August 10, 2001

ART REVIEW | ' THE ARTIST IN THE MARKETPLACE'

Ready for Marketing ... and, Oh Yes, Creating

By KEN JOHNSON

What do young artists want? Perhaps what Freud said they want: honor, power and
love. What about simply making good art? That traditionally has been what art schools
help aspiring artists to do, leaving the more worldly ambitions to take care of
themselves.

But over the last couple of decades schools and other institutions have recognized the art student's
need for more practical guidance. So they have designed programs to help young artists figure out
how to achieve and sustain rewarding careers as professionals in a market- driven art world.

The Artist in the Marketplace program was founded in 1980 by the Bronx Museum of the Arts to
help inform young and emerging artists about how the art world works and how they might be
more effective in achieving professional success.

Each year three dozen promising artists are selected from hundreds of applicants. They immerse
themselves in a 12-week career management training seminar that includes topics like gallery
representation, the role of the art critic, marketing, grant writing, public art commissions, museum
practices and tax issues. At the end there is a show. This year's exhibition, organized by the
curators Lydia Lee and Edwin Ramoran, is an uneven but diverting hodgepodge of painting,
sculpture, drawing, installation work and electronic art.

The show is not a student exhibition, although it could be mistaken for one. The artists have all
finished college, and two-thirds of them have master's degrees. They range in age from 24 to 44,
come from all over the world and now live in the New York region. Given that the program's
alumni include Polly Apfelbaum, Byron Kim, Glenn Ligon and Ernesto Pujol, you could expect
that the annual exhibition would introduce artists who will sooner or later garner serious attention.

There is, alas, little evidence of any world-altering vision in this year's show. Most of the work
looks derivative or familiarly academic. Still, it's an enjoyable event. There are good individual
works among the more than 50 included, and in the aggregate the show tells you something about
what is on the collective mind of an up-and-coming generation.

Most of the work is what Hollywood calls "high concept." It could be described, that is, in a brief
verbal pitch: make an Indian mandala using little colored toy cowboys, as Jennifer Zackin did; use
a computer program to make before and after photographs of men whose hairy torsos have
supposedly, but not actually, been shaved by the artist (Franziska Lamprecht); produce a series of
vinyl, foam-padded exercise mats using compositions from high Modernists like Joseph Albers or
Ellsworth Kelly (Rebecca Herman); turn stuffed animals inside out (Kent Rogowski); toss a Nerf
ball with a camera attached and see what develops (Carol Shadford).

On the other hand there are also artists who discover what they are looking for through more or
less traditional processes. Drawing with an extremely fine pen, Scott Teplin makes marvelous
miniature cartoon images in a style like that of R. Crumb; his vignettes include odd things like the
undersides of beds, cracks in walls, underwear and digestive organs. Meaning is not obvious, but
secret places in the psyche are alluded to. The effect is humorous and uncanny.

Hiroshi Kimura paints small, lucid, representational pictures in a simplifying style. His mysterious
images of people boarding a plane in a curiously empty airport or a naked person wading into a
wide body of water might have come to him in dreams. They might be about death. The beguiling
effect is not just from the imagery; it has as much to do with how the images are embodied in
paint: tenderly, searchingly, precisely.

Traditional media are not the only way to realize a captivating complexity, as Noah Klersfeld
proves. His synchronized five-screen video work narrates the obligatory visit of a brother and
sister to their father's vacated house. Conceptually, the way the different tapes run in and out of
phase and give different perspectives on the same events makes it an essay on time and narrative
disjunction.

At one point the woman, an artist, tries to tell her brother about the art she is making; the work
sounds similar to what Mr. Klersfeld is doing, and there's a kind of mind-boggling hall-of-mirrors
effect. The brother bursts out in exasperation, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
But they part with a hug and promise to keep in touch. For all its conceptual ingenuity, the piece
tells a touching short story about a prickly but loving human relationship.

Despite such works of unpredictable resonance, the overall impression in the show is that many
young artists think of creating art as primarily a matter of strategic calculation. Maybe it's the
context: the Artist in the Marketplace program focuses on making a career. But anyone who has
spent time visiting or teaching in graduate studio-art programs knows that careerist thinking is
rampant and to some degree affects the kind of art young people make.

Like it or not, it's very understandable. In today's art world the need to make a quick, visible splash
all too often overrides the idea of art as a long and difficult cultivation of soul and skill.

``Artist in the Marketplace 21'' is at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1040 Grand Concourse, at
165th Street, Morrisania, (718)681-6000, through Oct. 14.