Installation view of Create, curated by Lawrence Rinder with Matthew Higgs. Photo: Sibila Savage.

The growing spotlight on artists with developmental disabilities simultaneously questions ethics, challenges definitions in Art and inspires viewers. The current exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Create, features the works of 20 artists from three pioneering Bay Area centers for arts and disability – Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities.

Once in the museum, I found myself at an ethical crossroads. The only information provided was a brief introductory wall text at the beginning of the first gallery, and a slightly longer anecdote in the take-away, written by the co-curators Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs, respectively. Both texts note that the artists included all have a developmental disability of some kind, but little else about their process, experience or intent. Except, of course, to clarify that the artists are not performing art therapy in a drab gray room with bars on the windows. The paradox for me remains in determining for whose benefit exactly, is the mention of the artists’ conditions made? In the introduction, Rinder mentions that the artists’ “status as outsiders is rapidly shifting to that of insiders.” This can be taken in a few ways: for my Mom, and others like her, who insist they were among the first to discover the phenomenon of outsider art, they may be greatly bereaved to hear that outsider art has hit the mainstream, and now even their t-shirts are $60 a pop. For others it can be seen as an advancement that has been a long time coming. The artists featured in Create all possess the level of talent, individual voice and depth to be expected of the those supported by the Berkeley Art Museum and other major institutions. This issue elicits a nagging feeling that questions the motivation of listing the artists as developmentally disabled. I cannot help but wonder how I would have viewed the art if I had not known this facet of the exhibition.

Michael Bernard Loggins, 'Fears of Your Life' Installation View. Photo: Sibila Savage

Trying to look at the artwork as untainted by the knowledge of the artists’ conditions, I saw three galleries filled with pieces so creative and uninhibited, my eyes hungrily devoured the unique detail in each piece. Four examples of Attilo Crescenti’s sprawling, surreal and abstract figure drawings demonstrate the potential of an unrestricted vision of the human form. Written in huge, black scratchy handwriting on the entire back wall of the first gallery, is Michael Bernard Loggins’ text piece “Fears of Your Life.” Loggins included all fears in his list, both the profound and the mundane:

13. Fear of being lost.

21. Fear of spiders and roaches.

And mouse raccoons and rats too.

52. Fear of rolling down a hill backwards.

82. Fear that if you are bad or naughty noone’s isn’t going to love you anymore.

Carl Hendrickson and Jeremy Burleson both created sculptures that blur the line between practical application and surreal artistic liberty. Hendrickson’s wood sculptures resemble recognizable structures at first glance, yet further inspection reveals that their construction negates their utilitarian function. Burleson’s sculptures of medical equipment made from tape, plastic and paper, maintain an amazing amount of detail and accuracy, yet cannot be forgotten as non-functional art objects.

Carl Hendrickson. Image courtesy of Creative Growth

Create brings up several important questions that remain unanswered, and perhaps will not be answered for some time. How are these artists different or the same as others featured in major institutions? How does an artist’s past or present condition affect the reception of their work? Is the image of ‘outsider’ art exploited by the mainstream in the same way as other minorities, subcultures or fringe societies? The success and importance of the exhibition is in its posing of these questions, and the opening of a dialog that may be continued by the art world, both inside and out.

Create was curated by Larry Rinder, the director of BAM/PFA and Matthew Higgs, the director of White Columns. On view from May 11, 2011 – September 25, 2011.

Hauntology, co-curated by Larry Rinder and Scott Hewicker, at the UC Berkeley Art Museum, posits that the past inhabits the present in the same way that an individual’s past shapes how he perceives and acts in the present. By extension, art history and contemporary art are not so much in an ancestor-descendent relationship as they are roommates cohabiting the studio and the gallery. As roommates will, the past and present forever borrow from each other’s wardrobes; that is, the past and the present are not two things but one, participating in a constantly evolving mutual creation of meaning.

