“Taste” Exhibition
Small Black Door
This event has ended.
In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag asserts that taste has the ability to “convert the serious into the frivolous”. What does a serious work look like? What does a frivolous work look like? This is decided and further complicated by the viewer’s endlessly complex and personal sense of taste. She continues:
“Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the soverignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the facilty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive.” - Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays, 1964
Where and when in the language of art has taste, something so instrumental to intent, become regarded as frivolous or vapid? With “Taste”, Brian Hubble brings together artists who are working to confront this question. They are altering and exploiting their own sensibilites to illuminate the possibilities of reason behind this mysterious force.
In this exhibition, the conviction of taste and self-exploration fuels the practice of Bittman, Brown, Lewis, and Reyna. They each present their personal sensibilities as steps toward a deeper self-knowing.
In contrast, Ashcraft, Cueva, Powers, and Hubble court the ruination of sensibility. Exercizing the right to topple normative modes of art making, they stand for the destruction of aesthetic comfort and understanding.
With Elliott, Jensen, and Smith, clever subversions of the common languages of taste add an appropriate complexity. As taste is infinitely diverse and personal the investigation of its rationale is endless.
Media
Schedule
from October 19, 2012 to November 18, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-10-19 from 18:00 to 22:00