WHY GO ANYWHERE ELSE?
I recently went anywhere else.
I went anyplace. For reasons that are irrelevant here, I went there. I realized as soon as I got there, that I could have been anywhere. It didn’t even matter to me where I was going or why. I didn’t need to get away exactly; I just had to go. This place was in the middle of nowhere, as much (or more) than anyplace is the middle of nowhere. But it was a real place, a place whose movements moved and whose history happened even before I had arrived and will continue long after I leave. This sense of before and after in relation to time and place is one of the most existential components of going somewhere, anywhere. How can I be certain that it, this place, existed before I arrived? How does it get along without me? In other words, what happens in this place when I am not a witness? How do I impact anywhere and how does anywhere impact me? My family moved many times when I was a child, from place to place, small towns, cities, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and so the question, posed by this exhibition: why go anywhere else, is particularly poignant, raising fundamental questions about, not only movement through space, but also through time, as the work of art maps the movement.
This exhibition and its title question, why go anywhere else, suggest the triangular relationship between travel, the location and formation of identity, and the production of art. Writing offers one route between these three points. Visual art, perhaps painting most specifically, offers another. It offers a means of mapping this question: the why, the going, the sense of place, the notion of elsewhere in relation to home, and the fragmentary construction of the self in relation to place. In this sense the assembly of works here, all produced by current, former, or visiting artist faculty in the Painting Department of The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia, loosely considers the work of art as an amalgam of experiential parts, details, travel, and the collaborative efforts and images that result in such encounters between place and self.
Why go anywhere else?
It’s all here, wherever here is. Everything you could possibly want. After living in New York City for fourteen years, I recognize this question with force. I wondered daily, why I would ever leave, where I could possibly go after New York. Then after living in Savannah, Georgia for four years, I realize that I was wrong and that it is the very act of going and coming that informs (and confirms) one’s sense of place simultaneous with one’s sense of self. The home and the elsewhere are linked to the construction of identity, each in states of constant fluctuation in response to one another. One’s “own” place can become too comfortable. You learn to think, incorrectly, that nowhere else matters. Nowhere else could have anything to offer. Or the opposite may be true and one envisions everywhere else as superior to (greener than) the here and the now. But it is in the act of unraveling this question: why go anywhere else, that the answer resides. It is found in the act of walking, driving, uncovering, turning corners, meeting, seeking, entering, finding, and losing. The why of the question is revealed, actively producing meaning with each phenomenological step through the unfamiliar place. It is in these acts of travel and movement that each memory-image becomes engaged. Each image is lodged, sometimes step-by-step, and marks are made. The images of a place pile up around us as our photographs do, constructing a place in memory and alongside impacting who and how we become.
This exhibition has traveled from one anywhere to another elsewhere. In this sense it engages painting in one location together as a faculty body as being about the act of responding to place. Sometimes this effort is collaborative or at least conversational. The artists in this exhibition have all traveled extensively and have also worked together, even if indirectly, in one city. Indeed the work is not brought together thematically. Instead, it travels as a faculty body of images, as the work of very different artists. It represents a group of colleagues whose work is as diverse as its numbers, but a body that has loosely merged as community, in response to a place, in this case, the city of Savannah, Georgia, a somewhere with as much of a sense of place as anywhere else, - a city intoxicated with American historical memory and iconic cinematic mythology.
But indeed this exhibition is united by a single but loaded question: why go anywhere else? The question itself is both humorous and serious. It calls to mind the “homebody” who sees no need to leave his place of birth. It confirms the urgent and ever-more-current vogue for the local, the new culture of the “staycation,” and the replacement of global as a buzzword with local, a cultural preoccupation, not only for “foodies” and farmers, but now, sometimes out of economic necessity, for the general public. The works in this exhibition, paired with the desire on the part of the artists to temporarily travel somewhere else, if only for a summer, speak to the power of place, both local and relational, in each of the projects represented. Many of the works included do address, even if unintentionally, the visual construction of anywhere here and elsewhere there and the unexpected involvements with person, city and object that “take place” in the interstitial moments of travel. Many of the works in this exhibition demand a quiet attention to these questions, an attention that will produce radically shifting responses as the audience shifts from the southern United States to states of reception unforeseeable in Eastern Europe.
