Bruce Adams in Proximity
by
Cliff Parks Jr.
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Bruce Adams, Stay Safe, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Resource:Art.
It’s a bit of a lift even thinking about the time before “stay safe” became a standard farewell for emails, teleconferencing, and actual, in-person human interactions even though it was barely two and a half months ago that Tom Hanks got the Coronavirus, and things got really real. It’s against the backdrop of this new reality that Resource:Art organized and mounted their all county fine arts exhibition Proximity: In Search Of Life And Art and Bruce Adams gave us his frankly hilarious and downright ominous mixed-media front porch installation Stay Safe.
Like everything else, the art world has been entirely upended by the pandemic. The abruptness of the disruption was jarring: one week it was business as usual with a robust First Friday at the new Albright Knox space on Northland and on Allen Street; the following week saw the nixing of the First-Year UB MFA show, Burchfield Penny’s Friday night programming and the Buffalo Arts Studio’s fundraiser, which all fell like dominos as social distancing and avoiding your fellow humans in enclosed spaces became the new normal. How does new art happen, and how do audiences experience it, when the traditional venues are temporarily rendered taboo?
Inspired by the balcony concerts that began in Italy at the height of their lockdown, artists throughout Western New York stepped up to offer their own front yards as exhibition space for installations toured by mobile audiences over the span of Proximity, which ran for almost two weeks. It was an act of tremendous generosity, for artists to essentially invite audiences into their homes, and this generosity enabled new art, and some welcome limited human interactions, to happen.
Thrillingly, the gallerists of Resource:Art chose to take art galleries out of the equation for this exhibition, bringing art audiences to the artists themselves, offering a fascinating DIY variation on a good Buffalo First Friday art crawl. While the social aspects of the First Friday experience so integral to the Buffalo arts scene were necessarily muted, there was still some art-centered social interaction, and it was much needed and appreciated.
One highlight of Proximity is the work of a noted local art critic with a free-ranging regular column in Buffalo Spree, Bruce Adams, who used his mixed-media front yard installation to establish a dialogue with the viewer. Applying his deceptively light touch and keen critical perspective to the matter at hand, Adams delivered a warning that we’ve been here before and that the virus isn’t the only thing to be afraid of. The two socially distant, boxer short and sci-fi space helmet-clad male mannequins separated by six feet and a Jasper Johnsesque print urgently stating the work’s title do a lot of work, visually, to establish a distinct historical and social context for the piece rooted in the sexually and racially repressed 1950s.
At first glance allegorically grounding a work created in response to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic in a decade known for the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the birth of the modern Civil Rights movement seems odd, but Adams knows that the inhumanities inflicted upon our fellow humans represent an even larger threat than the virus itself. The shiny, fishbowl space helmets worn by the semi-nude male mannequins that went out of style thanks to George Lucas and Joe Johnston might provide protection against space aliens spraying droplets with airborne infection vectors, but they wouldn’t help one bit if you were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or targeted for your sexuality or skin color.
Adams also uses pop-culture signifiers from 50’s science fiction movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still, posing his unwigged male mannequins in an exaggerated and humorous “we come in peace” gesture usually reserved for space aliens greeting terrified townspeople and trigger happy soldiers before the bullets and death rays started flying. This grand, fear-driven tradition of paranoia never really went away, and it’s certainly having another moment in 2020 thanks to the President’s Twitter feed, the questionable information-gathering habits of citizens inclined to believe everything but objective reality, and the invisible enemy of the current Coronavirus crisis seemingly tailor-made for a multitude of conspiracy theories.
But what does it mean to “stay safe,” and why does that sound familiar? The clear homoeroticism of Adams’s piece points to a somewhat more recent chapter in American history featuring another invisible enemy, and woeful Presidential leadership, specifically the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s when the concept of “safe sex” entered the popular conscious. The Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS crisis, which featured two of the public health officials currently leading the Coronavirus effort, Drs. Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield, was also controversial at the time, thoroughly inadequate, and frequently punitive instead of palliative. Using bleakly ironic, camp humor, Adams underlines this history and the sobering fact that there’s no cure or vaccine for AIDS...almost forty years later.
Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and the Proximity socially distanced road show art exhibition that it was a part of, Stay Safe beautifully straddled the needs of public art, with it’s considerations for community content, especially with regards to artists displaying their art in their own neighborhoods, and a desire to go deep and go dark into the subject matter that’s reshaping the world around us. Underneath the shininess and warmth and temporary placemaking, Bruce Adams uses of camp and historical signifiers to raise warning us that our enemies aren’t invisible.
Cliff Parks Jr. is a concerned citizen, activist, and troublemaker. Parks writes primarily about music but is currently in the process of branching out.
