12.23.24 — Moving Away from Materials
Exactly halfway through a show subtitled “Material and Motion” is a near empty room. A table set for a frugal meal nestles into a corner as if abandoned long ago.
Do not, though, not try to sit down. Mona Hatoum has left the sole chair empty, but its occupant’s unseen presence is not going anywhere, and her veins and flesh stare back from the center of the empty plate. The video recalls Hatoum’s actual colonoscopy, but that, too, has passed. So much for materials and motion, at the Guggenheim through January 11. 
And I work this together with past reports on sculpture by Dorothy Dehner and Alice Adams as a longer review and my latest upload.
The title proper, “By the Way,” sounds like a mere aside or a means to an end, and it returns often to assemblage, as object and act. Selections in 2021 from the museum’s holdings, as “Knotted, Torn, Scattered,” featured Senga Nengudi, her stockings and ropes sagging under their own weight. She is back now, and again the Guggenheim relies solely on its collection and largely on mixed-media constructions. (The museum rounded out its picture of collecting abstraction in 2022.) Materials and motion call for large work, and the present show has not two but three tower galleries. Hatoum’s table is small enough for a doll’s tea party, but the room itself looms larger and larger.
Still, it defies materials or motion. So does the poverty of Arte Povera in Italy. Gilberto Zorio leaves a scrap of PVC by the ceiling, while fiberglass from Piero Manzoni might have dissolved in a cloud. A motorcycle high on the wall from Mario Merz is going nowhere fast, too. Jannis Kounellis leaves a steel plate at an angle, casting its weight on sacks of coal. If you mistook them for coffee beans, you are reaching too hard for meaning.
The Guggenheim is as well. Each floor has its own theme—”On the Move,” “Gargantuan Appetites,” and “Material as Meaning.” Yet motion and meaning are hard to articulate, leaving only the gargantuan. Xaviera Simmons sets her snapshots beneath a strange black bundle, but her faces withhold their story. Kevin Beasley cakes sneakers, mics, and speakers in resin that both hints at a lost glamour and refuses it. When Mildred Thompson assembles wood into a flat picture, she might have slammed the door in your face.
As with these three, the show does not lack for talented African American artists—but not as you might expect. David Hammons, too, questions the material presence of the artist and his work. He has used such materials as shoe polish, a flag, and a hoodie—and all appear in a larger show of “Going Dark” on the museum ramp. Here, though, he leaves only the elusive traces of his “body prints.” Shinique Smith and Rashid Johnson are a closer match to the themes, with her bulging black fabric and his painting in black soap. It looks just right near the thick surfaces of a white artist, Mark Bradford.
So does the mass of leather torn from the chairs of a Cold War secretary of state, by Danh Vo, or of a rug by Mike Kelley, draped over stainless steel pots. So, too, does the more modest mass of blue jeans from Joseph Beuys or a light sail from Robert Rauschenberg, in memory of India and his home on the Gulf Coast. The first thing one sees may be the most massive of all, coarse red mountains by Maro Michalakakos. They might have erupted that very moment, covering themselves in lava. As Dehner and Adams know so well, scale alone is mass. It just may not be going anywhere fast.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.