Todd Schroeder’s “Kung Fu” series approaches the fragmentary nature of truth, as his “missing” subject is revealed to be an exoticised, kung-fu fighter hero of 1970s American T.V. The former actor David Carradine’s life and death are pieced together via sound bytes of media misinformation about his 2009 death in a random Swiss Hotel in Bangkok. Midwestern childhood memory, Hollywood fantasy, and Bangkok reality collide in perceptual questions posed in Savannah. Text hides and seeks with gesture recalling the piecing together of meaning and the piecing together of identity as fragmentary balancing acts.
Adam Cvijanovic’s mural-sized paintings often use scale as an entry point for establishing location. The viewer enters an all-encompassing mise-en-scéne. The subject matter is charged with complexity as the close-up, the fragment, and the meteoric mass of detail emerge as twisted metals, consumer detritus, or a mass demonstration of single bodies on a beach. The fragmentary part is in constant dialog with the whole and the chaos of the crowd (mass audience, consumer base, collaborative group) is suggested. Painting becomes an act of call and response to place: suburban experience, Hollywood set, the city as ideal, the consumerist present, and the classroom as collaborative site for the collision of individual memory and method.
For Morgan Santander the experience of place is one of time travel through the history of art as a history of possible, fantastical heterogeneities. The collages respond to a history of painting as colonial practice by rendering them hybrid: time and place are interwoven with a sepia-toned photographic nostalgia, as if to suggest the what-could-have-been, if the colonial framework (and that is a big if) had not been the most rigid, defining experience of the past. This is travel through centuries and conversation between cultures that could only take place with the present as starting point. Santander’s prints assemble a postcolonial critique of the past together with a regenerative understanding of how objects and figures (and paintings) can yield new meaning in the present. Tribal masks impose themselves upon Dutch Baroque lace collars, while indefinitely Mayan statuettes preside over an eighteenth century British farmhouse picnic, offering gifts from another time, a distant place.
Suzanne Jackson’s paintings have a three-dimensionality to them, a tactility that embraces layering as a fact of meaning-making. The making itself seems to be a central act. As in the walking around a city, or the analog experience of place as a quotient of self-construction, these multi-part, multi-storied, collaged remnants of materiality and compositional structure engage painting as a physical act of looking back at memory. Her works insinuate the making as linked to the re-presentation of memory: the taking of time to cut, to tear, to unravel, to tape, to peel, to mask, and to render, acts which are at the very heart of an understanding of the relationship between painting and sculpture.
Natalija Mijatovic paints with a type of poetry often reserved for photography. Reminiscent of a Neue Sachlichkeit impulse of the 1920s with its focus on a machine aesthetic, the imagery employs shadow and light, black and white, tonal value, form and line to produce a palimpsest of remnants of the urban industrial landscape. Fragments of an electrical power plant, network enmeshments of wires and cables, the mechanics of a machine-age culture, are effaced and revealed; reminders of a still visible present in the midst of becoming the past. The composition insinuates a loose grid of parts or details whose human context has been hauntingly extracted.
Matthew Blackwell, like Adam Cvijanovic, traveled to Savannah from elsewhere, Brooklyn, and then back again, collaborating with students, painting alongside other artists, working and living in the SCAD painting department in the shadow of the vast hull of the looming Savannah Bridge. Snippets of place emerge in Blackwell’s work. Hybrid figures are culled into being, part Catskill Mountains, part Low Country, part Brooklyn, all simmering and boiling in an artist who has created a rural studio, cabin-like, remote, in the most urban of cityscapes. Place and the experience of self (even as the self resists and embraces the place) are as inseparable in Blackwell’s work as place and the vernacular. The local quality of language, food, humor, music, and folk are given body in his paintings, the iconicity of which sinks in as universal over time; work that will be remembered.
A recent interview with Montenegrin artist Blazo Kovacevic, who lives and works in Savannah, and an artist who played a central role in organizing this exhibition, points toward the humanity of this curatorial question, and the trauma and liminality of travel as integral to identity formation and artistic production:
BH [interviewer]: Would you prefer to live there [Montenegro]?
