Robert Watkins and Dr. Gary Burton, Visual Arts
Magazines represent a flourishing industry that feeds upon society’s megalomaniacal craving for information—and not just any; only the latest breaking news from the fashion front can slake the thirsts of today’s trend mongers. Supply for this need was never so urgently called for nor its delivery so diversified. Magazines, independently published “zines”, and e(“electronic”)-zines, not only attempt to satisfy our fixation with the fast paced but, more importantly, pose interesting questions about the ever changing nature of our culture.
Can the magazine, as a representative example of culture, continue to renew itself in light of what history has taught us? Will the magazine’s subversive character appeal to youthful readers tomorrow as it does today? Will the publishers and readers of those magazines increasingly resemble the now defunct avant-garde, or more closely resemble its antithesis, the consumers of popular culture? The installation, paintings, and essays exhibited in Brigham Young University’s B.F. Larsen Gallery between September 7th and the 21st attempted to answer these questions.
An installation housed six paintings, two in each of three different rooms representing environments in which the magazine is a familiar fixture: a waiting room, a magazine stand, and a living room. Three essays written in connection with the rooms explained why, despite the frequency of its publication or size of its subscription, magazines fail to initiate meaningful change in society. The essays added the insights of others to personal research about what I consider a problem common to both art and the magazine–their inevitable assimilation into popular culture. The diptych format of the paintings and formal elements within them suggested their relationship to magazine layouts. Each painting consisted of one side painted in oils and another side painted in black and white gesso. Subjects in the oil paintings fell into one of three traditional categories (landscape, still life, or portraiture), while subjects in the right-hand panels referred to themes introduced in the essays.
The installation, paintings, and essays bore a common thread: the idea that they could soberingly reveal the artifice in much of our communication along cultural lines. Modern art theory, postmodern fiction, and information technologies represent ways in which we communicate through our cultural products and implicate the magazine’s failure at attempting to overstep the boundaries that art and literature have successfully transcended. I feel that art must rise above the desire to be merely contemporary—or in the magazine’s case, fashionable—but at the same time art must admit its inadequacy—the fact that it is finally just another surface.
