(I swear, the closest I got was “Rroses for Selavy“… and frankly, I would have hated myself all night had I made that the title. Honestly, I can hear you groaning from here.)

I want to put a few words out there about Selavy Oh’s work. Eventually, I would like to write a longer article about it, but I’m still thinking it through. But in the meantime I just wanted to toss my two cents in, and perhaps start a little discussion.

En route to Jack the Pelican Presents for the taping of our 10th podcast I stopped off at a local bar. Williamsburg is a neighborhood loaded with hipster artsy-types who wear cool eyeglasses and lots of black. I chose what I thought was the most downtrodden bar I could easily find, only to pull up a barstool and find the bartender and the patron next to me talking about Robert Rauschenberg.

Hey yeah, so who is this guy who died?
I dunno. It was on the front cover of the NY Times. Do you still have it?
Oh yeah – he was an artist. He did something with a hawk or a eagle or something.
Oh I saw that once, yeah. It’s really messy. I mean, it’s cool because he did it in the 1950s.

I sat there, fixing my eyes on the railing of the bar, commanding my brain and my ears to shut down completely. Full disclosure: I have always wanted to live somewhere as cool as Williamsburg and have never been able to afford to. And here were two neighborhood guys who I can only suppose are dripping with the kind of dough it takes to live among art galleries and bars and that sort of thing, and they don’t even fucking know who Rauschenberg is.

Soon my blood was boiling so much that I reached an impasse: Either say something to these guys or simply stand up and punch them in their individual, if not collective throats. I took a deep breath and slammed my hand against the bar and said to no one in particular, “Hi! I teach art history at the School of Visual Arts. Do you want to know about Rauschenberg?”

The guys figured out I was more or less talking to them so they said sure, tell us about Rauschenberg. I started babbling about American art in the 1950s and the importance of collage and assemblage and all that good stuff, and the second it became clear that I wasn’t drunk enough to be entertaining but maybe a little crazy enough to be sad, I could see the guys tuning out. So I had to sum it up quickly and cheaply, which meant doing a horrible disservice to the artist’s work, but at least maybe I could create some sort of basis for understanding.

“So you know Andy Warhol, right?”
Sure.
“And you know Jackson Pollock?” (I crossed my fingers.)
Yep.
“Ok, in the great march of the history of American art, how do you think we get from the messy abstraction of Pollock to the clean, crisp world of Warhol? Rauschenberg was in between that space. Some artists do that. They navigate in this tiny little space that exists between styles and root in very deep and make that little space their own.” The guys looked at me blankly. I pounded my drink and got the hell out of there.

Somehow, in these very preliminary thoughts of mine regarding Selavy’s work, I can’t help but think she’s the Rauschenberg of SL, albeit one whose hands are much, much tidier than his ever were (makes sense for the environment we’re talking about). Navigating in this little space created by artists whose work is pure abstraction (DanCoyote, Juria) and artists whose work specifically references real life (Cheen, Nebulosus), she comes to find some very fertile ground indeed. What could be more abstract than 1001 white cubes, floating in mid-air? And yet, the piece references the “white cube” in a way that makes it more about a single prim object and more about what’s happening in the real world, what with the “white cube” being the modern way to showcase art and the topic of conversation for a few weeks running at our sim. She’s making her way in between those two worlds and, what’s more, her tongue is in her cheek the whole time. She’s poking fun at us (and herself, at the same time), and what could be better? Selavy is a subtle, sly artist who has been pretty much under our radar while more forceful personalities have dominated. I want to correct this trend.

Anyway. I’ll return to this sometime very, very soon… I just have to do some more thinking. And Selavy, feel free to leave me some more things to think about! The island feels lonely without your work.

Posted by Amy Freelunch on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 8:34 pm.