 "Photo: Molly Raskin")
When I was 15, my English teacher told me that everything’s been done and there are no new ideas, and that all you can do is write what you want to your best ability.
He and Caleb J. Lyons should talk.
Lyons’ show Abstraction in the Twenty-First Century, currently on display at the MCA’s 12x12 gallery, explores the evolution of art, framing it as a constantly evolving derivation.
The exhibit includes a few sharp, insightful works. “The Artist is the Model: Do It Yourself, Still Life, Amatuer Hour, Idiot Box” (2010) pulled on my feminist heartstrings. The video installation frankly presents the artist, naked, lying on his side, propped up on one arm, posed like a classical female nude. While Lyons’ incorporation of gender inversion highlights social progress made in the art world, his choice of medium addresses the introduction of technology and audience participation. Breaking the static wall between artwork and viewer, the title invites audiences to try their hand at rendering the nude in a more traditional mode, by sketching the artist in all his pant-less glory. In doing so, Lyons not only reverses gender roles, but forces the established positions of artist, subject, and viewer to intermingle as well.
Unfortunately, while Lyons addresses the social politics of portraiture beautifully, landscape does not fare so well.
In the center of an otherwise aesthetically and conceptually stimulating exhibit is an assemblage of sculpted clay pipes filled with small cacti. Awkward and curious, the herd of cacti-pipes, entitled “Landscaping (Canyons)” (2010) shares many elements with Lyons’ nude portraiture film. “Landscaping,” too, aims to breed a harmonious relationship between a traditional subject and a medium that has only gained legitimacy and prevalence in relatively recent years, in this case, craft. The childish pipes seem out of place in an otherwise strong, smart show. Although Lyons succeeds in highlighting the marriage of art and domestic utility that craft work can sometimes cultivate (hence the cacti), I still found myself fighting to look past how unattractive his lumpy spray-painted pipes were. The aesthetics are off-putting without being particularly provocative, leaving the viewer torn between something that seems unnecessarily heinous and the clever, relevant idea behind it.
Be the first to comment on this article!