Most locals won't go to a festival performance, but in previous years even the most disconnected resident could get a taste of the Spoleto/Piccolo experience thanks to their often-panned "site-specific art" installations... stuff that would go up around town and alternately delight and/or freak-out spectators.
Last year we had rice growing in pans at Memminger Elementary... people were all excited about it, but I never understood why... we had a sod maze at Waterfront Park ... and a very strange thing at Marion Square in which one participated in a childlike mythical quest, moving from plywood installation to plywood installation, eventually being rewarded with a glimpse of something attached to a parking garage, viewed through a hole in a piece of wood.
And yes, it was strange. But here's a clue: We like strange.
As a fan of the visual arts, I look forward to the annual festival exhibits, and I've got a bunch more to go see. I stopped by the City Gallery at Waterfront Park on Sunday and was wildly underwhelmed by this year's exhibits.
Not only is there no art in the public spaces this year, but the stuff at the CG@WP is relatively bland. Shimon Attie's "The History of Another" is a cool idea, and it grabs you immediately... but when every piece is a variation on the same theme, with the same idea represented over and over, the net effect is a devaluation of the original thought. Result: I was appreciative, but quickly impatient.
Phil Moody's "Textile Towns" is a subject near and dear to the hearts of many Southerners, which makes Moody's exhibit upstairs particularly disappointing. Combining words, images and textures to create art? I'm there. But Moody seems to buy into too many mill-town myths for my tastes.
The textile period is a complex and emotional subject, but let's be blunt: it remains a stain on our collective regional soul. Mill towns put working people "in their place;" separated Southerners from their rural roots; turned individuals into cheap labor. They beat us down, made us feel dependent and inferior and, in the end, they turned us mean.
Some of us want to remember the experience fondly. Others don't. And perhaps my anger at Moody's representation was intentional on his part. In that case, perhaps it was successful. But my take stands for what it is: Mill towns make people small. I don't like art that does the same, that renders the actual pictures of the subjects smaller than the words that someone else speaks about them. "Textile Towns" buries the realities of hard-pinched, desperate lives under a threadbare blanket of rosy, nostalgic kitsch.
Give me a sod maze for children to play in any day.
daniel conover
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