Looking Back on 2024 in Art

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Photo by Colin Matthes - colinmatthes.com

‘What is Right about the Right?’ by Colin Matthes

‘What is Right about the Right?’ by Colin Matthes, Installation in a vitrine in the lobby of the Saint Kate Arts Hotel.

End of the year “best-of” lists are a dicey endeavor, especially in the world of fine art where recommendations can’t necessarily be consummated by downloading or participating in the content. Still, a sweep of the-year-that-was can offer an opportunity to lay out the state-of-affairs going into a new year of production and reception. It also allows us to think about what the work we saw tells us about art what we might see in the year to come. What art in Milwaukee in 2024 tells us is mostly that the world is astoundingly diverse, and the artistic diversity is indicative of a general expansion and fragmentation of visual culture, generated both by imagination and by media. With the two primary forces of tradition, one historic, fueled by history, and one progressive, fueled mostly by Web 2.0, the art landscape is increasingly more difficult to taxonomize.

The exhibition from 2024 that best encapsulates this Balkan set of circumstances is Robert Longo’s exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum: “The Acceleration of History.” The title itself reflects the issue at hand. And the work in the exhibition, along with the profile of the artist, emphasizes the crossroads facing the contemporary art world. Longo’s grand-scale, charcoal-on-paper drawings freeze moments from the world of flickeringly-fast, feed-fed snapshots: a line of riot police; a football player celebrating a touchdown; a flotilla of refugees. Like the Metaverse itself each image relates jarringly with the image before it. They act as particles, not waves. 

But Longo’s method of execution is taken from the world of the tradition and history. Technically, but also emotionally. It’s slow and persistent on purpose like Durer and Rembrandt. To see his works in person, and you may still do so through February 23, is to rouse a queasy ambivalence about how we consume the firehose of imagery from our digital hoses. Longo’s storied career reflects the residual presence of an industrial complex that is being tested in a same manner that all gateways of legitimacy are at the moment. For all its rich history, Milwaukee has never been at the canonical epicenter of the art world, but it’s always maintained a radical creative culture that bubbled up and influenced that world. One wonders if the gap between the street and the industrial complex is contracting with the continued assault of social media. You have to admit that social media has fostered a kind of imagistic democracy and then wonder if that will liberate us before we suffocate on the exhaust. Local artist Della Wells had a well-received exhibition, “Mambo Land,” at the Andrew Edlin gallery in New York City, a great indication of the possible democratizing of the industrial complex. She’s self-taught, local, and in her sixth decade of making art. Thirty years ago she probably would have remained a local delicacy, but the networked information bridged a regional gap and now you may see her work in New York as well as locally at Portrait Society Gallery in the Marshall building. A good sign that we hope will be a leading indication of things to come.

When Information is Cheap

A dustup this summer around contemporary politics and fueled by the energy of the Republican National Convention told us a great deal about attitudes in the City. Claims of censorship at several institutions around what is appropriate to exhibit and who gets to decide stirred debate. The discussion reflected another version of the same ambivalence felt in Longo’s work. The internet at its worst fires at us indiscriminately, which often provokes a counter-impulse of discrimination and control. How does one discriminate responsibly? It reminded me of a quote by science writer James Gleick: “When information is cheap, attention is expensive.” In other words, the battle in 2025 and beyond won’t be sourcing imagery, as it was when I was a teenager, but curating it responsibly. Which raises another interesting question about what it means to produce art heading into Web 3.0.: does the sheer amount of information devalue originality enough to change art’s traditional role?

Its forms, maybe, its role, never. Nevertheless watching the transition in action triggered many an artist last year. As any good social psychologist would expect, the anxiety has led to a defensiveness and counter-position. The feeling seems to be that if half the world is going voluntarily into junk culture and anti-intellectualism, the art world should offset the nonsense with a crusade of its own. The art world’s playbook has accordingly been to intellectualize, to contemplate itself, and to care. And to tell you it cares a lot. With the election of Donald Trump, the art world seems to have come to a reckoning about all this. This reckoning is the story of 2024, and the answers it comes up with will be the story of 2025.

A piece of work by artist Colin Matthes at Saint Kate (where I am a curator) this summer addressed the issue directly. “What’s Right” a 5 x 8-foot drawing featured text and jagged inked imagery in an attempt to try to inhabit the consciousness of “the Right.” It’s no secret that the art world leans far left, which is reasonable location if it’s a natural philosophical proposition. But when art functions as an automatic counterreaction to a deranged and obscene “Right,” it becomes farce itself. Matthes’ piece was one of the few indications last year that anyone saw this in advance of the election.  

There were other moments of hope in the same direction. Less overtly than Matthes, Rachel Foster’s exhibition, “Empathetic Objects” at Grove Gallery last winter did a full forensics operation on the nature of image-concepts. Her brilliant screen prints are like 4-dimensional visual Rorschachs urging viewers to trace the intersecting meanings of her subject matter. Purposefully layered, obscured, polyglot, reprocessed, her work reminded viewers of how flattened the rest of their world has become.  

New Creativity

The answer to art’s increasingly predictable united front against the deficiencies of the Right will only be solved by flickering imaginations. Convention in the art world, even aimed in the right direction is insufficient. Reaction needs to be replaced by a new creativity. Who knows what this looks like, it’s a “know it when you see it” situation; however, there were examples of wonderful independence last year that might light the way ahead.  

Ryan Peter’s exhibition “it only works if everyone believes it does” had me scratching my head from the moment I saw his large photogram collages from the entry way at the Green Gallery. And the exhibition became more elusive as I looked. A little surreal, a little processey, a little Man Ray, a little punky humor. But also, none of it; it’s his own weird thing that left me looking for failed precedents–always a good sign. Dawn Cerny’s show, “The Coconut Effect” at Hawthorn Contemporary also left me searching for words to match the uniqueness of her wall sculpture and draped textiles. Melissa Cooke Benson’s exhibition at the Marian Gallery at Mount Mary University was also a knockout. Nothing as buried as Cerny or Peter, just graphite on paper drawings of recognizable objects. But her choice of mundane and personalized subject matter along with a masterful control of the medium combined to make some subtle magic happen. I enjoyed seeing a shows in alternative spaces like one at Tooth and Nail, curated by Janelle Gramling and Shannon Molter called “Soft Structures,” and a one at Woodland Pattern by Parker Markin. Both helped signal the enduring presence and potential of Milwaukee’s local community-oriented art world. 

A fantastic show at the Milwaukee Art Museum may be a fine note to punctuate a story about the year that was. Idris Khan’s show “Repeat After Me,” about the nature of how imagery changes with repetition over time, encapsulated the fugitive nature of information in 2024. Khan’s large-scale photographic palimpsests stand as perfect metaphors for how an image loses meaning each time it’s represented, until, finally becoming an abstraction. This truth ultimately reminds us why artists have to stay on their toes, and ahead of the stultifying effects of mass culture. If the terms have changed over time, the strategy of art remains the same: to harness the independence of creativity in the face of a homogenizing leviathan of information designed to consolidate our consent. Our best defense against the coming waves of the prediction industry will always be to remain unpredictable.