I was gifted Helen Molesworth’s essay book “Open Questions” the Christmas of 2024. It had everything I expected out of a art critics essay book. The good and the bad: Complications of seemingly simple ideas. Questions that though were answered in lockstep, would frustrate a reader with the route taken.
It wasn’t new to me, this frustration over art. I was combatting my own with the curation of the Montana art gallery, I couldn’t figure out how to make it… MORE. My frustrations on a specific essay “Lisa Yuskavage’s ‘Northview’” is what prompted this immediate crafting of a philosophical rebuttal, an attempt to rationalize her position for myself and to solve my own problem. It was through her ideas on sexuality and base desires that I bumped into what we both needed. I have come to despise the discussion of our over-sexualization or under-sexualization. The way we are prompted to wonder constantly if we are stuck in perpetual youth trying to justify a juvenile conversation. Maybe we should’ve been given more than the “birds and the bees”, but does supplanting it with a rampant movement of sexual liberation not create a culture where people end up as I have? Exhausted of the idea entirely? If her writing was to make me as uncertain as she was of her feelings of “Northview”. It was a smashing success.
Does all art need to be attached to ideas this divisive? How often do we dissuade or persuade ourselves simply because society tells us to stop looking? Would I be showing value in curation by justifying contrarian themes for a gallery? An onlooker for their state curation may want to see the very best national parks, portraits and picnic scenes, with the most well known painters spotlighted at the end of the hallways. Would giving them a type of antithesis, in wall to wall depictions of Yuskavage’s women guarantee outrage and by proxy a type of eruditeness? Are the real physical complications that go along with this online gallery already enough? To move throughout the gallery requires both hands to remain on the keyboard. If one or the other is removed, you can exhume yourself as the user gazing at art, being defined by your actions as just another internet denizen finding something quick, easy, and appealing.
Almost all of the galleries I had found in Montana, their offerings as well, followed this pattern. They were “easy”. They were landscape and nature paintings.
Unlike “Northview” there was no monkey statue to constitute even a “negative space” (Molesworth describes this in the literary term “foil”). Montana seemed to want something ONLY pleasing to the eye. There was or is no doubt talent with the brush here, but I couldn’t help but feel the constant contemporary reminder: That a photograph does this same job, better. My adulthood has been constituted of thinking of art as something complicated, often impossible to understand. Each person rendering subjectivism stronger and stronger with their wildly differing tastes and humors. Their obfuscation into new meaning was not to attempt to dissuade each other of any objective merit; it was it’s function. What could be so when it came to a landscape or just another painting of a bison.
It was staring at Northview, and seething about landscapes when it happened. “Unreal Reality”
The pinkish hue of skin that you’re not supposed to be looking at, the sky that is somehow bigger than all others. They are both meant to ensure you can’t believe what you’re seeing let alone justify it. Montana and it’s artists are not hiding from this nature, they ARE that nature. The state and it’s residents are embattled with the contemporary state of art, politics and culture but create… landscapes. Animals. Ad nauseam. We are stuck. Stuck in the modern age but unwilling to conform, or unable to. Maybe it’s our purple politics, or freezing in the winter and burning in the summer. Whether it’s the fence we sit on, is also the one that we fix. That the cowboy hat we wear is ironic, but only because no one can stand up to the legends of Lonesome Dove, True Grit and Tombstone.
It is in this capturing of the real, so real, that you must refuse to believe what you’re seeing.
My future wife grew up cowboy, something almost no one ever did, ever will do again. She speaks on the death and life of cattle, men, and times like it’s a passing thing. Though almost all who wear the wide brimmed hat of the west are “fake” cowboys they are wrestling real steers. There will be (and are) more forgotten minorities trying to survive fake deals. It’s brutal, it’s cold, it’s unfeeling. Montana asks that you look at what life tells you it’s about: “Death” and then stare back shaking your head in permanent obstinance.
Combined with Helen Molesworth’s essay on her avoidance and inevitable acceptance of her own sexuality I found what Montana wanted to say with it’s art. That all along what I wanted to avoid was robbing it unfairly of it’s need. The need of photographical realness.
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Now at one end of the gallery demanding to now be seen as part of the painting exhibition sits this photo. It sits in it’s own category of modern art. “Unreal Reality”. Clocks melting, a face created out of non Euclidian geometry, single blocks of colors. Knowing the context of this legendary rider of national fame with a lifetime on a horse. Doesn’t give you acceptance of what is being seen in this photograph. The horse is levitating. Her back snapping at an awkward angle. The pair of them fight each other to the death. And you’re desperate to see it stop.
This. Shouldn’t. Be. Possible.
This is Montana. A place that demands to be met on its terms, even with all of the terms being unreasonable and unrealistic.
Get on, and hold on.
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