Learning to Love Commodities

Bauhaus in America and James Turrell

Aspects, Forms, and Figures

When Clement Greenberg opposed abstraction to kitsch, he did more than declare the importance of painting, Modernism, or American art. He also redefined the art object. Paradoxically, the moment that painting revealed itself as an object, the more it claimed to rise above consumerism. Even when Pop Art embraced advertising cartoons, and the movies, it still made panting, and it still made art. Now that anything could be art, what else could it make?

Before all that, however, Modernism had no problem making commodities. Bauhaus and other movements incorporated design, and they positively demanded knockoffs. After all, they were teaching the world how to design. In the process, they were teaching it how to live. Love, wrote Richard Wilbur, calls us to the things of this world. So, as it happens, does a really good shopping experience.

Postmodern critics continued Greenberg's critique of capitalism, but by seeing fine art as part of the problem. Now, the market has all but taken over, and it is not bringing utopia. Three shows help trace love of the humble object. The Whitney asks how Bauhaus came to America. James Turrell still unites Minimalism with something an Abstract Expressionist would admire, but increasingly in the form of gadgets and tchotchkes. Last, "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" almost bucks the tide, by seeking a beauty akin to abstraction in the things of this world.

From Bauhaus to our house

The Bauhaus was out to change the world, but Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy settled for teaching art in America. They did it with a reformer's zeal anyhow—and an insistence that, when it came to the twentieth century, America had a lot to learn. Now the Whitney takes them from their Bauhaus years in Germany, in the 1920s, to their adopted nation. Ironically, they as much as their students come off as the slow learners.

Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, to unite art and design. It would put the modernist imagination, as free of history as of surface decoration, at the service of industry and craft. The exhibition includes both craft and publications, many of which Moholy-Nagy would have edited. It contains media from porcelain enamel on steel to Formica and Bakelite, the plastic used for radios as recently as in an Elvis Costello song. However, both Albers and Moholy-Nagy found themselves more at home with artistic experiment for its own sake, especially when they could claim to codify its rules.

Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee passed through the Bauhaus, too, but Moholy-Nagy preferred the look of Russian Constructivism. His paintings share its planes floating in a pale field. His kinetic sculpture, sometimes with its shadows projected on a wall, owe something to its stage sets and to its faith in a world in motion. Dada had introduced kinetic sculpture, too, and Moholy-Nagy also made photograms, or the direct imprint of objects on photosensitive paper, like Man Ray. He seems eager to preserve the essences of the modern world, as in his photographs of cities. Perhaps that explains why, for all its hyperactivity, his images look at once static and cluttered.

Albers has a still more determined sense of artistic purity, and he made it his educational mission as well. His early work gives colored glass a tight grid, as if instructing fin-de-siècle Vienna in Piet Mondrian. Of course, one knows him best for Homage to the Square, late paintings of concentric, off-center squares, and when I find myself wishing they came sooner, I know a show is in trouble. Along the way he taught at Black Mountain, alongside such freer spirits as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, and at Yale, which still looks good on an emerging artist's CV. One could see his pedagogical style in a whole show a few years ago at Hunter, devoted to grids in shades of red. It startles me to recall that he had entered his twenties by the birth of Cubism.

The Whitney has taken an unexpected direction for a museum of American art. With "The American Effect" in 2003, it exhibited contemporary "global perspectives on the United States." The 2006 Biennial included artists born or based overseas. Another exhibition catalogued Picasso's heavy hand on American art history, and this one began at the Tate. See a pattern? If New York once "stole the idea of the avant-garde," as a famous critique has it, apparently Europe now claims copyright infringement.

As with the Picasso show, one has fun comparing personalities, but also too much pedantry—in this case, with two notable pedants. Worse, Moholy-Nagy and Albers had very different styles, little interaction in Germany, and even less in this country. The first settled in Chicago, where he directed Bauhaus for its last year before helping to start what is today the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech. I could imagine a show with more excitement, more of the mark on American artists, and more of Bauhaus. Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building still looks pretty good in New York and still looms over courses in the history and practice of architecture. Perhaps the show's real value is in tracing the very idea of a school, from a Modernist movement, through pedantry at its loopiest, to university credentials in art today.

Two sides of the picture plane

A wedge of light by James Turrell has two aspects. It exists as an heir to abstract painting and as Minimalist sculpture—both in their most grandiose mode. It transforms the space of a gallery and it depends on the viewer, for an illusion, after all, exists only in the eye and mind. Yet it does not offer a space for a viewer to enter.

One can see it as the two sides of the art object in late Modernism. Call that object the truth in painting. Call it a sculpture. Either way, it unites volume and the picture plane, and it offers a space for contemplation and delight.

With his latest work, Turrell does something new. He divides that unity into two bodies of work. That brings his output a bit too close to a commodity for comfort, but it also allows one to see the elements of his technical wizardry up close.

It happens just as spring's gathering daylight extends past museum closing hours. Long sunlit evenings mean late sunsets, and they shut down his installation at P.S. 1 until fall. Visitors there may have to settle for a wall of light or mist by Olafur Eliasson, but those who need a light fix in winter may need their Turrell fix elsewhere.

As with that square opening in a rooftop, he still exploits symmetry, simplicity, and transparency, and he still invites comparisons to Mark Rothko. Sunset turns visitors to Long Island City into Caspar David Friedrich's Moonwatchers. Again, too, he insists on the sensation of light as occupying real space, like Dan Flavin but with natural or ordinary gallery lighting. As with both traditions, he plays with painting and architecture—again envisioned as plane and volume.

