ART REVIEW AS SHORT STORY
Twice in my life I had visited Glendale Community College and twice in my life I had vowed to never go there again. Both times I had wonderful experiences with the art. The first time was a solo show by Brian Ruppel some time in the 1990s. Maybe one day I will excavate a box of photos from my storage space and be able to revisit it but I recall it being a great experience, except for one thing. The second time I went I gave a talk to a class of students and looked at their art and talked about it, I used to be on that guest speaker gravy train where you show up and pontificate and get a check for $400 five months later after filling out seventeen forms with every bit of personal information a hacker would ever need to take control of your bank accounts. You gotta love the state, always there to get in the way except when you need it. So those gravy train days were fun and GCC was no exception except for one thing. The same thing.
What was that thing?
The parking.
You see this is where we lose the New Yorkers and maybe readers from Boston and DC, even Frisco can’t relate to driving like Angelenos can. In Los Angeles, you could see your worst enemy on earth getting into their car in an abandoned parking lot and slowly reach for the gun in your glove box and look up and if they said “Hey there, I have an extra parking pass for this lot! You want it?” you would go procreate and make a baby or adopt an orphan just to name someone after them.
The hideous thing about the parking at GCC is not that it is crowded. No, in fact, there are probably tens of thousands of people with the same attitude as me, they will never park there again and in not parking there they have left the vast concrete slab there as an empty wasteland of painted lines so minimal you might think it was an installation from 1966. It isn’t a crowded parking lot, but it is a distant parking lot.
Oh, and it is on top of a mountain.
Yeah, so the last two times, the only two times that I had visited, I had to park on top of the mountain. It is a deceptive mountain (let’s call it Mount GCC) in that you are driving uphill and you pull in and you park and you leave your car and buy the parking pass – all normal, reasonable things in any parking lot, especially that of an institution in California, be it medical, educational, governmental – and as you walk toward the campus you are greeted with a stunning view of the valley below. There are google street view satellites closer to sea level than you are. And so the trudge begins. Downhill. You see, at GCC, you start atop Mount GCC and descend into the valley that holds the college. Stairway after stairway down, a meandering sidewalk past a tennis court leads to, you guessed it, more stairs. Finally a plateau. And a wise decision to have signage toward the campus art gallery.
Finally, after all that, I was at the GCC art gallery for the third time in my life.
The show was of recent work by Dwora Fried. Entitled CURATE / CURE HATE, it was curated by Dana Marterella, the gallery director at GCC. I wanted to ask Dana if she parked in some special faculty parking lot that doesn’t require mountain climbing gear but I thought, better to not bring up the sorest subject on campus, right? On my best behavior for Dwora’s show, because you must have surmised by now that if I am willing to go back to the mountaintop that I vowed to never again scale, this must be quite the compelling artist. You see Dwora deals with the darkest of looming subjects in a manner that is deceptively pleasant and unassuming, just like the propaganda and mass inculcation that happens before a holocaust can occur. The daughter of a holocaust survivor, this is an artist who wants you to be pleased at first and look a little deeper before you are left feeling a little deeper about things.
Dwora makes what are technically called dioramas, but really she composes them like a painting so I call her a painter. Save that tube of Alizarin Crimson though. She composes objects into a picture plane that has a third dimension. This is quite appropriate for GCC where one is reminded of the infinite space that comes from looking down upon creation from the top of the world or at least the GCC parking lot upon it. There is also here much depth of a conceptual nature. Now everything today made for kids is sanitized. There are more standards and practices employees working for the studios and streamers than there are artists. But the archetypes of children’s stories, their exaggerated features and imagery, they all hold a potency that the mind of a censor cannot grasp. And it is with these figures, bursting with the possibility of the shadow lurking near their cute veneer, with which Dwora sets her scenes, tells her tales, with an astute ambiguity to lead viewers right to the precipice, but unlike code-compliant GCC, there ain’t no staircase with an arm rail to hold onto once your imagination takes the leap a little further.
