Why I Didn't Vote for Cavalry

I suppose it is no surprise that Cavalry won. The only thing we midwesterners love more than work is a righteous affirmation of work. I have a lot of respect for the skill and scale of the drawing. Without question, the draftsmanship is stunning. But what exactly do I get from looking at Cavalry, American Officers 1921, that I can’t get from the photograph and a magnifying glass? Technical ability is a prerequisite, not an end in itself. In his statement, Chris LaPorte wants to make an argument for the wholeness of it. OK. But why is that wholeness best represented in a completely faithful outsized pencil drawing of a documentary photograph?

The drawing shows me who wore spurs in their morning ride (and which riders rely on those spurs more than others), the variety of jodhpur fasteners available for the 1921 US cavalry uniform, trends in field boot styles, and the alarming weight of the whips used on their horses—information I might have missed in the photograph, but probably not. Perhaps critic Roger Green can help me see something I missed: “His drawing skills evoke the sense of wonder convincing illusionism has always inspired. Little surprise that our Paleolithic forebears accorded magical properties to cave paintings. LaPorte continues that primeval tradition, investing departed soldiers with new life in the contemporary world.” Hmm. I think what he means that LaPorte’s hyperrealism creates a sense of wonder. But of a military portrait? A scene we have seen over and over again? Really?

And second place has gone to further the important aesthetic advancement of Malibu living room art! Fabulous. The first and second place winners suffer from the same flaw: They are both exceptionally detailed works, both of which required terrific talent and skill to compose. But their subject matters have no apparent aesthetic merit. Both works draw our attention to the creation of the thing, not to the thing itself. How many times have you heard how many hours it took to make these? It’s not irrelevant, but it certainly isn’t the point.

It’s true that LaPorte’s technique is above and beyond the cleverness of the pixilated pieces (last year’s thumb tacks, this year’s Rubix cubes, corks, crayons, marbles). But take the winning work and look at it next to, say, the hyperrealism of Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait, a massive acrylic, 11-by-7 feet, painted between 1967 and 1968.

The aesthetic power of the subject in Close’s Big Self-Portrait is immediately alive and present—a transient moment captured in the curl of smoke, the impudent expression, the photographic fineness of each pore and hair. Big Self-Portrait says less about the execution of the painting (which is impressive on its own), and instead thrusts upon us an overwhelming act of self-examination. “I am not making facsimiles of photographs,” Close said. It is impossible to look at this painting in person (it’s at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, if you ever have the chance), and not confront painting’s aesthetic force. It encourages the viewer to go beyond mere wonder at the technique and to experience and engage it. Like the technique in David Sprigg’s Vision (which should have ranked higher than it did), Close’s technique falls away in the service of a greater master: the aesthetic power of the subject.

Marianne Moore, who studied and wrote about the visual arts, wrote in her poem, “When I Buy Pictures,” “It comes to this: of whatever sort it is, / it must be ‘Lit with piercing glances into the life of things’; / it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.” The point is not to celebrate and bring attention to the individual. We have enough of that already, don’t we? These subjects fall flat: soldiers; damsel in water. And? If the audience is ooohhhed and ahhhed enough by the craft, it seems, they stop asking questions of the art itself.

American poets, painters, and philosophers have long wrestled with what distinguished American art, literature, and thought from that of the Continent. For many, it was movement itself, the tension between the constancy of transition and the longing for epiphany. Art became an answer to that longing, what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the path of the creator to his work. Art was not a record as it was in the Old World traditions, but an event. I’m not saying good art has to be abstract expressionism. What I’m saying is that art has the capacity to address harder questions than, How well can you render a picture? I’m thinking of questions like, What does it mean to be alive in this place, in this cultural and historical moment? To answer, the artist must have the skill, of course. And the artists in the top ten have skill of some sort, or at least persistence, which is on its way to skill. But you also must reveal something only you, the artist, can show us. And it can’t just be about you.

My vote went to Beili Liu’s Lure/Forest or Lure/Wave. It was my early favorite, partly because of the happy accident of seeing it first thing opening night. By chance I met the artist and her husband, Blue, and got a first-hand explanation of how the piece was made and how they troubleshot unexpected setbacks. As most know by now, the piece is 3000-4000 disks, hand-stitched with bright red thread and hung in a wave-like composition. Individually, the disks shimmer with light and movement, enlivening an otherwise unremarkable industrial-looking room. The sheen on the disks gives the piece an aquatic, kinetic feel, as if all the disks are in constant motion together, whether they are physically connected or not. The disks take on the pulses of the space not independently, but together. This is not a mere illustration of a Chinese legend, as one critic has suggested. The legend of the red thread may be the originating force, but the piece goes far beyond that to evoke an organic holism to which we are all inextricably tied. The connections, seen and unseen, take on multiple meanings—they are not just intimate bonds, but bonds that connect us in ways we may not even know.