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Outside Magazine, March 2007
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Out of Bounds
The School of Sap (cont.)

I KINDA LIKE IT, and I'm not the only one. A month later, at the gallery show in Atlanta, five of the 30 pieces will sell, in the range of $750 to $1,000 each—a tad less than $50,000, granted, but still twice the price of an elephant painting.

Catherine Fox's Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece from October 29 will turn out to be surprisingly charitable. "The project is amusing," she'll write, "and if it shakes our smug certainties even a little, then it is a success—at least from my point of view." She'll conclude with the remark that a piece of Agrifolk art might complement the ordinary household fixture that inspired conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp's Fountain: "You could always hang one above your urinal."

And Jonathon, philosophical to the end, will refuse to judge any piece until he's sat with them all, fearing that doing so says less about the art and more about him.

As for me, I keep thinking about the trees. On the farm, intrigued by the first drawings, I ambled through the rows and columns of Leyland cypresses with no goal but to study them. The flat, bluish-green leaves smelled faintly of Vicks VapoRub, and the scaly trunks were a ruddy hue, almost cedarlike with their traces of waxy white. I tried to find a correlation between the art and the artist—were the more exuberant drawings done by trees exposed to the fresher breezes on the edge of the farm?—but couldn't. The drawings were purely random. Perhaps the trees were individual in some way, though I'm not prepared to claim they're smart.

Nonetheless, there is something really beautiful about the trees and their work. If modern art is the ultimate expression of its creator's take on the human condition, then these artists' message is clear: You guys think too much. Chill out and scribble awhile.




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