ArtPapers
Sept/Oct 2007

Talent Show: Atlanta Biennial Review
Words: Phil Oppenheim

Every biennial nowadays must be a meta-biennial. Curators just wouldn’t be worth their CV’s unless their shows served as referenda on, critiques of , or brickbats burled at the genre’s big issues. Biennials raise questions central to curatorial practice: how can institutions champion localism without risking provincialism? How transparent or opaque is the mediation of individual works? Should curators be invisible mediators or should they stand as artists in their own right?
Stuart Horodner, curator of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, is no exception: his meta-approach to the Atlanta Biennial was to perform an extreme makeover, borrowing the tropes of competitive television reality programs to transform a conventional regional survey into Talent Show (June 8 - August 11, 2007).

Referencing Sol Lewitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” Horodner detailed his own thesis on Talent Show, illuminating the “curatorial process of selecting works . . . (questioning) how talent operates, where it resides, who designates it.” Unfortunately, though, the intriguing idea never quite sang.
Horodner mimicked American Idol and its ilk by inviting established artists, emerging newcomers, and amateur nonartists to “compete” against one another. The gesture suggests populist democracy - after all, audiences determine which contestants win the trophy or get the hook. It can also be interpreted as an abdication of curatorial authority. Here, the amateur work, most of which would be at home among Jim Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings albeit with less weirdo charm, rests uneasily among the more skilled works. Instead of blurring the distinction between the two camps, Horodner’s juxtaposition serves to marginalize the nonartists - casting them as the equivalent of reality show losers like William Hung, Sanjaya Malakar, and The Unknown Comic. Talent shows, especially on television, also flatten idiosyncrasy to create homogenous mediocrity - in the way that Idol, for instance, has reduced contemporary singing to mere melisma. If the goal of the Contemporary’s show is to critique or spoof such a dynamic, its parody is too subtle - at least for me.

Ultimately, the gimmick overwhelms any potential for cumulative effect, a cohesive through-line, or virtually any dialogue between or among the works. As LeWitt himself observed though, “it is difficult to bungle a good idea,” and several of Horodner’s better selections prove admirably resilient, keeping the exhibition afloat.

Charles Huntley Nelson’s installation Invisible Man 2.0, 2006-2007, successfully culminates the Afrofutur-istic themes of his already-impressive body of work. On one long wall of a rectangular room, Nelson projects a mash-up of Ralph Ellison’s novel, James Whale’s 1933 horror classic, and autobiography, set to an illbient soundscape. On the facing wall hang watercolor renderings of framegrabs from densely textured video. Distilling the vocabularies of science-fiction, cybernetics, and music video and the iconography of classic Hollywood through the artistic processes of drawing and montage, Nelson’s sophisticated work looks both backwards and forwards peeling off the bandages of a received past to reveal the promise of the individual beneath.

Jiha Moon’s two paintings mesh linear precision with amorphous fussiness to create abstract landscapes grounded in corporeal reality. Knotty tree roots counter menacing, ethereal clouds: her ink-and-acrylic works on paper over canvas combine contemporary and traditional Asian motifs, with superflat cartoonishness complementing organic indeterminacy. Her exquisite, imaginary worlds drift around the borders of Hanji paper, flowing from the concrete world of the frame into the intangible recesses of the unconscious.

Suellen Parker’s digitally doctored prints suggest Duane Hanson’s characters vacationing in Charlie White’s photographs. Parker sculpts figures out of non-drying Plasticine, and photoshops them into tableaux pieced together from a variety of found and original images. The characters’ moist, inchoate clay skin rebels against their hyperrealistic eyes and lips, which Parker transplants from real photos of actual body parts. Unlike Mary Shelley’s cobbled-together monster, though, Parker’s creatures don’t tear down castles. instead, they fit comfortably - if creepily - into the routines of average life, catching rays in a backyard, stopping for a refreshing smoke, or crunching sit-ups on an exercise ball, and becoming, well, us.

Fahamu Pecou continues his witty self-mythologizing, simultaneously assaulting and embracing the universes of hip-hop and art-world celebrity. In the painting Genuine Adrenaline, 2007, his blinged-out, stogie-smoking persona vogues on the faked cover of Look magazine. Although the Duchampian reference is appreciated, Pecou’s other prnaked magazine covers - maybe even ART PAPERS? - might have made a worthy addition to his corner of the gallery. A video mockumentary, Instant Celebrity, Just Add Water, 2007, accompanies the painting, dimensionalizing Pecou’s Diddy-does-Warhol character by showing him strutting the streets, schmoozing the glitterati, and otherwise capturing “the birth of a star.” Insinuating that the artist is the son of Marla Gibbs, a rumor-mongering member of Pecou’s entourage provides the heartiest laugh of the entire show. For the crap-culturally illiterate, the inside joke is the reference to Lenny Kravitz, the son of Roxie Roker, a star of The Jeffersons. Within or without the context of Talent Show, Pecou proved that he is, as he prefers to brand himself, The Shit.