This text is by Clara DeGalan in her capacity and does not, necessarily, reflect the views of different infinite mile contributors, infinite mile co-founders, the author's employer and/or other author affiliations.
| The curtain rises on “Staging Ground: Alexander Buzzalini, Jon P. Geiger & Nick Mayer” | ||||||||||||
Clara DeGalan |
||||||||||||
“Staging Ground,” a thoroughly masculine show featuring three young artists, opened at Butter Projects Friday, May 1. From its core outward, the show engages with the art world's (and popular culture's) recent interest in the changing face of masculinity in contemporary culture. The title riffs on historically masculine environments and activities—preparations for large-scale projects, rituals, theatre and charged space. Such “grounds” have, until now, been largely controlled by men, a social/professional culture that is rapidly changing. This fact loops back on our current interest in masculinity—the signs by which we've always recognized it are growing increasingly scrambled, ambivalent. The three artists in the exhibition, Alexander Buzzalini, Jon P. Geiger, and Nick Mayer, approach their concept with a searching ambivalence and, in Buzzalini's case particularly, a wry sense of humor that saves his heavy subject matter—icons of Twentieth Century Americana and The Old West—from sliding into nostalgia or sentimentality. In fact, there is no whiff of nostalgia or sentimentality in this show, despite the fact that the gallery space is arranged like a stage on which a grand story is about to be enacted. Geiger's smartly scaled sculptures—including a human-sized abstraction which, as Mayer pointed out to me, resembles a stretched out bull's-eye, and a provisional, diorama-esque landscape model so small and low to the ground one must bend down to examine it—stand among the milling reception attendees like stage sets. The two-dimensional works, notably Mayer's massive mixed media drawings on loose, draped bolts of canvas, are like hastily placed backdrops.
If the work is combining to enact some ritual or spectacle, it's a last-ditch endeavor on the scale of a comedic film plot circa 1987. The closest this show cleaves to a sense of nostalgia for traditional manhood is in this sense of haste that enlivens all the artists works—a strong need to deliver content on whatever material comes in handy. In a show laden with examined symbols, the kernel image is the bull's-eye. Expressed more abstractly in Mayer's piece “Wheel Love” and Geiger's aforementioned “Cardinal,” it's brought to the fore in Buzzalini's prominently placed set of mixed media drawings of bull's-eyes, “Bull's-eye Studies,” which echoes Jasper John's flag works. The naïve, juicy palette and intentionally sloppy execution of the drawings bring the odd, ungrounding effect of John's paintings into a lighter, more ironic twenty-first century dialog.
The revelation that these young men can deal so loosely and directly with the same subjects in which their fathers were too deeply embedded to even perceive: the injustices, paradoxes, and the ultimate absurdity of Western manhood at the dawn of the new Millennium helps this exhibition transcend the simplicity of trendiness and visual pleasure and makes one feel there is important knowledge about the trajectory of gender identity in contemporary culture percolating just behind the curtain, among the plaintive bull's-eyes.
|
 |
