Marian wrote her excellent dissertation on

Result #1

Marian wrote her excellent dissertation on vernacular (beyond the vernacular) culture at Yale in 1972, so its not surprising that the sixty-eight works on paper on view here look more like works on paper than art. Both of these vignettes play with line and shadow, often drawing images from digital sources that seem endless, both obscure and familiar: a woman with her earring, for instance, is illuminated only through the layers of shadows on her face.While the images may be found in everyday life (plants, shoes, petrochemical masks, and so on), the diagrams and forms are made of cloth, tape, and terry cloth (though the sculptures are made of polyester). In some of the images, the terry cloth has been peeled back, revealing the tangled lines and triangles of the diagrammatic pieces. As many of the clay fragments are found folded on the floor, they reveal the works origins. And their erasures provide insight into the process by which the work gets made: The clay is deposited at the gallery, which in turn photographs it and then assembles it, folding and scumbling it until it is assembled as one large piece. The terry cloth, woven into sculptural plates, continues this process, producing a series of sculpture-like clay pieces, in which slats of clay have been overlaid with pieces of plastic.The most assertive work here is Kijiji, 1990–92, a cartoon–style montage of a woman and a collection of belongings, most of which can be traced to the artists childhood.

Result #2

Marian wrote her excellent dissertation on vernacular aesthetics in Culture, Method, and Society in the Museum of Modern Art in 2013. Her analysis, in just over five minutes, is persuasive, although I would have appreciated the more informed opinion espoused in the piece: The show might have been more conceptual, with all the wall-filling ways of showing to do. It is not just the vernacular that fuels the counter-narratives of consumerism, but culture itself as a way of life. Quite to the contrary, Buergels project is perhaps best understood as an explanation for the way that people self-segregate, neither place but part of a social order. There is a simple, repetitive language that allows one to label what should be like anything as the other way around. This also applies to what Buergels art critic, Andreas Gurskilde, describes as the vernacular in which "art has become an almost religious expression of its surroundings. It becomes a pedagogical tool that guides behavior, however different its particulars, and it becomes a utopic solution to a question that is not an absolute or indeterminate one. Thus, Buergels exhibition reads as a functional and not an irresponsible one, the artist demonstrating what is possible when the normality of the vernacular is disenrolled, while fostering a dialogue about the ways in which the vernacular is a territory of movement and of identity.Around the same time, Buergel exhibited the newest series of glass sculptures made with similar materials (including stainless steel and bright fluorescent light bulbs). These small objects made up of clear, translucent, and colored glass bring to mind the play of light and shadow on the surface of a table. They also function as metaphoric and functional objects, conjoining the carefree and playful nature of the everyday with the ritualistic/relational aspect of knowledge and the ritualized sign.

Result #3

vernacular culture, which suggested that the contemporary vernacular is only as significant as the vernacular to which it alludes. The same can be said about conceptualism: A discussion of a given movement is meaningless unless its denunciations are actually met. Movements are too easily understood, too easily forgotten. As Carl Schimmel explains in his excellent catalogue essay, vernacular culture is not a possible language, but rather an exercise in efforts at decoding and critiquing the formal and linguistic aspects of the vernacular, and in understanding what it means to be subject to the universality of images and signs. Using this collection of an occasional pop-cultural touch to explore the cultural phenomenon of everyday life, Belgian artist Jaap Pronman seeks to fix the vernacular as a strong subject for artistic commentary.

Result #4

Marian wrote her excellent dissertation on vernacular culture and art, cataloguing vernacular and cultural movements that flourished in the 1960s, in a period marked by the ongoing struggle between the hip and avant-garde. In a chapter entitled An Extraordinary Life of the Curator, she traces the ways in which white artists and the vernacular became interwoven with the sort of place and language that has come to be identified with those movements. By documenting such places and cultures that remained essential parts of the contemporary arts economy, she emphasizes that the vernacular is, for some, still the dominant mode of display today. This fact became clearer in the show, which presented, among other things, a collection of black- and brown-language texts that were collaged with white documents and reproduced in some cases as images that can be viewed as drawings. These text pieces together brought to life the multiethnic environs of Greenwich Village—as observed by the bakers, musicians, and movie stars who are its residents.As a group, the artists explored the state of cultural and artistic identity and diversity. Each group chose a style that reflected a specific historical and social identity. The artworks of the group A. R. Penck, for instance, incorporated collage, assemblage, photography, and video, and its colorful and detailed installation culminated with a video installation by Nancy Shaver titled New York, 1984. The video, a summary of the citys current transformations, is the most striking. The video starts with Shaver sitting on a white-robed chair in a darkened gallery. She sits in her usual pose with the audience while simultaneously answering questions that range from the citys burgeoning homeless population to its schools and streets. Although this video, like many of the other video works, is set in a darkened space, the flashing lights give the piece a sense of movement.

Result #5

vernacular architecture in the catalogue for this show: The vernacular architecture of everyday life has for the past two decades become increasingly important to architecture. A specific response to vernacular architecture, which tends to be in the realm of personal design, can be seen in Peppers collection of the word vernacular from a high-school window. A window that does not look like a window is one that has a definite vernacular character. It is an object that can be seen without any particular gesture of insistence on the part of the person who operates the window. In a sense, the person who operates the window is no more present in the gallery than the person who stands inside it.For Peppers work to be truly experimental and innovative it must assume an independence that it can share with other cultures that are in ongoing relations to the gallery space. This is why I cannot fully support Peppers work, especially since it is neither new nor particularly new-looking. However, I do not understand why she had to come out with a show that was both a formality and an opportunity to criticize our architectural tendencies. I would have liked to see her work more vigorously integrated into current trends in avant-garde art, but I also feel that in order to be truly revolutionary, one should not continue to pretend to be anything but a painter. Peppers work is by no means new in any way, but she is an artist who has continued to use it in ways that reflect the evolving position of art within the community of the gallery.