"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.

There's Something Strange About "Simulacrum"

By simulacrum one can mean a simple representation: Mme. Tussaud's Wax Museum, for instance, presents simulacra of famous individuals. But a simulacrum can also be an inadequate or slight copy: "He said their house was a palace, but it was a mere simulacrum of anything palatial."

Tony Matelli, The Idiot, 2011.
Stainless steel, paint; 11 x 8 x 20." Courtesy of Leo Koenig, Inc.,
New York. Author photograph.

I loved the current show called Simulacrum at the Canzani Center Gallery of Columbus College of Art and Design. It's a big show with nothing that fails to grab the eye and intellect. In fact, that's its special delight—that all the ideas here are not merely illustrated by the physical objects: the objects embody the ideas. Of every work, the viewer has to ask in what sense this is a simulacrum, and of what original? Is there only one copy here? What does this work reflect or resist about the original or the world the original occupies? "No ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams wrote, and this show is the next step out from that idea. Then why copy a thing? Why even make the simulacrum? Who wants it?

At the show's entrance is this wonderful, provocative opener, Tony Matelli's The Idiot. It's a simulacrum of what, exactly? Certainly it's a perfect painted, stainless steel representation of an opened Coors beer container. But into that box has been ripped, or blasted—as if by a rifle at close range, when someone ran out of beer bottles to shoot?—three holes in the configuration of a face, with two eyes above a mouth. So the imitation box is itself a crude simulacrum of a face. At Halloween when I was child, a box or paper bag with holes served as a mask; so it's a simulacrum of a disguise or anonymity too. But the crudeness of the face, the rough punches, the indifference of the language (since the box is oriented on its side)—all this plus the mounting of the piece by itself like a hunting trophy on the white wall, certainly suggest that The Idiot is in fact named for its original. And maybe this is a simulacrum more significant than its original, a beer-swilling, aggressive, inarticulate man with a gun, a hunter taking trophies—or simulacra thereof.

Lee Stoetzel, Small Meal #2, 2007, detail (one of three elements).
Cypress, mahogany, hickory, and zebrawood. Dimensions
variable (under 6"). Courtesy of the artist and Mixed Greens,
New York. Author photograph.

Lee Stoetzel's Small Meal #2  has three parts, a cold drink cup with straw, a burger box, and this french fry cup, all obviously modeled on a McDonald's meal. On the one hand, unlabeled, they look like a design engineer's models, reminding us that considerable marketing art goes into the presentation of the most common and ephemeral material aspects of our world.  But on the other hand, these make us think too of timeless Harry Winston jewelry, when common everyday items—a shoe, an insect, a chair—can be the basis for a jewel-encrusted clasp, brooch, or hair ornament. Stoetzel's rendering with minute accuracy in precious woods—mahogany and zebrawood among them—mass-market burger and fries elevates the lazy and trashy to the precious dazzling. We take a deeper look, even if our notice begins in a joke. Is the simulacrum of McDonald's fries the simulacrum of Schiaparelli-like fashion whimsy?

Robert Gober, Bag of Doughnuts,
1989. Polyester resin, paper,
11 x 5 x 3.5," Private collection, NY

Robert Gober, Bag of Doughnuts, 1989. Interior.

Robert Gober also offers a simulacrum of food, but to a very different effect. His Bag of Doughnuts appears to be just that, in size and materials. The paper bag is a paper bag just the right size, and looking in, there are those fried cake donuts, yum yum. Gober has chosen to make his real white paper bag look as if it were just that by drawing in pencil the trademark "Union Camp" and the assurance, "Made in America." The treats inside, once their authenticity is called into question by Gober's have made the bag less authentic, plummet from appearing goodies we'd still like to dunk in coffee, to the repellent, dense, indigestible matter that they are. Gober's interest in materials seems focused on the subject of food itself, on the comparison between doughnuts as a dainty and as something that is barely food at all. There's a fine line, perhaps, between food and what we accept as edible.

Chris Bradley, Grease Face #3, 2012. Steel, aluminum, cast bronze, plastic strapping,
spray paint,oil paint, colored pencil. 24.25 x 22 x 2.5." Courtesy of
Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago.

