By Beth E. Wilson

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve just gotten too dependent on being comfortable. Chain stores like Wal-Mart and fast-food eateries like McDonald’s specialize in flattening out the world, systematically reducing the range of experience to a very narrow—and significantly impoverished—set of standards. Operating outside the realm of the big-box prepackaged world places some real demands on us, however. You may need to find an out-of-the-way restaurant instead of heading for the drive-through. You’ll have to sharpen your eye for clothing in order to make your own judgments on the aesthetics of style and fashion. Above all, you’ll need to gird yourself to develop your own, possibly quite strong, opinions on the world and your own place in it.

As much as we like to enshrine our right to absolute individuality, however, in most cases it revolves around a series of pre-fab choices—Coke or Pepsi? Ford or Toyota? Football or baseball?

None of these identifiers fundamentally calls into question the system that generates the choices. What about water quality? Or the absence of an efficient mass transit system? Or the commercialization of sport as spectacle?

You would think that art might provide a respite from this institutionalized, consumerist conformity. Well it does—and it doesn’t. As Walter Benjamin presciently outlined in his frequently quoted 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the endless repetition of mass media images (photography, film) creates a world in which things are considered important because we’re bombarded by them, as opposed to the traditional “cult value” of art, which depends on the inimitable charge of the individual object’s physical “aura,” which makes unique, non-reproducible things like paintings valuable.

The power of this shift toward the power of the mass media is undeniable, and ultimately unavoidable. The art world has responded by attempting to recuperate mass culture as original art (Pop Art), or by annexing the production line in order to maximize its economic return while minimizing the artist’s direct labor (Thomas Kinkade). In both these cases, the results have successfully found significant (if quite different) audiences, largely due to the familiarity of the images involved—there’s not much surprise in seeing images of either Campbell’s Soup cans or quaint seaside villages, but rather a reassuring continuity with the appreciative viewer’s own comfort zone.

Paradoxically, even in the most elite circles of contemporary art, where the envelope of the shocking and the new is pushed the hardest, this concept of the comfort zone can kick in, but at an entirely different level. Nowadays, art stars are rewarded with a brand-name status, and are often quickly ensconced by the art market as producers of valuable commodities, usually with an identifiable shtick.

The paradox lies in the fact that the vast majority of non-artworld people won’t recognize these “big names,” and in many cases find the resistance (and often downright obnoxiousness) of much contemporary art off-putting enough to avoid the experience entirely, even as artworld insiders can’t seem to get enough of them.

But you can’t reject everything out of hand, just as you shouldn’t unblinkingly accept whatever is presented to you as “art.” Charting something of a middle path, I recommend that you visit two quite different exhibitions at either end of the Hudson Valley this month, each with the potential to reveal a new and unexpected aesthetic experience.

At Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson this month, an exhibition of three painters may hold some surprises, especially for those who normally aren’t drawn to abstract work. Ruth Edwy discovers strongly abstracted, archetypal forms in saturated colors as she takes an open-ended approach to the process of painting. Tracy Helgeson focuses on more immediately recognizable imagery in spare, richly colored landscapes that are clearly the product of imagination rather than empirical observation. And Geoffrey Detrani, a poet as well as a painter, lays shadowy, semi-identifiable plant forms and brief passages of type across broad expanses of flat but gesturally painted canvas, opening the viewer to many possibilities at once—negative vs. positive space, visual vs. linguistic representation, painterly vs. mechanical expression. The works here are all by serious, dedicated artists, although none of them has yet achieved the status of an artworld “brand,” so you may just have to encounter the work yourself to discover the meaning invested there.

By comparison, an exhibition opening on May 22 at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill makes the pure painterly approach of the Haddad show seem pretty traditional. “Figure It Out” is “a major exhibition of contemporary figurative sculpture and video by a younger generation of international sculptors,” according to the press release. This new museum, which opened in Peekskill almost a year ago, is housed in an impressive 12,000-square-foot exhibition space, and has groomed itself to present work from the fast lane of the international contemporary art scene.

As a result, this exhibition features work by a number of quite famous ‘brand names,’ from Paul McCarthy to the recently ubiquitous Takashi Murakami. The curatorial emphasis on the figure here offers the viewer a familiar framework through which to comprehend what’s going on, even as the work is executed in a wild range of approaches. From the use of impoverished materials, as in Tom Friedman’s witty Garbage Can, portraying a man with his head buried in the eponymous trash receptacle, to Keith Edmier’s exquisitely finished, pregnant figure of Beverly cast in translucent red resin, and dressed in real clothing and shoes, there are plenty of opportunities to explore various artistic strategies.

For the uninitiated, looking at high-end contemporary art such as this can provoke reactions ranging from reverential awe to the emperor’s new clothes—as it ought to. There is no such thing as the “perfect” artwork, but depending upon how you define and cultivate your own aesthetic sensibility, you can enable yourself to make critical distinctions about art. There’s a beautiful, dialectical tightrope walk in allowing an artwork to challenge your preconceptions while at the same time judging it based on your own standards and experience. Fail to commit yourself to the experience at that level, and you fail to do justice to the work.

When you get down to it, all art is ‘Brand X’, regardless of whatever hype or reputation precedes it. It’s only in the active engagement of the thoughtful viewer that the meaning and value of the work becomes apparent.

Ruth Edwy/Geoffrey Detrani/Tracy Helgeson
on view through May 22
Carrie Haddad Gallery
622 Warren Street, Hudson
(518) 828-1915
www.carriehaddadgallery.com

Figure It Out
May 22-April 1, 2006
The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art
1701 Main Street, Peekskill
Opening reception Sunday, May 22, 4-6pm
(914) 788-7166
http://www.hvcca.com

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