Evidence at Mercer Union

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In one breath children's art is celebrated. The crayon marks as an unspoilt freedom, eden not yet subject to the cultural regulatory capture. This is the raw art, ore for artistic refinery, later on scatlogic nappies of adult canvas wipes, ART. Which this exhibition is at pains to distance itself, by bringing the raw stuff itself to market. But this is the paradox of how art means. Because the exhibition still begs the light, needs legitimation, the names of consecrated artists to perform the ritual of valorization. This is like asking artists to make flowers mean. And do flowers mean?

Brian Belott, Rhoda Kellogg at San Francisco City Hall, the genius whose diapers we exchange, An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Petrit Halilaj at Kamel Mennour

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"composed of a group of 12 school desks [...] from the Primary School “Shotë Galica” in Runik , a small town in the north of Kosovo, where Halilaj lived and studied. The artist discovered [...] while filming the demolishing of the building of the school in favour of a new and more modern one. The green surface of the desks and the wooden benches were covered with thousands of drawings, inscriptions, carvings and scribbles left by several generations of school kids. [...] reproducing and enlarging these drawings in his sculptures..."

The desire to preserve often comes with attempts to rectify, solidify, clean, put it in frames, protect it from the world with cushions and embalm it, so its nice to see the graffiti of children maintain a bit of its chicken scratch projected like leaded ghosts on walls. There's no desire to clean it up, Halijaj is like a povera artist on roids even amidst a sea of it in contemporary art, the sentimentality balanced with material mysticism bearing the weight of history in all its unkempt detritus, so the sky transmits Eminem.