19th Nervous Breakdown at Norte Maar. — Photo by Sarah Pappalardo
It isn’t everyday that a gallery show is provocative enough to inspire another show; with the help of some good friends and Norte Maar, curator Elliot Lessing created an exhibition called 19th Nervous Breakdown in “immediate response” to the zeitgeisty Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, now showing at the Brooklyn Museum. For Lessing, this homage to Rock & Roll culture was a “call to action” that would inspire artists to produce works as spontaneous as the artists who embodied Rock & Roll.
“While you’d usually spend 12 to 18 months curating a show, this was a completely different experience putting this together…a complete departure,” said Lessing, who is the Executive Director of the Center for Outdoor Contemporary Art in San Francisco.
By creating and curating accessible art, his primary goal is to foster art that is comprehensible outside of the “artist’s lexicon.” In wrangling the raw energy of the Rock & Roll exhibit and the playfulness of the works in this show, there was
a unique mash of humor, celebrity obsession and derailment that is an inseparable (and warmly reflected upon) part of our popular culture.
In less than a week, Lessing cobbled together the work of seven artists who produced installations, sculpture, and photography inspired by the icons (and our unconditional love for them) on which we were all nursed from birth. From a 3-D homage to Amy Winehouse to a written-on-the-fly song by “Kraft-Halen,” a couple of artists departed from their usual media to have fun with the ways that the sometimes edgy, but often absurd Rock & Roll aesthetic has shaped our lives. You may not know it yet, but Amy Winehouse is shaping your life as you read this.
Artists Mark Shoffner and Rebecca Herman collaborated on an installation of “album covers for albums that haven’t been made yet” as Shoffner’s electronic-hair-band mashup played in the background. While the local artists were around to chat on Saturday, other San Francisco-based artists shipped their work to Norte Maar the night before the opening — “while the paint was still wet,” Lessing noted on some pieces. Lipstick love notes were found on every mirror in Norte Maar, while a gritty, questionably legal video installation complemented the playful pieces in the other room. While the show itself was compact, the power of a truly immediate response was apparent in every piece in the space.
Local artists Jason Robert Bell, Robert Bush, Ben Godward, Rebecca Herman, Mark Shoffner, Andrew Hurst, Nicole Tschampel, Frank Zadlow and San Franciscans Rives Granada and Kim Weller all contributed to this response.
