Art Reviews

`1978
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Art

Two-week gallery a Goodfellow idea By ELIZABETH EHRLICH

Detroit's newest and most ephemeral art gallery is temporarily open for busi- ness. Located at 422 Willis (just west of Cass), it's freshly painted, well-lit and is displaying recent works by Stephen Goodfellow. The exhibit runs until May 20, when the two-week-old Bastard Gal- lery will close for good.

What? you ask and you're not the first. Goodfellow has unwittingly created something of a conceptual event with his fortnight's gallery, here today and gone before you can say.

"I've called it the Bastard because it's not approved by any authority, it's just my brainchild," explains the bearded, British-born artist, who came to Detroit three years ago. What he had in mind was finding a practical way to put on a one- man show without making compromises.

"I don't like going to other people to show my work," he says. In the past he has exhibited at Detroit Artists Market, the Art Institute's rental gallery, Detroit Ar- tists' Guild, in New York and England; today he sees risks in that. "I don't want to find out what creates money and start working that way. This way I avoid the middleman and I can do what I want."

The gallery space, a few doors down from Cobbs Corner, was donated by the tavern's co-owners, Henry and Howard Normille. Formerly the home of the now-defunct Willis Gallery, Goodfellow found it completely stripped-down, giv- ing him still more leeway to arrange things to his needs.

Out of that freedom emerged "The Last Supper," a painted mural 23 feet long and 17 feet high, covering one entire gallery wall. Depicting a military strategy session in a modern war-room, complete with

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THE WHEELOF FORTUNE

Stephen Goodfellow at ease with work

maps and TV monitors, it seats 12 generals and a president around a conference table, snacking on Twinkies and fast food as doom nears.

"This is the first time I've tried anything so big," he says, dwarfed by the larger-

than-life-sized tableau. "I was putting my work around and I thought, my God, the space is so big," Using a sponge-tipped "paint wand" he saw advertised on televi- sion ("It frees you to work rapidly''), he completed the mural in less than a week.

The format may be different, but the subject is typical of his work. In Goodfel- low's paintings, prints and drawings, realism is tipped with menace and tem- pered with a sense of the sardonic. In the chalk drawing "Freedom Fighter," a young woman holding a gun sits before a television amid precisely noted domestic paraphernalia. The light of the screen il- luminates her face as she glances over her shoulder. "The Shoplifter," set at a supermarket checkout, suggests guilt in the nonchalant faces of register girl and customers alike, and provides no clues to identify the thief.

Using big blocks of soft, rich blackboard chalk, he offers "current visions of im- ages" handed down in the ancient practice of Tarot Card fortune telling. "Wheel of Fortune" becomes a card game played with strangely-marked cards in a dar- kened room. "The Pope," a traditional image of things to come, is a cassocked figure "descending from a dingy place, down a winding staircase to a kind of utopia," according to Goodfellow.

"I look at things and keep them in the back of my brain, let them boil over a bit, and they come out as concepts," is the way he describes the process.

Born in Southhampton in 1953, Good- fellow attended Britain's Hull College of Art and lived in Denmark and Mexico be- fore moving to Detroit. Here, he studied printmaking at Wayne, receiving his MFA last year. "Of all the places I've lived," he says, "I like Detroit the best. There's a basic energy drive here with nothing sup- erficial about it."

Gather your energy before it's over. During the Bastard's two-week existence, everything but the immobile mural is for sale. And the prix fixe is $150, apiece.
(Images): Photo by JOSEPH BANISH