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This season, MOCA features two distinctive exhibitions. Populence is centered on the 1960s Pop Art movement’s legacy, as well as the ubiquitous penchant for slick, sensuous surfaces among contemporary art makers (and buyers). Drawn to Cleveland is both a tribute to MOCA’s founding director, Marjorie Talalay, and a celebration of successful contemporary artists with connections to Cleveland. Both shows are compelling. However, they are more celebratory than critical of the contemporary art world’s quandaries and paradoxes.
According to the Populence exhibition catalog, rock video producer Sharon Oreck coined the term “populence,” defining it as “the confluence of accessibility and luxury, populism and opulence.” A well-written essay by curator David Pagel charts the trajectory of the Pop Art movement and aesthetic from Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha to Pop’s acolytes, such as Jeff Koons, Polly Apfelbaum and Kim Squaglia. While the essay and the exhibition fully address the luxury and opulence of the genre, one is less convinced that the work in Populence is truly accessible or “populist” in nature. This claim is undermined by the fact it is rare to find anything resembling the spirit of populism — the raising of “ordinary” people against powerful ruling elites — among art audiences and buyers in cities like Cleveland and Houston (where Populence originated), which are largely white, educated, and/or affluent. The title of Pagel’s catalog essay, “Not Your Father’s Pop,” speaks inadvertently to this shortcoming; it presumes an audience of people whose “fathers” fit a “high” art demographic, which indulged a base of cultured “high” art sellers, buyers, and, for the most part, viewers.
Pop artists were largely — albeit surreptitiously — critical of spectacle and mass production and consumption. Warhol’s studio was ironically named The Factory because his creative processes — silkscreening, photography and filmmaking — referenced popular culture and mass production, and because he produced images of banal objects like Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes. While his work was, and is, popular because people didn’t have to “get” the irony to like it, his art and his public persona were, in fact, a thinly veiled parody of capitalist culture.
What makes Warhol’s work historically relevant is its collusively critical tenor. Conversely, much of the work in Populence is devoid of analytical edginess. In this way, it is utterly reflective of American popular culture circa 2005: flashy eye candy without substantial content or depth. Ultimately, it is like gorging on rich chocolate cake: while eating it, you feel elatedly satiated, but when finished, you can’t help but feel guilty. Yet, just as fattening desserts have their merits, Populence is a show worth bingeing on.
Polly Apfelbaum’s Love Love Me Do, and Kim Squaglia’s paintings, beautifully installed in the rotunda gallery, are reason enough to make the trip. Apfelbaum’s piece is simple yet dramatic, consisting of an array of linear, floral forms cut out of napped velvet and arranged in a circle, echoing the shape of the gallery. The piece works more as a painting than an installation, yet it activates the space, making the floor “breathe” with color and line. Squaglia’s oil-and-resin painting, Turquine, is stunning. Fields of color meld lusciously, yet definitively; the colors — lavender, cool blue and green, teal, and shot of white — are sublime. The lustrous surface is utterly seductive, making it hard to resist touching it. Despite its shortcomings, Populence is seamlessly curated; works are well placed and installed in a manner that allows one to take in even the largest painting.
Drawn to Cleveland, curated by former Clevelanders Kenneth Dingwall and John L. Moore, is also a visually sound exhibition, showcasing work by artists who were educated, raised, and/or worked in the city at some point in their careers. The show includes several gouache paintings by New York City art star Dana Schutz, who earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2000. Schutz’s gawky figures appear especially stark in black and white, revealing what it is that makes her work so appealing and such a hot commodity among art dealers and collectors. Untitled depicts the hands and oversized head of an eerie young woman sketching an eye with her left hand. The subtly simple fields of gouache reveal Schutz’s magically intuitive handling of pigment.
No exhibition of successful Cleveland artists would be complete without the work of Robert Crumb. Crumb’s Untitled (New York Times Series) Douglas Hannant Dress with Manolo Blahnik Shoes depicts a powerful-looking woman cloaked in high-fashion signs of conspicuous consumption. Drawn in 2003, at the height of HBO’s Sex in the City-inspired designer shoe madness, the work patently addresses the conundrum of high fashion, as the woman in his illustration acknowledges that the shoes “make [her] calves look good,” but that one must “leave [their] body to wear [them].” Like his sometime colleague Harvey Pekar, Crumb incites social critique through everyday observation.
Drawn to Cleveland reveals a range of artistic talent and practice, but is framed by the implicit notion that these artists are successful because they left Cleveland. Including successful artists still living in Cleveland would have made this exhibition truly compelling. Instead, “success” is here narrowly defined in connection with larger art markets, especially New York, further fostering Cleveland’s ingrained inferiority complex. It also overlooks Cleveland artists like Don Harvey, Robert Banks and Hildur Ásgeirsdottir Jónsson, who enjoy international acclaim, as well as the benefits of living in an affordable, diverse, and culturally rich city. Including work by artists such as these would have been a better way to honor Marjorie Talalay, a former New Yorker who has lived in Cleveland since the 1960s.