NEUROTIC REALISM
Bad Objects #3: Gary Kuehn & Christina Ramberg
GARY KUEHN: IN SITU (CANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY, HAVERFORD COLLEGE, HAVERFORD, PA)
Is it unfair to beat up on a college art gallery for what they’ve done? Small, early sculptures arrayed on a shelf like tchotchkes; definitive works, best viewed in-the-round, shoved against the walls or crammed in a corner; a video interview with the artist, Gary Kuehn, readily available on YouTube, projected onto one of the space’s few remaining surfaces, the volume cranked up so loud as to become a sort of bleating sound installation. Navigating the compact gallery’s complex floor plan, I felt as though I had been locked inside a hoarder’s labyrinth, even though the cluttering objects (obstacles?) themselves were relatively sparse: rectangular prisms of wood, lacquered with enamel, and conspicuously bolted together; a length of aluminum fastened to a metal form with c-clamps; twisted ro…