Before anything else, however, Turrell does something else again: he plays the illusionist. He has also long aligned illusion with his sculptural side. He reverses one's associations of painting with illusion and Minimalism with the literal. For all his interest in Romanticism and Modernism, that marks a real break, in the direction of Postmodernism's theater.

Boxes of light

For these reasons, Turrell may attract the same friends and critics as a dramatist like Bill Viola. New-media illusions in white light from younger artists may try even harder to overwhelm the eye. However, they also insist on industrial processes rather than the Romantic sublime. Anthony McCall and Terence Koh both update Flavin's fluorescent tubes updated for Hollywood studio sets. As it happens, Barry Diller has just opened his Chelsea offices, covered with bulging volumes of frosted glass by Frank Gehry.

With "Light Leadings," Turrell himself goes high tech, in order to pull apart the components of vision. The largest works manipulate neon and LEDs like pixels, rather than leave changing patterns of light up to the gallery and the night sky. These dwell on his Rothko side, and they assert control. Visitors sit in front of them, while pale, swollen rectangles embedded in large monitors slowly shift in placement, intensity, or color. As with his open ceiling, it takes time to realize that anything is happening at all. I cannot swear that I have described any of the patterns or their evolution correctly.

Smaller works allow the image to change according to one's movements, while the geometry itself remains fixed. These develop Turrell's illusionist side. At first one may see a diagonal line in electric green against a black field. As one walks past or turns one's head, the line becomes a plane in depth.

If one does not recognize these works as holograms, one may imagine that the planes occupy dark, shallow niches cut into the wall. The glass could outline cabinets in a museum of natural history. I have seen one-color holograms before, although never so dark, crisp, and intense.

Turrell still asks one to contemplate real space. The large gallery and its winding partitions have by no means become incidental. However, his reliance on technology alters his output from single installations. So many discrete art objects may invite charges of selling out, and his devices may make him seem more of a one-trick pony than ever—if maybe now with two tricks. The departure from fixed geometry in the LEDs and the diagonals in the holograms also reduce his grounding in formalism. He may have become more derivative, only this time of science more than art.

However, one can see more clearly than before his roots in painting, both as a skill and as an analysis of vision. One can again, too the more modern idea of painting as physical object. As with the trendier light boxes of Jeff Wall, the work closest to Rothko sticks out and weighs the most. Perhaps the cuts in a wall approach his cut in a ceiling after all.

The thing itself

As with Turrell, art can offer moments of contemplation or transcendence, an intuition of something unseen. The very term abstraction implies a movement away from the concrete and toward the essential. Yet one can feel that same movement in a pair of stones, a broomstick, a broken glass, or a tangle of string. One can attend to light reflected off plywood or shadowy impressions on paper, a bookshelf's arrangement of memories or remnants of a cigarette break. So, at any rate, might run an abstract of "Aspects, Forms, and Figures."

The stones appear in a photograph by Adelina Lopes, Anthony Pearson's shadows derive from objects placed on photosensitive paper, and Alice Könitz's Circle Lamp of polished plywood and paper would look at home amid Russian Constructivism. Mostly, however, the group show turns on assemblages of humble materials. Jonah Groeneboer's string traverses a corner of the ceiling, but it resembles a game of cat's cradle more than an Eva Hesse. Carol Bove's shelf of books, driftwood, and a found image reassembles a cheap apartment into a miniature museum of natural history. For all his smooth, black stone, the sculpted man by Nathan Mabry can barely suppress a smile. Even Christopher Deeton's black-and-white paintings derive their symmetry less from Ad Reinhardt than an ink blot.

The show's success lies in its humility and a healthy sense of humor. I suspect the curators want something more—more than a Rorschach test for the buyer's esthetic impulse. João Ribas and Becky Smith describe a search for the "archaic, noumenal, and totemic." Oddly enough, they quote Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto sits atop Stephen G. Rhodes's broomstick. Marx is describing how an object acquires an aura by becoming a commodity, not a bad lesson for the art market now. He does not see the commodity fetish as continuous with religious rituals, although he has equal contempt for the illusions in both.

Modernism had its seekers of the "perfect moment," and many abstract and figurative artists alike still know when to capture the light. Many still go to art for a Romantic's sense of beauty, or else they whine about its loss. However, abstraction long ago lost its literal meaning. If anything, abstract artists after Minimalism have had their hands full struggling against a fixation on the object. One or two here, too, struggle too hard. The token older works, by Jack Goldstein and John McCracken, look particularly out of place, although McCracken's usual leaning plank gets a helpful, almost comical splatter of paint.

More often, the show's sense of proportion saves it from any number of dogmas, including its own. Lopes smashed her two panes of glass and then carefully reassembled them. I imagine her afraid of leaving too big a mess or too much reverence for Robert Smithson. Könitz's Table for a Family of Three Smokers consists of ashtrays set out according to a spare, off-kilter grid that Peter Halley might have drawn. All in all, enough objects lie about that one might quote William Carlos Williams after all: "No ideas but in things."

Marx might not find himself all that happy with any of these exhibitions, and each in its own way might agree with him. Is art a conspicuously upscale object of consumption? Bauhaus explained how to make art on the cheap, Turrell to substitute an illusion for the art object, and Bellwether to turn it into a thesis topic. Each, in turn, projects an idealism I can only love but cannot so easily share. Is the market making us stupid? Not necessarily, but it is putting a lot of pressure on art to know when it is selling out.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World" ran at the The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 21, 2007, James Turrell at PaceWildenstein on 25th Street through April 28, and "Aspects, Forms, and Figures" at Bellwether through March 10.