Lots of Things Like This curated by writer Dave Eggers is on display at apexart from April 2-May 10, 2008. The work in this show combines images with text. Usually the images are very simplistic comic book style drawings.
Upon entering the space I look up at the first wall and I’m greeted with a black and white piece with what appears to be a cock protruding from the lowe side of the picture. Across the top it says, “FORGET THE MEANING. JUST ENJOY” This seems like a good summary of the entire show... Below it is an ink drawing of the same nature by Shel Silverstein. It’s of a woman with a bonnet and a nose stretching across the long paper. On her nose it says “THE LONGEST NOSE IN THE WORLD, BELONGS TO MISS BETSY BLUE BONNET-WHO LET’S ME WRITE THINGS ON IT.”
There are many ink drawings, simple and black and white. Several Tucker Nicholas sketches hang on the wall. I have to think of them as sketches because they take seconds to compose. There’s a circle with a slice out of it and at the bottom, “SAVE MY PIE”, a circle with more missing that says “CHEESE TEST” at the top, a gun painting with the words “HEY LADIES” under the barrel. This is the sort of art that makes you question, is this art?
Maria Kalman’s acrylic paintings are framed on the wall. They have nice texture and the colors blend beautifully into one another. There’s masking tape at the bottom of the frame to accompany the paintings. A still life of a sink is in one frame, at the bottom on the tape “I look at her sink. And leave.” A painting mostly composed of walls and at the center a door slightly ajar and a staircase says “sentence fragment” on the tape. Was it meant to be ironic that these are some of the only framed paintings in the show and she just slaps masking tape on them? Amy Jean Porter has some paintings that are rendered the same way. They’re delicate little animal paintings. A red leopard stares at you from the center of a plain white page, “man you’ve got good-looking handwriting” is in pencil cursive at the bottom. A squirrel with a leaf in hand has “your wit greatly enhances all of our efforts in forging through the sexual morass” at the bottom.
As I’m leaving I flip through some of the artists books for sale at the front. I come across a book of mail art- Tucker Nicholas’. I had thought most critically of him at first but putting the art in a different context changed everything. I think many of the artists in this show make comic books and that shifts my perspective on them, too.
I was lured in by names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry Darger. Seeing the show I found the Basquiat and Vonnegut disappointing. The Darger painting was exciting, but there was just one painting. I was expecting a Basquiat painting but there were only a few small simple drawings that fit the theme of the show. There was only one Vonnegut piece too- a print of a grave stone that said “life is no way to treat an animal.” It was signed at the bottom and also said “For the believer Dave Eggers- 6/7/04”, that in combination with the simplistic quick drawings that took up most of this show leads me to believe that many of the pieces might have been from Eggers personal collection.
