Step into the galleries of the newly renamed Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, and you won’t find any paint or canvas.
Nor will you stumble across anything made of stone or bronze.
Like legions of other artists over the past few decades, the talents represented in the center’s most recent exhibit, “Food for Thought,” have tossed aside these tired, worn-out materials – all in the hopes of fabricating something fresh and inarguably new.
In the process, these adept contrivers and the critics who praise them have deified the role of the imagination. To their discredit, they’ve also undermined the importance of sheer physical talent and the ability to manipulate paint, marble or other media with skill.
Silly as some of their most extreme symbolic statements may seem, however, there’s no doubt that the best work of this generation ranks with anything from the past when it comes to opening the eyes of the viewer – even when, as is the case here, they start by making a list and going to the grocery store.
In “Food for Thought,” the stuff we eat is not just the subject of an artistic fancy. Eggs, cake, salt, sugar and pieces of fruit also provide the basic building blocks of their work as well as provocative sources of inspiration.
But if you think that Terril Gadde’s “Wheels of Fortune” is limited because it’s made from roughly 200 rounds of chocolate cake – or that Gay Outlaw’s “Caramel Ropes” might have a hard time becoming more than mere candy – then take a moment to think again.
In this show – as in much contemporary work – the art lies in maker’s ability to prod your brain and prompt a string of ideas.
“Wheels” starts that process with its unexpected choice of materials, creating a surprise that longtime interpreters of contemporary art will recognize as telltale evidence of a clue.
“Cake?” you might ask. “What does cake have to do with anything?” The answers to those questions hold the keys that can help make sense of Gadde’s puzzle.
Combine the traditional celebratory function of cake with the architectural nature of the piece, for example, and you get an intriguing juxtaposition of concepts.
Cake can be used to mark an event as important – as can a commemorative arch, shrine or memorial. But when you put the two together, the baked-goods building blocks begin to dry out, crack and fall apart within a matter of days, reducing the structure they form to an unstable set of ruins.
No one in his right mind would construct such a monument from cake, of course. But the very absurdity of such an idea also says something about building them from stone.
Eventually, even the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids will crumble as if they were mere sugar, salt, eggs, butter and flour.
That makes the human impulse to erect such shrines either hopeful or hopeless – or both.
Judging such unconventional works isn’t easy. You can’t compare the physical objects with anything else, for example, since the whole idea for the artist is to be as original as he or she possibly can.
What counts here is cleverness, ingenuity and the ability to entice the viewer down what often becomes a winding and precarious path. The worst pieces leave you hanging – and possibly cursing – after that journey ends, while the best drop you off to explore somewhere you haven’t been.
Take Karin Luner’s monumental “Office Coffee and Cake Piece,” which consists of nearly 200 used coffee filters and paper muffin-cups mounted in regular ranks across a long wall.
Accompanied by diary-style entries listing the dates and descriptions of the muffins, this calendarlike piece brims with the notion of repetition and routine – qualities that play large and sometimes wearing roles in almost everyone’s working life.
Step back a moment, however, and look at this mass of paper circles, food bits and stains as if it might be something more than a playground for ants. From a purely visual standpoint, the constantly changing patterns of the large filters and the smaller muffin cups resemble the movement of a satellite moon across the face of its parent planet.
Such cyclic notions crop up frequently in this show, and here the interaction of the spheres approaches the nature of a cosmic dance.
Remember that the next time you take a break from your job for a snack and a cup of java.
EXHIBIT
* “Food for Thought” runs through July 6 at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and noon-4 p.m. Sunday. 2200 Parks Ave., Virginia Beach. Free. Call 425-0000.
