Reading the Fine Print

Amy Wilson

Amy Wilson does not make art for the farsighted. Never mind her thousands of words, in small, tight capital letters, or the dozens of little girls and skeletons that populate her world. I started to estimate their number, extrapolating from a brief count to the eighty works on display. At some point, I simply gave up. She means them to be too much for anyone to absorb, and the delightful excess makes for some delightful art.

It has also made her a figure of controversy. A tabloid searched high and low through past exhibitions of the Drawing Center, looking for a good story. In particular, it was looking for a story juicy enough to derail plans for the Center's move to Ground Zero, as part of a larger cultural complex. The Daily News had to work hard, but in due course it latched onto Wilson—or rather onto a single image out of an ambitious drawing spanning several sheets. Again I do not dare estimate its word count. When it comes to images of war in Iraq, one can see why those girls and skeletons might have a lot to say.

On day, when the papers wish to denounce me, I only hope that they spell my name right—and direct others to this Web site. And when one broaches politics, one has entered a divided and divisive arena. Artists expect that, but attention can still sting. Fortunately, it can also trigger new associations and new art.

After a spring 2005 solo exhibition, Wilson returns in summer 2006 as part of a group show, "CHOPLOGIC," along with Anthony Campuzano and Melissa Brown. Wilson could have made the controversy itself part of her work. Instead, among three artists all using text and all alluding to politics, she chooses to avoid overt protest. Her characters enter the modern art museum, where they wonder at the very possibility of making art. Potential buyers really had better read the fine print.

Oh, THAT Abu Ghraib

But never mind all that. In Wilson's solo exhibition, only the farsighted reader, in quite another sense, could decide what she has culled from conspiracy theorists on the Web and what from more or less legitimate magazines. Only someone with remarkable assurance could say what comes originally from the left or the right, what amounts to reportage or prophecy. Without question, they have all entered her imagination, and somehow they sound consistently, or at least collectively, like a reasonable, liberal critique of the Bush administration. They sound, in fact, rather like me and my friends after a few drinks. Perhaps one no longer can say something sufficiently outlandish not to engage real-world anger and despair.

The exhibition comes at a time when many other artists are engaging those as well. A spring 2005 survey of political art would surely have to include Emily Jacir and Guy Richards Smit, to name just two. I originally saw Wilson's work, too, in context of dozens and dozens of other artists, at "Greater New York 2005." Why, then, are these little blonds having so much fun?

Wilson obviously exploits and actively disappoints the habits of a reader—or at least a reader used to political cartoons and how to take them in. She rides on the wave of "graphic novels" and the acceptance of alternative comics as art. No doubt she herself has contributed to that acceptance. She also belongs to a renewal of interest in imagery, fantasy, and outsider art. Her cast of characters and their landscape pay their debt to Henry Darger. Her rural world of grass, boat, and trees shares his curious mix of a mockery of innocence and a picture of hope.

Somehow, critics in the mass media have seen only a kind of humorless political cartoon, and so she has become an excuse to deny art's place at Ground Zero in an International Freedom Center, in the shadow of buildings by Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Libeskind. I find it hard, however, to pigeonhole someone this innocent and this crazed. Like Smit, she happily sees two sides to every story, but only provided the extremes grow fantastic enough. It helps a great deal to see her in so large a solo show. It becomes harder to write her off as nostalgic for nature or for a purer engagement with art. On Wilson's intense scale, any sense of a plain message quickly slips away. So does my confidence in my own cynicism.

Spaced out on gallery walls, too, the works look smaller and the execution more delicate. I could start to appreciate the watercolor, graphite, and white space as sunshine. The twenty acrylics began to convey a darker light. Darger exploits a mural scale to lock his manic energy, not to mention hints of adolescent sex or a battle between darkness and light, into a kind of Neoclassical stasis. Wilson's thin figures move more lightly or find themselves unable to reach for balance. I could never swear when the girls and skeletons are colluding—or at war.