Simulacrum includes three empty, greasy pizza boxes doodled on in seeming idleness by Chris Bradley. All this is in a manner of speaking, of course, for this box isn't made of cardboard and grease, though the tacks are tacks. Bradley's work is the perfect replica of an empty pizza box, on which he has lavished materials and cunning to create realistic illusion. This (and its neighboring boxes) impressed me with awareness of the ignored lulls in life that may take up more time than the experiences we insist on attaching significance to. Bradley's torn "cardboard" edge resembles the result of restless fingers with no more pizza to pick up, which then resort to shredding its box. If the viewer reaches toward that edge, though, its chillingly clear that it's nothing like cardboard at all, but more akin to razor wire that could send you bleeding to the hospital with a mistaken move of the arm. It's lethal. The points of the corners are like edge tools. The face, idly made from the grease spots left after the good stuff is gone, feels sinister in its blankness—as if it refuses to be eradicated just because bellies are full. Life goes on after the meal is eaten, and there is considerable interest in that apparent idleness. We sit and play with the trash; we talk as our minds wander to our constant preoccupations, and our restlessness reveals what we don't discuss. What comes after the pizza party? Rubbish? Our genuine feeling and expression that preexist and linger after the pie has been ordered and swiftly consumed? The box looks back at us empty and blank much longer than it wasn full. Bradley's simulacrum represents a box; it represents our time and streams of consciousness.

Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg,
Chandelier, 2006. Polystyrene, hot glue, painted
steel armature. 86 x 86 x 58." Collection of the
Artists Pension Trust, New York

The 2006 Chandelier by Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg adds yet another twist to the idea of a simulacrum. Fashioned to make us think first of the extravagant swags and dangling crystals of  Rococo illumination, the artists undermine the larger design not only with industrial materials but by replacing candelabras with microphones. The swags are in fact dripping electrical lines that will hook the microphones to recording equipment. The "chandelier," rather than shedding light, bugs the room, spying on anyone within its monitoring range. This work not so much represents a chandelier as the obvious lies we gradually grow to accept. Have we grown so accepting of privacy invasion that we no longer recognize the concept? If imitation or representation are at the heart of Chandelier, it is with a sinister irony.

TAYLOR McKIMENS, Truck, 2005. Oil and acrylic paint on cardboard and paper,
98  x 54  x 48 inches. Collection Neuberger Museum of Art.

While the Hanson-Sonnenberg chandelier stretches the idea of "simulacrum" almost into the realm of synesthesia by laying "oversight" on top of "illumination," the Truck Taylor McKimens constructs pushes us even harder. Yes, it's a light cardboard simulacrum of a pickup truck, that emblem of rugged manhood advertised by images of tough working men with ripped muscles, driving through godforsaken places to get motors to the turbines or hay to the heifers. McKimens' pastel truck is a clunker with broken windows; tangles of unattached wires; a domestic potted plant where the monstrous payload should be, and "Sorry" across the bumper where we're expecting to see "Semper Fi." It is a satire, a pathetic pick-up in girly colors.

A cardboard truck is a simulacrum of a tough-guy steel truck, just as a beat-up truck is a faint imitation of a real, big, shiny pick-up. But the essence of this wonderful work is that its essential point is the premise of this and every art show: that to be making art at all is to be dealing in Plato's cave of shadowy copies. The most lively thing about McKimens' work is that it is so conspicuously drawn. The artist took up paper and paints—the traditional materials of drawing—and "made a truck." It's folded, to boot, but essentially it's the sort of thing little children do very young; it reflects that very simple impulse to record on paper the thing that's out there and to make it one's own. Certainly any representational art, and even art that claims to record emotional or psychological experience abstractly, explores the idea of simulacra.This and McKimens' other pieces in this show—including a drawn cardboard television, turned on—seem to me to make this point with a beautiful, innocent poignancy. His work lacks the edge, the satire, and irony that most of the show is premised on. By making art at all, one makes comparisons: It's not even a matter of attitude.

How much more basic can one get than drawing a simulacrum of a truck? It does seem to me that Mary Temple takes it one heady step further in her imitation of light and shadow.

