Buckethead is, but it’s Wikipedia’s Avant-Garde list, not the list that set our art community on fire. Not all of them of course, and anyway, I’m not sure what “art community” means. Do you know? Who among you can answer?
Mary Louise Schumacher, MJS art & architecture critic, recently identified the Avant-Garde in our town. In a lengthy, Dec. 12 piece (Art City blog) in MJS, anchored by a decade-old photograph of our town’s leading artists, and a survey she sent out to prepare for the feature, Ms. Schumacher came up with Avant-Garde 2011. I did not receive a survey form. Who received them and how was the survey shaped? I guess I’m chopped liver.
All writers like comments and Schumacher is getting both sweet and sour. That’s a no-brainer. And there are always a few transparently pandering raves from those who made the list but remain ever so humble, just in case their friends have started avoiding their company. The comments are rolling in, but the story isn’t over.
My biggest problem is her inclusion of people who blog for Art City. What’s with that? A few are actually artists on the leading edge (she cites deserving listee Stern as an “occasional blogger”), but others sure aren’t. I’m not on the list. I never expected to be. Would I have liked to be? I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t.
An artist friend told me he wouldn’t want to have been included on her list, but many other artists must be feeling bummed by being excluded. But it’s just a list, albeit by an art and architecture critic with a big platform at MJS, though it’s doubtful that any of the listees will find themselves thrust into the realm of fame. When the MJS decades-old photo was published, Tom Bamberger made the list. He remarked back then, and I quote very loosely, that in the next decade, most of the local stars would have left Beer Town, to graze in other pastures. Schumacher carefully notes some of those who left and some who left and came back here. Bamberger stayed put. He’s on the new list, deservedly so. I do take issue with her broad-brush statement that “persistence pays off.” It sometimes pays off. The landscape is littered with the talented who expired while being persistent.
When I first read about the coming of her Avant-Garde list, I thought, “Oh good, these will be artists on the cutting edge, the forward marchers in the march-of-art-time.” But I guess that wasn’t to be, at least not entirely (lists are imperfect tools for identifying talent), for where are Bridget Evans and Gene Evans who kept various forms of Lucky Star up and running through thick and thin? Beth Sahagian of sculpture and Vanguard fame? On the other hand, I was pleased to see Martha Monroe, the curator of the Allis/Villa on the list. Here’s a woman who’s turned the old into the new, as has the talented Polly Morris at Lynden Sculpture Garden. I guess the article included Mike Brenner just because he is Milwaukee’s Liberace. He certainly is colorful, but it must be discouraging to those artists who don’t shave their heads, or maybe do, and alas! fail to make the list. Take heart all ye rejectees.
A list is a list is a list, though the eventual slap-down of the Folliard Gallery was a tad snarky. Folliard didn’t make the list because it is a sales gallery ostensibly lacking in the right dollop of curatorial expertise. Huh? Most art galleries are in the business of selling art, and yes, from a curatorial standpoint, some are more lively than others. Tory Folliard runs her own show, and has for years, successfully so, and for many years she had excellent curatorial assistance. I’m asking, can one be too successful financially to make the list? Is this more of big vs. small? MAM vs. the others? Save me from an “alternative” list. That’s like peeing on gravestones.
Schumacher suggests that “social consciousness” is what counts these days and she nails MAM to the art cross when she says, wrongly so, that MAM has more or less turned its back on our art community, whatever that means. I’ve heard that whine for decades. Big vs. small is a good way to set up a story, and don’t you know, the masses love throwing stones at glass houses.
All in all, her feature seems to be carefully researched, and it surely required hours of fretting about who to include and who to exclude. Somewhere along the route, she lost her way among too many words and too much to cover, but from the standpoint of what’s been happening in the past decade (and even with the problematical inclusions and exclusions), she did her job. I like her comments that having opinions is her job. It’s about time. On the flipside, could it be that we like our art critics best when they remainabove the fray, which is to say, “elitist.” The Internet has changed that stance.
Let’s leave it at that as we wing it into 2012.
