I checked out Rosson Crow’s show yesterday. It was my first in-person viewing of her work. (My favorite painting by her, New York Stock Exchange After Bond Rally, 1919 was not there.) I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the giant canvases. The colors were extraordinarily snappy, esp. on such a dreary day with a Noreaster going on outisde. I was not crazy about every piece, or every aspect of every piece, but it was generally very enjoyable. The scale of the work impressed me and left me looking forward to a book of her work. All in all, I kept thinking (though I tried to stop) of 80s splatter paint and I feel less paint actually might have worked better. But I enjoy her work more for the ideas than the acrylic. The fantastic color is a bonus. I’m intrigued by her idea of meditating on the abandoned spaces where something exciting once happened. I think she has struck gold with it and generally executes it well. (Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why I so enjoyed the peripheral rooms on the stage of Radio Golf – the abandoned lunch counter and so on. I was also intrigued by the made-to-look-old-and/or-eroded shoe shine chair [contrasted with a futuristic shoe shine chair] at the Whitney Biennial.)
While looking at the neon figures in Crow’s (non-great, imo) painting The Bang Bang Room (about Plato’s Retreat – and the only one to feature anthropomorphic images), I was reminded of a letter (unpublished) that I dashed off to the New York Review of Books some months back in response to Michael Kimmelman’s review of the new Yankee Stadium and Citifield:
I agree with most of Michael Kimmelman’s superb analysis in “At the Bad New Ballparks,” but I was surprised by his declaration that he found the giant neon baseball players that adorned Shea Stadium “appalling.” With all due respect to Mr. Kimmelman’s expertise, I would like to venture that the spare and not un-graceful neon figures were Matisse-inspired and/or Calder-inspired, and while they were perhaps somewhat hokey, they were far from appalling and could have been much, much worse. I never saw in person the panels that the neon figures replaced, but the figures made driving past Shea Stadium more interesting than driving past Yankee Stadium. They were reminders of summer on a winter’s ride on the Grand Central Parkway. Not to overthink these loud neon relics from the 80s, but wasn’t there something almost primordial about them, bringing to mind the Cerne Abbas giant in England or the Nazca Lines of Peru?
Well, that was the text of my letter. Googling around has let me know that popular wisdom called the old neon ballplayers “embarrasing.” Such vast amounts of our culture are embarrasing that the word really does not mean much. But I think the fact that Kimmelman’s highly trained eye found them appalling does mean something. Then again, perhaps he did not mean “appalling” as “appalling” but as “appppaaaaaallllllllling” as in “oh this Big Mac is appppalllllling” when it fact it’s actually pretty good, yet still appalling.
