Radical Love: Charles Clough at Fitz Books and Waffles

Installation view of *Cluffalo 290* (2019) and many of Clough's self-published books at Fitz Books and Waffles. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.

Bursts of color and texture emanate from works both epic in expression and modest in scale within the tastefully subdued gallery at downtown bookstore, wafflery, wedding picture destination, and meeting place for Buffalo’s artists and activists, Fitz Books and Waffles. It is Charles Clough’s retrospective. Clough — a noted abstract artist, 1970s Buffalo radical and scamp, and foundational member of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center — brings it home with the rousing The Political Value of Art is Beauty as Symbol of Love, an unofficial passing of the torch to Buffalo artists creating new spaces and new realities within Western New York. It issues a bold question to its audience: Can abstract art meaningfully defend the ramparts of a society besieged?

Not to belabor the point with a laundry list of ills facing this country or wherever else you might be, but clearly things are currently not ideal pretty much everywhere. Art itself is on the hot seat, with activists now targeting historic works in major museums to draw attention to a climate crisis accelerated by war and Western sanctions. Meanwhile, the benefactor class profits from it all and launders their gains through the art world. Against this backdrop of discord, polarization, and rage, Clough’s works of radical beauty are pure defiance.

*Clufffalo: Winter 2018*, 2018. Latex on expanded pvc, 32 x 44 inches. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.

Emphasis here should be put on “radical” because Clough was also a proud member of Buffalo’s historic Left and avant-garde, which flowered in the 1970s on the University at Buffalo campus and throughout the city. Artists flowed into the region to breathe this air and ride this current at sites such as Gerald O’Grady’s Center for Media Study at UB, Artpark in its 70s Land art heyday, a progressively curated and simpatico Albright-Knox Art Gallery, as well as various living rooms and backyard hangouts on the West Side. Some of those newcomers would also pass through the newly formed Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center: artist commune and cheeky enfant terrible of Buffalo’s art scene founded by Clough, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Longo, Larry (LP) Lundy, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack in 1974, and located in what is now the Essex Street Art Complex and home of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. This wave also flowed out of Buffalo, taking with it some of Hallwalls’ founders, including Clough, who would alternate between New York and Buffalo before settling in East Aurora.

The works in The Political Value of Art range from thumbnail paintings the artist calls “studio notes” — analog visual journals used to workshop ideas and themes arranged here on tables in a manner not dissimilar from an Instagram grid — to the epic, full-scale pieces that anchor the exhibition in the gallery. Perceptions inevitably shift when presented with such pure, detached abstraction, and one cannot help but feel a rush of awareness and appreciation for abstraction itself: in the “maybe we can figure this out together . . or not” vibe of Clough’s studio notebooks; in the broad, gesturing brushstrokes of his larger works; and in the subversive visual motifs hidden throughout. This riotous spectacle reveals both the insurgent creative milieu from which his practice was born as well as the playful, generous humanity of the artist, who has offered pro bono art instruction on the Roycroft Campus since 2015.

Visually, the work draws from the Abstract Expressionist movement that Clough would’ve been exposed to from an early age at the institution formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. However, Clough rejects or ignores the justified baggage of its history — its elitist pretensions, its turning-away from politics, its insistence on individual genius — and straight up appropriates its more liberatory aspects as a starting point for his own insouciant and open-handed artistic ends. The ongoing invitation to viewers to engage with the abundantly pleasing work on their own terms and take what they want from it is in many ways a form of community building. So too are his invitations to strangers to deploy his method to their own ends and create paintings of their own in his studio at the Roycroft. Such generosity might very well be the soul of Clough’s life’s work.

This catechism is in many regards part and parcel of Fitz Books and Waffles proprietor Aaron Bartley’s curatorial work. A meeting place for artists, poets, activists, thinkers, and book lovers, Fitz Books and Waffles has, from the beginning, been about connection, social change, and revolution. These are ethical continuations of Bartley’s work as a cofounder of PUSH Buffalo, a local advocacy and activist organization dedicated to seeking racial, economic, and environmental justice in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. This ethos carries over to the art exhibited at Fitz Books and Waffles, with diverse artists — especially older, established artists and younger artists at the start of their practices — and their audiences interacting and dialoguing together. This conscious effort to foster a continuum of progressive artistic thought and heritage is valuable now that Buffalo’s reenergized Left is actively organizing to take on the stagnant status quo while the area’s creative scene gears up for a new era with the reopening of the expanded Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Clough’s art and legacy have earned a place of honor within this important and virtuous cycle of renewal.

In the end, Clough’s The Political Value of Art is Beauty as Symbol of Love represents the possibility of creation itself as an agent of change and transformation in the eternal struggle with the status quo, a struggle Clough has made his own for the last half century. In a time of global tumult and increasing polarization, Clough’s and Bartley’s practices of generosity provide blueprints for navigating the change our community and society require.

Radical Love: Charles Clough at Fitz Books and Waffles

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