Last month I invited ya’ll to go to the art museum in City Park and lay eyes on Claude Monet’s last paintings (by the way, there are still a couple of weeks before the big Frenchman splits for San Fran). The interesting thing about that show is Monet’s apparent blending of Impressionism and emotional brushwork.
This month, try to make it to Arthur Roger’s on Julia and check out the expressive impressions of Elemore Morgan Jr. You’ll find the same self-assured, unhalting strokes of color as you found at NOMA, passages of paint that both loosely define the subject in crystalline hues and expose the painter’s soul as well. Yes, Morgan is definitely one of Monet’s contemporary reincarnations, his cosmic twin in art al fresco.
But Morgan’s work is also entirely his own. In fact, even before you react to the subject matter or the aggressive application of pigment, you’ll notice the quirky, shaped masonite panels upon which Morgan paints: stretched-out eggs, round-edged rhomboids, a tiny pyramid, and a long frowning triptych, among others.
Every painter contemplates the shaped Canvas. Ninety-nine percent of all paintings are rectangular, and thinking artists eventually ask themselves why.
They experiment with unusual forms, then, generally speaking, they get over it and return to the rectangle. Stuart Davis — a jazz/cubist painter from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s-explained that as long as the walls of rooms are rectangular, there’s no reason to avoid the obvious. And Stuart was right: even when artists employ odd formats, they usually compose the shapes to react to the regular outline of a wall anyway. But Morgan’s work strikes me a little differently. He seems to have real purpose in his eccentricity; his formal weirdness tells me something about his subject.
For years now Morgan has been rendering the Louisiana landscape: a visual menu of rangeland, wetland, crawfish pond, rice field, and sugar plantation, a misty green ribbon evaporating into a low sky-horizontality as relentless as Kansas. So one possible reason Morgan dices up the flat-line landscape is that he craves topographic variety and therefore physically imposes it on the substrata of his paintings. Or maybe Morgan is tangentially communicating the social/psychic diversity he’s found in The Bayou State in the context of the geographic monotony.
But to tell you the truth, I’ve always had a more bone-headed interpretation of Morgan’s shaped panels. Is it possible that Morgan paints Louisiana as seen through windshield, and rearview mirror, and streamlined backseat window? Is it possible that Morgan’s shapes were inspired by automotive glass and the allure of the two-lane highway? That’s what went through my mind as I viewed these pictures. Imagine Bonnie and Clyde glancing furtively out the win-
dows of their Ford sedan, just before the ambush. Imagine the young Hank Williams ‘gazing at the slurred colors of Feliciana parish as he is chauffeured to another grits-circuit dance hall gig. Imagine Uncle Earl surveying his domain as he raced down Highway 61 from Baton Rougeto New Orleans. Forgive me Elemore, but preposterous assertions are the business of the art critic, after all.
Whatever his reason–and his reason may actually be nothing more than formal playfulness-I promise you will love Morgan’s work. Individually his paintings exude their own peculiar sensa-
tions: country songs of color and shape. together they fill a gallery with a concert of delta-land eye music: Impression Louisiana Suite in See flat.
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Have you ever wanted to be there for that breakthrough show when a young artist comes into his own, exceeding everyone’s expectations (in this case the expectations, I should say, were already high), and moves on to a higher plateau? This may be the time. Jeff Cook’s show of sculpture at Simonne-Stern on Julia has the feel of a turning point.
Cook has always been a marvelous artist, mind you. He modeled himself on junk-sculpture masters like Kurt Schwitters, the early-century German Dadaist who discovered that perfectly good abstract art could be made of bits of trash. Cook, like Schwitters, composed small sculpture of weathered wood scraps, discarded machine pans, nails, string, matchboxes, you name it-attractive, romantic stuff. But when Schwitters originally displayed his trash assemblages, the work was both seductive and subversive. You see, Kurt’s gallery garbage was an absolute affront to the bourgeois art world of the time, who still thought art had to do with genteel images in paint on canvas, with nice frames.
By the time Cook contributed his junk sculpture to the art world, the medium had lost its teeth. Cook’s work was extremely well done-his best pieces, like a composition of stainless steel hotel tea pots bound together with bungee chords, were some of the best assemblage anywhere-but the medium had become so familiar that good formal qualities weren’t really enough. Cook needed to find a way to deliver a better gut punch, something to take your breath away.
With this new show, Cook has done just that. In these 22 small pieces, Kurt Schwitters meets the tribesmen of the Congo river basin. I’m not going to try to explain why the artists of a handful of West African cultures pound nails and sharp slivers of iron into their carved wooden figures until they bristle like porcupines. I’ve read that it has to do with penetrating into the spirit of the wood, but I don’t pretend to understand the concept. The resultant fetishes, known as nkisi, are some of the coolest art made on the planet.
In this body of work, Cook introduced the nkisi form into his Dada assemblages. but instead of threateningly jagged shards of rusty iron or eight penny nails, the artist studded his figures with alphabet blocks, wooden dowels painted to look like sticks of chalk, yarn, and canvas fragments. And it was this highly personal choice of material, combined with the suggestion of an African ceremonial groove, that took Cook’s new work to new heights: he had found, as we critics like to say, his own voice within the genre let these pieces speak to you.
Alphabet Fetish for Setchie Sino (another New Orleans artist), the most reminiscent of the traditional nkisi form, is a bound baby doll that evokes the burden of adulthood and the emotional infant at the core of us all. The Teacher–one of my favorites in the show – is simply a pair of tiny chairs, one somewhat larger than the other, facing one another on a stage. A visual haiku, The Teacher is an utterly streamlined, perfectly economical telling of the relationship between Cook and his mentor, sculptor John Scott. Another narrative bullet, Roller, recalls Cook’s days as a dancer touring the globe with the Los Angeles Repertory Company-the defining, expansive period in the artist’s life.
Raul’s Pony, a mummified rocking horse, speaks of continuity, rocking forward, rocking back, remaining stationary: Cook allowing himself to change, grow, and experience, but returning again and again to past values. Rock Arrows, another favorite of mine, is a storm-whipped cutter ship bathed In forbidding midnight black enamel, masts thrusting upward like spear points: a sailor’s yarn of jeopardy and survival.
Twenty-two pieces, 22 intrigues. A cultural blur. Joseph Conrad discovers post-World War I disillusionment on the banks of the Mississippi. A show to remember.
