In a review on the Minnesota Artists (MNartists.org), art critic Ann Klefstad reflects on the “victorious return of story to art, a triumph evidenced by the narrative-rich work of the four McKnight Fellows on view at the MCAD Gallery” (which runs for just a few more days, though Aug. 10).
Klefstad asserts that “stories really haven’t been respectable in art around here lately–let’s say, from the mid-1980s until sometime last year, when everyone simultaneously got sick of ambition-made-visible as an art strategy.”
When she says “around here,” I wonder if Klefstad means Minnesota. Have stories been respectable in art elsewhere, but not that state?
As an appreciator of art, I always enjoy looking for the story in it, whether the artist intended it or not. Here are some snippets of Klefstad’s review:
[Stacey] Davidson [first picture on left] makes dolls, sculpts these characters, and then paints pictures of them. And the artwork is this second-order product, the painting. The process feels like the double level of making you find in the nouveau roman and in the air outside of the book itself — the making both by author and by reader that such a book demands. You become conscious of the intervention of the fabulist, but the fictions she paints are more credible than many real lives, maybe in part because you, the viewer, are actually collaborating with her to make the story.
In [Andrea] Carlson’s world [2nd from left], the everyday reality we experience most of the time is charged with the breathing life of spirit, which maybe you could think of as “meaning” if meaning were alive.
[Amy] DiGennaro has a huge resonator for her images [3rd from left] — and that’s the way story works. It always plays out before the crowded hall of all the other stories that people have told. And the more of them you know, the more every molecule of the one you’re hearing is electrified and, yes, illuminated.
[Megan] Vossler’s recent work is more difficult to take in. All of Our Moments Are Stolen [far right] is an attempt to tell a story that the storyteller has not mastered — hasn’t lived. The need to fake it, to gloss over the crucial unknown detail, to resort to generic gestures of abjection — is clear in this array of human beings grubbing around in a cul-de-sac of broken wood and crumbled rocks.