Nearly as significant as any question about what art is in 2018 is where and how art should be made and received by the public. These considerations have preoccupied the art world since the middle of the last century, when art moved off its traditional walls, easels and pedestals and merged directly into four-dimensional contemporary life.
The John Michael Kohler Art Center has done an admirable job of addressing these issues over the years. Consider their compendious exhibition series, “Road Less Traveled,” and their ongoing partnership with the Kohler Arts and Industry program. And, as the custodian of many of Wisconsin’s site-specific visionary art works and grottos, they’ve taken a leading role in considering how the place of creation relates to the site of reception and how to preserve not just the object but the entire creative context of artistic production.
Another ambitious, multi-part exhibition cycle entitled “Live/Work” is now underway at the center, aiming to examine the role of the artist’s studio in contemporary art practice. In Made and Connected, father and daughter Gary and Peggy Noland engage in a productive collaboration that addresses the creative crucible of the household and even biology itself. Unsurprisingly, their visual languages relate to one another. Peggy is a fashion designer whose omnivorous process leans toward the sculptural; Garry is a sculptor whose work occasionally flirts with 2D design, pattern and geometry. Their mutual sensibilities amount to a seamless explosion of raw, interactive productivity in the corridor gallery at Kohler, mixing informal materiality with punky, formal eccentricity. The final installation begs viewers to imagine the raucous explosion of familial creativity that generated it.
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Recent Arts and Industry Fellow Joel Otterson’s contribution to the “Live/Work” program, Dark Matter, explores identity against a variety of loaded productive histories from quilting to gilding to ceramics. It makes for a gorgeously eclectic show, with hanging textiles, handmade tables/plinths and metal urns bearing intricate vegetal ornament. The final installation is a spirited and oxymoronic domestic arrangement covered in the maker’s symbolic fingerprints.
It is worth noting here that there has been a recent tendency to connect contemporary art works to traditional productive histories to inflate their social significance. The old art adage applies that a meaningless show isn’t the same as a show about meaninglessness. Simply using a certain form isn’t an automatic commentary on or a connection to that form’s social history. Otterson, though, has been working with these strategies and idioms very fruitfully for decades and shouldn’t be thrown out with the recently soiled bathwater. Nevertheless, it’s an issue that needs to be addressed.
The final two parts of the show open soon. Virgil Marti’s Hothouse will be open by the time you read this. Makeshift, the final act in the four-part series, will open with an event-filled reception on Saturday, Sept. 22. Curated by Michelle Grabner, the exhibition will feature some of contemporary art’s most high-profile and generous practitioners, including Trenton Doyle Hancock, Brad Kahlhamer and Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who will collaborate with local artist John Riepenhoff for a one-night performance at the opening. Makeshift will shed even more valuable light on the subject of the contemporary studio practice.
It has been more than 50 years since Brian O’Doherty published his seminal collection of essays, Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space, announcing the deficiencies of traditional sites of whitewashed production and reception. Wisconsin, and Kohler specifically, finds itself in a unique position: having a historic relationship to both visionary work produced in and for unorthodox environments and to a more insular, contemporary, fine-art tradition which has more willfully challenged traditional histories of reception and production.
So, where does the ultimate furnace of creativity and inspiration lie? In the mind? In the process? In a magical material consummation of media and material? “Live/Work” gets at all these impossible questions by suggesting that the studio, whatever that means to any individual artist, is the primary ecosystem of art making. And all wildlife, including those of the cultural and artistic persuasions, are best observed in, or with concern for, their most natural habitats.
