We went to see the poppies. We stopped by the museum. There were some shows there we wanted to see but we had made the drive to Lancaster to see the poppies. They only bloom for like five weeks. The shows were up for seven or eight weeks but it was getting close to their closing and close to the end of poppy season.
I’ve been in the art world a long time and seen a lot of shows but I had never seen the poppy fields in person. Born and raised in Southern California and it wasn’t until a rainy season five years ago where the poppy fields bloomed that I understood the depth of the phenomena. That year the LA Times had daily coverage of poppygasms and maps to the best poppy places and tips on proposing to your sweetheart in poppyland until of course two weeks later the scolding voice that is the editorial conscience of the LA Times started in with its “Are the poppies too successful?” and “Shame on you for wanting to see the poppies. You are interacting with nature and that is not natural.” Their typical garbage approach to anything is pour it on high-level clickbait style and when that peaks, start shaming the Times readers for liking what the Times writers loved last week. Well, we didn’t go back then, but this year my wife said we were going, so off we went.
We stopped at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster first. It was windy outside but fantastic inside. When you go outside to see poppies you aren’t interested in which botanical subdivision their genus stands. You just want to look at pretty poppies, immerse yourself in color, space and infinity. We were there to see poppies on a formal level. We didn’t need the stupid LA Times micromanagement of our experience to remember that it is the state flower or other peripheral trivia. We were there for the pure poppy experience.
So why not be there for the pure art experience? Could we enjoy the shows at MOAH for their formal qualities alone? For their immersive potential? Forget what historical lineage they are part of, the deeper narrative or artist’s back story? Is museum work these days successful as an art object and art object alone? Is art at least on par with poppies when freed of the details of its subject matter?
Art history is long. Object makers might have the coolest story and the greatest reason that they made a piece to fit the historical puzzle, but narratives change. The formal strength of your work assists in making the art appealing to future generations who are not going to care about the issues of your day that you think are important. Those future generations (your great-great-great grandchildren if you are breeding) are going to care about something that looks like the early 21st century or something that looks great no matter what. So capture the look of your time or something timeless beyond mere subject or your art is going to be like you: eventually not immortal.
First up was a career survey of Mark Steven Greenfield organized by the museum’s curator Robert Benitez. I have followed this artist’s career for many years, decades even and recognized many of the individual artworks here from their original gallery shows. Greenfield’s paintings work on a formal level just fine. He has a calligraphic abstraction that is as interesting and disciplined as the seminal abstract painter Mark Tobey. Perhaps one day it will prove just as influential. A Mark Steven Greenfield is recognizable visually from a distance in a gallery with this signature calligraphy in the way the Ramones are distinct and original when you hear them playing in a passing car – multiple generations know exactly what it is. I would think that as his career continues, this approach to drawing, this masterful chopped salad of an approach to calligraphy in service to composition and rendering – that this is a fertile field for other artists to see and explore for the next few hundred years.
The installation itself was orderly with each series given its own space. Every solo show was repped by one or two pieces, what more could an artist want from a retrospective? The back wall was painted a lush purple that you really never see in museums and here is this wall whispering “Well, why not?” On this purple wall were golden-bordered portraits. That they were of Black Madonnas is a subject for a review that deals with subject matter. On a formal level they were fantastic paintings done in a detailed, precise manner. They had a fine art painting approach to cartoon imagery similar to the great LowBrow painter Robert Williams with a touch of Kerry James Marshall ’s palette and foreshadowing of the main figure in a composition. The images were surrounded by a solid gold paint with small passages of Greenfield’s calligraphic calling card.
These are the types of fine art objects that stick around and become part of art history. They are well-crafted, unique, made by an artist with enough exhibition history that the work is well-dispersed into collections that care-take the objects and have an appeal on enough levels that if you (or should I say, future YOU five hundred years from now) don’t “get it” you still like looking at it for one or more of many reasons. That is one thing that separates art from social media posts. There is a massive weight to art beyond language.
The next artist we came to see had an installation on the second floor of MOAH. April Bey’s work incorporates language, specifically in the form of text, as one of many elements. A superficial glance at the work delivers a zap of energy like walking into a nightclub just as the action is happening. Every article about April goes into her theories of alien planets and wild, fun, deep, brilliant stuff, but it would be like going to the poppy fields and talking about how the poppies pollinate instead of just how fantastic the poppies actually look. April Bey gets articles written about her and her fantastic theories because she is making art objects that are built to last and palpitate with visual excitement. This is art, all the supporting theories are riding in the passenger seat, the visual appearance is still driving the truck.
April’s show at MOAH was like walking into a music video. The artist has a unique series of artworks on each wall. They involve wild combinations of materials – from shag carpet to glittery clothespins holding up illustrated tapestries. There were more visual ideas palpitating in this one room than there are in a year’s worth of programming at many galleries and museums. Her claim to fame, historically, may be the making of memes into fine art objects, but the way she thickens up the paint to create the text is the neutral zone here; expressionism and minimal pop go to debate the future direction of art. If English is, a few centuries from now, a dead language, April Bey’s thick paint will keep its memory alive.
The text is but one part of her April’s complex work. Unapologetically figurative, the artist uses photographed images sometimes and other times she paints people. Her painted portraits accompanying the text – the physical manifestation of the words – reminded me of the best of Elizabeth Peyton, that turn of the century school of watercolor on steroids. And as with everything that is in the April Bey Universe, nontraditional “art” materials (shag carpeting as a frame is my favorite) that reflect lush glitz abound in all the work. These are sumptuous, sensual art objects.
Bey and Greenfield are artists who get enough press that the deep concepts they explore and express are well covered. I just wanted to put on record that they make great art objects as well, beautiful, durable, intriguing and original. Are they like a trip to the Antelope Valley poppy fields? I don’t know, we stayed so long in the museum that the winds picked up outside and when the winds pick up, the poppies close up. They are still there but the wide open poppy leaves shrivel like a weenie in an ice bath and are hidden and their leaves, their stems, it all just looks like the tall grass of regular nature. I guess it would have helped to know this fact about poppies, like having some understanding of the subject matter and concepts of art when viewing it, but when we try to see the poppies again it will be for their unique visual transcendence, much like the great art of our times.
–MG
All Photos via the author’s iPhone