Goldwater Likes: Cacti in the Sun

Some magazine end-of-the-year “best of” lists are better than others. Art Forum’s is comically arcane but also informative. You’ll find nothing, for instance, about Britney’s unraveling or Larry Craig’s urine-soaked sexcapades. But you will find out about so-called prankster artist Jeffrey Vallance. This year, the Art Forum critics gave Vallance a “best of” nod for a work he did in 1978 while attending junior college and that is presently on exhibit here in Los Angeles. Vallance sent notes to all 100 U.S. senators and asked them for a “drawing or a sketch of something you like.” He got 33 replies, including a cactus in the sun drawn by Barry Goldwater and an American flag sketch by Strom Thurmond. The senators reportedly thought it was part of a child’s school project. We still love the idea for its having put the senators on display in a way they hadn’t for once prepared for. And so we appreciate the Art Forum write up, especially the block below, for getting as close to nailing it on the head as an Art Forum kinda writer can do:

“Playing with a nostalgic and simultaneously hopeful sense of the world as one big, happy place where everyone gets along, Vallance plucks at the tightly drawn strings of institutional power dynamics with the blithe confidence of a teenager strumming his guitar. By turning the letters into exhibition pieces, effectively inducing the government to participate in his critical, conceptual practice, Vallance affects a subtle but profound shift in power, as if reversing the flow of influence away from ‘them’ and toward ‘us.’”