Craig Norton’s recent show is a different beast than what you’ll find in galleries around Chelsea and the New York art scene. Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore, at Jim Kempner Gallery until June 23rd, is an emotional and explicit rendering of the schizophrenic divide between America at war and at home, and the egregious neglect of veterans. Norton is also a hyper-realistic and self-taught draftsman who makes narrative art. These factors are not the taboos they were fifty years ago, but they are no longer typical in contemporary art either. To compare, the famous Gagosian Gallery is showing a famous photographer’s gargantuan, historic prints of other famous people. I’m currently writing this piece next door, in a miniscule gallery called Family Business, where we are exhibiting a group show entirely comprised of sticks.
Conceptual strength and skillful execution are crucial to the success of any art work, past or present, even if the faces of these terms have changed. In Tim Came Home… concept and skill manifest in ways the wider public would expect them to—ironically, this quality makes him an outsider in today’s art world. I hope Norton’s pop-out, transfixing murals can function as a gateway for casual viewers into contemporary art, and a call for artists to consider the perspective of those unversed in it.
Norton’s work rejects the idea that art is by nature morally and politically apathetic, ineffective, and/or isolated, ideas that philosophers, artists and critics have argued for centuries. Artists periodically challenge this claim, but perhaps no population rejects it more often than those outside of the art market, whose faith that art ‘matters’ may be the art world’s most regular misguided compliment, (and art has suffered for it through many censorships and its co-option by propaganda.) Along these lines, many still believe that art is a showcase of technical skill, and that virtuosity isn’t inherently absurd. Norton caters to these ideas, but in doing so, his work also fulfills conservative expectations about ‘art’ that we have a good reason to question. Tim Came Home… is a riveting, provocative show, but it lets the art-world context essentially “talk behind its back,” rather than directly address the inherent weirdness of politicized art in the contemporary gallery.
Norton’s work is not only political, but fascinatingly journalistic. Reminiscent of the Wall Street Journal portraits, Norton renders faces, hands and firearms out of tiny marks and stipples. Oftentimes the hands and faces are blown out of proportion, which distorts the figures into punchy homunculi, and brushes caricature without slipping into it. The clothing and bodies are made of boldly colorful wallpaper collages. He ‘draws’ folds with wood-relief style incisions. This mimicry of print illustration is bolstered by the fact that he designed the installation to tell a story. Instead of accompanying a news article, Tim Came Home… could be read as the article itself, or as a history museum exhibit where the story is told through the dioramas alone.
The effectiveness of the hanging contributed to the shows emotional resonance, but also to what is problematic about it. From a strictly “graphic narrative in the gallery” perspective, I was thrilled to see the show explore the layout’s control over the narrative. Tim Came Home… was hung two different ways, which created two different ‘stories.’
Initially, the viewer would walk into the gallery and encounter a crowd of happy, urban passerby. Viewers would then typically start over to the left, with No Welcome Mat.
This crowd scene erupts into the first, with injured veterans parachuting down into the unworried crowd. Moving to the right, around the front desk, the second act focuses on the tragic integration of these two worlds. The first is a military funeral. The second is called My Daddy is A Decorated War Veteran, where a young girl claws at her face, before a crumpled man and a shotgun.
The forceful disruption of the “side scrolling”, frieze-like perspective allows you to peer straight through the wall, to the scene behind the girl, and at an impossible angle inside the coffin. The effect is very moving.
Unfortunately, gallery visitors sometimes didn’t notice the “second act” around the desk. The Jim Kempner Gallery rehung the show so that visitors first emerge to see My Daddy Is… No Welcome Mat still begins the show, but the scene doesn’t bleed into the urban passerby. Instead, the warfare peters out into negative space, and a small pocket of the passerby lead back into My Daddy Is…. Around the desk, the two parts of the military burial flank the rest of the happy-go-lucky city-dwellers. Life goes on, and no one is the wiser—the second hanging, while a compromise of the original vision, is rhythmically more complex, less melodramatic, and damning.
Norton’s past work focused on the Civil Rights movement, and he was challenged about his right, as a white man, to depict moments as iconic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest. Norton responds in his personal statement, “I make art about mankind. Lots of people care only about their own identity groups… and I’m not going to sit back and do nothing because the victims are different from me. It’s a human issue.” He goes on to say “Art is the way I bring about awareness and dialogue—and hopefully inspire change.”
This statement plays into the editorial feel, where a piece documents and somewhat universalizes the particular. Norton doesn’t comment on the role or the effect of the gallery context on his plea. The gallery is treated like a culturally heralded space, where people seek meaning, information, and often go to look at pretty things. This is not untrue, but it ignores other currents too. At the risk of being grotesque, art is a luxury commodity, and fetishistic, which the neutrality of the gallery amplifies. The art world is also a complex and hierarchical social scene that partially takes place in the gallery, transforming openings and installations into sets to act inside of. A truly thorough contemplation of a work will consider the historical context and precedents of the piece. Norton’s work is a little strange in that it appears to be descended from editorial illustration more than anything. This does not mean that Norton’s work doesn’t belong there, but that the conditions of its “immigration” are unusual and inextricable.
