THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502180303
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 132 lines
IN A GALLERY at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center is a plain black bed with black sheets.
The bed is tightly made, and sits in a dark part of the gallery. It has a title: ``Domestic Abuse.''
At the head of the bed, an electronic message board sends the same phrases around and around: ``COME HERE BE QUIET HOLD STILL.'' Near the headboard is a black fire screen that gives off a faint, sickening smell.
``Domestic Abuse'' is a memorial to lost childhood innocence. It suggests sexual abuse, and functions as a shrine for regaining a feeling of control over one's life.
The piece is part of an installation by Virginia Beach artist Anne Iott. She is among five artists in the Newport News show whose art conveys a journey, as a center statement put it, ``from the dark secrecy of childhood abuse to a personal emergence.''
Together, the exhibits are titled ``Art as Invocation.'' To invoke means ``to call forth, to call out, to call attention to,'' said Iott, in a documentary video that accompanies the exhibit.
The work in the show may or may not reflect the artists' personal experiences. The images might be metaphors. They might reflect an artist's empathetic reaction to other people's experiences.
From ancient times, personal healing has had its place in art. The process itself can be cathartic. For artists who work on an intuitive level - drawing from their unconscious - creation can dredge up imagery and ideas that lead to wholeness.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of artists who create work that confronts provocative subjects, such as the sexual abuse of children. Terminal illnesses, from AIDS to cancer, also are popping up as an art subject with greater frequency.
A recent article on a New York dance performance choreographed by Bill T. Jones has polarized the arts world on the notion of real-life tragedy as the core of an artwork. Jones' work featured videos of dying people airing their feelings. Dancers performed before these giant terminal talking heads.
The New Yorker magazine dance critic, Arlene Croce, complained in the Jan. 2 issue that ``the cultivation of victimhood by institutions devoted to the care of art is a menace to all art forms.'' She also wrote that ``I can't review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about.''
Her shots were heard 'round the arts world.
``The current fracas is the biggest since the obscenity debate over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography,'' reported Time magazine earlier this month.
Creators and critics decried Croce's ideas with ferocity. New York Times editorial columnist (and former theater critic) Frank Rich wrote that ``AIDS is responsible for yanking death out of the American closet. . . This is the story of our time. Amazingly, Ms. Croce missed it.''
Among Croce's few supporters was the ultra-conservative art critic Hilton Kramer, who called her piece ``the most definitive essay on the arts in the 1990s that any American critic has yet written.''
There is no single reason why such personal and heated content is becoming more prevalent.
We are in a therapy-heavy era. Artists tend to be among the most courageous in exploring their inner demons, a requirement for successful therapy. Since artists can't help but reflect their own experience, sharing their therapeutic path seems only natural.
This is blockbuster art of a wholly different kind. Picture the artist as a kind of visionary, capable of ``seeing'' deeper than many people. The artist has undergone a trip into his inner landscape, has found his inner blocks and confronted them. As a result, the artist feels freer inside, and probably happier.
The artist wants others to feel that way, too. It is likely that he can sense those blocks in other people.
So the art, besides its apparent aesthetic value, has several functions. It takes on a talisman quality for the artist, affirming and continuing the healing. For others, it bears witness that such changes can occur.
Through the ages, art has been compared to alchemy. Here, the alchemy - the transformation of base metal into gold - is of the self.
In a recent exhibit tour, Deborah McLeod, the center's curator and organizer of the show, paused at a table of books. These were no ordinary texts, but one-of-a-kind ``books'' made by Iott, who has a national reputation as a maker of art books.
One was called ``Book of Names.'' The pages were made of thick white felt, smeared with dirt and sticks and nasty words - ``Stupid,'' ``Jerk,'' ``Liar.''
``It's such a violation,'' McLeod said, turning the pages with white-gloved hands. ``The purity of the snow is sullied. That's the innocence of childhood, ruined by. . . words.''
In the next room, artists dealing with related content were exhibited. Richmonder Cate Fitt showed a fiber collage with fractured details - a hand, a baby doll. The black on black palette, McLeod said, ``is a hushed way of saying something.''
Using an agitated brushstroke, Minnesota artist Ruthann Godollei has crafted images of infants being shaken, scalded and locked in a pet carrier. Washington state painter Jane Orleman came up with canvases that are just as horrific, such as a young nude girl tied to posts in a basement.
Robert Eads' large unstretched canvases contain the animated silhouettes of members of his family, acting out ritualized versions of a real family drama. ``His father was real violent, and ultimately committed suicide,'' McLeod said.
The California artist depicted a child placing a feather on top of a father's already enormous burden. Another work showed a child offering a flower to a destiny figure.
Besides actually painting shadows, Eads is dealing with the shadow side, as Carl Jung dubbed it, of his own personality.
``As archetypal images,'' Eads wrote, ``they act as tools that can touch the emotions and pry open the psyche. It can be terribly frightening to look at an image that holds the deep dark secrets contained in the human spirit and see them exposed to the world. It can also be a very rewarding experience that confirms our connections, as individuals, to a more universal understanding of life.''
There is a positive note of recovery in each artist's work. Orleman shows ``Whole at Heart,'' a self-portrait that depicts her after having yanked the arrow of pain from her belly. A healing shade of pink permeates her chest and forms a heart. She glows.
In ``Angela,'' Iott took an 1841 book and altered the text in ways that ``provide space and time and freedom for the main character of the book to break out of the traditional roles which bound her.
``And, in so doing, hopefully provide that for other women.''
The artists see it as unhealthy to allow tough subjects like child abuse to be taboo in art. They believe keeping it secret encourages unacceptable behavior to continue.
``This work is very graphic, very disturbing,'' acknowledged Orleman. ``Some people have called it pornographic.''
Orleman recalled once approaching a town's police chief to warn him about an upcoming show of her art. He said, ``Well, as long as it's not obscene.''
``And I said, `But it is obscene.' '' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
``The Bones Remember What the Mind Forgets'' by Jane Orleman is part
of the Peninsula show.
by CNB