Getting in Touch With Our Senses Through 'The Texture of Knowing'

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The Texture of Knowing runs through May 24 at The Haggerty Museum of Art, 1234 W. Tory Hill St.

I teach contemporary art to college students who are almost totally unfamiliar with the subject, and we routinely begin the course in crisis. The textbook is a little esoteric and makes a lot of assumptions about conceptual art practices that my practically minded, transactionally oriented students aren’t willing to accept initially. They usually come around, but still, after facing their incredulous mugs during the first few weeks, it’s difficult not to question my own faith.

I persevere, with the goal of leading those students to conceptual glory, where things that can’t be held, quantified or even known for sure, might still hold value. It’s a leap of faith. I called on the exhibition “Toward the Texture of Knowing” at the Haggerty Museum of Art, to assist in my gospel this week. The exhibition builds off a vivid, conceptual premise from Kathleen Stewart’s text Ordinary Affects, a meditation on our subtlest interactions with the world around us and how we organize ordinary encounters into continuous narratives. Or, as Stewart describes it, “Like a live wire, the subject channels what’s going on around it in the process of its own self-composition. Formed by the coagulation of intensities, surfaces, sensations, perceptions and expressions, it’s a thing composed of encounters and the spaces and events it traverses or inhabits.”

The show invites us to get in touch with our senses right off the bat by asking us which of six textures best describes how we move through the world: Sandpaper? Velvet? Perhaps none of the above? Your vote is cast with a marshmallow, and voila, your antennae are sensitized to start reflecting on the textures of knowing.

A section of green hard candies scattered on the floor of the gallery will be familiar to some as a relational artwork by the late Cuban artist Félix González-Torres. To others, its interactive nature won’t be clear until the wall text inviting them to help themselves to a piece of the art is read. I took two candies, to the slight alarm of some other visitors who hadn’t started reading. González-Torres’ work has always stood as an example of the possibility of readymade objects to transcend their material limitations to become aching analogies for fleshier, human struggles. A piece of his that’s not in the show features two battery-operated clocks that inevitably fall out of sync before stopping altogether; it’s my go-to when trying to convince skeptics about the value of visual poetry.

Nearby González-Torres’ patch of green sweets, Rachel Rose’s video “Lake Valley” rolls out a mesmerizing and impressionistic story of adolescent transition. Nostalgia, loss of innocence and suburban anomie are delivered through a churning collage of children’s book illustrations and surreal, cartoonish imagery that feels both hauntingly mature and disarmingly naïve. Rose’s eight-minute video abounds with “surfaces, sensations and perceptions” and their psychic implications, most pointedly in this case, the sadness of a forsaken family pet as it futilely tries to connect with a child who seems to have outgrown it.

Christina Ramberg’s paintings and Sondra Perry’s single-channel video trace the contours of the membranes between various dimensions of reality. Ramberg’s graphically painted bilateral forms almost get away with being abstractions before finally turning figural. All of a sudden, they go from pure form to patterned three-dimensional bodies. Her transitional skins lie between modes of art as well as forms in space. Perry’s you out here look n like you don’t belong to nobody…(For Flesh Wall) generates its own liminal sheathing in the form of an entire wall of roiling, churning CGI-generated flesh that lives between biology and technology. The late surrealist Eduardo Paolozzi and Ragen Moss further flesh out the exhibition with mysterious works that force hyper-examination and acute reception.

We continue to make headway in my contemporary art class with the help of images and text from this instructive exhibition, as well as an arsenal of material from other sources: a Bell Hooks poem; Far Side cartoons; ample amounts of González-Torres. We haven’t arrived in the Promised Land yet, but “Toward the Texture of Knowing” at the very least has helped calibrate and fine-tune our sensitivities in preparation for arrival.

The Texture of Knowing runs through May 24 at The Haggerty Museum of Art, 1234 W. Tory Hill St.

Opening Soon: Visual Arts

“Home: Conversations on Displacement and the Arts”
Saturday, Feb. 15, 1-3 p.m.
Lynden Sculpture Garden
2145 W. Brown Deer Road

This will be the third in a series of conversations among artists, scholars and community activists that continues the work begun with Lynden’s first annual refugee celebration, “Home,” in June 2019. It focuses attention on these communities as Lynden prepares for their second “Home” celebration, which is currently scheduled for Saturday, June 20. As with similar conversations at Lynden, the issue of human-cultural displacement will be approached broadly—as both an internal and an external phenomenon—from the experiences of refugees and immigrants coming to the U.S. to those of indigenous, enslaved and interned populations within this country. Participants in the third panel—moderated by artist-in-residence Kim Khaira—will include Ashraf Albakir, Sumeya Osman, Nirmal Raja and Ras ‘Ammar Nsoroma. Refreshments will be served. For more information, call 414-446-8794 or visit lyndensculpturegarden.org.

“Going Home”
Feb. 15-March 14
Tory Folliard Gallery
233 N. Milwaukee St.

The Historic Third Ward’s Tory Folliard Gallery opens “Going Home,” an exhibition of new landscape and still life paintings by Wisconsin artists Andy Fletcher and Katie Musolff. The married artists are life-long Wisconsin residents, and both execute a type of rural portraiture of the world they inhabit—one on the micro and the other on the macro scale. This new exhibition of their work includes new paintings by Fletcher and Musolff that capture the landscape, flora and fauna of their new agrarian surroundings. An artists’ talk and book signing for the exhibit takes place on Saturday, Feb. 29, 1 - 2:30 p.m. For more information, call 414-273-7311, send an email to info@toryfolliard.com or visit toryfolliard.com.