A contemporary alternative
The contemporary art world has always been a complicated beast. The drive for status, money, and fame coexist with an ever present, if often covert, search for meaning all the while riding the whimsical tide of art theory and artistic trend.
The art of our time might be infused with earnest expressions by artists like Josephine Taylor who attempt to capture the meaning of our complex existence in narrative drawings. Or it might come in the shape of artists who critique our contemporary, mass media culture like Brent Birnbaum. And then there’s the transcendent and timeless approach of the landscape, as executed by artists like Abby Kasonik. Or Shelby Lee Adam’s hauntingly evocative portraits of everyday people who embody the vital, vulnerable, and unbreakable human spirit.
All of these artists have found a home on Second Street’s pristine white walls in recent years. And many—like Sally Mann, Sam Gilliam, and Enrique Chagoya—have gone on to national and international fame.
The range of work that gets labeled contemporary art is astonishing. Consider Jeff Koons’ “Puppy.” While the original resides at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, a 40′ reproduction of the topiary terrier currently sits on the lawn of owner Peter Brant’s foundation in Greenwich and costs him an estimated $75,000 a year to maintain. The money pays for 10 men needed to maintain the stainless steel skeleton filled with 25 tons of soil, an internal irrigation system, and more than 70,000 flowering plants. Now compare that to contemporary artist Steve Keene, the Virginia native, who now lives and works in Brooklyn where his work is revered, met with skepticism, or openly disliked.
Keene participated in a group show at Second Street in 1989 and had a solo exhibition four years ago. Glorifying process over product, Keene uses an assembly line technique to make the same brush stroke on multiple pieces of plywood, effectively creating similar works of art quickly, which he then sells for anywhere between $3 and $30. If you live in Charlottesville, you’ve seen Keene’s cartoonish images in homes and businesses. He has sold about 250,000 paintings in the last 20 years, including close to 1,000 paintings during his last exhibition at Second Street.
“People either love it or hate it,” Keene said. “I haven’t been taken seriously because I mass produce my work. It’s a performance. I’m normally there painting for part of the show; people watch me work like I’m at a pizza parlor making pizza. And because I sell my work so cheap, it’s suspect.”
Keene’s mission to democratize art was consistent with Second Street’s, but he still felt uncomfortable inside.
“Looking back, Second Street has always been kind of a big deal in Charlottesville. It has always been the focal point of the best of what’s presented. It’s like the academy,” he said. “I show in galleries, but I’m essentially a street artist. My work didn’t really fit in with what they have been doing over the years. I’m outside on the sidewalk selling my paintings. I felt like I was a response.”
At the same time, Keene said being able to show at Second Street helped to legitimize him. There’s that tension again. The art and the market.
“It was in the art gallery and it didn’t mean it was garbage that you would find outside.”
The defining moment in Keene’s career occurred when someone from Time ridiculed his exhibition at Moore College in Philadelphia. A surreal moment, Keene said, that gets at the point of contemporary art. It can’t ever be one thing. It can’t be defined.
“In New York, you can go out and have dinner for two at an amazing restaurant and it’s $900. But, you can also go out and have cotton candy and it’s amazing. People don’t make fun of cotton candy,” Keene explained. “People think art is really good or doesn’t exist and that’s unfair. There are different levels of art and each level can be taken seriously for what it is.”
Helping artists has also always been a goal of Second Street’s. When the gallery shows the work of out-of-town artists like Keene, it pays to bring them to Charlottesville with a small honorarium, handles the shipping of their work, and celebrates them in person. At the same time, Second Street has helped provide local artists with access and inspiration from artists worldwide.
Clay Witt, who recently moved his studio into the gallery’s Dove space for the duration of his show “In Thunder, Lightning or in Rain,” summarized why it is important for Second Street to maintain its national visibility while nurturing artists nearer to home. Witt, a Virginia native, attended UVA, where he studied printmaking. His work, subtle yet grand, taps into primordial myths and fables where motifs and ideas emerge slowly from underneath the various layers of paint, evocative of Albert Pinkam Ryder. He spent years working in the Middle East before returning to Charlottesville in 2005, and he still remembers visiting Second Street as an undergraduate art student.
“What is most relevant for me is that this is the only place in town where you are getting international contemporary art,” he said. “It’s stuff you would see in New York, Paris, London. Without it, we wouldn’t have that exposure.”
For Taylor, creating that bridge means paying attention to an ever-changing landscape. An old-fashioned curator in the age of social media, he admits that he worries all the time about where things are headed. It’s his job to worry.
“The art world has become such a business now. I worry about what that does to people starting out,” he said. “Is it just about money and fame or is it about what you think and make? Social media is a great thing to promote shows, but there’s a downside. If you can see it, do you still need to go to a gallery?”
I’ll answer that for him. Seeing a work online or in a paper is not the same as viewing it in person. Take Witt’s work for example. Without seeing it in person, the viewer would never notice the intricate layering, the ethereal figures that emerge from behind gold leaf and from within lapis lazuli, or the reflections created by his use of layered media.
“It doesn’t take a lot of time to experience the space,” Witt said. “Second Street isn’t asking much from you, but the reward can be very great…It doesn’t require an investment.”
Investment? In art? In our rapidly commercializing world, investment comes in many forms. Money may be less valuable than time, for instance, or than the willingness to take chances. As a young person, who at 21 is only about half as old as the community gallery I’m writing about and who aspires to run a similar institution one day, I take inspiration from the idea that I’ll never know what I’m going to find when I walk into an exhibition at Second Street.
“We have to keep taking risks. And that’s kind of in our DNA and if we lose that, what’s the point?” Taylor asked.