Poetic Justice at the Harwood Pops the Balloon

The rise of the bourgeois in Europe produced a malaise of social conventions that both stimulated an audience for art and then suppressed expression as social conventions betrayed the bestial energy that threatened comfortable views of life. That which was new became old, staid, and conventional. Hence, each new generation converted energy into the art that tweaked turned up noses. Today’s “art world” is largely driven by the commodification, pro and anti-: some collectors and patrons retreat to the safer confines of yesterday while others see the avant-garde as a way to call attention to how “hip” the ego is. See the grotesque synthesis of capital and art featuring Jeff Koons in the latest issue of the NYRB.

But it’s JUXTAPOZ, the Harwood media sponsor that captures the idiosyncratic artists of today, artists who continue creating objects in their private shops, back rooms, or outside in the outhouses of Northern New Mexico. Resistance and rebellion have historically and presently transformed the way viewers look at or think about or experience art. Race and class, once suppressed mainstays of the museum and art world culture, have burst their chains and never more so than now, however late in the game, at the Harwood Museum of Art. It took Bob Ellis (RIP) to turn a quiet library into a celebratory of creative endeavor. If he’s not a little nervous, he’s winking at Jina Brenneman today.

If the fantastic Gus Foster Collection, recently closed, focused on the last forty years of the “third wave,” the art and artisans of execution and imagination in Taos, then “Orale” signals the fourth wave. Orale, opening this week, displays unconcealed expressions of energy, whether stimulated by Freudian work and the libido, or psychic obsessive-compulsive disorders bordering on autism and a“fascination with imagination” the likes of which—you can’t imagine. This unhinged culture of Dionysian expression signals the arrival of Las Marginalistas and the Los Urbanistos of the Southwest and West at Lucy’s shop on Ledoux St.

Influenced by girlie mags and calendars in auto shops, comic strips and strippers, or the low-riders of Chicanismo culture, the stuff of tattoos and complex designs, juxtaposed to amalgamated plastique next to posters from the San Francisco acid era, Orale reminds viewers of how a generation began by loosening bra straps and dropping trousers just to say, hey look there, look here, look everywhere.

And they looked and found gold in abandoned adobe gas stations and deserted desert cantinas, where as Ramon Hernandez used to sing, “You can be a louse to your spouse in Taos, New Mexico. (I put that in for Ruthie Moya, the world’s greatest cocktail waitress of La Cocina yore, who just turned 80, and whose grandson is in Orale. Orale Ruthie!)

If I were teaching art to school kids I would hire a bus and take them down to the Harwood exhibit, introduce all the children left behind by corporate America to the white-haired and bald-headed artists, who never grew up but kept knocking out pop art since they were kids in the sixties. Too, Orale features a generation of teeners and twenty-somethings, neatly “Juxtapozd,” the neophytes next to the masters of disaster.

Maybe you were always afraid the sacred would be reborn as the profane, and, sure it’s happened, even as appearances have been saved and expressed. We know how the LA guys like Cooper and Davis investigated body-shop fiberglass and resin, surfboard construction and the sandpaper beaches in the sunshine of Pacific Time. Now we see the results of the liberated libido giving the finger to the establishment and uttering an “art be damned attitude” while surrendering to the Gestalt of contemporary expression.

And so the poetry of imagination justifies itself in this expression of energy caught in pen and ink, pencil and graphite, slick colors and sensual skin, the visceral response to popular movies, rock ‘n roll, and the dynamic cross-cultural subversion of class and race in celebration of freedom. The bold and grotesque canvases of Conrad Cooper seem as at home as Douglas Johnson refined figures not far from El Moises’s provocative imagery depicting the new saints.

Call Orale outsider, outlaw, flawed and flayed but you won’t call it boring. Ennui has been banished, La Malaise exiled, and everyone’s invited to the show.

Editor’s Note: I first read that curator Jina Brenneman was leaving the Harwood after this, her last show, in Juxtapoz magazine and, I hasten to add, I know nothing about the local “politics of art.”

But we shall all miss Jina because she delved deeply during her six years into the art, artists, and La Gente of the Taos community. While introducing Harwood Museum of Art visitors to the historic moderns and contemporary post-moderns, she was a “Woman for All Seasons” and all cultures. She rehabilitated the forgotten moderns and illustrated the contributions of the marginalized or indigenous contributors who round out the Taos art community.

Jina filled in the historic gaps: the exhibition of Burt Harwood’s photos and paintings, Oli Sihvonen’s rarely seen work, while recognizing the powerful contribution of collectors and donors in the local art world, like the Healys, or focused on the muse of Black Mountain College, gallerist Rena Rosequist. Sure she didn’t forget the major figures—Agnes Martin, Larry Bell, and Ken Price or Taos moderns like John DuPuy, Cliff and Barbara Harmon.

Just as Agnes has her room and Patricino Barela his “Death Cart,” so Jina depicted on her wall work by the publicity shy Peter Parks and eccentric Marsha Oliver. She featured a reluctant ceramicist, Hank Saxe, and reminded us that R.C. Gorman was more than a publicist.

I loved seeing the long-locked away Taos Municipal Schools Collection. Then there was all the new stuff in New Mexorado, Curiosity: From the Faraway Nearby, and the kitsch and camp in Suspension of Disbelief.

During the last decade or so interest in the Taos art scene has declined but Jina and her colleagues have preserved a shrine for the faithful at the reinvigorated Harwood Museum of Art on Ledoux St. The current show, Orale, is a fine example of synthesizing and recognizing the reciprocal influence of pop, art, and life.

Orale Jina, Orale, Jita.