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Jeffry Cudlin is an artist, curator, and award-winning art critic. Since 2004, he has covered the visual arts for the Washington City Paper. He was recognized with first place awards for arts criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in both 2008 and 2009. His visual arts blog, Hatchets and Skewers, is nationally recognized. Since 2007, Cudlin has served as the Director of Exhibitions for the Arlington Arts Center, a large, private, non-profit contemporary art space. Cudlin is also a multi-disciplinary artist; he will have a one-man show next June at Flashpoint Gallery in Washington, D.C. Cudlin's work as a curator and an artist has been reviewed in The Washington Post, Art Papers, and Art in America. Cudlin received his M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, and his undergraduate degree in studio art from the University of Virginia.
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Jeffry Cudlin |
Juror's Statement
As a curator and critic, I do not accept the notion that all decisions concerning art are simply a matter of personal taste. Art is not up for grabs. True, the virtues of some artists remain essentially invisible to their peers during their lifetimes, and are only discerned by subsequent generations of artists, scholars, and critics. Additionally, the very definition of what is or isn’t art has changed over time, and has expanded radically over the last century to include all sorts of unlikely experiences, gestures, and objects. The shape and extent of the canon of fine art is determined by an uneasy consensus of cultural producers who sometimes experience false starts and encounter dead ends. But ultimately, they are all contributing to a professional discipline with a definite content.
To suggest that art is entirely subjective is to deny that content. Why bother studying the practice, theory, and history of art in schools if it simply boils down to occupational therapy, home décor, or entertainment? Of course art can be decorative; it can be therapeutic; it can even be entertaining. But none of these are its raison d'être.
Works of visual art need to express both the past and the present simultaneously, illustrating the artist’s understanding of the history of the creative act as well as her or his engagement with the world outside of the studio. Artists also need to display material mastery—not ostentatious displays of know-how, but simple rightness of execution that indicates both an eye for composition and a keen sense of how to translate our discontinuous moment-to-moment experiences in the world into discrete objects. Finally, artists should strive to provide experiences that have the power to transform the viewer’s notion of what the world is and how it functions—that can make viewers feel as if they are seeing and understanding their surroundings for the very first time.
These criteria might seem to set the bar awfully high for aspiring artists. Yet I am pleased to report that in judging the entries for the 2009 New River Art Show, I found much work of correspondingly high quality. The twenty-six artists that I have selected for this exhibition impress me with their highly developed sense of both the culture and the landscape of this region. They also illustrate their ability to innovate in otherwise traditional genres, like landscape, still life, and gestural abstraction. Finally, each artist demonstrates a sure-footed sense of the possibilities of her or his chosen medium—and the ability to push against that medium’s limits.
Certain modes of production dominated the pool of entries: There were many landscape paintings from which to choose, as well as traditional black and white photographs of people and places. Yet within a handful of familiar genres, the selected artists managed to stake out distinctive territory.
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John Shuptrine’s Olentangy Bridge, for instance, transforms an actual location into abstract, dreamlike space. His elegantly balanced composition features hard lines, reciprocal geometric patterns, and rich tonal contrasts—recalling the pictorial treatment of new industrialized spaces by New Objectivity and Precisionism between the two world wars. |
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In Day at the Getty, painter David Eakin juxtaposes bright washed-out blues and yellows with broad passages of darker, energetically scumbled color. The reductively rendered, silhouetted figures and overall sense of rapid, assured execution creates a fresh, pared down image recalling Bay Area Figurative art
of the 1950s and ‘60s.
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And Lynn David Alderman’s meticulously rendered watercolor, Rickenbacker in E Minor, makes clear its source: a bleached, throwaway flash photo. The subject’s flesh is flattened by the harsh flash of light; narrow, dark shadows cling to his outlines. Every extraneous detail is enumerated in this tongue-in-cheek photorealist-inspired piece, featuring some silver-haired character playing his flame-red guitar in a wood paneled rec room. |
Of course, it is always difficult to choose works of art based solely on jpeg representations. Much information is lost, and can only be guessed at. Still, the transfer of all of these pieces to files of roughly the same size and character, all to be experienced at some remove on my home computer screen, democratized the process of picking artworks. As a result, what counted most in the selection process was the artist’s capacity to produce a truly striking image, no matter what the scale or support. This show, then, is a succession of thirty striking images, all demonstrating the requisite balance between historical awareness, technical skill, and independent thought.
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