http://www.cia.edu/about/pressroom.php?sub=current&news_id=110
To clarify: a bachelor of fine arts degree is awarded at the end
of CIA's five-year undergraduate program. At that time a mini-show
of each candidate's work is presented for critique and review
during a week-long marathon. The class of 2007 event included
more than 100 artists from the school's 16 departments,
ranging from Biomedical Art through Industrial Design and
Interior Design, to Glass, Metals, Painting, Drawing,
and the school's much-touted interdepartmental TIME program
(Technology and Integrated Media Environment). The boundaries
between mediums are fluid these days, however, with printmakers
like the very promising Katie Loesel showing mainly watercolor
sketches, and painters like Nathan Margoni coming up with anything
from video projections to soft sculpture.
I was only half kidding. I overheard one weary educator at CIA's
Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts remark, "BFAs aren't
what they used to be." If he was remembering earnest bodies of
work that wore their formal concerns on their metaphorical sleeves
- well, times have a-changed, and probably more than once since
that was true. But there's no denying that informal or eccentric
materials (a lot of recyclables, from plastic to newsprint,
are among the basic materials used by some of CIA's current
crop of students) and resoundingly low-brow pop- culture themes
make for many of this year's most memorable installations.
Margoni's ""No Fear' Monster Park" was located outside behind a fence.
Luckily the sun shone throughout BFA week; in more typical Cleveland
weather, Margoni's fabric and crumpled-newspaper constructions would
have melted, mildewed and begun to stink by Friday. Even in
dry conditions they looked pretty sodden. One of Margoni's two large
sculptures might have been the aftermath of a Muppet genocide, or
maybe an explosion in a clown factory. Bulbous stuffed faces, hands,
claws and other body parts were melded into an eight-foot ball
of mayhem, mounted on a contraption which visitors were encouraged
to spin around. You cranked the handle, and the stuffing began to fly;
for those of us who are a bit warped, it was pretty funny. Another very
grotesque, long (10 or 12 feet) figure was stretched on the ground nearby.
Among the pale, heavy-lidded eyeballs on its forehead a sticker read,
"Shot Drinker." A rope was attached to it that ran up and through a widget
on top of the nearby fence. Pulled hard from the other side, the whole
thing suddenly stood up in a funky moment of 'toonish resurrection.
That basic post-modern equation, a dividend of information overload
and the changeless facts - the tedium, terror and beauty -
of human life, was inscribed everywhere at CIA's 2007 BFA exhibits.
A few of the grads on view will go on to become famous in their
various fields, others will end up running with some more stable
day job, perhaps burying their artistic efforts in a shallow grave
next to their adolescence. But judging from the creativity,
inventiveness and sheer thrill of encounter evident in so many
of the works, it seems that so far, art and school in the first
years of this new century have been quite a ride for just about
every one of them.
(Cleveland Institute of Art)
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