Unring the Bell at Cornish College surveys the early work of Cornish grad (1991) Dan Webb, curated by Jess Van Nostrand. Because the show is about getting started, its catalog (drawn by Kelly Martin) is a comic book, which represents Webb’s reading habits when he happened upon the evidence of art in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1983.
The day I learned about art, I was just another kid skipping class in high school.
Here’s what he saw, flipping through a book on modern art:
His reaction?
HAHA
Webb is a great carver in all materials by anyone’s measure, but there are better. What makes him an essential artist is not the level of his skill, which is high, but his ability to use his skill to be (in Kafka’s phrase), an ax for the frozen sea within us, what Rauschenberg did with a stuffed goat, tire and paint, using odds and ends as a floor.
Hiding out in the library stacks in high school, himself a maker, he realized there were makers who triumphed beyond literal depictions, and that the essence of art is exactly what he craved – freedom. Webb talks about his work tomorrow at noon in the gallery, free admission.
Samples of it include a pair of desks, with gum chewed by the artist. Hanging in threads, it looks suspiciously like paint thrown on the beard of a goat.
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