Exhibit coats St. Paul’s basement with ‘Graffiti’

An androgynous, paint-splattered nude stares provocatively from a photograph on Postcrypt Art Gallery’s poster advertising last Friday’s opening of their most recent exhibit, titled “Human Graffiti.” The show, a collaboration with the Columbia student group Artist Society, is therefore confusing because, upon entering the gallery, students are not confronted with colorful provocation, but rather an amalgamation of too many styles and media.

Hung up on clips and clear wire, a panorama of white butcher paper stretches around the gallery in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel. Figures—predominantly nude, bald, and female—overlap in black and white. A few scattered objects and colorful forms are thrown in at random intervals. The result is a fragmented exhibition of good intentions but little aesthetic pleasure.

Granted, it is difficult to express unity with many artists of differing styles working on a single project, as is the case here. The Artist Society, a group open to undergraduate and graduate students as well as Columbia employees, invited all members to contribute to the show. The group, which meets for figure-drawing sessions every week, convened several times to complete the exhibit. While the idea of collaboration may operate well when employed in the functioning of the club itself, the result for “Human Graffiti” could be the artistic incarnation of too many cooks in the kitchen.

The use of watercolor, charcoal, pencil, and pastel created a messy degeneration where individual elements of merit were unable to shine. Moments of innovation, like the simple abstraction of blue bodies, or another torso sprouting out of a neck, were masked by the cacophony of the exhibit as a whole.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect was voiced by an anonymous viewer, who was overheard asking, “Where are all the naked people?” While the figures displayed are predominantly sans clothing, observers may be bored due to the more overtly sensual offerings of certain publications such as C-Spot, or the nudity represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition on performance artist Marina Abromović.

The collaboration was certainly a valiant attempt to represent a variety of styles around a single theme, but in actuality, the talented students of the Artist Society may have been misrepresented in this show.