I 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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