MARY TEMPLE, Light Fragment, 2010. Acrylic paint on sheetrock,
acrylic gel, stain and urethane on hardwood. 30 x 36  inches. Courtesy of the artist and Mixed Greens, NY

Temple's delightfully named Light Fragment is surely one of the most convincing illusions in the show, and comes as a surprising lift amidst the mechanical, man-made, and trashy.  Many of the artists collected here deal with issues of comparative inherent and socially constructed value; with physical and psychological scale; with reconsiderations of beauty in the constructed, everyday world. Temple, like McKimens, draws what she sees, but brings a natural subject inside—where it, too, is an everyday occurrence. Any attempt to represent light is a simulacrum, but it also incorporates the subject itself. Painting and drawing are rooted in light and its properties. So, whether she imitates the fall of shadows through a window to create a simulacrum of shadows, or whether she uses her knowledge of light's properties to create a beguiling scene is either a fine question of philosophy—or it is utterly indifferent. What a satisfying work on the face of it.

Simulacrum is a much larger show than this review can begin to reflect. It closes on January 11; I recommend starting now to see its marvels. Curator Michael Goodson's achievement above all, I think, is in having chosen a topic that works in so many ways. The show is funny and thought-provoking. To anyone who maintains either casually or deeply their own inner conversation about what art may be, this show will heat up that discussion.

What a Piece of Work is Man: Contemporary Figuration at the Canzani Gallery

A thematic show is a work of art in itself. A group show built around a subject will have the visitor not only engage with  individual works, but  will find each enhanced by its neighborhood. The curator prepares the music for the event—the resonances, harmonies, discords, and even tempos that might propel our observing selves through the galleries. Michael Goodson's Bending the Mirror: Figure as Body, Body as Vessel, Vessel as Receptacle, running through March 16 at the Canzani Gallery of Columbus College of Art and Design is such a show, moving and arresting at once.


In Bending the Mirror, Goodson has assembled the figurative work of sixteen contemporary artists. As a teaching show at an art college, it is exemplary. For the contemplation and delight of the public, it is no less.

Fred Tomaselli, Portrait of Fred and Laura, 1996, detail.
Gouache on paper, 20 x 14 inches
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

We are greeted at the gallery entrance by Fred Tomaselli's modest  black and white drawing on paper, the 1996 Portrait of Fred and Laura. The white marks on the all-black background are round spots with auras in an array of sizes,  arranged in vague, scattered patterns, like stars in the night sky. In the top, left corner is printed "Laura 12-17-52" and "Fred 6-8-56" is in the right corner.


The stars are named for ingestible substances and their sizes hint at quantities consumed. On "Laura's side" the brightest stars are caffeine, acetaminophen, and nicotine, with twinkles of psilocybin (mushrooms), valium, and Rolaids. Fred's side glows with Seconal, peyote, marijuana, and alcohol, with bright splashes of  cocaine, opium, Sudafed, Percodan, and treatment for toenail fungus. 


It's an amusing but penetrating way of figuring Laura and Fred. After all, "we are what we eat." The portrait is both psychic and physical. Into the black recesses of the stomach go mind-, mood-, and nerve-altering substances. Perhaps Tomaselli means to show us the literal interior of a stomach into which pills drift and dissolve. Or perhaps he pictures where the body has gone, dissolved by death and too many pills—dissipated to gaseous burps  broadcast across the heavens. Maybe those pills will fix our bodies and powers and we will exist for eons like the steadfast stars of bright minds blown and expanded by our stimulants and painkillers.

Mickalene Thomas, Tell Her It’s Over, 2006.
Acrylic paint, oil and acrylic enamel, and rhinestones on wood panel, 72 x 72 inches
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

'The White Slave' 

by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte de Nouy, 

French. Oil, 1888.

