This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 24, 2011 - Have you ever repeated a word over and over and over and over again, until its meaning is drained and it fails to signify? Then you wait a while, and see how the word recovers?
Now consider this: Charlotte Posenenske and Lee Lozano were successful artists in the 1960s, working in Conceptual-Minimalist modes, showing paintings and sculptures and engaging in artistic "actions." And then they quit.
No doubt these women had specific, individual reasons for withdrawing from the active production of art. But they seem to have shared a common disillusionment with the entire enterprise, losing any sense of art's function, its purpose, even its definition. It seems that art failed to signify for them, like the too-oft repeated word.
Day of the Locust at White Flag uses Posenenske and Lozano to pose questions of art's meaning, necessity and ontology, to examine how and whether art can mean anything in an oversaturated world.
The exhibition, curated by Jessica Baran, brings together works by contemporary artists Rochelle Feinstein, Jon Pestoni, Mamie Tinkler, Katherine Bernhardt and Jonathan Horowitz.
They are witty, ironic, depressing, ingenious; and while they won't definitively answer these questions, they'll recover a considerable degree of meaning for art, reminding us of why we ask the questions in the first place.
Ivy Cooper is the Beacon visual arts reviewer and a professor of art at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.