Painting is far from “dead.” But in many art schools, it’s barely alive, even if — judging from gallery guides and publications like the quarterly New American Paintings — it is more popular now than it has been since the mid-1980s.
At the Cleveland Institute of Art, a national trend in art education
toward an ever more exclusive emphasis on conceptually based art has
accompanied the implementation and growth of the school’s
technologically oriented T.I.M.E. Department. That traditional forms
are destined to be seen as pit stops en route to a world utterly
transformed by technology is probably inevitable and necessary. But
still … there are at most three or four paintings in a show of
perhaps a hundred works by 43 CIA faculty members. Sculpture and
ceramics play a slightly larger role, due to the presence at the school
of versatile, first-rate artists like Barbara Stanczak, Brent Kee
Young, Judith Salomon and William Brouillard.
There is one painting that really looks like a painting,
aptly called “Picturing Paint” by Sarah Sutton — a large-scale
oil-on-canvas abstraction. That the work is based on a digital scan of
painted red and blue swashes makes it respectable but doesn’t change
the fact that Sutton has produced a painting. My point: It happens that
some of CIA’s best-known and most bragged-about alumni — from
Robert Mangold to Dana Schutz — are painters, and it seems a
shame to “virtually” dismantle one of the school’s most successful
departments.
But there are many other works in this hip and thought-provoking (if
paint-deprived) show that catch the mind in a firm grip of materials
and imagery. Dan Tranberg’s three ascetic yet tender small studies
executed in acrylic paint and thread on paper share common ground with
painting, drawing and collage. In two of these works, the presence of
thread, playing the part of drawn lines, sketches the sort of paradox
that art has always dealt with — questioning the conflicting
nature of sensual information. And there is Kasumi’s mind-blowing,
12-foot-long, untitled Xerox scroll, reproducing what appears to be an
alien landscape or possibly a micro-photograph of some polyp-like
structures (it’s actually a finger dance, performed in relation to the
movement of the machine’s scanner). Greg Martin’s series of wet-plate
collodion photographic self-portraits “Staring at the Sun” are also
indefinably haunting and haunted, evoking the thick shades of human
presence stirred into time.
Another ghost at this year’s faculty show is the grid. The late
modernist CIA building itself is a self-conscious grid, and many
artists working at the school still use a sectional, geometrically
analytical structure to frame and order their aesthetic explorations.
In a work called “Floor Excavation,” fiber artist Tina Cassara pried up
parquet squares from the gallery floor, interrupting the grid and
exposing a graphically powerful swirl of black adhesive — the
underbelly of geometric order. At a time when CIA is being revamped and
deconstructed, Cassara’s intervention carries a clear message.
This article appears in Sep 16-22, 2009.