Near & Far – Leaving the Art World for Frieze

IN DECEMBER I went to the Walmart Museum. In October to Thomas Cole’s home. Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, and Walmart, well you know what they do. But the founder’s daughter Alice Walton also has a museum in a rural-ish area. Living in the sticks, I'm interested in how art plays outside the centers of the art world. Living in the stomping grounds of the Hudson River School I’m curious about the legacy of that landscape tradition. This is a shorter version of a chapter in the book I’m working on Growing Up Modern.

The Frieze essay starts here:

A gaggle of school kids leads me through a tunnel of crocheted afghan blankets. The textiles’ clashing patterns transform the entrance to the exhibition ‘State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now’, at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas, into a sea of mandalas and psychedelic gods’ eyes. The children trail their teacher who, with her lank hair and camo fleece, looks like an extra from Winter’s Bone (2010), filmed not far from here in the Ozarks. She marches on; the kids stop. They cry: ‘That’s cool!’ and ‘Awesome!’ A boy points at the diamonds overhead. Tentacles lap around the doorways and, yes, this is awesome. I love Jeila Gueramian’s installation as much for the kids’ responses as for the work itself. The title, It’s You (2014), seems strikingly apt. In it, I see Mike Kelley’s ghost – suburbs, dark pasts, family histories – while the kids have their own takes, perhaps of grandmothers and knitted throws or blanket forts. The experience shifts how I see art and place, place and audience, context and curating.

You can read more here in the May issue, which was about “Place” to coincide with the opening of the Venice Biennale. Or, download the PDF here.