Clarke Bedford Seduces Salon Contra

Clarke Bedford is a conflicted man, but that only became apparent well into his recent appearance with curator Laura Roulet, at Salon Contra, Pink Line Project’s series of intimate artist/art lover interactions. Bedford invents histories, sometimes beginning with a real life (General William Tecumseh Sherman, e.g.) and reimagining the possibilities, embellishing, embroidering, enlarging, filling in the blanks. Sometimes he creates whole lives, as in F.D. Kalley, “Prince of the American Renaissance.” And he does so quite joyfully and without restraint.

Bedford, whose day job is as conservator of Paintings and Mixed Media Objects as the Hirshhorn, sees more than his share of the underbelly of the contemporary art world, particularly in its haute conceptual manifestations. His daily life is, therefore, full to bursting with possibilities for parody and he plows with great gusto in those fields. Bedford is smart, funny, self-deprecating and really fun to spend an evening with.

His current installation at Hillyer Art Place, “Wundergarten: Sa[l]vaging the Family Archive”, is a bit different, however, hence the tinge of ambivalence I detected. These are, or were, people that Bedford knew, a family whose extensive archive of photographs were put out on the street as refuse and were salvaged by Bedford. He spent hundreds of hours with the photos, each of which is carefully annotated on the back (e.g. “the Thanksgiving table before the turkey was brought in”) and which in the aggregate show a mid-century American family that was dedicated to doing all the things and visiting all the places mid-century America offered and to documenting each experience, all the while disintegrating. Based on the photos, Bedford created a richly cluttered interior that contains and reflects the family.

Because of the distance in time and the ironic lens through which we now reflexively view every aspect of post-war America, there is a mocking aroma that can’t be avoided; even though Bedford does not intend it, it is the inescapable product of time and distance. And Bedford knows this, which makes him a little queasy. I appreciate him and his art all the more for this vulnerability.

Image: Max Cook

(Video edited by Ethan Hicks.)