Student show at PAFA

Yards and yards of gratuitous shards:
Schticker schlock at Pennsylvania Academy

PATRICK D. HAZARD

One of the frustrations of living 4,000 miles from Broad Street is that it induces Pennsy Envy. All those enticing art shows back home, and I must remain mute because effectively blind. I only get back to Philly once a year to take my annual physical. But this year both the IRS and the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue failed for the first time to send me the requisite income tax forms and wouldn't be bullied by my long-distance pleas for service. Hence last Thursday I was rushing up North Broad to get the forms which should have been sent months ago..... when I passed the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, just opening its 106th annual student art show.

Hmm. I paused in my tax mission and took a good look at the more than 100 artists and almost 1,000 works, plus $100,000 in prizes and awards.

Now, PAFA has a special place in my cultural memory. I used to begin my American Lit courses at Beaver with a lecture on Charles Willson Peale and his ambitions for the new cultural democracy and his first art museum in America (1805). I relished the fact that Peale stooped to conquer his potential audience by deploying oddities like dinosaur bones to draw the under-educated into his cultural tent. He beat P.T. Barnum by two generations (and his motives were nothing like Barnum’s "A sucker is born every minute"). And it buzzed me that Peale named his sons after great painters, beginning with Raphael.

How Jefferson supported the arts

But the treat of this exhibition was an exchange between CWP and the third President of these not yet wholly United States. In 1806 Peale hit up Thomas Jefferson for a donation. TJ's reply was worth the price of admission: "I shall cheerfully contribute my mite to your Academy of fine arts by enclosing you 50 D at my next payday (early in July)."

I wish I could say I was equally pleased with the quality of PAFA’s art two centuries later. It was evident that this generation of artists had learned the Andy Warhol secret: Find a schtick and stick with it. The Governor's Prize went to Kai Pedersen for two huge mounds of recycled Philly newspapers, given heft by the insertion of wooden layers. We were treated to some autobio about the artist's love of rock climbing and how he used a travel award to climb a few heights in Europe. Not so Grand a Tour, esthetically speaking. But it’s his schtick!

Even more egregious was Jordan S. Griska's Sisyphus, an overwhelmingly bizarre space vehicle (of steel, aluminum and mylar string) that could be yours for only $25,000. (Don't rush to be first in line— Jordan promised editions!). And I assume you could cut costs by supplying your own mismatched pair of tennis shoes inexplicably poised on what looked like this vehicle’s saddle. Ha Ha.

And the PAFA Piffle Award goes to….

But if I were to add to the $100 grand in prizes, I would present a PAFA Piffle Award to Sumner Yates for his "mixed site specific installation" that seemed to suggest a kid's tree fort, where viewers are warned: Only two people at a time, and don't touch anything! All this piffle is surrounded by yards and yards of gratuitous shards.

This was a close call. I almost awarded the PAFA Piffle Prize to James Godin Garvey for three clusters of tubular effluvia, a sort of tribute to Hoover (as in rug cleaners). I was physically disgusted by the ugliness of Garvey’s collocations. Modernism has come to this: Recycle garbage to look even more useless than it already is. It recalled the Turner Prize winner who deployed her messed-up bed to beguile the mindless jurors who equate oddity with creativity. Yuck. Even Marcel Duchamp with his notorious Urinal would find these "artsy facts" deplorable caricatures.

The whole show was not such a travesty. I'd even buy Matt Zitman's digital paintings, especially his caricature of Colin. And I relished Lilly Woodworth's nature studies. Avoid the Higher Goofy show-off pieces and your eyes will bless you.

Two centuries of great sculpture

Luckily, and oddly, the show's conclusion abuts a splendid collection of sculpture amassed over PAFA's two centuries of serious achievement. Begin with Benjamin Rush's bust of the Marquis de Lafayette (1824). Relish Beatrice Fenton's Wattled Cranes (1943) and end your instructive historical tour with Harry Bertoia's Topiary Tree (1966). God knows this proves PAFA students can study lasting achievement in their own collections. It's just that their generation has been distracted by the death throes of Modernism.

And this isn't PAFA’s problem. In Weimar, Germany where I live, there was recently a rededication of a grand Art Nouveau villa by the great Belgian Henry van der Velde. It had been despoiled first as the Russian Military headquarters and then by two decades of STASI inhabitation. One schtickler had the not very bright idea of spreading 40,000 of the sheets of typing paper that the secret service used to memorialize its evil espionage. They were spread helter-skelter along a corridor, in and out of several of the STASI offices. We were warned solemnly not to walk on them if possible. Such kindergarten art is an insult to a great designer-architect. No one who had studied van der Velde’s architecture in Weimar could commit such egregious sacrileges.

I don't blame the students entirely. Their professors have led them astray. It's time the caricaturists laugh such lame brained art (and teachers) out of the Academy. Three generations of idiotic art is enough. Modernism is dead. Long live sanity in art.