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Red Grooms in Yonkers
When octopuses panic:
The pure creative joy of Red Grooms
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Over the Memorial Day weekend I went with some friends to see “Red Grooms: In the Studio” during its final days at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. Grooms has been creating his art since I was a small boy. I reviewed his big show at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1985, and I never quite forgot it. Grooms is one of those artists who remind you what it’s all about.
We’ve become conditioned to admire the Flauberts, the Capotes and the folks who sweat an hour over finding the precise word and take a week to write a single chapter. This is real “art from the heart,” we are given to understand. At the very least, it’s “method art.” But someone like Red Grooms reminds us that art is a divine form of play.
Why does the artist create? Why does the writer write, if not for the sheer joy of it? Grooms will take a shoebox, two empty cardboard toilet paper rolls, an adding machine tape and his imagination, and he’ll create a rinky-dink small town movie theater showing an action-packed “B” western. This is pure creative joy—the same sort of joy a four-year-old feels playing with Lego blocks. It’s the recompense that life gives to artists. Sometimes it’s the only recompense that life gives to artists.
One reason I’ve always been a fool for Baroque art is that it’s motivated by that same unleashed, overflowing joy of creation. Prancing elephants, lions and tigers, gods and goddesses, people falling out of the sky— and the kitchen sink if it can be worked in— all find a home in the world of the Baroque. Come to think of it, Red Grooms is a bit of a modern-day Baroque artist himself, inhabiting a world where Keith Haring graffitis the New York subway system and Davy Crockett gets jumped by a bear. Given what might be considered a routine commission— executing a ceiling mural for a Manhattan restaurant— Grooms will create a rollicking world beyond Mack Sennett’s wildest dreams, where lecherous waiters peek under women’s dresses, flying champagne corks relieve patrons of their toupees, and an enthusiastic angler in pursuit of a fresh catch from the fish tank causes the resident octopus to panic.
Sometimes people shy away from art because it seems all too serious. Sometimes it is. The joy of Edvard Munch in creating The Scream isn’t quite the same as the joy of a Red Grooms in creating a ruckus Manhattan piece. Sometimes the joy is more akin to a great sense of release, a feeling of relief. But Munch and Grooms alike will take the same pleasure in seeing their thoughts take form, as I myself derive pleasure from putting these thoughts into words.
This essay is dedicated to Anne d'Harnoncourt. Back in the 1980s I was once told that she enjoyed my writing for the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly). I don't think she ever connected my name to my face, though, because although I often saw her at the Art Museum’s press previews, we never actually spoke to each other.
To read a response, click here.
The pure creative joy of Red Grooms
ANDREW MANGRAVITE
Over the Memorial Day weekend I went with some friends to see “Red Grooms: In the Studio” during its final days at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers. Grooms has been creating his art since I was a small boy. I reviewed his big show at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1985, and I never quite forgot it. Grooms is one of those artists who remind you what it’s all about.
We’ve become conditioned to admire the Flauberts, the Capotes and the folks who sweat an hour over finding the precise word and take a week to write a single chapter. This is real “art from the heart,” we are given to understand. At the very least, it’s “method art.” But someone like Red Grooms reminds us that art is a divine form of play.
Why does the artist create? Why does the writer write, if not for the sheer joy of it? Grooms will take a shoebox, two empty cardboard toilet paper rolls, an adding machine tape and his imagination, and he’ll create a rinky-dink small town movie theater showing an action-packed “B” western. This is pure creative joy—the same sort of joy a four-year-old feels playing with Lego blocks. It’s the recompense that life gives to artists. Sometimes it’s the only recompense that life gives to artists.
One reason I’ve always been a fool for Baroque art is that it’s motivated by that same unleashed, overflowing joy of creation. Prancing elephants, lions and tigers, gods and goddesses, people falling out of the sky— and the kitchen sink if it can be worked in— all find a home in the world of the Baroque. Come to think of it, Red Grooms is a bit of a modern-day Baroque artist himself, inhabiting a world where Keith Haring graffitis the New York subway system and Davy Crockett gets jumped by a bear. Given what might be considered a routine commission— executing a ceiling mural for a Manhattan restaurant— Grooms will create a rollicking world beyond Mack Sennett’s wildest dreams, where lecherous waiters peek under women’s dresses, flying champagne corks relieve patrons of their toupees, and an enthusiastic angler in pursuit of a fresh catch from the fish tank causes the resident octopus to panic.
Sometimes people shy away from art because it seems all too serious. Sometimes it is. The joy of Edvard Munch in creating The Scream isn’t quite the same as the joy of a Red Grooms in creating a ruckus Manhattan piece. Sometimes the joy is more akin to a great sense of release, a feeling of relief. But Munch and Grooms alike will take the same pleasure in seeing their thoughts take form, as I myself derive pleasure from putting these thoughts into words.
This essay is dedicated to Anne d'Harnoncourt. Back in the 1980s I was once told that she enjoyed my writing for the Welcomat (now Philadelphia Weekly). I don't think she ever connected my name to my face, though, because although I often saw her at the Art Museum’s press previews, we never actually spoke to each other.
To read a response, click here.
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