Like Sugar at Tang Teaching Museum

Installation shot of Like Sugar at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum

photograph by Arthur Evans

The exhibition Like Sugar, on view through June 23 at Skidmore College's Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, is an unusually thought-provoking show that, like its namesake, still somehow comes off seeming insubstantial.

Organized by the Tang's Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman and Skidmore English professor Sarah Goodwin, with input from three other Skidmore faculty members, Like Sugar may suffer from the too-many-cooks syndrome, as it attempts many diverse things. Is it about art? Of course. Food? Check. History? Global economics? Advertising? Health? All of the above.

Julia Jacquette, Two Tiered Cookie Platter, 1997
enamel on wood panel

As an art exhibition, Like Sugar is a bit sparse for my taste, but it features some very good work. Unfortunately, several of the best artists in the show are represented by only one piece each, which can be frustrating. On the plus side, while the show has very much to say, it doesn't overwhelm the viewer with didactic panels or unbearable preachiness - it manages to maintain a light playful tone despite the deadly seriousness of its content.

I think the show makes plain just how conflicted we are as a society - and individually - about sugar. It's killing us, but we love it. Historically, the sugar trade drove the creation and growth of the horror of the slave trade. This is delved into through visceral works by Kara Walker and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and alluded to in historical and contemporary documentary photographs also in the exhibition. Even honey bees get some of the blame - or credit - from both the scientific perspective and the creative one, as a video piece in the show records an experiment demonstrating their preference for sugar, and three fascinating sculptures in the show are a collaboration between a human artist, Garnett Puett, and comb-making bee colonies.

Advertisement by Sugar Information Inc.

Among the most shocking materials in Like Sugar are the many mid-twentieth-century magazine ads collected and presented in a grand collage and also individually, where we can see the audacity of Madison Avenue's efforts to sell a nutrition-free, highly caloric product to an unsuspecting and exuberant post-war consumer. As a child of the '60s, I was the direct recipient of the concepts these ads promoted, and it particularly struck me that the majority of the artists in this show were too - born between 1959 and 1965, a rather narrow demographic band to see in a large group show.

Clearly, we were all affected, and the impacts are still seen in the obesity and diabetes epidemics that plague the United States today. These diseases are explored in a display of public service graphics that attempt to scare people straight off the sugar track, and in photographs and paintings that simultaneously seduce and disgust.

Emily Eveleth, Big Pink, 2016, oil on canvas

One of the strongest pieces in the show, which is used prominently in publicity for it, is a six-and-a-half-foot painting by Emily Eveleth entitled Big Pink, which employs scale, gorgeous painterly flourishes, pastry worship, and frankly pornographic effects to drive home several points at once. Like the ad pictured above, which advises eating cookies rather than a healthy lunch as a weight-loss strategy, it's creepy - and irresistible.

All in all, Like Sugar may be overly ambitious, but it got that way for important reasons. More art exhibitions should make such efforts, even if falling short is almost inevitable.

And, while you're in the neighborhood, check out a first-rate three-person show at the Saratoga Arts Center. Passing Time, on view through June 15, features paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Paul Chapman, Harry Wirtz, and Rebecca Flis (respectively). In a happy coincidence, some of Flis's ingenious cast works are made of - you guessed it - sugar. I promise you will like.

Rebecca Flis Ironscapes, cast iron, crushed red stone, steel perimeter

The Cosmic Perspective

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Karen Ciancetta share a photo-op

Do you think a two-hour lecture on physics would be a dreary exercise in relativity (as in how a short time can stretch to infinity)? If so, then you have never seen Neil deGrasse Tyson in action.

A full house at Proctors sat enthralled on Monday night as two hours flew by at warp speed, with TV's Cosmos star Tyson guiding us on a rollicking trip through centuries of scientific, cultural, and social ideas, illustrated with slides that communicated clearly and entertained fully.

Though he claims to prefer time in the lab, Tyson is a natural and enthusiastic showman who knows how to work a big crowd as if they were guests in his living room. Rarely have I experienced such a sense of intimacy among so many people. This is the Tyson charm - he may be a genius astrophysicist who regularly schmoozes with presidents and billionaires, but somehow from the stage he makes you feel like he's also happy to hang out with simple ol' limited you.

