The Kimball Art Center’s new solo exhibit by Karl Haendel is “Less Bad.”
The title of the show, which opens with a reception at 6 p.m. on Friday and will display through Dec. 1, sets a whimsical tone of new and older pencil-and-ink drawings on paper created by Haendel throughout his career.
“It points to how a museum show tries to show the good stuff, a ‘greatest hits,’ but instead of calling them ‘hits,’ you say these are the works that aren’t that bad,” the artist said. “I always like to use some humor in my exhibits because art is sometimes seen as hard to approach, and I think the answer to create art for the broader public is not to dumb it down. You have to provide ways … to bring them in.”
The title also refers to Haendel’s own struggles as a straight, white male who is trying to explore masculinity through challenging stereotypical definitions and become less bad.
“It offers a new load of masculinity that is introspective and self-reflective in terms of how I see myself relationally,” he said. “It’s about thinking about men who are vulnerable and who have access to a full range of emotions, and not just anger.”
Those themes include intimate experiences such as fatherhood, love, friendship and loss, to broader issues such as tenderness, introspection and vulnerability, said Aldy Milliken, Kimball Art Center executive director.
“These are ideas that we can elevate and have a transparent conversation about, and it turns the conversation around in a post #metoo and Gus Walz world,” he said. “It opens up and frames a conversation that we’re having across the country at this time.”
This site-specific exhibition is organized in collaboration with Dr. Andrea Gyorody, director of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, according to Milliken.
“This was a long conversation that involved three of us in the conversation,” he said. “We met in L.A. in the spring and talked about all the images in Karl’s body of work. Then we pared it down to a smaller, attainable number.”
From there, the three discussed the precise themes of the show, Milliken said.
“Karl used his own expertise with the storytelling element and decided how the space and works would relate to each other,” he said.
Haendel looked at the Kimball Art Center’s four exhibition rooms in terms of sight lines and how people feel in the space, rather than the venue’s history or the socio-political or economical concerns.
“I’ve always been interested in bodies in space,” he said. “I’m very into thinking about the viewers’ perception and movement within the space, and that makes an exhibit participatory and active so they are more aware and receptive to feelings and thoughts.”
Painting the walls is one way to do that, Haendel said.
“That is a way to animate the space and make the viewer find a rhythm,” he said. “It also destabilizes the space. It is a way to make the space exciting, and even a little off, and make the viewers juggle their senses.”
Haendel also considered that the Kimball Art Center is an accessible place where the public can also take classes and make their own art.
“So, one thing that Aldy and I wanted to focus on with the exhibit is the process and how we could make the installation thematically, conceptually and materially accessible,” he said. “So, some of the drawings will be super stylized and highly rendered, but other drawings would be more simple and just pinned to the wall. (That way,) if students come and see the art in pencil just pinned to the wall, they could feel like they could also do something like this.”
Even the mediums — pencil, ink and paper — are accessible, and these materials are Haendel’s trademark.
“I was always pretty good at drawing as a kid,” he said. “I think a lot of people who become artists are those who like to make something as kids, whether that’s playing with clay or wood, and I like to draw a lot.”
When Haendel was attending graduate school at University of California Los Angeles, he made a “life decision” to focus on drawing.
“That was because there were artists my age who were showing at commercial galleries,” he said.
At that time, art fairs were just starting up and the modern world of artists overlapped with fashion, where stars such as Beyoncé would attend these events, Haendel said.
“So there was this international, elitist, global art world, which makes young art stars,” he said. “While I went to a school that made those stars, I found out that a lot of the artists who made this type of art had trust funds or other means to maintain a living.”
Since Haendel didn’t have a trust fund or wealthy relative and drove a truck on days he didn’t have class, he decided he wanted to find a medium that wasn’t flashy like paintings.
“I wanted to do something that was close to me and that felt closer to conceptual art and truer to the kind of art I liked,” he said. “I wanted to do something that had some physical quality as an art object and something I could make.”
Although Haendel had worked in video and performance while in school, he liked the accessibility of drawing.
“It’s sort of primitive, and it’s not hard to get pencil and paper because it’s inexpensive,” he said. “It’s not like CGI graphics, and it also stores and ships easily. So,I liked that I could do something with things that everyone has access to and relatively under-explored in the canon or art, and once I started, I realized there was a lot of room to grow, and I could make an argument for drawing as my career.”
‘Less Bad’ exhibit by Karl Haendel
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‘Less Bad’ exhibit opening reception