REVIEW
Smoke and Mirrors – Per Omnia Saecula Saeculorum
By Ezrha Jean Black
August 10, 2015
Jeffrey Vallance, The Medium is the Message; Spirit Photo: Salvador Dali, 2012. Archival digital photographic print on cotton rag paper, 52″ x 42″, 1 of 4.
Jeffrey Vallance’s séance/performance, Ghost Writers – a collaboration with the self-titled psychic astrologer, Joseph Ross, held in conjunction with Vallance’s show at CB1 Gallery, The Medium Is the Message – was ostensibly intended to draw out the spirits (and opinions) of art critics past (Vallance has not lacked for critical commentary in the local or contemporary art press), to sound off against Vallance’s photo-montaged artist-icons displayed on the surrounding gallery walls – themselves previously channeled by psychics in Vallance-led performances (e.g., at the last Frieze Fair). But the actual effect was more of an invocation directed at his entire audience of culture consumers.
The spirit of the invocation derived more from the 19th century than the 20th or 21st. Mr. Ross has appeared in varying costume for his séances, but on this particular evening, he seemed to be playing a mid-20th century version of the dandy, albeit one conceived in 19th century spirit, attired head to toe in lavender – lavender suit, lavender-banded fedora, and white and lavender spectator shoes. An electric candelabra flickered at his feet as Vallance tried to massage a few channeled spirits from his medium. They came almost too easily and perhaps predictably – two dandies of 19th century criticism (and art). “Hello, I’m Oscar Wilde…. Does anybody know who I am?” Naturally, he immediately made reference to Wilde’s famous essay, “The Critic As Artist,” written in the form of a quasi-Platonic dialogue (that would have made Plato howl – probably with fury, but not without laughter). I didn’t recognize any direct quotes from the essay, and he may have even contradicted a few of Wilde’s actual points, but he caught the spirit of the thing, which attempts to dissolve the distinctions between art-making and its criticism. Wilde was making a larger point in “The Critic,” but the subsidiary point of artistic choice and selection as functions of critical thinking applied. He segued from Wilde to Baudelaire, whose spirit has abided close to the art world since he first took it on in the mid-19th century – the ambiguous divide between the sacred and profane, innocence and corruption, the perfume of decay, the respiration of civilization’s rise and fall – yeah, we get it….