The Greatest Danger

Friday night Amber and I were beyond beat; this has been one hell of a week. We actually had to psych each other up for doing the opening circuit. We did this by bribing ourselves with Sushi first. Ryu on Summer has an early bird special that can get us stuffed on Sushi for under $30 and it proved a very effective way of getting us out of the house. If you go, and aren’t in the mood for Nigiri, I recommend the "Spicy crunchy" roll.

After dinner, the first stop was Jana Travis’ "Inside-Out" at DCI. I didn’t know it at the time, but this show introduced me to what was to be my theme for the night: "I have no idea how to look at this." We were in the gallery for right at half an hour and the only even remotely useful phrase that wandered through my head was "this is the domesticity of a highly ordered mind." I’m not even sure what I meant by that, but I wrote it down anyway in hopes that it would shed some light on the experience later. It didn’t. I just get the impression of someone that has flowers in her house but doesn’t like them very much.

Now it’s time for a little confession: I was actively dreading our next stop, Bobby Spillman’s "Vacate Now!!!" at L. Ross. I’ve actually been dreading it since I first started on the idea of writing these reviews because I knew that I couldn’t go see art in Memphis and not eventually see a Bobby Spillman show. And I should say up front, that I have nothing against Bobby (I like him, insofar as I know him), I’ve just never been able to come to grips with his paintings.

It’s embarrassing actually, because a great many people that I like and respect, like and respect his work and if they ask me what I think, I have to tell them that I haven’t the faintest clue what I’m looking at. Abstraction I can generally do, but the frenetic energy of these paintings usually just leaves me feeling defeated and confused.

This is exactly how I was feeling as I was leaving the gallery on Friday, when I turned for one last look and something in the painting “I can See clearly Now” caught my attention. I chuckled quietly to myself as for a moment I seemed to catch a glimpse of Terry Gilliam. Then I realized that this gave me something to hang onto. I looked around the gallery for something else... There was Hokusai... and across from it was Phillip Guston accosting a tree... Christ! The tree is Chuck Jones (and so is that tornado over there)! Am I looking at metaphorical collage? I still don’t know, but at least I have something to hang on to.

We left that show around 8 and came to the unfortunate realization that we’d missed Carolyn Bomar’s show at Material (a fact that bums me out on a lot of levels), so we make a b-line for Larry Edwards at Marshall Arts. Again I was confronted by something inexplicable to me. I could take ten pages of copy and explain to you in excruciating detail exactly what I saw, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good.

I’ve been told by people who knew his work from before that this show is pretty much indicative of his work. Apparently he’s something of a perennial figure in Memphis art, which does me no good seeing as I’m not from Memphis. What I saw was a beautiful and exquisitely crafted train wreck. I walked in the door and saw an image so bluntly horrifying and yet inescapably beautiful that I had to physically extricate myself from it.

It was like watching the Masterpiece Theatre version of Jerry Springer.

***

My fortune cookie at lunch today said, "The greatest danger could be your stupidity."

My Chinese word for the day was Green Bean.