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A FEW WORDS ON PEACE, AND ON SPIRITUALITY

This is an exhibition that wanders around two points: one is peace, and the other is spirituality.

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What can art say, or do, about peace?
It can enact peace, and not harp on war. The exemplary voice here is Emily Jacir. It is wonderful work, because it is so specific in its actions, so local. And yet I will register one complaint. This is art which, if it is seen by the right people, could play a much larger role in promoting peace. If she asked me what I would like, I would say, Go back to all the places involved in “Where We Come From”, both in Palestine and around the world, and hand out printouts of the work, so people can see what is happening. Art world venues just aren’t enough for work like this: when “we” see it, it’s preaching to the converted.

That’s not to say “we,” the art-world public, cannot be shown new things. One thing that the twentieth century showed us is that art can be light-hearted even while it is serious. Duchamp first made that point. Here I would point to Diana Guerrero-Macía: she has done some pattern pieces, with hard-to-read slogans à la Christopher Wool, and also some peaceful collages. Her work is developing an edge. “Silver and Gold” juxtaposes the outlandish consumerism that helps bring us news of places like Somalia, and it owes its strategy more to Fluxus and arte povera than surrealism—which is to say that in addition to being serious, it is light hearted. “We”—the serious, the dedicated—can learn from that.

I’ll say the same about James Westwater’s work, which is in a long line of toy-soldier art. Westwater is seriously minimal in his choice of form and color, but also lighter than, say, the Chapman brothers’ Hell.

Jesikah Ruehle’s snowy mountain scene is also pleasant: lighter than Ernst Kirchner’s serious Germanic mountains, and even lighter than Weimar-republic skiing scenes (I saw a show of those in Vienna this year). The process is light and airy, like Laura Owens, but without the I-am-going-to-scare-you-a-little-because-I’m-really-weird edge.

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And then there’s the spirituality of much of this work. Christine Tarkowski is the most explicit. Her artist’s statement (on the Priska C. Juschka Fine Art site) begins: “I am building my own religion. Religion is not an entirely accurate description for what I’m creating…” Her work has become an “extended, complex, and multi-faceted” project around a “faith-based system.”

Juan Garcia’s work also comes more or less directly from spiritual traditions: especially Ana Mendieta (as he says in his artist’s statement), gamelan, and movements after minimalism to find new, private spaces for encountering art. Work of this kind cannot always find a place in the art world—or rather, it can, if it is willing to hide its affiliations. (At the moment the largest counter-example is The Land, which is enjoying wide popularity despite its earnest, dogmatic, nearly mystical spirituality.)
And finally, Mel Davis’s quiet, meditative paintings are a kind that is common on the outskirts of the fine-art world, where the strategies of modern and postmodern art can be put more openly to the uses of “religionists.” Makoto Fujimura is another… but all that is an enormous subject, for some other time.

James Elkins