ArtSeen
Bush League Roebling Hall

Bush League wades the well-swum waters of expressly political art with a group of paintings, sculptures, and videos that levy a critique of current politics and policy in America. The work is acerbic, as art of this sort tends to be, and suffers from the tunnel vision characteristic of its breed. Explicit political messages do not give art meaning. They merely constrain its potential content to a narrow frame of reference.
Bush League sounds a note of deep discontent with the status quo in varying cadences. Rather strident is Michael St. John’s close-up photo of a woman penetrated anally and vaginally surrounded by images of various pop icons and flanked by little American flags. Wayne Gonzales’s tight, monochromatic images of the president and his cabinet as they might be seen on a surveillance monitor are understated to the point of invisibility. In subservience to his depiction of alienation, his flawless craftsmanship is barely noticeable. Ivan Navarro’s "You Sit, You Die" is discordant. If his sculpture of fluorescent tubes, electric cables, and list of people who got the chair in Florida is meant to evoke an electric chair, why does it look like a lawn chair? An appropriately literal question for an extremely literal piece.
Most of the work in the show suffers from a compromise similar to Navarro’s. The problem is, when work relies on communicating specific information, the form in which it is expressed needs to be transparent. The degree to which it isn’t is the degree of the piece’s failure. Why, for example, did Dan Ford choose to depict his burning of the National Library in Baghdad as an oil on canvas in romantic swirling color reminiscent of Turner? Wouldn’t it have been more practical as an inkjet print pulled from a documentary photo? Doesn’t the romanticism of the swirling line and color get in the way? One might say intuition led the artist to do it, but intuition is out of place when a painting’s message is not intuitively gleaned but literally read. Probably in recognition of this, Ford’s coloring and drawing seem somewhat forced. As for Navarro, he could have made his sculpture look exactly like an electric chair. He probably could have found some old defunct chair, dragged it into the gallery, and tacked the list on it.
Painting and sculpture, when pushed through intuition to their limits as media, can take radical form far more evocative as image and more efficient as critique. When artists such as those in Bush League are willing to settle for less powerful statements, the indication is that they themselves have ceased to believe in radical form springing from profound exploration of a medium. Instead they opt for imposed content and, by extension, imposed form.
Not surprisingly, those artists in Bush League who go the farthest in disregard of their respective mediums make the most forceful work. Jane Benson need not bother about modeling in her sculpture, a solid wood door of dada parentage impotently installed against a gallery wall. Its message of unease and frustration is implicit, not illustrated. The form of David Opdyke’s sculpture "Oil Empire" is entirely dictated by its function—to detail the movement and storage of oil in America on a manageable scale. Its medium is a product of, not a compromise with, the constraints of the information conveyed. Deborah Grant’s contribution, a frieze-like collage, adopts the language of pulp fiction and comic books, as opposed to classical draftsmanship, to send its angry message.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Alex Katz: New Paintings and Sculptures
By Tom McGlynnJUNE 2019 | ArtSeen
At a certain point in a career as long and accomplished as Alex Katzs, one hopefully reckons to ask if that artist has begun to transcend themselves: where they become, in effect, more themselves (arguably a form of inner transcendence) or simply a representation of such.

Joseph Holtzman: Six Recent Paintings
By Gilles Heno-CoeDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Holtzman finds an excellent collaborator in Sam Parker, whose refreshingly visionary approach shares the painters energy and tongue-in-cheek humor, qualities that are often lacking in the woefully conventional and overly-serious New York art scene. Holtzmans first solo exhibition on the East Coast, much like his installation at the Hammer Museum in 2014, features an all-encompassing environment of color and pattern, visually situated somewhere between Biedermeier, Arts and Crafts, De Stijl, and 1980s Pattern and Decoration. This campy atmosphere of celebratory excess serves as the perfect backdrop for his recent oil on marble paintings.
Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?
By Osman Can YerebakanJUNE 2020 | ArtSeen
The core of the YBCA’s census awareness program was and still is a group exhibition titled Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?, in which more than 20 artists, mostly from the Bay Area, could exhibit their work on citizenship and civic presence, supported by workshops and performances in line with the organization’s multidisciplinary program.
Tom Sachs: Handmade Paintings
By Jonathan GoodmanDEC 20-JAN 21 | ArtSeen
Tom Sachs, in a mid-career showhis first at Acquavella Galleriesis offering handmade paintings aligned with classic American, mostly commercial iconography: a reproduction of the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup wrapper, the McDonald's Golden Arches, an American flag. These images are so ubiquitous as to have taken on definitive status, giving them an authority nearly ethical in their quality; all this despite the fact that Sachss paintings are mostly of logos of things to be sold.