Paul Sietsema. Ship Drawing, 2009 (detail); ink on paper, diptych; 50 3/4 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.

One of my teachers, the late Stan Rice, said that if you can’t title a work, you haven’t figured out what it is about. The flip side of this flip remark is that you can title a project and ignore the title; this practice is endemic to the stated themes of art biennials and is something that curators can do in their smaller exhibitions, as well. A provocative title can finesse the flaws in obscurely or randomly assembled objects. At the same time, it is no secret that public institutions’ collapsing budgets make relatively inexpensive shows sourced from museums’ permanent collections desirable—as are shows of recent acquisitions. Hauntology is a group show of some fifty works, mostly recently acquired objects augmented by older pieces from the Berkeley Art Museum collection. An intelligent and economical endeavor gussied up with reference to Jacques Derrida, Hauntology nevertheless contains many wonderful individual art pieces and some very touching or clever arrangements.

After walking through a photography exhibition that juxtaposed works from the history of photography in groups of twos, threes, and fours, the late photographer Larry Sultan remarked that he preferred the sets in which he was forced to ponder what exactly the curators had seen that he at first failed to see, as opposed to those in which he found the shared thematic threads more obvious. Halfway through Hauntology, two medium-size works are placed to the left and right of the entrance to the second gallery. Essentially identical at first glance, the two works, Abstract Painting #3 (1960), by Ad Reinhardt, and an untitled work (2008–09) by Carina Baumann, appear to be grayish black monochromes.

Paul Schiek. Similar to a Baptism, 2007; chromogenic print; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the UC Berkeley Art Museum.

The Reinhardt contains a nearly invisible rectangle of a slightly different hue at its bottom center. The Baumann, on close inspection, reveals a face emerging from the gloom. Two artists, one living and one dead, separated by the gulf of an empty wall, collapse time by addressing the same retinal phenomenon from the point of view of two different generations.

The exhibition is at its best when the curators avoid the spooky-for-its-own-sake. As wonderful as death-drenched folk art can be—who can resist an eighteenth-century mourning embroidery for a lost-at-sea husband?—Twirling Wires (2001), a Roger Ballen photograph of a bald man, wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of the print and cowering beneath an unexplained gigantic ball of razor wire, is far more uncanny. Similarly, Okyo’s 1750 Ghost of Oyuki—the wall label suggests that Oyuki is the source for much of the manga stylebook—is great fun. However, sussing out the relationship between one of Vincent Fecteau’s always-perfect shelf sculptures and Mitzi Pederson’s large 2009 untitled floor-based mixed media is much more satisfying and moving.

Julia Couzens, an underappreciated Sacramento artist, is represented with a charcoal drawing. Being Exposed #41 (1991) definitely depicts something organic—a body part or a vegetable—but I couldn’t describe it in any other way than to say that it is inarguably luscious. Nearby is a dreamy watercolor by Laurie Reid and Nocturne (1878), a James McNeill Whistler riverscape that is shrouded in mist. D.L. Alvarez’s drawing titled Dead (2009) depicts young people at a rock concert, transfixed, in a grouping that includes Goya’s famous Sleep of Reason (1799) and explores people sleeping or swooning.

Paul Sietsema’s 2009 diptych Ship Drawing is a large drawing that suggests a found and damaged photograph of a two-masted nineteenth-century sailing vessel that evokes the (ever-creepy) legendary Flying Dutchman ghost ship. The left-hand panel appears to be the back of the same print or an erased version of it. This kind of exercise—a haunting of Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning—is as evocative as anything else in the show. Finally, Paul Schiek’s Similar to a Baptism (1977) is a photograph of foamy ocean turbulence in which the splashing water suggests the arms of an octopus, among which can be seen a swimmer’s head. It is a perfect metaphor for Hauntology’s argument that we are all just trying to keep our heads above water amid a flood of images, memories, associations, and histories.

Hauntology is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through December 5, 2010.