ART REVIEW AS SHORT STORY
We drove up Fairfax for the sole purpose of turning right onto Wilshire. The Craft and Folk Art Museum, I still call it that, they changed their name to Craft Contemporary but old habits don’t die, the point being it is on the right side of the street. The traffic was light on the 10 East and I figured with gas inching above six dollars a gallon that there would be less people out and we might just pull up right out front and park like it was a movie.
Well sure enough there was not just one but two parking spots right out front. Metered parking so my wife instantly says in the panic we all have once we’ve gotten a ticket, “Check the sign, check the sign!” Everything was cool, it was a few bucks to park for two hours. Unless it is egregiously priced, shouldn’t one always pay the max as a show of optimism, a bet that maybe a series of events will happen that will make you want to stay here? There is so much bad luck out there that betting on good luck immediately kind of creates it. And it was a lucky day of art viewing, so there!
First things first, though. This is 2022 and they needed to see our vax cards. What every paranoid “freeeeedom™ screecher” had warned us about has come to happen, we are required to carry our papers everywhere. And guess what… It is kinda cool, a fun experience, a bonding ritual, a vote for humanity perhaps, with one’s individuality shockingly, glaringly remaining intact after putting the vax record card back into one’s purse or pocket.
Once you check in, 2022-style, the temptation here is to go racing up the staircase to the galleries but then, oh, right in front of us is the installation we came to see. Rosalyn Myles paid homage to her grandmother with her installation entitled Daisy Hightower. Here was an artist who was fearless on a few different levels. First off, the first thing they teach a kid to do at overpriced cons like CalArts is to spit whenever they think of family. Any revealing of earnest sentiment is stomped with violent boots by the worshippers of that devil they call art theory. And in that regard the fearlessness that Ms. Myles delivers is holy. Fearless, too, in the formal structure of her installation; it was so engorged with the poetry of wistful love that it had to be at the Craft Contemporary, could only be there, this installation would have caused an ordinary art world institution to melt. What we have is a deceptively minimal presentation, a kitchen table. But this is not any ordinary kitchen table, this is the center of the world of Daisy hightower, and is rendered in three physical dimensions and innumerable other ones that swirl around with the spirit. The artist has layered different tablecloths as time signatures, you know a tablecloth on a dining table only lasts so long, it gets more wear and tear than many sets of bed sheets ever hope to have.
The poetry in this timepiece flooded out to any viewer with even average empathy. Again, there isn’t any theory here, just love, appreciation and an artist not confined to tired conventions making a spectacular installation of the emotions. There were hints of the decor of the room coming and going over the decades. It made me want to looks at old photos of my front yard, made me go home and look thru google maps at places my grandma and aunts and other relatives had lived over the years, made me understand the tragedy when my mother said her girlhood home had been torn down to make a connector road. You looked at this installation, you just KNEW the newspaper read “Roosevelt” in the headline when you could only see “ROO” before time and memory covered up the rest. After a while I was agog in emotion seeing a whole life, a whole history, a shared progression honoring one woman when my wife asked, “Did you see the alcoves?”
There was more. To make things dry ‘n clinical for a second, let’s appreciate the curation here, which I assume was mostly the artist because there wasn’t a giant neon sign with a curator’s name taking credit (like I would have done had I been curating at Craft and Contemporary, oh wow my big break, and most others would have too). The wall across from the installation lining a hall had alcoves with clear plexi between the viewer and small dioramas that Roz (you realize that informality of using her name-name instead of her art-name in a formal review is a sin in the church of art writers so stop here if you have a stick up your ass) illustrates the life and loves of Daisy Hightower. I couldn’t even take pictures of these alcoves, they were so precious and personal and yet so intimately relatable, imagine visiting an estate sale both humanized and arranged in chronological order. Now imagine it is YOUR grandmother’s stuff on display, her life a public reliquary. This is brave, bold installation art, this sees every rule of the postwar art canon broken and yet is a superior presentation, more satisfying, more fulfilling to the viewer, than 97% of what the installation art factories are churning out in exchange for student loan cash.
There was much more to explore at the Craft Contemporary, we even bought official Gronk teeshirts in the gift shop, but the power of Daisy Hightower, the revelation of history as layers always present stayed with me. We walked outside and I said “Wasn’t there a bookstore around here back in the day?” and those tablecloth layers, those newspapers strewn to be read and discarded and remembered in the tapestry of our minds was alive because of Daisy Hightower, because of Rosalyn Myles.
