Last night, I attended an unusual event at XXXX. It was a “Smash Down,” and it featured two local, all-female roller derby crews competing against each other. The OC Roller Girls and the Long Beach Roller Derby took turns crashing into 8-foot clay walls on each end of the California Gallery, accumulating points and making impressions in the clay for YYYY.
A DJ spun tunes, and beer and popcorn were served. When the roller derby started, one competitor crashed into a bystander and a large amplifier the DJ had set up. I thought that was a sure sign that mayhem would ensue, but the girls toned it down a bit after that. I guess they were just testing the boundaries in the beginning.
Is this art? It depends on how you fill in the Xs and Ys, doesn’t it? If X = ESPN, say, and Y = a television spectacle, it wouldn’t be.
But if, as is the case, X = the Laguna Art Museum and Y = “Long Beach artist Jocelyn Foye,” then most people in the art world would say “yes,” because Foye says it is. Foye, according to the post by Richard Chang of the Orange County Register (from which I quoted above) “plans to pour liquid rubber into the clay impressions. When the rubber hardens, that will be her final product, which she calls ‘redefined action painting.’ “
Some of her work — though not this piece — will be on view in The OsCene 2010: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC, opening today and on view until May 16 at the museum.
I’ve never seen Foye’s work, and make no value judgments about it — some of it, posted on her website, looks interesting.
But I do question whether the smash down should have been staged in the museum’s galleries. As Chang reported, “As the evening wound down, the young women posed for pictures and there was clay all over the California Gallery’s walls and hard wood floor.” (Chang posted videos of the event, if you’d like a look.)
I want museums to broaden their audiences, yes, but how they do it — what message they send — is important. When they move the focus away from art and toward spectacle, it’s a stunt — and a mistake. They may get crowds interested in roller-derby, but how many will come back to see other art? Meantime, are they driving away their core audience, which probably doesn’t want to see galleries laden with clay? Or be hit by a careening roller-skater?
Is the museum undermining its case for support when it stages something that, seems to me, belongs more in a commercial gallery? I think so.
Photo credit: Courtesy Laguna Art Museum