The Brooklyn Rail

Art communities making for the territories isn’t anything new. It’s a perennial phenomenon, usually seen as a sign of either an epochal shift in environmental/spiritual awareness or simply as a pragmatic move by artists needing to stake out some piece of earth, where they can work relatively unmolested by more urbane social obligations and real estate precarity. New York School examples include Philip Guston’s tactical withdrawal to Woodstock, NY after a generally hostile reaction to his 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery; Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock’s move to Springs in 1945 to consolidate and protect their studio time from downtown temptations and cyclical rent obligations; and Arshile Gorky setting up what was to be his last studio in a Connecticut farmhouse. Each of these situations reflected a need to reimagine the means of production (and reduce overhead) by establishing creative zones at a remove from the demands of art world propriety and the escalating costs of living. Of course, alternate narratives exist. Georgia O’Keeffe chose the New Mexican landscape as her subject, and Marsden Hartley explored his intimate relationship to his Maine origins. All illusions of the call of the pastoral aside, the (now decades long) escalation of artists decamping from New York City for the Hudson Valley is more of a desperate search for solace, paradoxically, from urban marginalization and market pressures than a sentimental relation to the land. It makes complete sense that institutions would take their hint and follow suit.

It’s revealing to compare such situational reactions of artists and art institutions to shifting cultural and commercial imperatives with parallel shifts in assumptions about the cultural relativity of evolving American civic traditions. The Campus, an art-adaptive reuse of an abandoned local public school in rural Claverack, New York, presents a fascinating opportunity to juxtapose shifts in ideological social structures with the symbolic play of such civil significance. By ludically occupying the evacuated site of didactic social reproduction, the gallerists, curators, and artists involved in the project reflect on perpetually evolving transitions between artistic expression and social contingencies. The symbolic gesture of withdrawing from the gallery “white cube” to the brick-and-mortared ghost of a site of post-war American civic aspiration presents a series of opportunities to scaffold contemporary art amidst remnants of the utopic ideals of America’s past. If John Dewey’s vision for an egalitarian public school system was represented in architectural apogee by the Ranch/International Style of the former Ockawamick School (erected in 1952, during American post-war/Cold War prosperity, to accommodate the Baby Boom generation) then the site’s reimagining as a destination for experiments in contemporary art presentation represents a heterotopia within which that vision becomes subsumed into a form of an endless recess. Presentational play abounds at The Campus, a tribute to the labile and inventive approaches the organizer Timo Kappeller has found to integrate the site’s social history and aesthetic specificity with an installation that simultaneously riffs on and elides such bracketing.

Immediately upon entering the former lobby of the low-slung building, one is confronted with what appear to be typical class photos. Presumably they are left behind, long after the school closed, installed above the tile wainscotting. They are actually the work of Miguel Calderón. Entitled Secundaria #4 [Secondary #4] (2003), the series depicts secondary school students lined up in obligatory rows and columns—yet all sporting dark aviator glasses. Taken in Calderón’s native Mexico, at more formal institutions from his youth, their uniformed and artist-streamlined (the glasses were his idea) images nevertheless comment sardonically on the endemic conformity of all institutes of learning. Since the organizers have left much of the original school remnants intact, these images fade quizzically in plain sight. Nearby is a more active intervention in the form of Barbara Kasten and Nathalie du Pasquier’s collaborative inhabitation of a series of adjacent office spaces. Super-graphic wall paintings interact with discrete works on paper by du Pasquier (who was a founding member of the Memphis design group in the 1980s), while Kasten has installed both photos of and actual translucent Plexiglas sculptures that formally complement each other. Taken as a whole, the multi-room installation offers a postmodern mash up in response to the generic, mid-century modern rooms.

Moving down the long hallway, one enters a room animated by the sculptures of Manfred Pernice and the paintings of Rebecca Morris. Pernice’s ground-hugging constructions seem to be inspired by both the orientation of coffee tables and industrial design. Constructed of base materials like particle board and MDF, their muted, monochrome tonalities gather in shades of former Constructivist glory. Similarly, two of Morris’s works here deploy the grid form as a take-off point for a kind of demure formalism. This is a rather cluttered room, yet the clutter feels pointed and intentional in the school’s context, as if it is warehoused furniture reserved for a moment of a more active assembly scheduled at a past (or future) date. These types of atypical install decisions by the curator and organizers adumbrate the palpable sense of time that such a specialized social venue contains, so that nostalgia and its unsympathetic dispatch via contemporary gesture forms a rhythmic hum throughout The Campus.

This is less a determinist dialectic and more of an Infinite Conversation in the spirit of Maurice Blanchot’s concept of a constant sorting of form in the present. Other more poetically locatable interactions with the form and context of the exhibition include Chris Martin’s monumental Catskill Afternoon (2017), a painting/collage squeezed claustrophobically into a side hallway; and the way that the plainly-stated, prosaic materiality of the cinderblock sculptures and the related photographs of Shannon Ebner are in dialogue to the school’s spartan architecture. Jenny Holzer makes an unexpected appearance, with hand-wrought signs of some of her earliest work that presaged her “Truisms” series (1978–87). Their tactility expresses a more familiar tone than the imperative one that the artist is most known for; and in The Campus’s context they could be read as either ad-hoc posters for student protests or simple, hand-painted school announcements. The indeterminacy of colloquial-versus-administrative address makes for no pedantic resolution here; and such fluctuating significance taking place in a “country” school sets the folksy-versus-urbane in a classic apposition, so that the complexity of multiple sprouting shoots of artful intention still resides in a kind of amicable nursery. “Bush league” typically has a pejorative meaning, but on this plot of earth there’s a graceful leveling of such categorical hierarchies in a heterotopic convergence.

Elsewhere in The Campus one can take in installations that skirt actual direct commentary on the site’s context, such as Michael E. Smith’s quirky deconstruction of the school’s strangely doubled kitchen facility and the choreographer William Forsythe’s outdoor invitation to engage in an ongoing performance on the site’s overgrown football field. Conversely, there are rooms that would look at home in international art invitational contexts, such as the raucous assembly in the school’s gym—a grouping which includes Yinka Shonibare, Lily van der Stokker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Madeline Hollander, among others.

There’s much more to the exhibition that limited space here can’t allow. Suffice to say the rest is as unexpectedly compelling in its situated juxtapositions as what is described above. Kappeller’s inaugural curation displays a refreshingly light touch. Ultimately, The Campus installation gives a sense that, while it is envisioned as an upstate satellite project by a cohort of significant galleries with an international roster of artists, The Campus is not necessarily a place of business as usual. It remains to be seen if the transformation of a former learning community into a site of aleatory display gels into a new and abiding form of civic investment. The idea of replacing Fordist social engineering for a voluntary shop class in seeing how “things” actually tick is certainly something to look forward to, not only as an art destination, but also as a symbolic experiment in social time.