SALON DES REFUSES
Thorne’s opening exhibit, “Salon des Refuses,” was advertised as open to any artist who’d ever been rejected in any way–by an art jury, by a lover. While some of the work (and some of the best work) came from friends who are fellow students or recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute, some was submitted by people who wandered in off the street.
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What excited me about this exhibit, which included about 80 works by some 40 artists, was the inventive playfulness, the boundary-crossing transgressions, the oddball quirkiness of many of them–qualities largely absent from high-modernist masterpieces. These young artists–like many in their generation–try to rupture modernism’s smooth surface by including utterly incongruous elements, mixing high art and kitsch. Some works are inexplicable even by the hermetic standards of recent art. Given the open nature of the show, it isn’t surprising that a lot of the work is poor, but even among the strong works few are “perfect”–many of these artists don’t seem to aspire to self-enclosed formal perfection. This art is messy, often highly personal, open to the unevenness and complexities of life itself. Yoko Pono (no, it’s not her real name) presents four untitled pencil and watercolor drawings that combine graffitilike words with patches of color. In one, enigmatic phrases (“PLO Chairman,” “Kung Fu”) appear above and amidst a forest of colored blobs. Kurt Fondriest’s Nostalgia on Constant State of Religion combines a Last Supper reproduction with abstract patterns of paint and toy figurines, some from The Wizard of Oz. Amphay Oudomsouk places together four tall rectangular towers, each made of a different material–tar paper, metal rods–which seem mysterious monuments from some distant civilization.
Identity is also a central issue in Jason Greenberg’s When I Grow Up, an installation whose pieces are scattered like “visitors throughout the gallery,” in Greenberg’s words. The largest portion, however, is displayed against one wall: spread out on the floor are a mass of toys with several rows of stuffed animals behind ending at the wall. On the wall hang two rows of T-shirts and sweaters–a few even hang from the ceiling. Sewn onto the clothing are what seem to be children’s nicknames–“Bundle of Joy,” “Late Bloomer,” “Thumb Sucker.” Littler T-shirts with stuffed animals emerging from the neck openings are also sewn onto the front of these garments. “I’m interested in looking at the relationship . . . between who we were as a kid and what we became as an adult,” Greenberg told me.
Similarly enigmatic is Maloney’s Scrutiny. A black wood frame contains a grid of bars resembling a window guard. Behind it, close to the bars, is an irregular surface of pink wax with black threads streaking over it, the wax and thread clearly suggesting flesh and hair. Here the issues of voyeurism, the body, and identity explored elsewhere in the show are presented more complexly and paradoxically. The wax is shiny and luminous in parts, and unabashedly sensuous throughout. Though the black thread looks like body hair, the hills and valleys of the wax are irregular, asymmetrical; this does not resemble any known part of the human anatomy. Anyone looking for a sexy body will be thwarted by this surface, just behind bars: some weird giant butts up against them, a wall of flesh that has become a world.
