For Example...

June 12, 2000 cover of Time
Illustration by Brad Holland
used with the courtesy of http://www.time.com

Brad Holland isn't big on the zaniness of 20th century and contemporary art. At 17, he skipped art school, moved from Ohio to Chicago and then to New York, and became a famous illustrator working for the likes of Playboy and eventually Time. His philosophy is that modernism was all about "rule breaking" and that postmodernism is just playing in chaos.

Recently Mr. Holland lectured to support his show, "Third Eye" at Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA where he reliably supported statements like the following one taken from his article "Express Yourself: It's later than you think" (published in Atlantic Monthly in July 1996):

Postmodernists believe that truth is myth and myth truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It was called psychosis.

While I read his words prior to the lecture and while I listened during it, I cheered him on: "Art should be more than shock. Yes! Art should be more than silly. Yes! Art should be more than pranks. Yes! Abstract Expressionism has turned into interior decoration. Yes! Avant-garde culture is outdated. Yes!" However, something unexpected happened. When Holland started using examples for how ridiculous contemporary art has become, I stopped pounding my fist and started reflecting. His perfect model for the absurdity of experimental art was a New York Times article about an artist eating Sheetrock. He mockingly said, "Oh, but she isn't a performance artist! You can't watch her eat it. She munches at night while no one is looking." As he said this last part, he shot the audience a look that read, "Seriously, folks?"

Despite the strength of the work at Holland's show in the beautiful space that is Pennsylvania College of Technology's gallery, all I could think about was this anonymous artist who was eating Sheetrock in secret. What stuck with me wasn't necessarily the shock value of someone eating Sheetrock, a stunt that one might see on MTV's Jackass, but rather that she did it when no one was looking. So, I went home and found the aforementioned article online. It was published on February 6, 2005 and the artist's name is Emily Katrencik. The Sheetrock she ate was part of a wall in the LMAKprojects satellite gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that separated "the gallery's exhibition space from the bedroom of its director, Louky Keijsers."

Emily Katrencik nibbling away
Image used with the courtesy of http://www.nytimes.com

In my mental recreation, Katrencik becomes like Franz Kafka's "hero" in The Metamorphosis: a shunned creature who sneaks out at night seeking nourishment but isn't sure where to find it and is too ashamed to be spotted. One who is driven by instinct to perform a destructive deed but survives by way of the calcium and iron in the Sheetrock (who knew?). One who is deprived of freedom and is forced to sustain by any means necessary like the women in Suzy McKee Charnas' dystopian The Slave and the Free who are turned into baby-making machines and left to survive off of their breast milk.

At the same time, Katrencik is exposing by dissolving the wall between the private and the public, the professional and the personal. Through invading Louky Keijsers' bedroom and uniting it with the gallery, Katrencik is building a bridge between the sometimes distant and uppity gallery owners in NYC and the viewing public. But she's not only "tearing down the wall" Berlin-style, she's ingesting it, making herself and her health vulnerable like a Bushido warrior who's willing to risk everything for his cause.

Holland said, "If you can't laugh at that, there's something wrong with you." And he's right. On some level, Katrencik's art is silly but it's also thought-provoking, unsettling, intimate, desperate, educational, layered, and memorable. Every time I'm ready to dismiss contemporary art as meaningless, frivolous, devoid of artful composition, casual, or shallow, something comes along like Katrencik's art to remind me that maybe all those rules being broken did lead somewhere and if navigated right, maybe the pluralistic sea does have pearls.

In "Third Eye," Brad Holland's Pearl consists of two sciency men measuring the size of a wondrously large, rosy-pink pearl in a clam. It seems out of place for these men to be trying to qualify this surreal treasure because whatever world they're in, their tools aren't going to be sufficient. It would be like counting inches in a dream.

Pearl Brad Holland
acrylic on panel

The problem with placing a cut off point and saying, "Here's where art stopped making sense!" is that it impairs one's tools for comprehending what can make contemporary art good. I'm not accusing Holland of anything because I make this mistake too and many people are looking out at the art world and thinking, "Where did this go wrong?" I'm just saying that assumptive dismissal is the inevitable conclusion of closing oneself off to anything that isn't in a traditional frame.