Tuesday, February 26, 2019

POST #172: SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI




spent a gloomy winter afternoon in my studio today cleaning out a box of old exhibit invitations that date back decades. I had stacks of leftover invitations for a couple of dozen one-man shows, some in prestigious places such as the Bruce Museum or the Hurlbutt Library Gallery in Greenwich, others in small local venues, mostly for my friends.  Since I’m not much of a traveler, my work tended to stay close to home; the furthest north was a one-man show of three-dimensional installations that took up the entire first floor of a museum in Manchester (New Hampshire) My furthest venture south was a small gallery in Georgetown, D.C. which I filled with larger than life-size cardboard cutouts that satirized local politics. My shows all went completely under the radar of the major art world, although the openings made for great parties that got talked about for years.

Some of the invitations were for exhibits I barely remember but was pleasantly surprised when memories of them came back. One of my favorites was a collection of a hundred or so tacky supermarket boxes filled with Xeroxed photos of street scenes with my unsavory figures inside. They were shown piled up in the oversized windows of a gallery on Prince Street; everyone passing stopped to look, crowds gathered. A friend who worked nearby told me about a co-worker coming in late from lunch and explaining that she had lost track of time staring at stacks of inhabited boxes in the window of a nearby art gallery.  


The boxes were also a big hit at a show of a group of slick Westport artists who called themselves “the Boxists,” only unlike my gloomy street discards, they created finely finished work visibly derived from Joseph Cornell. They hated my work on sight (“garbage!”), wouldn’t give me any wall space and forced me to place my boxes in a giant, sloppy pyramid in the middle of the gallery floor. The critic for the New York Times (they had critics who came to local art shows in those days) reported that she would “fall on her ball point pen” if people really looked like mine. Nevertheless, my pile of detritus, was generally agreed to be the best (and most original) work in the show.

My favorite incident – it happened dozens of years ago when I was just beginning to exhibit my work – took place at a one-man show of my paintings held at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich.  I was in my “Suburban Satire” period, trying to outgross George Grosz. At the end of the show, when I took my work down, I found a piece of paper tucked behind one of the paintings. In a childish scrawl someone had written: “I HATE your work.”
Now that’s what every artist wants: honest criticism!

Renee Kahn

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