course, its title. Then, there is the whopping contrast of the final element, the amazingly costumed and be-wigged Lady Bunny gesticulating, shaking, adjusting her wig, completely lacking self-consciousness as she sings disco with spirited instrumental backup. "You Are the One." And how you believe it: She's singing to you.

Atlas produces all these common markers of verbal, rational meaning, but outside of a context that supports intellectual interpretation. They are superimposed on tropical sunsets; numbers line up to float in a vast, darkened space; words are massive but transparent—insubstantial—at the same time. They are juxtaposed with the atmospheric, with the contrast between the fiery red and yellow of the sun setting over the ocean; of the symbolism of the sunset intensified by the clock's running down; by the black void space of the room. The sensations the work delivers are in fact the matter; the words, numbers, grids are secondary to the feeling generated by atmosphere Atlas creates visually. When the clock expires and the sun sets, then Lady Bunny performs in the smaller room, deeply artificial and wondrously positive in her emphatic, multi-costumed performance. It's a change of mood, at the least.

 Charles Atlas,The Waning of Justice, detail, 2015, video installation with sound. Featuring Lady Bunny.Courtesy of Contemporary Art Space.

The Waning of Justice makes sense in the way that mood makes sense. The combination of natural beauty, numerical grids on a black background, the ticking clock, and the elegiac mood invoked by the implied relationships between setting suns and all the other elements reminded me of such usual experiences as reading the Sunday Times. Isn't that the way my world feels, the combination of daily countdowns, the anxiety of the all the half-understood numbers that constrain me, my fleeting perceptions of beauty, my sense of a world in decay? While none of the individual aspects of this installation seems to me to have exceptional meaning, the experience affects me as a scaled-up experience of the Zeitgeist. But with hope added in the form of art. Art of the most brazen, self-confident sort, affirming the viewer as well as the artist.

What an amazing artwork. I am glad l that I stayed to think about it. The thought that I put into it reminded me that the rational exists in a world that is not. If I remember it, I can use that relationship to my benefit.

Perhaps this is why people duck through galleries like this one, though. I can appreciate the urge to flee. Yes, it's time-consuming work to think about something as strange-looking as The Waning of Justice. Nearly everyone is put off by what is alien to their experience. But that doesn't make it desirable to shun new experience, especially experience in the safe zones of art. Where better to exercise the mind and imagination, to solve puzzles, to make connections with the minds of artists who experience and respond to the same world we are living in? 

America has become a place where people are willing to believe that what we don't recognize is alien and therefore threatening; that it is in opposition to us or harmful to us. This is the national attitude toward other people, other cultural practices, and even toward free speech. Contemporary art provides a route to surprises of joy, new ideas, and enhanced experience of the world we occupy daily. It reminds us how to observe closely, how to defuse our suspiciousness of of the odd or alien, and to come to identify with—and so, to love—what we invest time and attention in.

Nothing external makes us stay or go when it comes to art experiences. We like what we know, but what we know usually defines times and points of view long gone by the time we learn them. Even our ideas of beauty, so static, are nostalgic and can make us regretful of a world in which we have doomed ourselves to ignore beauty's new sources and expressions. 

Atlas's The Waning of Justice is, like many frightening new works, art that gives those willing to consider it a receptiveness to expanded ideas of beauty and how to retain them, both in the gallery, reading the market report, regarding nature, and moving through everyday's wildly disparate experiences of meaning, indifference, and absurdity.

Whizz-Bang! Ebullient "Now-ism" at the Pizzuti Collection

Anselm Reyle, untitled, 2011.Mixed media on canvas, 89-5/8 x 88-5/8." View as one enters the building.

Everything about the second season's show at the Pizzuti Collection astounds and thrills. Ron and Ann Pizzuti, exuberant collectors of contemporary art, have turned their own house inside out so that lucky we can live with its splendors until June of 2015. The only things missing among this abundance of singular, beautiful, and high-spirited work are fainting couches and fans: Some of us may grow dizzy, exploring the carnival of brilliant colors, optical illusions, innovations and subversions inside this show's sparking energy field. 

