- IT SMELLED That’s one part of Karla Black’s cosmetics-and-other-powders installation that you can’t understand from this photograph, a partial view of a multi-roomed installation at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
Karla Black’s heaps and piles of cosmetics and other dusts and dirts drew me in at the last Venice Biennale (can you believe it’s come around again?), but the Scottish artist rarely shows stateside. She now has work in a student-curated exhibition I’d love to see in Philly (nice review by Edward Sozanski).
In an interview from last year, when she showed in Dallas, she put creativity on the animal side of being human.
FR: What do you mean when you say your work has “consequence,” more than “meaning?”
When I say my work doesn’t have meaning it has consequence, I mean I am putting out this difficult, chaotic, messy, problematic moment that art is – that creativity really is. It is not some nice sealed off hermetic transferable thing. There is lots of difficulty and chaos in it. They are things that people don’t really want; it is sort of messy. These sculptures manage to kind of push that into the institutional framework of the museum — and of the market. Because the market is really important to me too – to get that rawness, to get the raw creativity into it. But in order to do that, it has to have this civilized surface. That is the difference between self-indulgence — what is going to make you happy — and the fact that there are other people in the world. But just that sort of animal behavior of just mucking about with stuff is really the thing. I wouldn’t just do something that is just a gesture because that’s really self-indulgent and it doesn’t have any real consequence. So it is trying to work up its civilized surface in order to feel acceptable. But not really through meaning. They are what they are. Hopefully you can still see the fact that somebody struggled with them, that you can still see the sort of human, the animal creativity in the thing, because there are the marks. But I think lots of it is very, very pretty, but it is doing that on purpose, in order for its rawness to be acceptable.
Obviously, any distinction between humans and animals is labored, since, yes, humans are animals. Black’s language—”the sort of human, the animal creativity”—reflects the lack of any clear divide. But I’m intrigued by how far she puts creativity on the side of the physical, of “mucking about with stuff.” Her creations do seem like the leavings of busy creatures.
Yet other accounts describe her as a perfectionist, and say she gives specific instructions for installation when she isn’t there to do it herself. She’s balancing muck and ideals, maybe. I’m reminded of a display I saw Friday at the new exhibition featuring this spring’s UW MFA grads (through June 23), with Stephanie Klausing’s ceramic agglomerations set in rows of escalating material dilapidation, even ugliness (some pots, finger-pressed and still bearing the prints, shaped like feces-full intestines), and Ryan Weatherly’s painted concoctions, depicting melting, candy-colored women’s faces.
- Stephanie Klausing (foreground) and Ryan Weatherly at the Henry.
The Henry is closed Mondays and Tuesdays but open again Wednesday.
