All right, kids: time for my review of the 2005 Atlanta Biennial, including some notable lovelies, some nosewrinkling, some kudos to curator Helena Reckitt, and a brief inspection of recent Beasterizing tendencies in ATL arts criticism.

Last summer Kristin and I wondered whether the crowded, incoherent So Atlanta show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center was just an excuse for co-curators Helena Reckitt and Felicia Feaster (see: “Beaster,” elsewhere) to re-do an Atlanta Biennial to their taste. Now Atlanta audiences have a partial answer: no. Left to her own devices, Helena Reckitt has curated a Biennial marked by humor, restraint, and careful research into artists generally little-seen in Atlanta. There is none of the jostling of So Atlanta here, and the diversity of the Biennial manifests itself as a heterogenous whole, rather than as a frantic checklist. Harmonious variety is in itself a real accomplishment in light of recent art world scandal concerning under-representation of female artists in shows such as PS1’s Greater New York 2005. (For all you feminist score-keepers out there: 10 of 16 artists represented in the 2005 Atlanta Biennial are women. For all you non-score-keepers out there: spare me the reactionary bra-burner emails.)

I traveled the spaces of the Biennial with a sense of balance and discovery, conscious both of contiguous relationships between pieces, and of space granted to individual works on their own terms. Implied dialogues suggest themselves to me, as follows:

• The craft store, dollar bin, glue-gun aesthetic of Ben Fain’s marooned parade float and the obsessive re-stapling of Christopher McNulty’s shattered logs share a conversation about an absurd human desire to make the scattered whole.
• Barbara Campbell’s saturated paintings of suburban epiphanies sit with Sally Heller’s exuberant Two Trees like blissed-out neighbors giggling all night over glittering secrets of the everyday.
• I don’t care for the shallowness of Matthew Weddington’s whiny-boy self-stalking, but when it’s paired with Dona Lief’s Madonna-moths, there’s an interesting confluence of mutated celebrity culture.
• Likewise the insufferable free-sample consumers in Jennifer Drummond’s excellent animated video hover hungrily around Jane Timberlake’s work, drawn like bees to honey by her products’ call to “buy me wear me trash me.”

I suspect few of these free-associating connections exactly match Helena’s thought processes in assembling the show, but it’s clear she’s allowed intuitive as well as critical faculties to guide her.

There are notable exceptions to the sense of mutually beneficial proximity. Santiago de Paoli’s pieces don’t add much to either of their two locations, and are for me some of the weakest works in the show. The two pseudopaleolithic canvases in the large gallery with Heller’s installation certainly do not feel as though they will “one day contribute to the development of an international and possibly intergalactic form of language.” De Paoli’s drawings do carry a sense of hieroglyphic communication, but one suspects the rewards of decoding might be slim. In the side gallery between Stephanie Dotson’s gorgeous facing wall-drawings, de Paoli’s smaller drawings feel like only so much gnat-like twittering filling the air, and I find myself wishing the two big wall pieces had been granted the space to themselves.

Elsewhere, Christopher McNulty’s Breathing Lesson is a tedious exercise which somehow undermines possible didactic elements in Lester Julian Merriweather’s Blurt Advertisement. After McNulty’s numbing minutiae detailing the parts of the breath, I find myself scrutinizing the bits of tape used to put together Merriweather’s neighboring wall-sized image. How do fancy adhesive tricks further the artist’s aim of inspiring viewers to consider “the wake and/or pretense of multiple legal trails [sic] involving black males ‘allegedly’ victimizing others”? Why not just use a marker and get it over with? Might leave more time for better communication of outrage over the cases of Marcus Dixon (mentioned in Merriweather’s artist’s statement) and Janorlo Wilson (not mentioned, but recently convicted of child molestation and sentenced, at 17, to 10 years’ jail time for consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend.)

OK. Now time for notable loveliness. I’ve glossed over them above, but I want to come back to Stephanie Dotson’s Untitled Installations, and crown her 2005 Featherweight World Champion of Cool Multilayered Translucent Drawings. It’s a genre unto itself, yes? I’m talking about mixed-media drawings sampling from silkscreened vellum, incorporating cartoony sketches, and referencing indecipherable handwritten journals: whee, fluffy fun! Dotson’s work goes way beyond these conventions in terms of sheer scale, material invention, elegance of fluid line, and close juxtaposition of the sweet (huge layers of pastry frosting printed on vellum) and the scary (looming bears and other large predators). Many delights of discovery reward closer inspection: the printed foam mats, the looping calligraphy layered among fluffy clouds, and the insistence on the glories of drip. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen basically decorative work imbued with such insistent power.

Barbara Campbell’s work also stands out for me. As a mystic I love her affirmation of ecstatic experience in the midst of suburban existence, and as a painter I love her colors and the way her paint goes from matte, to shiny-wet in the same canvas. Her paintings’ human-body scale lends itself to close physical conversation. Standing next to Good News I feel included, almost fed by yellow afterglow. Ever-faithful to her taste for the sordid and superficially clever, the Beaster claims in her Creative Loafing review of the Biennial that Campbell’s paintings seem “more about flashy effect.” Pah, I say! These are the real thing, like the green goat Chagall painting in Moscow offering me a door into the timeless, through time.

I promise I’m almost done. Just a couple more thoughts. The first is about the danger of critics oversimplifying their responses to art. Here at the Rat, we have all the space we want, we don’t depend on anyone for a paycheck, and we’re still tempted to do it. At CL, the AJC, and Access Atlanta, there’s much less space and time, and the danger of one-liner reviews runs rife. (For a striking example of the effects of editorial pressures, compare senior Atlanta critic Jerry Cullum’s quickies for Access Atlanta with his complex article on religious symbolism in the most recent Art Papers.) One common form of bad review is the List, in which the reviewer provides a handy roster of included works, without any analysis. A second, somehow more pernicious form, is the Biased Blurb. In this case, the critic comes up with a super-duper premise such as: Older Artists Are Smarter than Younger Artists, or Atlanta Artists Are Deeper than Artists from Elsewhere in the South, and runs with it, using it as a single string to harp on. How can either of these approaches possibly be of benefit to art viewers, artists, curators, or other critics? Recently Robert Cheatham, Chief Readings Sleuth at ARTNEWS, has made several postings of articles on the role of criticism in contemporary art practice. I’ve realized writing about art is a way of really having to look at art, and think about both what is there, and what could be there, what I understand, and what I need to work harder to try to understand. Knowing I will write about a show makes me pay better attention as a viewer. Someday knowing someone will write in depth about my work will help me pay better attention as an artist.

Helena, I will miss you! Thanks for all your help with my Monster Job Quest in the past year, and for a wonderful Biennial. Good luck in Toronto & all the best in your new life.

23 May 2005