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Human to the Max
Assign the portrait job to an artist, though, and the rules go bye-bye. That explains the wild and woolly variety of stuff from which nine Minnesota artists concocted the contemporary portraits in "Only Human," on view at the Minnesota Museum of American Art (MMAA) in St. Paul through March 26.
By no means comprehensive, "Only Human" makes a modest and engaging stab at broadening common notions of what a portrait could be. While there are likenesses among the show's photos, paintings and videos, this stuff is not designed to flatter or to sell. Rather, the art seems intended to suggest something of the frail, vulnerable, quirky and often contradictory impulses that lurk behind our more public facades. Those perennial contemporary flash points -- sex roles, racial and religious issues, celebrity, class, violence -- all bubble up, too.
Photography provides the show's most nearly conventional imagery and some of its most powerful. Xavier Tavera, born in Mexico and living in the Twin Cities, applied his keen eye for color and character to eccentrics encountered on his travels, including a Mexican street photographer and a boy in a psychic's shop. His large portraits of hyper-muscled "extreme fighters" are a tour-de-force, images of bruised and sometimes bloodied brawlers whose dark, emotionless eyes are pools of fear, cunning, dread and dull curdled testosterone.
In a 5-minute DVD installation and several pink-toned photos, Suzanne Kosmalski manipulated a film clip of Marlene Dietrich's last concert into a meditation on the eternal feminine and the ravages of celebrity and age. According to exhibition curator Theresa Downing, Dietrich was 72 when the film was shot, but she looks decades younger -- blond, ramrod straight and elegant in a gleaming gown. By distorting and doubling Dietrich's image, twisting, elongating and colorizing it, Kosmalski suggests a bleaker reality.
Katinka Galanos' computer massages images to concoct imaginative photos -- of a dark, cat-faced figure she evidently associates with Christina, the peculiarly masculine 17th-century Swedish queen who famously converted to Roman Catholicism and abdicated, and a double portrait of a contemporary friend, "Andy," and a bearded Civil War-era figure whom he resembles. Anthony Marchetti eschews the human body entirely, making "accidental portraits" by photographing things people leave behind in empty apartments -- posters, toys, stuffed and mounted birds.
Each of the show's three painters has a distinctive style and subjects reflective of their own intellectual concerns. Ernest Arthur Bryant III weaves race and politics into his beautifully airbrushed, street-smart images of Osama bin Laden, Jimi Hendrix and a snarling Mike Tyson. Ben Olson renders anguished, possibly beaten women in vulnerable images, and Jay Wittenberg expresses his love of literature through stylized, folkloric paintings of female writers from Louisa May Alcott to Sylvia Plath.
The show's most eccentric work is a self-portrait sculpture that David Hamlow concocted from the detritus of his daily life -- receipts, bills, diary jottings, empty milk cartons, cereal boxes, junk-food containers and the like. Roughly 4 feet tall, the 12-sided junk sculpture entombs his leavings from 1994 to 1998. A compulsive sketcher, Hamlow also shows dozens of drawings of friends whose faces he's been recording since 1999.
By far the most original and haunting piece in the show is "Nine Monologues," by Peter B. Becker Nelson, originally of Redwood Falls, Minn. Nelson audiotaped brief interviews with people ages 5 to 74, in which he asked them to explain the differences between men and women. Then he videotaped himself -- head only -- lip-synching to their responses. An actor of stunning capabilities, Nelson deftly assumes the mannerisms -- fluttery eyes, facial twitches -- of the female speakers, from the girlish hesitancy of a child to the resonant tones of an older woman. Watching a young, scruffy guy discussing sex differences in feminine voices is a bizarre, and utterly fascinating experience.
A yeasty exhibit laced with provocative topics, "Only Human" would benefit from more extensive development -- more art, more interpretation, more connection from one artist to another. Still, given the MMAA's exceedingly limited resources and staff -- a single curator who doubles as education director and publicist -- that "Only Human" materialized at all is something of a miracle.
What: Eccentric contemporary portraits -- photos, paintings, videos, sculpture -- by nine Minnesotans: Peter B. Becker Nelson, Anthony Marchetti, Ben Olson, Suzanne Kosmalski, Xavier Tavera, David Hamlow, Ernest Arthur Bryant III, Katinka Galanos and Jay Wittenberg.
When: Ends March 26.
Where: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 50 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul.
Events: 1-5 p.m. Feb. 19, family day; 7 p.m. Feb. 22, art dialogue; 7 p.m. March 10, audio portraits. Free.
Tickets: Free. 651-266-1030.
Web: www.mmaa.org.
Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431