2500 First Ave, 448-5250
Through Feb 29.
Red is the least ambiguous of colors. It is not subtle. Its associations--blood, siren lights, hellfire, passion, anger, heat--are obvious. Yet somehow when curator Stefano Catalani asked artists to remake one of their own works in red, he thought we would be surprised by the results.
We are not surprised by the results.
For Rosso, Catalani chose work by 13 artists and then asked those artists to remake the work in red. His intent was to test the ways that palette influences meaning, and, to quote from his press release, to create an "experiment inside the semiotics of art." He goes on: "How does the subtextual language of color change the language of the image or the object of art?... It will be interesting to experience how the red color overpowers the work of art by changing its language and how the artists' reinterpretations confront and revise the agenda at the root of the original work."
But it really isn't very interesting, is it? Red is hardly subtextual--it intensifies emotion and shoves ideas to the edge of reason. But not every work of art needs to be ratcheted up to the point of insanity; many of the artists shown here pointedly sidestep the overlay of heat that Catalani has insisted on. Helen Curtis' delicate cages of string, filled with translucent objects, are about barely-thereness; the tint of red (dipped in blood, blushing, whatever) does nothing for them. Some work already carries plenty of intensity: A painting by Rich Lehl--a lovely little bit of paranoia, a lonely runner on some kind of spotlit nighttime overpass--is only given a kind of meaningless, lurid glare. Christian MacKetenz's ambiguous painting of a weird brawl becomes, in red, a patently obvious fight between good and evil, complete with leering skulls.
At best, the assignment has only the unfortunate ring of the design showroom, where if you don't like an object in one color, it's certainly available in another. At worst--and on my first viewing it struck me as much worse--it overrides the artist's intent altogether, suggesting that the curator's needs are more important. I like Ana Lois-Borzi's thorough and demented autopsies of stuffed animal parts, like solemn taxonomies, but when each part is dyed deeply red, the strange variety, the odd palette, is drained away, and the sly suggestion of violence gives way to a heavy-handed and spurious version. At least part of the pleasure of Lois-Borzi's work is how little of the artist's rather surgical will needs to be exerted on these found objects to give them meaning; Catalani's proposition pushes them right over into cliché.
This is bad curating, in love with itself, calling attention to itself instead of letting the work's own significance emerge. It's the kind of show that leads to theories, like one I heard recently, that art no longer has any intrinsic meaning; that, instead, we wait for curators to assemble meaning for us. A good curator strives to lead us toward new perceptions, toward new thinking; a bad one tries to manage our reactions.
Two works in Rosso seem to know this, to tartly undermine the project's methodology: When Tom Sacco went to transform his bent metal sculpture, which looks to be a scrap left over from some industrial jigsaw, he chose the hood of a red car, and where else but a car dealership is your choice of color so easily accommodated? Similarly, the red-toned version of Doug Smithenry's scruffy little painting of a man split down the middle uses an exaggerated paint-by-numbers technique--with all those little strange pools of color and odd contrasts--that seems to laugh back at the assignment.
The inflated language of Rosso's proposition and the dull results infuriated me--is this what passes for rigorous thinking around here?--although when I went back for a second viewing, it seemed more harmless, though no more interesting, than I had first thought. I suppose there's a measure of credit due to Catalani for trying to diverge from the usual commercial gallery practice of solo shows and tame group exhibitions, but like Strata, Davidson Galleries' show of all striped works a few months back, the effect is more so what? than groundbreaking. And with a show featuring so many artists who don't normally deal in so what?, it's certainly the fault of the curator rather than the work.
