Cultural Myths Cloud Perceptions

Of “Interiors”--the exhibition of paintings now up at LACE--William Wilson writes, “The work . . . invites forgetfulness.” Well, I saw the show April 13 and haven’t forgotten it at all. But then again--if Wilson’s reductive review is any indication--it seems I paid closer attention to the paintings than he did (“Wry and Witty Observations Decorate Images of ‘Interiors,’ ” Calendar, May 1).

He claims that “Francis Alys, Robin Tewes and Kevin Appel are all wry and witty about being the victims of decent upbringings.” What, then, are we to do with Appel’s brightly aestheticized images of bookcases and living rooms? How does transforming the most mundane of interior decorations--a console cabinet, for example--into gorgeously colored abstractions qualify as “complaining” about them?

Alys paints faceless self-portraits and has a stranger fill in his face. What does this gentle mockery of our attempts at controlling how we’re interpreted have to do with “middle-class suburban environments”? And if Tewes’ interrogations of cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity are simply whining about how middle-class suburbia “leaves artists helplessly shallow,” then send Wilson a copy of Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” for insight into how gender is the culturally demanded performance.

But, alas, Wilson’s review carefully selects from each artist the one painting that, with a stretch of the interpretive imagination, proves his thesis: Generation X is everywhere. And that’s what most appalls me about his review. It’s one thing to have the exciting new work of your peers honestly criticized; it’s another thing altogether to have it strategically represented and then dismissed simply because the reviewer is the victim of a cultural myth. This cultural myth--that every young voice complains futilely about futility--is too often deployed, conveniently enough, to dismiss what has been only cursorily explored by way of a generation’s contributions to contemporary culture, to art, to film and to literature. And I’m tired of it.

Trite generalizations about a generation may be the easiest way to dismiss work that one doesn’t (want to) engage, but it surely does not make for insightful writing on art. Nor is such totalizing very accurate: Appel is in his 20s, Alys in his 30s and Tewes in her 40s. According to Wilson, all adults under the age of 50 now belong to “a dispirited generation existing in a vacuum between the past and the future.” That attests to the lengths he is willing to go in order to see Generation X lurking in the background.