Meanwhile, he's teaching you lessons that could be some of the most important ones you will ever learn.

The theme of The Cosmic Perspective is to share with the general public the extra-proportional mindset that astrophysicists live with every day - as they are accustomed to seeing everything from a big-picture point of view: from biology and space travel to arithmetic, economics and war.

Tyson presents each topic in a humorous, yet well documented style, referring to his PowerPoint slides as needed, but riffing like the best professor you ever had crossed with a seasoned stand-up comic. Along the way, you are asked to question whether space exploration is a good investment (clearly, he thinks so), how the periodic table can be read as a history of different nations' passion for science, and why Americans tend to be so afraid of math that our elevators never display negative numbers for the floors below ground level.

Along the way, you may learn something about evolution (for example, we humans are more closely related to mushrooms than mushrooms are to green plants) about astronomy (the tiniest slice of a clear picture of the universe from Hubble will include countless billions of entire distant  galaxies) or about chemistry (the "noble" elements are called that because they don't bond - i.e. associate - with other elements).

And, ultimately, you will see both how utterly inconsequential our own actions are and how easy it can be to feel empowered to try to have a positive impact on our little world.

Tyson, like all scientists, owes a debt to those who came before him, and he honored many of those lights during his talk - but none so much as his direct predecessor, Carl Sagan, who he quoted at length in his conclusion, citing Sagan's elegiac book Pale Blue Dot, which really puts things on Earth into proper perspective. The book was inspired by a picture taken in 1990 by the Voyager spacecraft as it passed beyond Saturn. Tyson shared a reprise photograph of Earth, taken in 2013 by Cassini - which, in timely fashion, has begun sending back new close-up pictures of Saturn and its rings just this week, on its way toward total immolation in that planet's atmosphere.

The evening ended with a lively Q&A, leading Tyson to offer advice to one questioner (and the rest of us) on how to "talk to idiots": He advised empathy, patience, and the willingness to offer information. Tyson also emphasized the value of supporting STEM education as our path to a future as a world-leading nation - a status that he amply and viscerally demonstrated the US is rapidly losing. He also pointed out that our educational system must find ways to stimulate students' imaginations, rather than teaching them how to pass tests.

My one criticism of these conclusions is that, to stimulate the imagination, STEM must become STEAM - that's for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math. I wish Tyson had publicly acknowledged the importance of the arts in developing good, young minds into critically thinking adults.

Finally, as you can see above, some people with special tickets, including my wife, Karen, were able to meet their idol backstage. While waiting, I had the good fortune of running into my friend Steve Tyson, a painter and professor of art at Schenectady County Community College. He would also be going backstage - to visit with his kid brother, the scientist. I like to think Steve might have taken the opportunity then to say a little something to Neil about the importance of that A in steam.

Cassini took this picture from behind Saturn, showing the "pale blue dot" of Earth 

Breathing Lights

A Breathing Lights house in Schenectady

photo by Cindy Schultz, stolen from the Times Union

On  a recent Saturday night I took a truncated bus tour of a few of the Breathing Lights houses in Albany, offered as part of Historic Albany Foundation's annual Built fundraiser. It was good to finally get out and see some of the illuminated vacant houses, and I plan to go again soon - on foot for the real experience - and hopefully in all three participating cities (adding Schenectady and Troy).

In case you have been living under a rock, Breathing Lights is the local winner of a $1 million grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies, part of its national "Public Art Challenge," and comprises a collaboration among three city governments, several nonprofits, and numerous neighborhood organizations. It is the brainchild of UAlbany art professor Adam Frelin, in partnership with architect Barbara Nelson, and consists of a very elegant, broadly distributed installation of glowing panels in the windows of more than 200 vacant houses, which represent less than 10% of these three cities' unoccupied housing stock.

photo: hyers+mebane

The installation is (obviously) very ambitious, but it is also simple, which I can't help but like. And it passes the "Is it art?" test quite easily, as the work transforms the subject matter and gives viewers a new experience of something old. All the better that this new experience comes directly out of one's own presumably familiar local raw material. (Those who know my personal photography of some of these same neighborhoods will understand this approach is not unlike my own as an artist.)

