Beth Reitmeyer: You Mean So Much to Me
Donald Moffett: What Barbara Jordan Wore
The front room of Standard, containing about half of Beth Reitmeyer’s installation You Mean So Much to Me, is itself provocative: 18 paintings of abstracted roses hang on walls covered with wallpaper made by screen printing similar patterns in red. In part a joke on the neutral white walls of the typical gallery or museum, Reitmeyer’s background both sensualizes the space and competes with her paintings for attention. Another distraction is that the paintings are of different sizes; one wall has a single 30-by-40-inch painting while another displays a grid of 15 8-by-8-inch ones. This excess gives the room a pleasantly “hot” feel just this side of obsessive nuttiness.
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Though there’s an element of childish kitsch here, Reitmeyer is hardly a naif. An Evanstonian who earned an MFA from Northwestern in 1998, she combines the wallpaper, paintings, and sub-Hallmark-card poems in a knowing way that suggests conscious choice. But there’s also something heartfelt about the installation. Her handmade flowers are considerably more supple in color and shape than the typical kitsch object, and though Reitmeyer described the exhibit to me as “a little funny, like something you might do in eighth grade,” she added that “you’re sincere in eighth grade.” The fact that the artworks for sale are so similar to those being given away–and that the latter might help the recipient build or rebuild a relationship–suggests generosity and hopefulness. Reitmeyer has given away work in earlier shows but says she was reacting to the September 11 attacks, if only obliquely: she intended to create a more direct response but found her natural optimism made that impossible.
Nov. 7th is being presented on the half hour, and I’d recommend visitors experience it from the beginning. Marcus’s story is so compelling, and he tells it with such skill and conviction, that I thought it might be fiction or a scripted account. But Art Institute curator James Rondeau says that it’s a true story that was recorded without rehearsal. Viewers don’t usually stare at the same still image for 24 minutes, and this one takes on a disturbing forensic quality, constantly returning the viewer’s attention to the monologue, whose lapidary details are as precise as the few hairs visible on Marcus’s scalp. Image and sound alike establish a vaguely disturbing intimacy, and the focus is on the physical particulars of one accident and on one man’s grief. The old feminist saying that the personal is political seems appropriate here: Marcus’s story makes an implicit argument for gun control.
On the third floor, Moffett projects looped videos of a small portion of the same hearing on three canvases painted gold, accompanied again by a recording of Jordan’s full 13-minute speech. In Untitled (Ms. Jordan) we see her in medium shot, an image dominated by her red dress; Untitled (The Public) shows people listening. These videos at once abnegate the artist’s work–we can’t really see the paintings–and ennoble Jordan. Gold in art has long signified the precious and the holy, and by obliterating his painting with her image, Moffett suggests the artist’s function is no more important than that of leaders like Jordan.
Palmer’s other installation–Land Mass, made with Wendy Jacob–consists of 16 benches in the same room where people can sit while reading the maps. Each dark green top is different, repeating the shape of a vacant lot in the city. Set on casters and easily movable, the benches can be rearranged, and the process of putting them together in new ways conveys a wonderful feeling of possibility. Together the photographs, the maps, and the benches give one the sense that taking action can bring seemingly incompatible realities together–and improve the world.
