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Thursday, October 20, 2005

OPTIONS 2005 stuff

From curator Olivia "Libby" Lumpkin's OPTIONS 2005 statement -

"The artists themselves represent a wildly diverse demographic" and "among the twenty artists represented in the WPA\Corcoran OPTIONS 2005 exhibition, the connecting thread may be somewhat difficult to find". It continues with - "some are still tethered to parental beneficence, while others have day jobs. One has abandoned a career as an architect; another appears to have made his way from the street. Still others were found in the most domestic netherworld of the bourgeois suburbs that constitutes the culture most foreign to the edgy domain of contemporary art."

Well... six of the seven included Richmond artists were found on a visit to VCU's MFA program, so I'm not too sure of what she is talking about. The connecting thread is pretty obvious to me. How many of the others were found on visits to MICA or elsewhere? It is pretty ridiculous that she doesn't mention the grad program studio visits in that message about how she selected work.

I haven't seen the show and most probably won't be going up, but I'll link here to all of the coverage mentioning the Richmond artists:

Michael O'Sullivan's review for the Washington Post - positive on Tim Devoe, negative on Judith Baumann.

JT Kirkland writes a response to O'Sullivan's review - agrees with O'Sullivan on Baumann and Devoe, but very much disagrees on a non-Richmond artist, Susan Noyes Vaughan.

JT Kirkland on individual works - JT has posted a bunch of photos of individual works from the show and is writing a short review of each directly below each photo. So far he has talked about Randy Toy (+), Tim Devoe, Suzanna Fields, and Ryan Mulligan (-). Still to come is Emily Hall, probably next week.

Here are some photos from the opening, including a couple from Ryan's performance.

Alexandra Silverthorne - is doing one artist a day, alphabetically. She is critical of Baumann and really liked Jorge Benitez.

James Bailey is anti-OPTIONS and anti-Lumpkin.

Although I haven't seen the show I am more than a little disappointed to note that both Judith Baumann and Emily Hall are showing the same work they exhibited six months ago at their thesis shows in April, especially considering the fact that both of them were recipients of $8,000 VMFA professional grants. Money well spent? I liked Emily's thesis installation of six or seven little "homes" in that little room with that title, but the one red structure removed and included in radius250 was a bit of a letdown, and now here it is again in the OPTIONS show.

I'd like to suggest to the VMFA that for their next round of grants they give the undergrad grants to undergrads, grad grants to grads, and the professional grants to artists who can demonstrate that they might be in it for the long haul. Also, if maybe they didn't choose a juror doing private studio visits with VCU grads that year, that might be nice.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Only about a third of the show passes muster, true. Still, it's more than a numbers game. There's just something about the cumulative weight of the show's failures -- its over-reliance on the work of recent art school grads, particularly from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond; its inability to distinguish between the nostalgic and the stale, between the novel and novelty; and the feeling that it has been juried rather than curated -- that seems to rob even the worthy artists of the pleasure their work would otherwise evoke.

--The Washington Post, link above.


It's nice to see people seriously disagreeing with the notion of "one-stop-shopping" for juried art shows. I like my school, and I don't think this type of behavior makes for good press. Are we "branding" art shows now? Ick...

Anonymous said...

I was at this show during setup day helping Senor Benitez and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There are some drawings of somebody's friends doing what friends do you know hanging out together. Good drawings but just refined foundation type work. Also there was some girl from Mica who was just a knock off Bruce Wilhem well a Bruce without a sense of humor. A Bored Wilhem? Then there are the what Jorge and I (mainly I) called the Crap Boxes, literally boxes of random shit found here and there flea market style by some 40+ woman who looked terribly bored as she was arranging them. I did meet the curator lady and I would agree that she did one stop art show shopping and really put off a sense of 'I just liked this work from here and then this stuff from over here and now that all the work and artists are here I don't know how to arrange them'. She kept moving people around to different spaces and only stopped that when an artist started to hang their stuff. Let's not forget about the "painter" next to Jorge who did a full length portrait of a character from Grand Theft Auto Vice City and then a close up of another character's face. The show is worth seeing it'll make you feel a thousand times better about your own work. Hours are Friday 6 to 10 pm, Sat and Sun during the day.

Martin said...

Wow - Yes, blanding. Not good for anybody.

Dennis - You are a brave and foolish hater, I cringe for you.