.It’s Hip to Be Serious

Self-expression survives at John F. Kennedy University.

Anything goes in the promiscuous mosh pit of postmodern conceptual
art, so style sometimes reveals more about professional ambition and
career strategy than about personal experience imaginatively
transformed. The post-Warholian artist becomes the art, while the art,
decoupled from reality, becomes entertainment: art of the media, by the
media, and for the media. Artists’ ancient dream of life and art
intertwined, integrated, and accessible to all — Art Universal
and Triumphant — may indeed come to pass in the digital age, but
at the price of meaninglessness?

Perhaps not. The Bay Area has a longtime tradition of individualism
that has thrived far from the centers of power. The countercultural
alternative, in my opinion, remains a viable wellspring of humanism in
an increasingly abstract technological culture. Can conceptualism be
given a human face — infused with physicality, emotion, and
humanity? A current faculty show at the East Bay’s John F. Kennedy
University
, featuring filmmakers Robbyn Alexander, Thomas
Becker
, and Erica Chong Shuch, painters/draftsmen Michael
Grady
, Glenn Hirsch, and Mark Levy, and sculptors
Debra Koppman and Margaret Lindsay, along with lyrical
poems by John Fox, demonstrates that modernist individualism is
alive and well, evolving and available.

Alexander’s film, “Fear of Falling,” employs found 16mm film
depicting parachutists, dancers, and swimmers that she has painted with
dot-and-squiggle flak patterns; dreamlike music enhances the rapt
lyricism. Becker’s video “A Poem to be Read into a Flashlight…”
employs montage with digital effects to dramatize the poem that
inspired it, while Chong Shuch’s “To Hellen Bach” depicts a dance/duel
between two women that suggests Cocteau, Barney, and MTV — while
featuring Bach, among others, on its soundtrack. Grady’s acrylic/ink
paintings on paper depict what appear to be mountains glimpsed through
mist and fog, combining spiritualized Western abstraction and Eastern
landscape, while Hirsch’s mixed-media collage paintings derive from
Mesoamerican archaeology and the invented glyphs of painters like
Rothko and Gottlieb in the 1940s to depict moody, radiant fields of
energy populated by altars, steles, and boats covered with magical
inscriptions. Levy makes expressionist oil pastel portraits of
Verlaine, Beckett, et al. Koppman exhibits a trio of serpentine
sculptures made from disks of foam that have been painted with magic
symbols. Lindsay’s wall hangings stand midway between painting and
sculpture: composed of strips of painted canvas hanging from branches
like scrolls, they both contain pictorial space (albeit abstract and
nearly monochromatic) and assert themselves as constructions and
artifacts. Reception on Saturday, March 7 at 5 p.m. Exhibit runs
through March 18 at JFKU’s Arts & Consciousness Gallery
(2956 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley). JFKU.edu/news/exhibitions or
510-649-0499.

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