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Arizona State University (ASU) Faculty Art Exhibition (1990s) Tempe, Arizona
There is an overriding technological depersonalization in this show; isolated aesthetic manipulation without significant expression of human feeling or contact with the world. There are protractors, semi-circles, an air-brushed neon waterfall, rulers, an obelisk, a geometric ceramic wall-hanging, an undeveloped collage, a brass rocket ship with six shot glasses that rise from a steel cylinder filled with oil, and a gaudy mandala of glistening plastic acrylic on cut paper that is more glitz than a symbol of the self. There is a sculptural totem encircled by human ears on a screw-thread base borrowed from Brancusi, four shelves of white, computer-generated hydrocal "sculpture," computer-generated flame images, and a triangular metal form six feet high that resembles a bathroom scale tipped on end with a bubble-level in a below-center hole. Among works of more positive achievement is Gayle Novak's oil, "Song of Silence," a large, strongly, richly brushed abstraction with subtle, glowing violet-orange light and seeming pueblo architectural references. Arthur Jacobson's abstract watercolor, "Antique Shop," has an animated all-over design of small, brightly colored, tightly integrated, multiple organic shapes. Robert Cocke's oil, "Place of Origin," is an expressionist-surrealist vision of past monuments of a desolated society. Jerry Schutte's oil, "Painter, Model, Business with Sidney and Jerry," is a vigorously brushed interior of a crowded studio-laboratory with six figures, including artists, nude models and a central, cartoony, close-up head strongly illuminated as if by some sudden shock, discovery or explosion. What can students possibly learn about genuine art and the human spirit from their professors' dominant mechanistic aesthetic? |