This is the first show I've seen in which every work included was made in the 21st century: What a wonderful surprise this was to me. The Pizzuti's have been the first believers and buyers for many of these artists. The couple has been collecting others for a long time. Everything in the show was picked with love and appreciation, not only with an eye to market value. But when you're at the show, you won't have to be told that: The investment in pleasure is more than evident.

Dion Johnson, Moonlight, 2009. Acrylic on
linen, 72 x 48."

Detail, Johnson's Moonlight, showing how the
 linen'sweave modulates each color,
undercuttingthe illusion of "solid color"
bands.

I'll be writing more in the future about individual pieces and artists in the show. Here, I want to convey a sense of the vivacity that makes Now-ism so irresistible. Whatever turn you make toward a new gallery, or up the stairs, a bold, big, and brilliantly colored work greets you. If painting had hips, their hands would be on them, luring you with their defiant self-confidence, with their smirking mysteries.

The show is hung with an eye for these bravura moments. Whenever you decide to move along, you are put in the position of encountering a simplified, high-impact visual event. Each of these explosions of color and intrigue—each a feast in itself—merely opens the door to a room of excitement. There's always more to come, as my future posts about this show will illustrate.

Brian Porray, "!===FL4M3JOB===/", 2011. Synthetic polymet, spray paint, paper
on canvas. 96 x 216."

But the message that Now-ism calls from every lobby, landing, and portal is, "Come this way; come in; we want you here!" The building's gray, cool, low-affect interior does not simply not compete with the works, it actively supports their brilliance by contrasting effectively with them.

One of the truly fabulous moments is turning south from the first floor lobby and catching a view of Brian Porray's aptly named, "1===FL4M3JOB===/". Aptly-named, I say, because I'm probably not the only person rendered speechless by the size, brilliance, hilarity, and aggressive inscrutability of this painting. Its detail, viewed through the neutral lobby passage is like finding a playmate when you've been alone indoors for a week.

This is a treat that only grows, for as you approach the room, and  enter it, you discover that the painting is over twice the size you'd come to expect. It's hard not to burst out in laughs of simple high spirits when you step into the room, the work is so immense, bright, and bursting with life. It's a room of it's own; it's a life of its own in which any viewer can spend days, moving back and forth across the room for views far away—it's like intergalactic space—or close up, when it looks, despite dribbles of paint and other crude lapses of technique, like samples of the well-wrought handicrafts in paper or quilting cotton or enamel.

In door, Sarah Cain, Kiss, 3013, acrylic, beads, and string on canvas. In foyer,
Jim Hodges, Constellation of an Ordinary Day, 2002. Wood and metal panel,
ceramic sockets and lightbulbs,  in two parts.

Advancing up the stairs to the third floor, the visitor ascends into another vivid and playful scene, this time composed of two works that may as well have been installed by an interior decorator, they make such a playful and pretty pair.

This feels definitely to me as if I've come to a feminine quarter, pink and polka dotted, pastel undercoated until Cain's black band and big, red X remind us that Pirate Jenny was a girl too. Once you've passed the light installation, you can no longer see the two pieces at one time. But this lovely entrance—up the stairs and across the landing—left their similarities in my mind. The diamond shapes, the rounds with spaces between them, the dark spots mixed with light ones: These similarities left the memory of each in the other.

There are so many reasons to venture forth into the world of contemporary art, and the Pizzutis' Now-ism makes as simple and direct a case as possible for doing show. How could any show be more fun than this? Why should you go? Because you like pink. Because you like shiny things. Because you like dramatic things, or puzzles, or things that make you laugh. This is a high-spirited, high-jinx show, where every doorway and every gallery is an invitation made as alluring as possible. This is definitely a show to bring children to, for they nearly always have to right attitude around art like this. Ask them what it's about: They'll have an answer. But you'll enjoy it anyway, even without child guides. See it soon so you'll have lots of chances to go back.

Self portrait of the writer in Anselm Reyle's, untitled, 2011