But Breathing Lights is also so much more than an art installation. It seeks to help correct the widespread social and economic problems of vacant and deteriorating inner-city housing in our region, by raising awareness as well as energizing the grass roots of these communities. And this is where I start to get a little uncomfortable with it.

So, I'll ask a few more questions:

1. Is it the job of art to make our world a better place?
2. Should art be a community organizing activity?
3. What would be the best use of $1 million for art in the Capital Region?

1. My answers to these questions are not off the cuff - when I was a young artist growing up in the turbulent '60s and '70s, I wished that art could make the world a better place. I thought it could open people up, make them more sensitive to their surroundings, maybe raise their conscious levels and even change their harmful behaviors.

from Breathing Lights website

But, as time went on, I recognized that big business and politics, and education and religion were the forces that made things go, and that art in American society was an afterthought, a decoration, an entertainment. Yes, art can make you think, it can make you feel, it can make you understand. But I decided it can't change the world, and neither should it try to.

Instead, it is the job of art to be the best it can - as art - to reach the viewer and then to let the rest of the process go as it may.

2. When I see artists out there working with kids and community members, I get thinking about time and money. Many artists and arts organizations are struggling financially, and they often turn to the relatively abundant cash cow that is education for financial relief, and to build an audience.

So a dance company, for example, does a lot of reasonably well-paid school visits throughout the year, designed to enlighten the kids as to the wonders of dance and its creative potential. Or an arts center offers classes in pottery and jewelry making and drawing and creative writing, thereby bringing in some cash, and some interested bodies, as well as providing a little income to the artists who teach those classes.

from Breathing Lights website

And, truth be told, I've done a fair amount of that stuff, myself. But it did nothing for me as a creative artist, and it did nothing at the time for my real work, either (which would be - you got it, making art). This is the sort of thing that nonprofits call "mission creep": You set out to cure cancer but, along the way, in order to raise money, you find yourself spending all your time organizing road races.

Arts in education should be a normal part of the curriculum. But, instead, it has become the mission creep of everyday artists and arts organizations. I say get back to your core mission and leave the community organizing to social workers and political activists.

3. If I had to decide what to do with $1 million for art in the Capital Region, I would want it to have the most impact. And I think that would be best suited to a myriad of projects, rather than one ambitious project.

What about $50,000 each for 20 artists? Or $10,000 each for 100 artists? Do you think that the 100 best Capital Region art projects that could be done (or at least carried significantly forward) by a $10,000 grant would potentially have more impact and broader appeal and be more lasting than one (admittedly very nicely done) project that is essentially about real estate?

You already know what I think.

Find out more about Breathing Lights here. The lights are on from 6 pm to 10 pm nightly, through the end of November.

From Breathing Lights website

Masterworks at AIHA

This 1817 map of the proposed Erie Canal is part of Masterworks: Paper

With trips to all the summer shows winding down, I'd like to recommend a really worthy exhibition closer to home. Actually, this is a pair of exhibitions with the unifying theme of a deep exploration of the collections of the now-225-year-old Albany Institute of History & Art, entitled Masterworks: 225 Years of Collecting and Masterworks: Paper.

Thomas Cole - Button Wood Tree, ink over pencil 1823

These shows were mounted during the past year to celebrate the Institute's anniversary and its own history, with the larger, more inclusive exhibition featuring a thoughtfully constructed timeline of the organization, punctuated with compelling artifacts and objects such as grandfather clocks, a book of wool samples, paintings from three centuries, marvels in glass and silver, a fire bucket, travel posters, etc.

The richness of the AIHA's holdings is well displayed here, and would be difficult to exaggerate. Though I am biased toward contemporary art, I can enjoy a sumptuously festooned French-style bed as much as the next guy, along with almost absurdly decorative cast-iron stoves, Americana in the form of elaborately incised powder horns, ceramics from near and far, and plenty of earlier fine art.