BK: Yes, but I also like to live here. Actually I live there and here – but most of the time it is in the airplane between the two that I feel most like myself. [1]
This occasional in-between state offers the space of contemplation but also ignites a state of heightened physical awareness and bodily vulnerability. In an example of Kovacevic’s work, a minivan is x-ray scanned, its “body” turned inside out. A proxy for the human body passing through state-controlled technologies in transit, the vehicle’s skin is transparent, its metallic bones made susceptible, frail even. Moving from place to place becomes an act of (self) exposure as the artist also offers a critique of the blind acceptance of the limitations upon civil rights we have experienced in response to terrorism.
Denise Carson’s paintings involve collage as a material process and as a narrative one. The female figure is often the starting point, layering past and present, wending back and forth between fantasy and reality. The figure slides on this scale with ease: a mythological goddess, a fairytale heroine, a grandmother, a girl in between childhood and teenaged knowing. Place and person unite in a fluid fantasy without rational restrictions.
Craig Drennen, former SCAD faculty, has devoted much energy to the importance of artists moving from one place to another, encouraging guest artists to visit Savannah and faculty to travel elsewhere as a component of art-making. His images, with a Twombly-esque exchange between pencil and paint, explore mark-making as a self-reflexive act. A letter is shadowed by its imprecise self, a memory trace and the repeating of the mark, that constantly re-investigates representation step by step, interrogating the choice that led one to that mark as opposed to the one that was not made.
Roger Mark Walton’s paintings, oil on canvas, do not deal with a place as much as they attend to the margins of that place. Titled with time of day or month of the year, each image presents a point along a highway, at once non-descript anywhere and yet a local light quality stamps these images with place, suggesting the flatness, foliage, and fiery sky of a southern landscape. Dilapidated billboards and artless pylon bridges render these scenes uncertain; a criticality of ecological destruction and sprawl rests quietly alongside an optimism that is reminiscent of the Dutch Baroque expansive dialog between sky and land.
The paintings of Gregory Eltringham seem to travel inward. They locate a space of intentionally awkward exchange. Scenes at once voyeuristic and vulnerable are governed by a playful carnivalesque. The images haunt as dress-up and drag (the difference between the two a fine line) result in an unveiling rather than a masking of private truth. His figures channel Manet’s maladroit female figure, perpetually crawling in a stupor through the central background of Dejeuner sur l’herbe. What is she doing? Is she even there? Similarly, the distinction between fiction and fantasy has been removed in Eltringham’s work. Painting as construct and identity as conjecture keep the viewer on his toes, not an altogether comfortable place to be.
Stephen Knudsen’s work deals with a tension between the figurative and the abstract. His recent work references the bodies in between death and life, although more aligned with death, aboard Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819). One example takes an interest in the witnesses’ accounts and the discarded figure of a woman, set further adrift by the already drifting victims. The work traces a fiction with some basis in historical record, an abstraction of that record. In Knudsen’s image her body floats like Ophelia, barely hovering between this place and the next. The play of reflectivity and shadow, diaphanous fabric and flesh, reverberate with the gravitas of the image.
The individual figures in a number of Laura Mosquera’s paintings seem almost to be contemplating questions about where to go next, not literally, but existentially. A situation has been presented, a quiet moment acquired, a confrontation unexpected. With titles such as “Almost There,” “Anything Goes,” and “Can I Stay,” the paintings present particularly poignant moments of solitude and clarity; the kinds of moments that change lives. The figures are probing, questioning, without confrontation toward anyone except the self. Going and staying, laying and gazing into the distance are linked with being and becoming as the nature of existence is probed, if only for that instance.
Historian and theorist, Victor Burgin, in writing about the relationship between images, cities, and identity, asserts that “[t]he (con)fusion of representations of body and city has a history… For example…Humanist authorities wrote that the first men derived their units of measurement from the palms of their hands, their arms, and their feet.” This exhibition binds artists together if only temporarily, linking them to one city, while seeking a collaborative movement (of works in proximity) from city to city, from country to country. As the exhibition investigates, in part, the operation of place and painting in relation to selfhood, the question: why go anywhere else is rendered moot. The “why” is dropped and the answer becomes instead an imperative: go, return, try, seek, move, enter, find, lose, walk, see, share, make, but sometimes, just go…. anywhere.
Lisa Jaye Young, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design
[1] From an interview conducted by Savannah art critic Bertha Husband in February, 2009. Please see http://www.natalijamijatovic.com/Probe/Interview.html (accessed 5/14/2010)
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