Paul Gaugin, The Seed of Areoi, Oli on burlap,
36 x 28," 1892.
Museum of Modern Art

Portrait of Laura struck me as sweet and droll. It's not the only work in this show that is tongue-in-cheek, catchy, or ironic—often poignantly so. Such is Mickalene Thomas's Tell Her It's Over, a big, rhinestone embellished portrait of a decorative nude that brings crashing down on tthe viewer great waves of queasy association. There's the nineteenth century Orientalist fascination with the female nude, especially with yielding courtesans or slaves. The interest in Eastern pattern and decoration sets scenes in which women are aestheticized. In Thomas's work, the nude woman is the focal element in a richly patterned composition of animal skins and floral pattern cushions.


Who is over whom? A man doesn't exactly "break up" with a kept woman. Yet we viewers are essentially cast as a person whose gaze the woman resists. We are forced to experience in her perceived reaction the perverse erotics that cast the nude Black woman as tantalizingly exotic yet demeaned by her vulnerability. 

This nude isn't wearing romantically long, flower-adorned hair as the Gaugin and Lecomte de Nouy nudes do, but a voluminous Afro made hard and sparkly with rhinestones. Her lips and her nipples, too, the delicious parts that attract the mouth, are cast in rhinestones: they are brilliant and seductive, but make you think twice about contact. The woman's head is pulled low on her chest, her eyes look down and away under lowered brows, her bent knee makes a barrier of her hip. (Compare to another form of defiance in the direct gaze of the woman in Gaugin's The Seed of Areoi, above.) 


"Tell her it's over?" Is this a request to a third party from one who may recognize that a nude among pillows is a real, naked woman, captive to the viewer's perception?

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Play Station, 2009
60 x 40 inches, Marquetry on panel
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

Against Thomas' complicated presentation of an erotic female nude we can consider Alison Elizabeth Taylor's Play Station 2010, which features a life-sized, seated male nude. Every plane of his well-shaped body is articulated; his nipples and areolas pop out; every curve and the slit of his penis are minutely detailed. But this nudity feels anatomical, for Taylor's medium is marquetry—wood inlay. In order to fashion the small details of nipples, penis, and hands, one images her working with fine tool, similar to surgeons'. The broader expanses of skin over the the planes of the body are shaded like topographical maps. The significance of its nakedness to the game player is unclear and, being so, it leaves the viewer uncertain about her own attitude toward this man. Shock? Curiosity? Approval? Repulsion? Is he just another guy, or someone remarkable? 


Taylor has placed Play Station Man in a setting of restrained opulence. The dark, paneled room suggests the rich privilege of a men's club, board room, or an antique library. The color of his chair suggests leather or velvet—luxury materials. The, spaciousness, and supportive height are even suitable for a throne.

If we consider the man as the occupant of a throne or executive seating, his open-mouthed, empty, indirect look are disturbing. So are his hunched shoulders and his body's collapse into the chair. Taylor has taken pains to articulate his hands, the Play Station control unit, and his thumb on the button.


I find myself wondering about that unit with buttons. Who, exactly, is playing with what? Are we looking at a weary slacker with no imagination? Or at a prince of the world with no imagination, who holds the buttons as if the consequences of pushing it were as remote as a computer game's? His slack face, vacant expression, and his nakedness perhaps represent his disengaged remoteness from the rest of  society and even from the mores of civilization.

Philip Akkerman, Self Portrait No. 24, 2006
Oil on masonite board, 15 3/4 x 13 3/8 inches
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

Nothing is more intimate than the body, yet nudity is always a public, social matter because everyone is free to look at someone else's body. In self-portraiture, the artist chooses what to  reveal about himself in what degree. The exterior is the objective focus; the person is the subjective one. Goodson has chosen three beautiful self-portraits by Dutchman Philip Akkerman, who represents his face in different guises, each one gripping, and each with the feel of lived-in conviction. Akkerman's face is his constant subject , yet each iteration reveals a persona unto itself.

Francis Bacon, Self Portrait,1971, MUsee National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 

At first glance, Akkerman paints his face in the manner of  Francis Bacon, but in fact he does not since he doesn't smear and abstract with the suggested plasticity of time and motion. Akkerman's are all solid, as if their grayness is the color of modeling clay from which they have been painstakingly formed and finished with utmost care to smooth the surfaces. Their solid dimensionality is certain. Beyond that, whether each is an aspect of the man himself or of a theatrical character is one of the many levels of fascination.

