Posted Feb 1, 2010, 10:06 am
On Jan. 23, Tucson gallery owner Eric Firestone premiered “Get What You Want,” a collection of new collages and paintings by British artist Andy Burgess.
Like all of Firestone’s openings, the Burgess reception was packed with fans of contemporary art presented in a cool setting replete with curiosities. For the Burgess opening, several costumed “cigarette girls” made the rounds with old-timey candy, making the event feel more like a real art “happening” and less like a stodgy, cheap wine on the table sort of affair.
Most shocking in terms of décor, however, were the tiny red stickers adorning the Burgess pieces, meaning “sold” in gallery-speak. Three days after the official opening of the show, more than 20 pieces had sold, said Firestone.
That this kind of arts commerce is going on under our noses during a recession and a city, state and national arts budget crisis is indeed a coup for Firestone, for Burgess, and for Tucson’s gallery scene.
Meet your host
Firestone has been in the gallery business since he was 22. “I was taught that you walk before you run in the art business.”
He began with an emphasis on regional art and artists, and without any snobbery about what comprises art itself. His gallery on the North side has long combined furniture and fixture with painting and sculpture, and while this curatorial decision may seem to reflect necessity in Tucson’s arts economy, it also reflects Firestone’s larger mission: to explode certain art world binaries, like art versus craft and commercial concerns versus aesthetic integrity.
Firestone has mounted an offensive here in Tucson on those in the art world who think the only places west of New York worth showing work are San Francisco and Beverly Hills. “After 3 or 4 years, I started to make a hard shift. I saw an opportunity to go after work others weren’t,” he explains.
After relocating his exhibition space late last year, Firestone created a gallery vast and labyrinthine enough to house works by the many artists he represents, a temporary exhibition space and a gift shop.
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Firestone says that he is “trying to pull off a gallery hat trick,” attempting to bring a museum’s curatorial agenda, a community-minded ethic, and financial solvency together at the 6th Ave. space.
The gallery’s grand opening had an attendance of more than 1200, and Firestone hopes that his launch has been “contagious for others — maybe it raises the bar.”
Andy Burgess: Guest of honor
Born in 1969 in London, mixed-media artist Andy Burgess was not alive for the golden age of that other Andy, brightest of American arts luminaries and happenings, Andy Warhol.
There is a common thread between the two, however; like Warhol, Burgess is fascinated by commercial images, and like Warhol, he is employed in the commingling of such images with tropes of fine art.
Burgess has held a longstanding fascination with collage, creating patterns with old matchbook covers and allowing the smaller images on them to merge into a larger graphic structure. Citing Kurt Schwitters as his most direct influence, Burgess also names Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi and the cult of Dada, with their deep engagement with collage and montage, as his antecedents.
But Burgess describes his movement back into painting and away from assemblage as “a kind of epiphany. I suddenly realized that the collages could be source material for painting. Artists routinely use drawings when they start paintings.”
In Burgess’s work, collage has begun to serve that very purpose.The painstaking process of oil painting necessarily creates a different subject position for Burgess in relation to the new pieces. By definition, painting in oil is more deliberate and more premeditated than collage. According to Burgess, “The challenge is to follow up on that and see if I end up where I want to be.”
Certainly, the change to oils has changed the musculature of the work. Burgess does all the lettering by “hand and eye — I like the feel of doing it by hand. Using tools makes it feel like it has been mechanically reproduced.”
This aversion to the mechanical is what Burgess and others in his generation bring to bear as they interpret late- and post-Modernists like Warhol. History and place return to both subject and site of creation in ways that acknowledge the impossibility of un-ringing the bell of technology and its implications.
Burgess, who has relocated to Tucson for both love and family, will certainly continue to delight Tucson and international viewers with his new methods of appropriation and reinvention.
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