Review

A review of Community + Loneliness, with Troost, Troost, Troost

Michael Lopez, installation view of "Lenny," felt collage, approx. 1.5' x 25'. Image: courtesy of the curator and gallery. Click on it to link to more photos from the Charlotte Street Foundation on Flickr.

Paragraph Gallery
Kansas City, Missouri
May 21, 2010 — June 26, 2010
&
Urban Culture Project Space
Kansas City, Missouri
May 21 — June 12, 2010

One leaves the gallery after this exhibition thinking the mathematical operation in the title is a bit off: a more accurate representation would be “Loneliness minus Community.” But despite the misnomer, it is a high-quality and thought-provoking — if somewhat emotionally bleak — look at contemporary United States culture as experienced by a select group of Kansas City artists.

As part of "Voices of Community + Loneliness" on May 22, Gina Kaufmann, Rita Brinkerhoff, and Ron Megee performing live "status updates," which are normally used online in social media applications like Facebook.

Curator Angela Lopez said in her opening remarks that she started with the idea of community, understood not only as a collection of people brought together by geography or interests, but also as a network of people supporting each other. Loneliness was added as a kind of afterthought — the foil for community that ended up stealing the show. In her curator’s statement, Lopez explores the conflicting drives in US culture: a strong desire for community, in the context of a highly mobile society. Unlike in most cultures, US Americans typically leave the house at age 18 and freely move throughout their lives (11 times, on average) to pursue career advancement. Our culture also prizes modes of transportation and housing that minimize contact with others: the car and single-family house in the suburbs, rather than the bus and apartment building. These tangible and intangible factors all contribute to the widespread breakdown of community in the United States.

So far as it goes, it is an excellent and very insightful analysis of mainstream US culture. However, I found myself wishing Lopez had gone just a bit further in both her statement and her conception of the exhibition. For one thing, she fails to draw a distinction between loneliness and solitude — as any good introvert can tell you, there is a difference between being alone and being lonely. But that existential discussion will have to wait for another day. She also fails to fully exploit the potential of her chosen format: a group exhibition of artists living in close geographic proximity to each other, who all created new work specifically for the exhibition. Given the theme of “community,” such a set-up practically begs for collaborative work, and in fact Lopez said she had artist communities specifically in mind from the outset. The resulting exhibition, however, reflects very little such interaction; instead, any connections between the works seem accidental, and the conventional practices of artist as lone creator and art work as single, bounded object go largely unchallenged.

Michael Lopez, detail of "Lenny," felt collage. Image: courtesy of the curator

That is not to say, though, that it is a bad exhibition. There are several very strong works included, most notably Michael Lopez’s Lenny, an epic narrative in felt collage. It is approximately 1.5 feet high and 25 feet long, looped end-to-end and hung from the ceiling and walls in a horizontal isosceles triangle. Individual scenes in the narrative, all set in a single bedroom, show a male figure tossing and turning in bed, getting up, getting dressed, getting undressed, going back to bed. While he is tossing and turning in bed, with his face hidden, another male figure appears in silhouette in the window. He disappears again in a few frames, before the protagonist re-emerges — the one potential opportunity for human contact, lost. The piece’s strength lies in its attention to detail: the sun rises and sets in the window, clothes are added and subtracted from heaps on the floor, even facial tissues appear and disappear. A heart-shaped plant in the corner symbolizes the desire for love and acceptance, even if only from inanimate living things. The triadic color scheme (green-purple-orange) is also nicely done, creating just the right amount of unsettling dissonance.

Two works seem at first glance to be more community than loneliness: Whoop Dee Doo’s The Happiest Day Ever and The Best of Whoop Dee Doo, and Charlie Mylie and Andrew Roth’s Your Body Will Remember What to Do. The former is a taped selection from the eponymous faux public access TV show, which travels around the country (and even abroad) taking up short-term residence in a community and putting together a combination of scripted performances using local talent, and live audience participation. It’s certainly a diverse community: young and old, multiple races and ethnicities, brought together in a rollicking good time for everyone. And indeed, one could imagine that the world inside the video is a big, happy family, filled with joyful African dancers and exuberant choirs; but as viewers of this exhibition's rendition of it, we are forced to watch from outside, staring at a small screen in a corner instead of joining in the fun or even interacting with those around us. Heidegger’s prescient comments on the “Age of the World-Picture” go blithely unheeded, and the impact of technological mediation on community is never addressed.

