| Nedko Solakov
by Andrea Legge
100 Degrees in Tourist Season
A (for the purposes of this piece)
loathsome and ignorant tourist couple, (we hate them) goes to the Met for the afternoon.
The man’s done after half an hour. Like an idiot, he waits by the coatcheck for the
next 3 hours for his wife, growing more and more resentful by the minute. (He doesn’t
realize that there’s that great spacious cafeteria/restaurant to his right, just a
medium half-block trek downtown through the Greeks.) Anyway, he can’t understand why
his wife has to look at everything and read every wall plaque, best he can figure is that
she wants to get all her money’s worth, or maybe she just wants to be a pain in his
ass, one of the two. At the end of the day, after they’ve made up from their
knock-down drag-out fistfight right there on 5th Ave. while waiting for their
bus back to the hotel, neither one will be infused with any more social sophistication or
cultural matter than the other. It so doesn’t matter how we look at art. That’s
the Great Thing; putting monstrous mitigating factors aside, like quality of artwork and
willingness/education of viewer, (yikes—can I do that?), if the work is going to
touch or affect, then it will, whether you study a lot, a little, or not at all.
What is the responsibility of the viewer?
Do we have one? When we’re standing there in a gallery, the middle of the white cube,
what’s expected of us? Who cares, really. It’s up to us. It could be that we
should indeed invest as much energy and interest as possible in the art, especially if it
requires a bit more then ‘just’ looking, if it requires listening, clicking a
mouse, staying through the end of a video, sound piece, performance, etc. Or our
responsibility could be nil, nothing, and we can act accordingly; throwing a glance
through the plate glass window on our way by. But let’s just say we actually make it
into the gallery.
In the highly unlikely event that our
tourist couple find themselves out at PS1 during their vacation to NYC, (lets say the
hotel concierge or one of the bellboys is a struggling artist), I think they would have
greatly enjoyed Nedko Solakov’s A (not so) White Cube, especially after their
disastrous visit to the Met. And like the Met, the piece’s full
appreciation requires that a few brain cells be spent, but the reward for the effort is
large. Solakov’s humor alone is adorable, for instance his confused worm, hilarious 2
shades of gray paint conversing, or those stuffed toys and action figures perched near the
ceiling, ridiculously, keeping an eye on us. His attention to various incidental,
preexisting marks and scratches around the room is not exactly original, but it is the
comedic and ultrafine, unpretentious way he goes about the job of pointing out these
pointless non-incidents that hold our interest. The fact that our Met tourists may have
enjoyed this piece is not necessarily a dis, for while Solakov’s work could be
negatively dismissed as clever, it is more likely, in it’s smallness, about huge
global common denominators such as humility and humor. We’ve all, artists or not, had
those moments when we’ve lain in bed at night and made some kind of recognizable
shape out of the water stains on the ceiling. Maybe it hasn’t happened in decades,
since childhood, but we’ve all done it, formed imaginative one-liners or elaborate
visible stories in an instant, from absolutely nothing. So it took some concentration.
But, like Solokov’s white-ish room at PS1, it is effortless, like walking downhill,
which is why we go in in the first place, and also why we have such a good time there.
Andrea Legge is an artist who lives and
works in NYC. She recieved her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NYC in 1998. |
