GALLERY OPENING CRITIQUED

Openings at the Westside Art Gallery and Bookstore are pleasant affairs for several reasons.

People show up (which they don't always do at some of the other galleries around town), and, consequently, there is a high-energy sense of community, of people supporting a collective identity. The artists are usually committed to that group ideology.

Such is the nature of political art.

And such is the nature of Ron Amie, black artist.

Sometimes Amie's work is quite bad; when, for example, he paints frivolous lacey landscapes, which are unintended ironies in that they look like bourgeoisie Rooco idealisms of pretty trees and lakes, a polar shift away from the political intentions of black art.

Sometimes Amie's work is full of promise; like the large social-collages in paint, which present the artist's perception of some of the roots of social problems

for blacks in America. 

And sometimes Amie's art is really art — like when he juxtaposes pencil-drawn images of everyday American blacks with a ceremonial, almost haunting image of an ancient African mask where the pencil strokes are more immediately important to both the viewer and artist because they dissolve into the universal language of the eye before they impose their political intent on the mind.

The history of art is written for and by white men. We live in a society which allows us the leisure of producing highly sophisticated art.  I, for instance, enjoy the relative luxury of being an "art critic" in an age of war, starvation and child abuse.

And while Ron Amie's work is not real sophisticated, it is real honest.  The sophistication, the awareness of

modern art ideas which surround us all, the proper vocabulary about visual phenomenon . . . all these will come for him sooner or later.

But, at the same time, there is good art and there is bad; Amie shows both.  if he wants to be a good artist, he needs to become more sophisticted aesthetically, because complex ideas (such as the chal-lenge of being a minority in America) deserve complex forms to express them.

Amie's art looks "political,"which seems both necessary and unfortunate.  It is necessary because Amie is gathering strength from his extended family, his community.  It is unfortunate because Amie's individual talents are often side-stepped in favor of a "commonality" which dilutes the individual while thickening the collective lend.

Both are important.  Both are honest.  Amie is right in the middle.