Is the art gallery a useful place to encounter Tim Came Home…? Ultimately, yes— it does raise awareness for an important social issue, even if the scenario is ironic. But is a private collection a useful place for this piece? How about an art museum? Is Norton’s work best designed for public spaces? If Norton’s wish for awareness and dialogue attaches a use-value to his work, certain environments could be more successful than others, and Norton’s work would also violate ‘art for art’s sake.’ No big deal: art pour l’art has been rejected before, and chances are it’s a mental illusion, (people use art without admitting to it, and for reasons they can’t articulate.) Finally, Norton’s arresting photorealism individualizes the subjects, but it is also hypnotic, exciting the eye with spectacle of torment, violence, and artistic wizardry. Norton’s process receives a paragraph of the artist’s statement before the political component is even discussed.
I apologize: I won’t attempt to answer these questions in this review, but the questions themselves are illustrative. An artist doesn’t have to have a fully elaborated concept to start working. Here, the ideas and context don’t dovetail together to create an Eureka moment—instead, Tim Came Home highlights the mess of understandings about what art is and what it does. Which are, more than ever, important questions to ask.
All photographs are courtesy of the artist and Jim Kempner Gallery
Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore
Jim Kempner Gallery, May 12th – June 23rd, 2012
I really like your point that various censorship controversies have been the result of the public’s misguided notion that art matters.
Just looking at the images here…maybe it’s the weird realism/stiffness of the cutouts along with the heightened emotional content, but the work almost seems campy to me in a way. I wonder if that plays at all on the gallery context…there’s maybe a parallel between the hermeticism of the gallery (a secret that matters because it doesn’t matter) and the closet…..
why doesn’t art matter?
Well…gallery art doesn’t matter politically because it’s a really highbrow specialist niche that doesn’t really connect to a broad public. It’s not a mass artform, basically. Standing up in a gallery and declaring that the Iraq war is bad is just barely a public act, if at all.
The wall between mass art and highbrow art isn’t entirely impermeable or anything, and gallery art has long influenced mass art in important ways (Sonic Youth, Lady Gaga, Bjork…lots of other examples.) But as Kailyn says, if you want to make a political point that people are going to listen to, gallery art maybe isn’t the best way to do it.
Noah,
Thank you! I absolutely agree with the campiness… there’s an overwrought-ness that I’m not sure Norton intended or was aware of. Which makes the work seem melodramatic… I think the point I was dancing around was that the emotionality (maybe sentimentality) of the subject, plus the beatific hyperrealism of the drawing style has a “Norman Rockwell affect,” which makes me think that the message has been hyperbolized or simplified, rather than accurate. And I would love to explore the link between gallery hermeticism and ‘the closet,’ which are great terms, if you don’t first…
Tim Came Home… is probably the best example I’ve ever seen of “gallery cartooning, and its worth noting that Western comics and modern journalism both descended from the broadsheet.
Evan and Noah– Yeah, my conflict is that realistically, Norton’s art won’t reach many people, and its also in a context that’s largely forfeited making effective socioeconomic statements. And only seems half-embarrassed about its complicity with the excesses of the world’s richest .01%. My conflict is that while I applaud Jim Kempner’s sponsorship of subversive art, and Craig Norton for making subversive art, I think art needs to be really, truly effective if its going to be effectively subversive. I’m not sure Norton goes far enough in disrupting its Rockwell-ism, its journalistic tendencies, and its gallery setting.
You should write about it, Kailyn; I don’t know enough about the gallery scene. The book to look at is Eve Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet”…and I’d also recommend Philip Core’s book Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth.
I guess if I were going to think about it more, I’d point out the way the closet works/connects might be that high art’s link to the upper class and bohemianism links up with discourses around gayness…and also of course there’s the issue of knowing/not-knowing that comes up around gallery art; being the initiate and in on the joke or being a clueless outsider….
Noah: “if you want to make a political point that people are going to listen to, gallery art maybe isn’t the best way to do it.”
Nor are the mass media because they’re dominated by the fiercest dictatorship that ever existed: the economical dictatorship (hence: infotainment, etc…). Besides, the 1 % Kailyn is talking above *own* the mass media.
…Oh and no, the Internet doesn’t change anything. For two reasons: (1) It’s a Babel; (2) everything that doesn’t “entertain” is completely ignored.
Well, I certainly can’t deny that mass art has it’s troubles as well.
“those outside of the art market, whose faith that art ‘matters’ may be the art world’s most regular misguided compliment, (and art has suffered for it through many censorships and its co-option by propaganda.)”
