 "Photo: Melissa Dominguez/The Daily Texan")
What do I know about contemporary art? Apparently, not much.
I went to the New American Talent exhibition, featured in the Arthouse at the Jones Center on Seventh Street and Congress Avenue, with an open mind.
The first display I saw was a recreation of a large tree trunk, split open, with some plants growing inside of the hollowed out trunk. It wasn’t actually a tree trunk — though that would have been really impressive — but actually images of bark that lined what appeared to be cardboard. The display was fairly interesting visually, if somewhat lacking in emotion.
Located right next to the tree scene, there were some photographs lined up in a neat row on a large, plain white wall. One would assume that anything warranting such a proportionally large use of display room would be worthwhile, but it wasn’t really. The photos just showed a bunch of different trash cans, sitting in the street, with rolled-up posters thrown away inside of each of the receptacles. It was probably supposed to represent art being thrown away or something, but the message was lost.
Other head scratchers included items like what appeared to be Ikea chairs from hell covered with small bits of graffiti, pieces of broken wood that the artist claimed were “found” — a.k.a. taken from the garbage and painted with single colors — and last, a small model pipe made entirely of the artist’s hair.
I’m just not that cultured, I suppose, but there wasn’t much I understood in the exhibit. However, there were a handful of pieces that resonated.
One such piece was an interesting photograph set which featured a series of humanoid dolls engaging in activities such as lovemaking and the lonely consumption of alcohol in an empty room. The way the camera captured the scenes was equally, if not more, impressive than the quirky subject matter. Also noteworthy was a mixed-media, impressionist diorama that depicted events in Jesse Jackson’s life.
But nothing really hit me emotionally until I came across two displays by Tucson artist Stephanie Bernstein. One was a plaster/mixed-nonsense bust called “Jack.” The bust was small, maybe a foot-and-a-half tall or so, and it was fairly surreal.
Even better was Bernstein’s piece titled “The King of Hearts.” The display featured a boy king riding on a wolf made of an assortment of items that could have come from a Dumpster on any street in America. The boy king was surreal and disfigured, as was the wolf, and the level of sadness and emotion in the king’s face was almost painful to see. The giant wolf that the boy king rode stood over the body of a girl, and all around the trio were tiny cloth hearts that had fallen off of the strings that the boy dangled along the wolf’s side. I’m not sure what the piece meant, but I stared at it for almost 10 minutes.
In the end, I left the Arthouse with strongly mixed feelings, and as I walked to my car in the unbearably hot sun, I wished that I understood modern art better. Regardless, the exhibit was free ... so no regrets.