Is her cast more hopeful, more rueful, and also funnier and more ironic than I had any right to expect? They also grow more familiar and intensely realized as one spends more time with them. I could almost take at face value the exhibition's title, "The Global Appeal of Liberty." I could almost believe it when the texts on freedom of thought burst into larger words, like fireworks in the air. Does a word like "Assassin" or "Regret" stand as a threat or a promise? I told you to keep listening.

Art with a capital A

"If I wanted to send a message, I would have hired Western Union." Bob Dylan did not invent the line back in 1965, when he disclaimed the label of protest singer, but it still resonates. True, nowadays he might have found an Internet service provider instead, and yet the association of block capitals with politics and urgency lingers on. Think of what email etiquette calls shouting, or pull out a dollar bill. With "CHOPLOGIC," a 2006 group show, the title alone has me wanting less to parse the fine points of reasoning than to shout back. It also lets Wilson take her tiny letters and childlike characters out of headlines and into the modern art museum.

For one source of pronouncements, one can look to billboards and protest signs, like the angry scrawls of Raymond Pettibon, and Anthony Campuzano's paintings resemble slightly dismembered ones. Sometimes he roughly centers the fields of text, and sometimes he crushes the words together near the bottom, like a trash bin after the demonstration. The appearance of collage extends to the ragged, distinct handling of each letter, as in a ransom note. I only wish that the messages or the thick, dark colors suggested more. I kept thinking that I missed the joke.

Melissa Brown manages just one joke, but a very good joke indeed. Perhaps I should say two jokes, since her smaller drawings of paper money fold in on themselves, each to reveal a second image. Regrettably, one obtains a fanciful landscape rather than Alfred E. Neuman. Her far larger works have the good sense to stick to her theme and to play it for, well, all it is worth. They have images on both sides continued right to the edge, like true paper money, and their soft colors echo the shading recently added to foil counterfeiters. Even their scale pays homage to the U.S. treasury, which puts images the exact size of American money under suspicion of criminal intent.

Actually, Brown herself indulges in an elegant lowercase. Perhaps Old Europe if not U.S. currency will wish to adapt her font. Her letters spell out sometimes reassuring, sometimes more pointed clichés, like a self-help book for the American dream. Given the trade deficit and the cost of Iraq, the country might appreciate the advice. President Bush and his associates might thank her, too, for their prominent place on, appropriately enough, pretend money. Then again, I doubt it, especially as their likenesses indeed do remind me of Mad magazine, and at this rate future generations will end up with little more than play money.

With art making the headlines, it may take a moment to remember that Modernism has a long history of text as art and art as text, not necessarily with overt political intent. Within Dada and its associated movements, for example, only the circle in Berlin, including George Grosz and John Heartfield, rose consistently to anger. Ironically, at Bellwether, the one artist who has run afoul of censorship is immersing herself this time in painting and sculpture. Of course, I again mean Amy Wilson, who does hand-letter painstakingly in capitals. She may be invoking art-world politics—or simply the trepidation that comes with making and viewing art.

Wilson still populates her drawings with blond little girls, and I no longer dare call them figures out of Henry Darger rather than fully her own. However, they now take museums and galleries as their landscape, with enough personal favorites in the background—from at least J.A. D. Ingres to Dana Schutz—that no one can say she cannot make a painting. In one drawing, the girls camp out, and I kept worrying that the Modernist stalwarts would catch fire. In another, they hold a birthday party, and the paintings piled up and wrapped in bows might also find themselves mistaken for a trash heap. The texts seem to express uncertainty about celebrity, the redemptive power of art, and more than enough else to make one wonder where an artist's diary ends and quotation begins. If you do not know when to stop reading and when to look, when to join the treasure hunt and when to laugh, you may find that it becomes a chronicle of your present, too.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Amy Wilson at Bellwether through May 19, 2005, "CHOPLOGIC" through August 11, 2006.