Photo courtesy of Derrick Adams Studio.
Derrick Adams
Artist Derrick Adams in his Brooklyn studio.
While reengaging with the collection at MAM, a certain chill came over me. The experience seemed elevated, focused, and precious, and I began to notice not what it gave, but what it withheld—the less-tidy truths behind the production of a work of great art: the studio failures, labor pains, spills, gaps, collisions, hiccups, traumas and epiphanies. I thought of the story about Kandinsky’s upside-down painting revelation as I trekked to the East Atrium. Derrick Adams’ pictorial meditation on Victor Hugo Green’s now well-known Greenbook spoke to this idea as well.
Derrick is a fantastic artist and possibly a more fantastic human, but he’s evolved so much over the years that it would be difficult to tell his full story in one project, at one site. Even if that site-specific project is extraordinary. Museums of course aspire to add context where they can, but they’re always missing information that only the clumsiness of history, time, place and personal development can offer. Inevitably, selections from the canon inside palaces of public reception draw invisible energy from the past; trying to connect the circuit between history and the moment. Springsteen at Fiserv draws from the myth created at Max’s Kansas City 50 years ago; Rothko 60-on-center at MAM draws it from the grimy streets of a post war New York that has long since been sanitized. Without enough history truth is lost, without moments, history loses its religion. With both, it’s pure electricity.
Apartment Art Exhibit
We all know that Milwaukee is a crucible of bitchin’ DIY culture, its basements, bedrooms, and townie bars the furnaces of private radical expression. The pandemic destabilized the enterprises that blurred public and private, and Milwaukee felt it more than most. So entering an apartment art exhibition on Friday at 2742 N. Maryland Ave., curated by UWM painting students Isabel Cooling and Max Volk amounted to an awakening. As small as Fiserv is big, and with all the energy that future promises can handle, “In Limbo” swelled beyond its humble container. Paintings were hung cheek-by-jowl, next to huddles of young artists testing their chops as critical appraisers of the moment. Is Kaden Van De Loo’s sumptuously painted nest of grayscale brushwork too Guston-ey? Too? Never, but reflective of? Perhaps. But how does anyone get to painting heaven without going through Guston anyway? Does Max Volk need to repaint the representational cellophane portion of his chewy collage-based painting, Metamorphosis on the near wall? Perhaps, but the questioning only confirms the vitality of his emerging practice. I doubt anything Springsteen played at Fiserv was stumbling so gorgeously toward the unknown. Is Julia Bradfish’s painting Spore finally resolved? The debate continued. It looked complete to me, but it’s their history to assemble, as surely as Rothko’s is ours to see fully assembled. Cooling’s own contribution to the show, a piece from her concrete-and-oil “Axis” series, read as fluid and full of all the unlocked potential that her dense media might try to deny. Punk minimalism with an eye toward everything else that might be broken open with a sledgehammer.
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On my way out I nearly stepped on a sculpture of a life-sized fawn curled up in sweet repose by Bo Knutsen. Cute, strange, and life-affirming in its contrast to the more common form of Wisconsin deer décor: the mounted stag’s head. But it also seemed to comment on potential and spent energy. A perfect encapsulation of the moment. I continued down the steps and out into a clap of winter with vague reminiscences of my own history of art shows in basements and Rolling Stones concerts in football stadiums. I thought of the quote the late Dave Hickey attributed the late Peter Schjeldahl: “You move to a city. You hang out in bars. You form a gang, turn it into a scene, and turn that into a movement.” Hard to know how alive that quote is in the age of social media, but I’d sure like to believe that it springs eternal. Let’s hope it does. Signs for the moment, at one particular intersection, though, are good.
“In Limbo” runs through March 24 by appointment. Contact Isabel Cooling: 815-494-7298.