But aren’t the “those” of this sentence the very people that make art of any kind matter? That is, art matters when it becomes a matter of concern for enough people, as when it becomes a node in a controversy (“Sensation”) or what Latour would call a “mediator” between two ways of seeing (Sonic Youth presents Gerhard Richter which then gets an exegesis in a music magazine and on and on). This is just a long way of saying that even the most public of arts (political cartoons, pop songs) don’t matter very often, and when they do matter it’s not on their own terms, but because people make them matter.
Of course, I’m not denying that gallery art is the medium of first resort for politics, but I’m not sure we can tell in advance when or where or from what the most productive political conversations will emerge (and I would suggest that conversations about art are almost always political in the broad sense of the term).
So all politics is misrecognition? Sort of Lacan with joy replaced by dyspepsia….
Well, if we’re following Lacan and all recognition is a misrecognition, then sometimes? I’d be more willing to say that politics as gathering of actors around and issue or object of concern (this is sort of a pre-socratic, pre-modern definition of politics where politics can pop up anywhere, and not just in the agora or on the op-ed page). So the gathering doesn’t have to be dyspeptic or the product of misrecognition (though from my examples I can see why you thought that’s what I meant).
I didn’t exactly think you meant that; I was attempting to be clever.
Anyway…your point that the gallery scene does occasionally have political connotations precisely because people think it matters is a good one. It also fits with my point about the closet — the closet is both a private phenomena and a political one, and in fact can be seen as a way to link the two. The uproar around Mapplethorpe and Serrano was definitely very much structured around the closet, I think — that is, the attack was along the lines of, the NEA has an evil secret, and that evil secret is that it is funding all of this gay shit (I don’t know whether Serrano is gay or not, actually, but Piss Christ can definitely be, and definitely was I think, viewed through that lens.)
The phrase “art doesn’t matter” has weighed heavily on my mind the last few days… it overreaches what I meant to say, and I’m sorry its taken so long to respond. I decided to re-read parts of Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, an essay that has a lot to say on this. While Burger is writing about a discrete, historical period in art history, (specifically, the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, with a bit of crossover into Russian Constructivism and Cubism,) he makes the case that this period profoundly affected the way art has been produced and received since. This is ironic, because they had sought to destroy the institutionalization of art, not make it more robust and complex. Or, as Burger puts it: “What has occurred is the total subordination of work contents to profit motives, and a fading of the critical potencies of works in favor of a training in consumer attitudes (which extends to the most intimate interhuman relations.)” (30)
The avant-garde sought to sublimate art into the “praxis of life,” the every-day, not by better integrating art into life, but reformulating a new life praxis around art. In a strange twist, our current life praxis is determined by art’s visage via mass entertainment and commodity aesthetics, which only reinforce the old, institutional praxis the avant-garde sought to abolish. According to Burger, the story of modernist art is a tragic one– capitalism and institutional art won, and rewrote their greatest enemies as sexy, art-world heroes.
Later twists of fate, like the NEA scandal, could almost be seen as two heads of the hydra fighting each other. But that does a definite disservice to the sincerity of the artists of that era, like Mapplethorpe and ACT UP, who were working to build awareness of AIDS, the oppression of minorities, and gay culture, among other things. Going back to “art mattering”, art has mattered, ACT UP and Judy Chicago did build awareness, and art has been used as a vehicle for social change.
Just as anything can be art if you make it so, any art can “matter” if you let it. One beautiful thing about art is that its almost completely up to the receiver to decide what to do with it. It’s difficult to tell when you’ve “finished” a piece, and it often won’t be reminiscent of personal experience. Art demands a lot of work from the receiver– perhaps this is why most people feel more comfortable around paintings, or assume that a stack of concrete blocks is meaningless. But because of this, the way art “matters” can be wonderfully unscripted. I cautiously disagree with Burger’s belief that art is essentially sociopolitically ineffective, because its hard to predict what a piece will do or inspire. But I do agree that institutional art has developed and enjoyed its status as an ‘autonomous’ field, where according to Schiller and others, residual desires unmet by the fragmenting of society can be addressed without social change. In Schiller’s case, the fact that art exiled itself from reality made it possible for humankind to truly realize its humanity inside it. Burger doesn’t completely reject that art could be sociopolitically effective, but he does propose the history and qualities that make it difficult, (and any success it does have highly ironic.)
“…now that the attack of the historical avant-garde movements on art as an institution has failed, and art has not been integrated into the praxis of life, art as an institution continues to survive as something separate from the praxis of life. But the attack did make art recognizable as an institution and also revealed its (relative) inefficiency in bourgeois society as its principle. All art that is more recent than the historical avant-garde movements must come to terms with this fact in bourgeois society… But without surrendering its claim to truth, art cannot simply deny the autonomy status and pretend that it has a direct effect.” (57)
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