There are many types of viewers. There is the lazy glancer, the five-second-studier, the list-following-neck-craner glancing at the title sheet for ten seconds before gawking for a full half-second at the artwork just referenced. There are artists who come to shows to network and the spouses of artists who dawdle around one or two pieces. But there are also actual art-lovers, or at least people who enjoy looking at art, people who have seen thousands of artworks in person, who can gauge the stats and analytically fit an artist into an historical, if somewhat subjective lineage. Then there are the drunks who are just there for the free booze and were revolted at the absence of any beverages or snacks at the opening. Hey, there was a drinking fountain along the way for those of us who had scaled down from the peak. But among the other types of viewers there are people who have an antenna, who look at an artwork and “get it”. Of course, there is a high percentage of “Arties” who think they have an antenna and think they get it; but those types are really just saying some variation of “This gallery would be best improved with a show of my work”. Amidst all these types there is a subset of people who still have a clear view of their emotional commitments to the world from when they were children and these are the viewers, all three of them on earth perhaps, for whom this work was made. And for those of us who don’t have that clear view any longer we have substitute photographs in our minds’ eyes of what that purity looks and feels like. And the name of those pictures is integrity. Dwora Fried makes art that is the kind of art that people with integrity enjoy.
Integrity understands that the shadow side is present, and is in fact a byproduct of the light. There is no need to enforce toxic positivity around people with integrity. They get it. They’ve seen the world from both sides now. The power of Dwora’s composed scenes is in its anti-simplicity. There are lots of things going on in a Fried and they each inform the other parts in an interconnected rewiring of basic scenic composition. Marterella’s curation here was the dream of any artist – the strengths of the works were highlighted. Fried’s tableaus sat on shelves that did not visually interfere with the art at all. Each work was lit to maximize the space of the plane and intensify the depth present throughout. I curated this artist into a show and my solution was to have the works back to back on a pedestal. Here I am bagging on lazy art viewers and then bragging about my lazy curating habits, whoops.
The truest test of the depth of Fried’s work would be to take a child and ask them to tell you about what is going on in each work. And then after you have heard the cute stuff, interrupt them and say, oh no, this is a nightmare the artist had, what happened in the nightmare. On second thought, don’t do this. Not because it will scare the kid, they can all handle this. You, my friend, my reader, my internet article skimmer, you will not be able to handle the connections an uninhibited mind makes with this work.
Okay, so the show was fantastic and you are missing a great assemblage of assemblages (I just lost two points in the critic credibility standings for that one, but I just had to!). Now comes the part about the vow.
I vowed many years ago to never go back to GCC because of the Mountaintop experience disguised as a parking lot and Dwora cut me off, “They have an elevator now.” It was rehearsed, as if she was told that when she tells people her show is at GCC that she would meet with resistance from the people who have survived their expedition to the Matterhorn that shadows Brand Boulevard below. And so we left the show to find that elevator.
It was behind a locked door. The elevator was inaccessible as the opening was on a weekend afternoon while the campus was closed. This forced us to do what I had vowed to never do again… scale up Mount GCC. We retraced our footsteps and found the foot of the mountain, the first flight of stairs. Up we went. The trudge to the top had begun. Thoughts of being trapped on the cliffs of Glendale sped through my mind, uncertainty over attempting a quick sprint or a slow meandering pace vexed me. I kept the pace for a bit. Soon, we were farther up than I had imagined possible. The stairs were just as steep as they were twenty years ago. Had the world changed or had I changed? Much like Dwora Fried’s art, the stairs at GCC are best enjoyed by three distinct groups of people: the very young, the wizened elders who have been thru enough that they take better care of themselves now than before (we are in this second camp) and most notably, and perhaps the deepest appreciators of Dwora’s work, those who have been to hell and back, be it down or uphill.
Dwora Fried Curate/ Cure Hate is on view at the Glendale Community College art gallery thru April 29. The gallery is open Monday, Wednesday and Friday (and the elevator to and from the parking lot is as well… or so they say). My navigator easily found the parking lot high above the city of Glendale, but DO buy a daily parking pass there.
