“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” can be an order or a plea. As the title of the group show curated by Desiree Cronk at World Class Boxing, it evokes two attitudes artists have about viewing: being concerned about the artwork’s ability to communicate with the viewer (and the viewer getting it) or being more laissez faire about the work’s role in the world once it leaves the artist’s control. The artists in the former state of mind might say, let the work find its own identity once it is in the world. What this show provides is the opportunity to see that, as always, the either/or suppositions are rarely so simple.


Sean Duffy. Burnt Out Sun, 2003. Sculpture. 42 x 33 x 33 inches.

Placed across the room from the gallery’s entrance, Sean Duffy’s “Burn Out Sun,” 2003, is the first opportunity to explore the quandary that the title presents. LPs are bent to make triangular shapes which, puzzled together, form a two foot high “Bucky Ball.” Bucky Ball is the nomiker for the domes designed by Buckminster Fuller in the mid-century 20th century. The most traveled of these in South Florida is the huge white golf ball at Epcot Center. The initial impression for this viewer is one of absurdity, a feeling heightened by the tripod on which this outdated spaceship hovers.

The hybrid formed with these two references at first comes off as arbitrarily sci-fi. The failed idealism of the form, the geodesic architecture, is echoed in faded and, because the records are folded, erased functionality of the LPs. Pitting two ostensibly unrelated references against one another creates a new, third form that emphasizes its parts’ lack, or loss, of function.

In Cronk’s interviews with several artists in the show her first question for each artist is the same: “What is the one thing you wish viewers would understand about your work or what is one thing you feel is most misunderstood about your work?” Duffy’s reply to this question both admits an interest in the pure transmission of his ideas and denies an interest in whether the viewer understands – “gets”– or the work not. He states that considering the viewer is part of his process, but once the work is in the world, he accepts that the viewer may not receive these considerations in the way he anticipated. He places faith in the process of making. Another part of this process is combining metaphors and references which may not be immediately obvious. His objects and installations, then, can offer the pleasure of discovery and storytelling, but they likely require some investigation on the viewer’s part.


Peter Garfield. Mobile Home (Farm), 1994. Color photograph. 20 x 16 inches.

Cronk’s initial question concerning a viewer’s potential misunderstanding drew a slightly different perspective from Peter Garfield, whose photograph captures the demolition of a model house. Of course, one cannot know it is a model house without some extra information. That the work takes on “a life of its own” after it is out of his control is a metaphor which he explores throughout his oeuvre: “I attempt to mirror the uncertainty and confusion I believe is inherent in existence.” The photograph in the exhibition, “Mobile Home (Farm)” (1994), shows a simple, blue sideboard house. The house’s bottom is ragged where it was severed from its lawn. The edifice is in freefall against what appears to be a pure blue sky. One can experience uncertainty with the situation – there is no frame of reference, no way of verifying the disaster depicted, yet the image still relays a feeling of trauma. Garfield likes that two main readings can be gleened from the series – fascination that the artist created and/or captured a “real” disaster or an appreciation of the work’s inherent fiction. What is important here is each individual experience of the work. That is, Garfield offers his opinion of what the viewer might experience, but this is not the sum of it. The elusiveness of the work’s truth is productive, sowing more possibilities for thought. This last thought, productive uncertainty, is something that is not true for all art, but it one of the key points in the exhibition.


Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Deadline, 2007. Video, Dimensions Variable.

Garfield’s photograph – its violence and its uncertainty – draws out these strains as they exist in the rest of the exhibition. Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s video “Deadline” shows two palm trees swaying in the breeze. A frond hangs precariously in thin air between them. The string attaching it to the tree only comes into view for a moment and then disappears again. The trees and frond flicker, but nothing else happens. With quiet, even cool, elegance, this video conveys that something is wrong. Something eludes our criteria for “rightness”.

In Candida Hofer’s photograph of the British Library (see title image above) no one is using this immense repository for knowledge. The space is either limited to special access or ignored. Whether this is the meaning Hofer intended is immaterial. As a group, these works create a mood, or add to a mood created when cool presentations reveal strangeness. Indeed, the spaces between the artist’s intention and the work’s meaning within the world is a fertile subject, but there is another level of uncertainty in these works which contributes to the mood: mystery and open-endedness. Tacita Dean’s slide projection is apparently a recreation of a myth she’d read and yet, with the title, “Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake Utah,” she contradicts the imaginary association. A narrow slash in the focal point of the slide alternately confuses and fascinates. As in many of Dean’s works, mysteriousness draws out the encounter with her favorite material, film. It makes the viewer look longer.

Tacita Dean. Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1997. 35 mm slide. Dimensions variable.


Alice Channer. Untitled (Hair Pins), 2007. Installation. Dimensions variable.

There is a wavy line of shadow on the wall just above the entrance to the darkened room housing Dean’s projection. This sculpture registers after one passes it. One returns to look again, to note how the fluorescent light glows above a paper thin shelf, held perpendicular to the wall by hairpins. The exhibition’s context draws out the same question: what is the artist trying to do here? Upon seeing the work installed for the first time, the artist described that she was struck by how strongly the line of paper acted on the wall, casting shadow below and light above it. In this case found better understanding of the work by looking at it as a viewer.


Thomas Demand. Barn, 1997. Chromogenic print, 72 x 100 inches.

Thomas Demand’s photograph “Barn” (1997) envelops the viewer within it. With the size of a grand black Frank Stella canvas, the reflective darkness in the center of this photograph allows the viewer to see him or herself inside the space it depicts – one that recalls the Hans Namuth depictions of Jackson Pollock’s studio. Facing this work, one can fall into a spell of vanity, contemplation or wonder. Like with Dean’s work, the non sequitur elements, like the post-modern disaster proof windows in the barn’s walls or the emptiness behind them, prolong the state of wonderment.

As a group, these works create a mood, or add to a mood created when cool presentations reveal strangeness. Indeed, the spaces between the artist’s intention and the work’s meaning is a fertile subject, but there is another level of uncertainty in these works which contributes to the mood: mystery and open-endednes. From misunderstanding to uncertainty to mystery, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” encourages meditation about the slipperiness of meaning and the significance of acknowledgements of this disorientation. The exhibition has the mood of a silent scream, which one perceives beneath the surface but cannot see or hear.

title image :
Candida Hofer. British Library London II, 1994. Chromogenic print, 20 x 24 inches.