Self-Portrait at the Age of 34.
 Rembrandt van Rijn, 1640. 
National Gallery, London.

Baldassare Castiglione,
 Raphaello Sanzio,
1516, Louvre Museum.

In #51, Akkerman imitates another Dutch self-portrait, Rembrandt's self-assured pose of 1640, itself modeled on a portrait of Castiglione by Raphael. Akkerman takes the tradition a big step further by using it to make his own self-portrait as an artist. Rembrandt portrayed himself in 1640 not by his vocation, but by the status it had brought him. He poses as a prosperous man, without any arist's props or materials, relating himself to Raphael's subject, the diplomat and courtier. 

Philip Akkerman, Self Portrait No. 51, 2005
Oil on masonite board, 15 3/4 x 13 3/8 inches
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

 Akkerman's portrait pushes the face much farther toward us; the expression is rendered with complexity and sensitivity. He is  serious, yet there is enough furrow in the brow to keep the expression from being overbearing or proud. The mouth is firm and determined. Compared to the 16th and 17th century faces, this one is more purposeful and challenging.

I think that the hat made of paint placed on the artist's head is surpassingly beautiful, breathtaking in the way it invites us wordlessly to share many levels of observation and intuition about painting. The margin between hat and skin is itself both brave yet almost comical. Here are the raw and the refined placed matter-of-factly together in a daring contrast that creates lots of excitement. 

Part of the thrill is that the roughly applied paints that form the hat demonstrate the exquisite refinement of Akkerman's technique as nothing else possibly could. The flawless texture of the skin, its burnished sheen, the transitions of color and light, the perfection of control over every line and daub: These are breathtaking in any event, but the rawness of the painted hat and the background place the finish of the face in high relief. 

It also seems as if Akkerman has used the strokes and colors in the hat and background as his palette to create the self-portrait painted in between. Working almost as a sculptor in stone or wood, he's freed the portrait from the masses of paint that and left the residue as it was. The work was made by a subtractive process or, at least, one that didn't simply import an image stroke by stroke from elsewhere. The image of Akkerman's face, which seems stylized elsewhere, appears  realistic when it's compared here to rough masses of paint. It's a brilliant portrait of a painter, its ideas and flesh alike made of paint.

Folkert de Jong, Early Years, 2009
Polystyrene foam, epoxy resin, 7 figures, approx. 15 x 15 ft.
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

Folkert De Jong, a Dutchman as well, provides another stunning experience in Bending the Mirror. The hilarilous, horrible, haunting Early Years is just a few steps from the dignity of Akkerman's painting and the fine workmansip of Taylor's marquetry. Seven balletic apes pose on pedestals in graceful, extended attitudes, forming a large ring through which the viewer can move to both inspect and join their dance.

With their hands and feet cast from human hands and their faces in disconcertingly friendly expressions, the apes prove to be challenging presences because their harsh, unappealing construction, the drips of paint or tar, the cheap foam pedestals—so much about this scene instantly taps into my cultural (and biological) discomforts. It's cheap! It's ugly! It's backwards, uncouth, potentially offensive as apes shown in human activities usually are. It's creepy that the installation is; it makes it hard to move into the circle. Placing the figures on pedestals seems crudely ironic.

But despite the ugliness, crudeness, and clumsiness of Early Years, De Jong wins us over with its antic goodwill and cheerfulness of his Frankenstein-assembled creatures. 

Nothing disguises the fact that these figures are entirely artificial: Joints are bound with black bubble wrap or clogged with bubbles of foam calking if they are hidden at all. Some tar-like substance holds the dancers as erect as they can manage to be. Moving among them, we feel unsettled by the contradictions between their life-like and artificial qualities.

But the balance tips in favor of connection because of the gestures, the generous, happy embrace of space from the arms and legs of these black, hairy, awkward apes. However sinister the details, when we take it all in, their poses are graceful, extended stretches; they dance together to create something that surpasses themselves. Moreover, Each of their faces radiates a smile—not a sinister or leering smile, but an expression of open happiness with eyebrows arched, pupils fully exposed, and lips pulled back in pleasure. 