Tea Caddy with paper filigree 1804

The Paper show has had a shorter duration, due to the fragility of its contents, but the restriction to one material still allows for so much diversity that its designers created no fewer than 16 distinct sections for it, with titles such as Landscape on Paper, Weather on Paper, Certified on Paper, and so on. Though this organizing principle has merit, I have to say it didn't really work - in fact, the Paper show is so crowded that navigating through it is a confusing chore - but it is so stuffed with marvels that it's worth every effort.

Among my favorites (shown at left) is an architectural rendering of Albany's "first skyscraper," an elegant bank building on State Street that still stands (though in rough shape), where it is now overshadowed by the much taller, nearly new building next door that I happen to work in. There is also a great range of first-rate works of art in the show, including nearly every paper-based medium - even painstaking cut constructions, along with every sort of print, watercolors, photographs, and drawings by some major names: Charles Burchfield, Jacob Lawrence, Ellsworth Kelly, and contemporary artists Harold Lohner and Phyllis Galembo.

Alice Morgan Wright
The Fist, painted plaster 1921

Meanwhile, back at the 225 Years of Collecting show, there are many, many more great artists, most significantly the heart and soul of this collection - its Hudson River School paintings - but also a spate of other excellent works representing social realism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop, even post-Modern work.

If you're going, you need to hurry, as Masterworks: 225 Years of Collecting ends on Sept 4. For Masterworks: Paper. there's a bit of breathing room - it continues through Oct. 16. And there's a bargain to be  had: Through the end of 2016, Saturday admission to the AIHA is just $2.25. Go and discover - or remind yourself of - the treasure in our midst.

A new direction for Get Visual

When Get Visual began in late 2008, I purposely included the words "and beyond" in the tagline, so its mission would not be unnecessarily restricted - I wanted to retain for myself the possibility of writing outside the lines of Capital Region visual arts.

Until now, I have used that freedom sparingly - most often to address something in the arts realm beyond our regional geography or, even more rarely, to venture into a topic area not focused on art at all. This is about to change. The reason? I'm questioning the worth of art criticism in a time of economic, political, and social changes so vast (and fast) that it is simply impossible to keep track of it all, much less keep up.

So, in addition to the usual art criticism, I will use the pages of GV to explore my voice as a social critic. There are a lot of things on my mind - no doubt they are on your minds, too. Let's talk about them.

Here's some of what to look for in this space in the near future:

Gripes, complaints - and questions

We're living in a culture of complaint. Is there any way to stop the growing tendency of entitled young Americans to try to whine their way to the top? (Example - today's Academy Awards boycott effort by frustrated black actors and their supporters.)

Enough screen time already!

This is my dilemma (definition: a difficult or persistent problem). How to address the issue of too many eyes and brains spending too much time staring at little screens without using the little screens as a way to reach those eyes and brains?

Why can't we all just get along?

A  lot of smart, talented, well-meaning people (including myself) put a huge amount of effort into creating the current version of the Honest Weight Food Co-op, a beautiful grocery store and community pillar that employs more than 200 people and has over 12,000 members - yet, a few months ago, the Co-op was subjected to a hostile takeover of its board by an insurgent group representing a few hundred voting members. This group now behaves like the Soviet Politburo. WTF?

You call that disenfranchised?

In Albany recently there was a second vote on whether to approve bond funding for improvements to the high school. It passed, narrowly, amid some confusion at the polls - apparently, the organizers of the vote underestimated the turnout and were caught shorthanded on ballots, a situation that was eventually corrected, but not before a bunch of impatient brats decided they were being purposely "disenfranchised" of their right to vote. Inconvenienced, yes, but to think there was actually a conspiracy to manipulate the outcome of the referendum? Puh-leeeze! Yet, Albany County Comptroller Mike Connors won't let it go.

Photo Regional comes full circle

The 38th Annual Photography Regional reminds me a lot of the first ones. Are we making any progress? Does it matter? Review to come.

Cut to the video

OK, so it appears some people started a fight on a CDTA bus, then decided to report it as a racial assault on themselves, and eventually ended up getting charged with assault and false reporting to police. So many ways stupid - but the part I can't wrap my head around is how in 2016 did three collegiate 20-year-olds not know this was all being captured on video?