New Media Art
A look especially at Matt Kenyon's social conscience and egalitarian flair
I have a long history of contentious feelings about “contemporary” art. It’s hit or miss for me. I like some of what is now regarded as “vintage” in the contemporary art world—Andy Warhol’s soup cans, or his Queen Elizabeth in “Grand Duchess Vladimir” tiara, for example. But, I don’t know, I guess the most annoying thing about the industry has always been the astronomical and ridiculous inflation of value. $58.4 million for a balloon dog of Jeff Koons1 just strikes me as an obscene way for the superrich to indulge the bottomless pit of their egos. It would be unfair, though, to paint all modern art with the same brush. Warhol wasn’t merely competing in the game of the Next Big Shocking Thing. He was making deeply relevant statements about the commercialization and suburbanization of society at large—the way the icon of the British monarchy is reduced to being a mere celebrity of pop culture, perhaps. The Soup Cans are still discussed and debated. For most observers, they represent the branding and blandness of capitalistic consumer culture. We might add something about the conformist behaviors in American suburbs—that they all look alike, perhaps. Matt Kenyon, too, is offering me a fresh perspective on modern art. He is using “new media” techniques to convey powerful, deep, thought-provoking messages.
With all these conflicting thoughts, I naturally did not know what to expect when I visited the Baton Rouge Gallery (Center for Contemporary Art.) I was the sole visitor (during my visit, that is) on a Sunday afternoon. There were some people leaving just as I was arriving. It was fortuitous because I ended up having a private tour guided by Gwen Palagi, the gallery’s Director of Development. The exhibit on show was entirely provided by the widely acclaimed artist Matt Kenyon, a Baton Rouge native and TED Fellow who is also an art professor at the University of Buffalo, New York, where he resides. My visit was predicated on the research necessary for an article about the gallery which I wrote for my neighborhood Stroll magazine. That article, though, is only 300 words, and its purpose is to promote the not-for-profit space in City Park, not to advertise for any particular artist. I wanted to go more in depth about Kenyon’s work specifically.
His exhibit “Cloudburst” is on show at the Baton Rouge Gallery from August 3-31st. All of the works in it make a bold, Warholian social statement. Most of these works have been seen before. One of them belong in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One of them, though, made its world debut in Cloudburst—that is the work entitled, “Log Rule.” Kenyon used a trick of “microprinting” to offer up a “circulating memorial” to all those who have perished from COVID-19. “In a moment when people seem to want to forget the pandemic and move on with their daily lives,” says the catalog, “Log Rule offers a circulating memorial to the scale of our losses.” Logarithmic pages are projected onto a screen, showing microprinted ink on graphic paper. We use a device, moveable on the paper, to view the names of pandemic losses on that screen. “Log Rule” is an ongoing artwork at BRG!
This work of so much contemporary relevance is making its first appearance at any place in the world, and it is situated in the BRG’s “Dufour Gallery.” The Baton Rouge Gallery has two exhibit rooms—the Front Gallery and the Dufour Gallery, separated by a short hallway. In the two rooms, the Cloudburst exhibit is dispersed. With “Log Rule” in the Dufour Gallery, there are three other works:
“Alternative Rule,” 2020: Another presentation utilizing microprint technology, it projects the names of children who died in all of the American school shootings since the Columbine High School massacre and prior to the Uvalde, Texas shooting. Gun violence is an issue close to Kenyon’s heart. As a student, he personally witnessed a shooting at Westdale Middle School in Baton Rouge in the late 1980s. “I remember the announcement over the intercom to shelter in our classroom,” he says. He remembers the teaching telling them to lay down on the floor. “I remember the police with their guns and the subsequent shootout behind the school. Stray bullets punched neat little holes high up in the windows of the classroom. At the time, I struggled to make sense of that violence—just as we struggle today with why those in power allow such events to keep reoccurring, and how it might ever be possible to recover.”2
“Notepad,” 2007: This work by Kenyon belongs to the permanent collection at MOMA in New York. The story behind the creation of this work is fascinating. The Cloudburst catalog describes it as a remarkable “Trojan horse,” as it surreptitiously injected the names of slaughtered Iraqi civilians into the official archives of the United States Congress. See the video below where Kenyon explained his process in making his subversive, poignantly compassionate “notepad” artwork during a TED Talk. Kenyon gave each member of his audience a name of a slain Iraqi citizen and implored all to write to Congress and get each one of those names in the permanent record on Capitol Hill.
“Supermajor,” 2013: This work produces an optical illusion and puddle of yucky (yellow-dyed water, representing oil) to inspire commentary on the exploitation of a finite natural resource and its impact on the climate. It has global relevance, obviously, but in Louisiana, where the oil industry is so central to the culture and commerce, there must be a particular poignance.
In the Front Gallery at BRG, from August 3-31, the centerpiece work is Tide, 2022. This is the piece that grabs you as you immediately enter the space. At first glance, it’s just a neat, well-constructed pyramid of champagne glasses. Water fills the glasses from the top and runs down, strategically filling all the glasses, and this produces the intended metaphor for the city’s 2016 flood. The pyramid itself represents the flow of trauma from top to bottom—minimal damage at first, among the elite, but catastrophic and lasting damage at the bottom of society.
Matt Kenyon has made me appreciate contemporary art as I have not been able to do in a very long time. I’ve never been an absolutist on the idea that art must have a purpose, but I’m also no fan of art that produces no other purpose than to be shocking. Beauty is the highest purpose of all. Van Gogh’s sunflowers, his rich textures giving permanent life to the peasants and livestock of the French countryside, are giving us heart wrenching emotions every time we see them. This was Van Gogh’s gift that keeps on giving—showing us, forever, the world in vibrant colors he himself, being color blind, may not have been able to fully appreciate. Kenyon, no less, is provoking fierce emotions by tapping into our love for children, for nature, our impulse toward things like equality, peace, and compassion. Kenyon is no ivory-tower elite. He attended public middle school in Baton Rouge. He graduated from the public Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, LA. His art is about the brutal impact that decisions made in the halls of power have on the most vulnerable people in the world. In choosing a space to exhibit his Cloudburst, he did not choose some snooty private art gallery. He chose the totally free BRG, an egalitarian space open six days a week, Tuesday-Sunday. The dude followed me back on Instagram without having a clue who I was. I don’t know, if he’s not the real McCoy of the contemporary art world, I don’t know who is.
Kogel, Carol: “At $142.4 Million, Triptych Is the Most Expensive Artwork Ever Sold at an Auction.” The New York Times. 12 November 2013. https://archive.ph/WdJoh.
Cloudburst: The Work of Matt Kenyon. Catalog. Baton Rouge Gallery and Louisiana State University School of Art, 2022.