Charile Mylie and Andrew Roth, installation view, "Your Body Will Remember What You Do," clay, wood, foam. Image: courtesy of the gallery and curator

Your Body Will Remember What to Do is a performance piece, with the two artists dressed in clown-like costumes attending to a low platform heaped with modeling clay. Audience members were welcome to sink their hands into the medium and mold it to their hearts’ content, which proved especially popular with the younger generation. Though again this could have been a joyful endeavor, the dingy color scheme deadened the atmosphere. Furthermore — although it’s unclear if this was the work of the artists or the audience — a significant amount of the clay had been shaped into elongated spheres with three marks carved into one side, which distinctly resembled skulls. This again did little to promote the aspect of community, or at least of living community. The skulls also reverberated against Ann Pearce’s Face Off Him and Face Off Her, large ink, acrylic, and pencil works of human head forms that confronted each other behind the performance area.

Ann Austin Pearce, "Face Off Him,"acrylic, ink, and pencil on paper. Image: courtesy of the artist and curator

Installation view of "Community + Loneliness," at the Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, May 15 through June 26, 2010. Image: courtesy of the gallery and curator. Click on it to see more images of the opening on the curator's blog.

One other piece particularly worthy of mention was Miki Baird’s Stripes, a photograph of an American flag sliced into strips (the photograph, not the flag) and mounted directly on the wall in a penciled-in grid, enclosed in glass and a thick silver frame. Baird is the only artist to address the idea of nation as community, an important notion that was thoroughly explored in Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson argues that all communities larger than small tribes (about 150 people) are by necessity imagined, since it is impossible to encounter all the other members face to face. Although imaginary, these bonds can be very powerful, as the history of nationalistic violence in the past century attests. Baird’s work is a thoughtful reflection on nation as both a unifying and a dividing force, and its formal excellence should not be overlooked in a gallery full of larger and more imposing works.

Installation view of "Troost, Troost, Troost: Student Work Exploring Realities, Possibilities, and Fantasies on Troost Avenue." Photo: Paul Shortt, courtesy of the gallery

It is in no small way ironic that these numerous meditations on loneliness are offset by the impression of a thriving community just next door in the adjacent Urban Culture Project Space — in an architecture and design exhibit about Troost Avenue, of all places. That exhibition, Student Work Exploring Realities, Possibilities, and Fantasies on Troost Avenue, is a joint project of the University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design and Planning and the Kansas City Art Institute Department of Graphic Design. I found myself being drawn into the Project Gallery by lively films describing the Troost area’s cultural vibrancy; and though the introductory text to the exhibition outlined numerous factors contributing to the area’s decline, the overall impression — in stark contrast to Community + Loneliness — was one of communal hope and shared dreams and visions. The reason for this difference is not too hard to discern: a quick glance through the community newspaper developed by one design student showed Troost residents answered the question, “How long have you lived here?” with “60 years” and “since 1970,” far longer than the US average.

Detail view of "Troost, Troost, Troost." Photo: Paul Shortt, courtesy of the gallery

The juxtaposition of these two exhibitions inadvertently highlights the extent to which US mobility — and by extension, social isolation — is a function of socioeconomic status, race, and age. There are still places in the United States where people know their neighbors, because they can’t afford cars and single-family houses in the suburbs. Community + Loneliness, which consists almost entirely of young, white, (presumably middle-class) artists, fails to represent these many other realities of community in the United States and thus ultimately gives an over-simplistic and unnecessarily depressing picture of the state of US social relations today. Lopez herself is clearly aware that different cultures have different conceptions of community, but unfortunately the United States-as-monoculture idea prevails when Community + Loneliness is taken by itself. The presence of the Troost exhibition in the Project Space fortunately serves to remedy this fault. So in the end, there actually is community as well as loneliness; you just have to look for the community in an unexpected place.

-re-

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