The title of De Jong's installation is Early Years. Were we to imagine these figures as our prehistorical forebears; as the results of mutation; as who might remain in a post-apocalyptic future: Why would we have to imagine those beings in those times to be without love of body, movement, and ideas that they could connect their mortal selves to something transcendent?

Playing Angels, bronze on concrete bases,
7' figures, 20' posts, ca. 1950,
Carl Milles. Fairmont Park Art
Association, Philadelphia.

The joyful poses and their arrangement on a ring of pedestals reminds me (as it may not at all have occurred to De Jong) of the Swedish sculptor Carl Milles' Playing Angels. There is no mistaking the pastoral intent of Milles' rarefied, comely, youthful angels, designed for aspirational beauty. It's a piquant comparison with these dancers of Early Years. Surely the music of the spheres is available to them , too. 


In a wonderful curatorial decision, Goodson has hung two ethereal paintings by American painter Jansson Stegner on the wall behind De Jong's installation,where they serve as a kind of shimmering backdrop. The presentation of bodies could not be more different from De Jong's—Stegner's are as distended and narrow as pulled taffy, as white as hoarfrost. Their settings are erotic in their icy beauty; the utter perfection of painting technique lacks evidence of the brush and is varnished to an enamel-like finish.

Jansson Stegner, The Falconer, (l) and The Hunter (r), 2011
60 x 40 inches, oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Canzani Gallery

Jansson Stegner, The Falconer, 2011, oil on canvas. Author photo.

Whether intended as a pair or not, The Falconer and The Hunter, both from 2011, feel like a pair because the contrasts between them are clear enough to feel designed. In terms of figuration, the man and the woman share a surreal, stretched out, narrow shape. I nevertheless find them  believe subjects because their faces are realistically portrayed in feature and their expressions are delicately rendered. Their faces are the focal points of the paintings, so the elongated bodies seem almost like leader lines directing the eye to those faces.


The blonde, male falconer is pictured from a low vantage point that makes him seem extraordinarily majestic, as one might expect a falconer—in a pose so casually assured—to be. The mountains in the far background, with a steely sky of upward rising clouds reinforce the  air of ascendency. The magnificent falcon's wings rise, of course, while its head and tail bow down in a stirring emblem of submission: The wild and strong acknowledging a master. Finally, the painting is simply exquisitely beautiful, finished with lustrous glazing that elevates it to the level of the precious. It's a work that in every detail of its making and design is awe-inspiring. Almost. It's very odd, isn't it?

Jansson Stegner,The Hunter, 2011, oil on canvas. Author photo. 

The Hunter is a female, who looks down meditatively as if a great burden is upon her. Rather than expecting a predator to yield to her, she carries her weapon indifferently. The hand she places in her pocket reads like a gesture of uncaring obliviousness, where the falconer's hand on hip is confident and magisterial.
This hunter is not looking very hard for something to bag; and if she's headed home at the end of the day, she has bagged nothing.


But where the falconer appears to be a man cut out for war-like duties, the hunter is not. Her facial expression—the dark focal point of the painting—communicates her brooding to anyone who sees it. Her solemnity and her abstraction seem in turn to abstract her face from anything else in the luminous environment or from any goal that might be accomplished with a rifle. She is farther away from the frost-covered trees, the eerie atmosphere of the sky and the clicking branches overhead than we, the viewers, could ever be.

The oddness in the portrayal of the bodies in these Stegner paintings makes think that these are portraits of people through suggestions of character, with bodies among the system of props. This woman appears to me to be all mind, otherwise simply passing through a landscape of great interest to me, but unseen by her. The falconer, on the other hand, is part of his landscape in a way he is well aware of: It is his land, his kingdom, his world.


Do we have the falconer as warlike Norway to Denmark's Hamlet? I find it tempting to study this pair of paintings this way. If I encountered either alone, though, I am sure that I'd take not a whit less pleasure. Stegner's finesse with his medium, and his ability to paint characters of such beauty and conviction into landscapes that seem to exist under spells, are extraordinary gifts. I think these two works are mesmerizing. If I'd had my shearling hat, my heavy coat and muffler with me, I'd have stayed, spellbound, all day.