The
dialogue in Harrell Fletcher’s work between kumbaya campfire spirit and its
descent into bathic self parody defines for me what social practice art should
be. A rollicking journey between heartfelt sincerity and knowing parody. If
only radio call-in shows functioned like that the world would be a better
place.
You
would think because Fletcher often works with non-artists that his projects
would be unpredictable, chaotic. That’s why you introduce the outside world
into the art world—to shake things up. But somehow he manages to spoon off the
same oleaginous delicacy regardless of who goes in the pot. I guess this him a
kind of stylist.
In Selections
from Michael Bravo at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, Fletcher curates a survey of work by Bravo, a
life-long mentor and his sister’s ex husband. Sometimes Bravo’s work appears
lucid and original. The line drawings of street scenes and interiors convey the
pre-verbal strangeness of space and form the way a child might experience them.
Sculptures of figures made from colorful objects encased in plastic are so over
the top they cannot be denied.
When Bravo’s off, however, as in a large, messy abstract painting
inspired by South America seen from a plane, it’s like being trapped in a bad corner
of the De Rosa Preserve.
Bravo’s
work has a folk art aesthetic. He collects sticks from his walks and then
covers them with resin and silicone. His gifts to the young Fletcher, a carved
wooden mobile for the crib, charming wooden ships and a platoon of carved
wooden soldiers actually look more like folk art than art and further blur the
line between the two.
But
it’s almost impossible to imagine Bravo’s earnest, folky works in this citadel
of curatorial irony and critique without the aid of Fletcher. So this is either
the greatest act of curatorial nepotism since Charles Saatchi underwrote the
Young British Arists show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 or it’s something
completely different.
Fletcher’s
title and wall text suggest the former. In that pitch perfect, awe-shucks voice
of the common man, Fletcher explains Bravo’s work and their personal
relationship as though we were sitting on a hill in Humboldt County, throwing
grass into the air and watching which way the wind was blowing. He never makes
reference to the oddity of the situation. He never tries to pre-empt the
obvious question: Is it okay to do this, to put my friend in a big show when
there are so many other candidates whose work would be more appropriate? But if you left Selections From
Michael Bravo thinking that all you
need to get a show at Wattis is to know an art star than you fell into the
trap.
The genius of Fletcher's work and his voice is the way it hides the complexity and chaos behind a veneer of simplicity. Bravo’s work is only one subject of the Wattis show. It is equally an occasion
for Fletcher to explore curation and its values, and he makes use of the
specific familial situation between he and Bravo.
In
the most basic sense, Fletcher has put the curatorial on equal footing with the
art making, flushed the curatorial decision-making out of the back-room and put
it on display in the front, and made the process of looking at Bravo’s art
impossible without being conscious of the framing devices. The show’s not
called Selections for nothing.
In
the world of institutional critique, where artists investigate the values
behind their gallery’s decisions, the focus is usually on how dominant culture
has excluded alternative voices under the rubric of objective standards.
Fletcher’s privileging of the personal over the objective is so over the top it
seems both to mock our faith in the traditional, so-called objective standards and all the queer, feminist, post-colonial alternatives
that have risen up to challenge them. The family politics posed here are the most brutal form of identity
politics and the fact that two white guys put it together makes
it even more volatile.
Fletcher’s
use of personal narrative to materialize a conversation about curatorial values
is kind of amazing. He mixes personal items in with works of art, corrupting
the classical model of just artobjects, and asserting the equal value of both. In the wall text,
many of his thoughts about Bravo are seen through a scrim of childhood
memories. These have to be the least stable, most subjective kinds of phenomena
to base a show on. And yet he does, without apology or explanation, putting
them where you are used to seeing scholarship and some kind of
art-historically informed logic.
At the center of this show is the way Fletcher’s relationship to Bravo sends up the Oedipal struggle
that normally takes place between curators, who are seen exercising parental
control, and artists, who notoriously rebel against it. Institutional critique
reversed that dynamic. Artists like Michael Asher and Fred Wilson became
the knowing grown ups, and the curators were demoted to misguided children. It's like all those family shows of the 80s where the grown-ups were hoplessly dated and the kids had all the wisdom.
In Selections, the Oedipal maze is more confusing: Bravo was a
paternal influence on Fletcher, both as the first adult artist he knew and then
as a teacher. But it’s Fletcher the student who has the responsibility of
curating Bravo the older artist. In a reverse of institutional critique, it’s
Bravo the artist who seems conventional and responsible and Fletcher the
curator who is out of control.
In
fact the whole first impression of the show is undermined. What looks at first
like a gesture of curatorial generosity from a young famous artist to his
older, less well-known mentor, turns out to be the opposite. It’s Bravo the dad
giving the big assist to Fletcher the child, this time as the straight man so
the younger artist can squeeze a hearty curatorial laugh.
