Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 29, 1993 TAG: 9309300071
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TERESA ANNAS LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Yyyep, I am being stared at intently by a deer, who is wondering what in the world is going on," Gablik whispered into the receiver.
That was two weeks ago, as Gablik reflected on an exhibit she was judging: the Peninsula Fine Arts Center's Juried Exhibition 1993. It opened Sunday in Newport News.
Gablik, who moved to Virginia in 1991, is a provocative essayist who encourages artists to think communally rather than egocentrically, to become engaged with the world as ecologists and humanitarians.
She is on the cutting edge of a new approach to art. "Great changes are happening. It is not business as usual any more," she said.
In Gablik's view, that great individualistic, century-old macho machine called modernism has broken down, replaced by art that is responsible, ritualistic and interactive. The natural world is her greatest concern.
"If they take away all the forests," she said, "we are simply done for."
This year, the Peninsula center's popular annual show has an environmental theme, in honor of the juror.
"I can't think of anybody more involved in ecological art than Suzi," said curator Deborah McLeod. "It has been her calling for a long time to write about artists who are socially and environmentally active."
Gablik's choices reflect her concern for what is happening in the environment, from water pollution to deforestation.
Out of 515 entries, she selected 137 works by 76 regional artists who approached the theme in various ways.
A Charlottesville artist's realistic landscape paintings celebrate his relationship to nature. Another painting depicts the horrid cleanup in Jacksonville, Fla., after an oil spill last spring. A Falls Church artist's color snapshots of cloud formations locate cautionary phrases in the sky; one reads "Nothing Lasts Forever." Other works use animal skins in sacramental ways, or recycle man-made materials.
Roanoke artist Kathleen Wilburn Lunsford won the Dwight G. Moorhead Printmaking Award.
"I would say this is the most intelligent juried show we've had," McLeod said.
Gablik, born and raised in New York, is well-known in art circles. Her books include "Has Modernism Failed?" (1984), widely used in art history courses, and her 1991 text, "The Reenchantment of Art." She was an exhibiting artist in the 1960s and '70s, and has written for such magazines as ARTnews and Art in America.
She used to write about Rene Magritte and Andy Warhol. Now, Gablik, who turned 59 Sunday, gets behind artists whose work "in some way expresses a passion for the Earth and a sense of urgency about what is happening to it," she said.
The transition has befuddled, even angered, members of the establishment. Gablik prefers art that bypasses the market in favor of "more healthy and soul-giving forms of art that function to enrich or heal communities."
Among her favorite artists: Dominique Mazeaud, who spends a day each month cleaning up the Rio Grande River - a futile gesture if cleanup were the only goal, but valuable as a symbol, Gablik explained.
Gablik also appreciates Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who spent 11 months shaking hands with every sanitation worker in New York City. Ukeles also installed mirrors on a garbage truck so passers-by would be reminded that they're the ones who make the trash.
At her talk in Newport News earlier this month in connection with the PFAC exhibit, Gablik flashed slides of such artists.
Norfolk artist Wendy Farnham, who is included in the show, said she saw Gablik's view of art as "pretty limiting. Though it would be nice to believe rituals could do something to help the earth, I'm sure the way it could help the most would be to lift someone's awareness."
"I didn't find her views that radical at all," said Anne Bousquet, a Norfolk artist who heard Gablik's lecture. "Artists have been working in ritualistic performance art and non-object-oriented art for years."
Gablik's ideas get aired in "The Reenchantment of Art," which received mixed reviews. Utne Reader printed an excerpt. Art in America's Jill Johnston wrote, with apparent amazement, that Gablik's favorite artists can be found "cleaning up the environment, engineering structures for the homeless, participating in projects that involve kindness to garbage collectors, kids, street people or drunks, or creating fragile objects in nature that summarily disappear."
Her response: "The one thing that enraged me in that review was the use of the word `drunk.' There are no drunks in the book. It alters the whole tone of what the book is about, in a subtly subversive way. It's amazing how much damage you can do with one word, casually but strategically placed."
While Gablik wants to achieve a "true community," Johnston, in the same review, suggested an alternative route: shared autobiographies.
"Suzi's own story - just, say, the recent part, about how she came to make her dramatic transition from art-world insider to save-the-world outsider - could make a lively contribution."
Gablik says the changeover began a decade ago, after reading "The Aquarian Conspiracy" by Marilyn Ferguson.
"In reading that book, it became clear to me that there was this thing going on in our culture called `the paradigm shift.' " In Gablik's view, it meant "a change in world view as dramatic as the shift from the medieval period to the Renaissance."
She read more, slowly adopting a new world view. Now, "I believe that the models we have all grown up with are not only of dubious value to live our lives by, but are actually leading us on a course of planetary destruction. Slowly, I was awakened to a different vision."
Meanwhile, she relocated in Blacksburg after 22 years in London. She had come to the small mountain town in 1989 to be a visiting professor at Virginia Tech.
She bought a home in the Mossy Spring subdivision while teaching at Tech. After the school year was up, she returned to London; nine months later, she moved to Blacksburg for good.
"I had been feeling for a long time that I wanted to leave the urban environment and get out of England," Gablik said. "It had become too sterile and remote for me. Blacksburg seemed like a wonderful answer to the question of where to go. I was looking for a more slowed-down life more rooted in a daily life with nature.
"Most of all, what I was hankering for was to wake up in the morning and be ravished by beauty."
"The community was challenged by her," said Ray Kass, the Virginia Tech art professor who lured Gablik to Blacksburg. "Many people assumed that she was suggesting that art that was just art was no good. This upset people.
"After we became familiar with her, that feeling abated. Now she's a well-liked and respected member of the community. I see her as part of the panoply of strong and positive critical voices that is reinvigorating American art."
On Sunday, Gablik was at home taking part in "community group," a club she started last year. The idea is to bring together diverse members of the community, share a potluck supper, then engage in honest, searching conversation. Listening is highly valued.
"One of the valuable lessons I've gotten out of the community group," said Laurie Zuckerman, a Blacksburg artist who befriended Gablik, "is that you can get together with people you don't know and have no agenda, no plan and have it be a very moving experience. Suzi really made it happen. She puts a lot of ideas out, about community and involvement with society."
Gablik has never married nor had children, although she lived for six years with John Russell, art critic for The New York Times.
She was the only child of a New York couple. When Gablik was a child, her dad, an artist, was art director for Warner Bros. She saw his ability to recognize artists' works as "magical" and wanted that gift for herself.
She studied art at Hunter College in New York under the strict tutelage of modernist painter Robert Motherwell. She began writing criticism in the late 1950s, after an out-of-the-blue invitation from ARTnews editor Thomas Hess. Soon after, an insurance settlement gave her the funds to go to Europe and stay with Surrealist painter Rene Magritte, the subject of her first book.
Most of Gablik's life-changing events were serendipitous, she said.
"That's a useful lesson on the dynamics of how things work. You have to make enough space for life to come in and tell you what's supposed to be happening."
It's a little like reading cloud formations, as if they were handwriting on a wall.
\ "Juried Exhibition 1993," an environmental theme show featuring 137 works by 76 regional artists, on view at Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, through Nov. 14. (804) 596-8175.
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by CNB