Interruption: Some art 203 sketches

Brian Stauffer: Subtly Timeless Concepts

As I walked into the stuffy University of Arizona Museum of Art, I thought to myself, I read books for a living… I don’t look at art and pretend it makes sense. As an English major, I looked at my surroundings with War and Peace in hand: a silent hall shadowy except for the glass doors behind me. As I made my way toward my destination – the “Hard Eyes” exhibit – my footsteps were booming upon impact with the freshly mopped floor, their resonance lasting forever, ricocheting off the walls and making my heart beat quickly. I was out of place. I turned in haste toward the glass doors, my vehicle to freedom, when my eye caught a piece of art that wasn’t a picture of water lilies, that wasn’t a ridiculous Campbell’s soup can, and that certainly was the farthest thing from an empty white canvas save a thick black line.  I was instantly immersed in a grotesque realm, a bony skeletal hand in black and white poured into my pupils. Atop the hand perched a dove and in its mouth a twig.

            Of course, having read the Bible, having noted that every major author since the beginning of time has alluded in one way or another to the Bible, I was taken back. Everything in the hall faded instantly into shadow, and only the piece and I remained. I took note of the simplistic style; the subtle shading and the black and white definitive lines. But on a closer look, I realized that this was no sketch, rather, it was digitally created. The image seemed verging on cartoonish but still retaining some kind of traditional craftsmanship. The room, along with its other pieces, came back with a silent woosh into my peripheral vision and I stood there in tacit awe. This piece had stimulated me. It was my White Whale, the Minister’s Black Veil, the heart beating beneath the floorboards. Suddenly, this man named Brian Stuaffer (as noted on the placard below) was equated in my mind with Dickens, Faulkner and Poe. Stauffer had roused in me the same grotesquity as they did, and what’s more, with the same intensity.

            I melted into his concept, and flooded into the rest of his pieces. Here, a woman was encased in a suitcase handled by man clad in a tux. There, exuberant colors excited my senses in a flurry of references to nuclear bombs, weddings, death, drugs… and the list goes on, all with heavy political implications. I could not only see Stauffer’s concept, but could feel it. Why? His concepts dealt largely with situations I deal with everyday. Each of his pieces, most of them generally colorful with high contrast, played into my sphere of society and the political nuance that most readily affected me. Though some dealt with more distant concepts (such as the violence in Darfour), I still related to them on a personal level because of his style. Indeed, he bordered the Pop Art threshold, but what differentiated his art from the Pop Art of the 60s and 70s was that these topics were inherently modern, but also timeless. Though Darfour is a conflict born out of modernity, its raison d’être remains the same of war throughout the history of Africa. His concept of drugs, again, is a concept dealt with from water-to-wine days of Christ to the trainspotting days of Kurt Cobain and beyond. Just as Thomas Pynchon writes so well the post-modern human condition (whose basis is also formed on such timeless grotesquities of man) so did my new favorite artist, so did Brian Stuaffer in his exhibit, “Hard Eyes: Images in Empathy.”