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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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There are good installation shots here of the art show Cosmic Wonder, which we also saw recently when we were in California. There are 23 artists, including some bigwigs like James Turrell. I really liked it, especially the gigantic cartoon robot deity with dvd screens and multiple audio tracks by Paperrad. There was an animated squarish face up near the top that made a series of Chewbacca-meets-Zeus-like moaning roar grunts. Around human head-height, ie: the crotch/stomach zone, was a big screen with a loooong loose narrative about many topics including a robot who lost his heart and a prophet/scientist attempting to determine the entertainment of the future. Somehow (I can't remember, there were a lot of plot shifts) a video tape of the entertainment of the future got made, but during a scuffle at the lab it got stepped on and cracked and the entertainment of the future leaked out in a sort of rainbow puddle. Then an ipod absorbed it and re-interpreted the data in its own digital way. Then the screen pulled back and the movie was on tv and some cartoon characters were watching saying "I don't get this" and "what happened to the robot?" There was lots more, including a death-head puppet menacing various irritated household pets.
There was other work I liked as well, including this gi-normous, ornate punched-out paper bird collage by Reed Anderson,
and a trippy tricks-with-mirrors "Kaleidoscope" video ball by Ara Peterson and Jim Drain (the images below are from a different installation).
The show was ambitious, entertaining, and fun in a dazzling sort of way. Some works, like Richard Misrach's big sky photographs, were more stately, and some, like Terence Koh's row of white robed spectres, were downright goofy, but I really enjoyed the ballsiness of bringing all this disparate art together under the concept of metaphysics. I would not still be thinking about it much, however, if I had not read this review by Kenneth Baker, who pretty much pans the show with an old dude/young dude polemic.
Organized by guest curator Betty Nguyen, the exhibition looks at younger artists' replays of '60s pop aesthetics to express -- what? -- blissful awareness of life, hankering for a lost cultural innocence, honest amazement at what they experience?The review represents a kind of ungenerous whining about the shallowness of youth that really gets my goat. For one thing, to characterize contemporary high-visual-impact-party-art as a "replay of the 60s" sounds a tad narcissistic. Baker calls the show nostalgic, I would call it hedonistic (and I would mean it in a good way). I do understand the irritation of watching similar themes churn through culture over and over again, but that's just the curse that falls on any of us who stay interested in art for more than 10 years. It behooves the older people, who have laid the foundations, to give younger people the benefit of the doubt when they take on the tropes in their own way. There's a distinction between providing historical context and missing the point. Anyhow, the show is not presented as a documentary rehash of 60s pyschedelia, but rather "an exhibition of metaphysical art that gives colorful expression to the mystical yearnings of a new generation." Contrary to Baker's point above, there was no hint of postmodern angsty wallowing in impossibilities. The whole gung-ho thing may not have resulted in a deep spiritual experience, but its a such a cocky, out-on-a-limb premise that the no holds-barred funness of the show was both refreshing and uplifting. Go metaphysics!
The difficulty of deciding hints at the fraught position in which young and mid-career artists find themselves today. They look back at a period, indeed a century, in which their predecessors seemed to do and lay claim to everything that could be done in the name of art and its promise of surprise, pleasure, confrontation with and deliverance from managed consciousness.