12.20.24 — Vanishing Act

Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. David Hammons's Wine Leading the Wine (Hudgins family collection, c. 1969).

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.18.24 — Celebrating the Gaps

To pick up from last time on the Brooklyn Museum at age two-hundred, the American wing can hardly wait to see you. It cannot even hold off long enough for a conventional sign announcing the exhibition and welcoming you in.

Instead, the space off the elevator greets you with signs picked right off the street, like one for a bus stop that might have just left off a full load of visitors like you. To its side, a living room set contains seating, shelves, and what the museum politely calls antiques. Not that collectors often treasure some cheap furniture, embarrassing carvings, and an old TV, and not that a museum often displays them. Make yourself at home as best you can. Inside, the mad rush never stops. Just try to sort out the period for many a period piece hung high and low amid others. Just try to identify them at all, some without so much as wall labels. Albert Bierstadt's A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (Brooklyn Museum, 1863)

You can rest assured of one thing: this rehanging will emphasize BIPOC—black, indigenous, and other people of color. It claims that opening room for African American families of a certain age, and that should already have you wondering. Do its contrasts and disorder enhance or diminish the museum’s most esteemed collection? Does it honor blacks and women or trivialize them that much more? What is art, what is trash, and who gets to say?

The Brooklyn Museum has rehung its American wing before, though never as thoroughly. Not two years ago, as I reported then, it rolled out these very rooms to great fanfare. It put the emphasis on Native American art, with a first room for just that and the name of the Lenape nation in large type outside. It made a greater effort throughout to find parallels between tradition, but nothing like this. The latest comes just in time for the museum’s two hundredth birthday, so you will forgive it if the curator, Stephanie Sparling Williams, and her team boast, in the rollout’s subtitle, of “New Frameworks for American Art.” The entirety is “Toward Joy,” opened October 4.

Not that it has anything like an obvious framework or much cause for joy. The opening stress on indigenous art is gone, and samples of it are not so easy to find. Nor indeed is anything else. My eye first fell on small paintings by Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade, with all their precise observation and near supernatural color. Look around, though, and the magic is gone, along with whatever else was going on between the Hudson River School and the threshold of modern art. Not far away lies Georgia O’Keeffe, amid an awkward mix of prim academics and garish color.

What, then, do they reveal about an artist? The room also includes a wonderful piece of Native American pottery, but what is that doing here? You may need the room’s introductory text to spot what they have in common: these are about troubled waters, from seascapes to the stories that a culture tells only to itself. Other themes include flowers, backs, and “Surface Tension.” These are not exactly recognized genres in art’s history.

This is not a way to celebrate inclusion. Rather than welcoming diversity, they take the life out of almost everyone. Georgia O’Keeffe seems closer to native symbolism than abstraction, which is interesting, but also stiff as a board in a company of stiffs. Albert Bierstadt, once on a partition to himself, shares a wall in the next room with lengthy text about, well, I am not sure what. Rather than breaking away from so much garish art into majesty, he looks just plain overblown. Artists this electric deserve better.

Rooms without wall labels do have touch screens for greater access, if you dare and if you care. Two alcoves feature the conservator’s hand, as “Radical Care,” which sounds promising, but I could not detect it. A shed acts as a study room, where paperbacks by Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and bell hooks tell you know what you are supposed to study, and it is not art. A long succession of nineteenth-century portraits, starting with John Singer Sargent, hangs at knee level as if on an assembly line. Chairs rest on high shelves as if someone forgot to take them out of storage. One more chair, facing a tea set, is by Frank Lloyd Wright—perhaps the least likely artist to take tea.

One sad result of the new hanging is to call attention to the collection’s gaps. Good as they are, Al Held and David Diao will have to stand for postwar abstraction. Still, if one group defies the rehanging’s limits and its strictures, it is women, especially black women One can discover portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring in 1940, akin to Fauvism, and Lily Martin Spencer, holding court with ripe cherries in 1856. Faith Ringgold has a rare place of honor at the start of a room with For the Woman’s House. It may take women to keep a major museum on a major anniversary on the map.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.16.24 — The Big Birthday

Count on the Brooklyn Museum to throw quite a party, however embarrassing. Count on it, too, to celebrate the institution by celebrating the borough. On its two hundredth anniversary, it extends an open call to Brooklyn artists and invites them in. It fills the lobby rotunda with roughly two hundred works, through January 26, chosen from four thousand submissions, just in time for its birthday.

It is “The Brooklyn Artists Show,” with every pretension of the definitive—the Brooklyn artists and the show. Who could define Brooklyn or contemporary art once and for all? It is also an excuse not to worry too much about art. Kehinde Wiley's Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (Brooklyn Museum, 2005)Hey, it’s only a party. If it falls a bit flat, such is the Brooklyn Museum. One may as well enjoy every bit of Brooklyn sunlight and not dwell on the details, no more than does the museum itself.

It may even lie about its age—like that eternally young elderly relative, but the other way around. What is the oldest, continuously operated art museum in the United States? That would be the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. What about New York? The Met opened on Fifth Avenue in 1870. The Brooklyn Museum began instead as a public library, but then the New York Historical Society Museum and Library entered the picture earlier still, in 1804.

Upstairs, a rehanging of American art only adds to the confusion—and I turn to that next time, rounding out a longer review and my latest upload. The borough, though, has a way of reinventing itself, and the museum itself rolls out a new logo, as a “new visual identity”—a delightfully clean one at that. Back downstairs, things look weighty and tight. The café has moved forward from a long hallway to the underused lobby, near large paintings by Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, with still larger sculpture by KAWS. If Wiley and KAWS are as glib as ever, they still ask for space. Outside the museum, a newly acquired sculpture in rusted steel by Mark di Suvero looks more formidable still.

The show of Brooklyn artists takes things down a peg. Each artist gets just one work apiece, organized loosely by subject if at all. Instead of wall labels, one has only the artist’s name stenciled on the wall, not even a date and title. As the saying goes, that’s all she wrote. The show could almost pick up where a private collection last season left off in the very same space, only with fewer iconic artists. But then this is about not iconicity but belonging. Two views of bridges between the boroughs hang side by side, neither one of them the Brooklyn Bridge.

Portraiture hangs more or less together, but then portraiture dominates the show. This is, after all, about diversity, what could boost that aim more than faces? One might expect no less than currency and diversity from an eclectic set of contemporary artists as curators—Jeffrey Gibson (a Native American), Vik Muniz (born in Brazil), Fred Tomaselli (a Californian), and Mickalene Thomas (an African American woman). In the American wing, her self-portrait lacks her usual glitter, and her face looks a bit dour as well. In the rotunda, things are looking up. Gibson makes sculpture, and the show has allusions to non-Western totems and household trash, but plain old painting still predominates.

All this makes it hard indeed to identify a work, to give it context, or to remember an artist. Anonymity has an upside, though, leaving space to enjoy a leisurely stroll. I am, I know, not really doing my job, but I felt on vacation, a nice one at that. A young woman, in a photo by Jasmine Clark, might be on vacation, too, seated in a perfect wildness in a pristine white dress. Isis Davis-Marks might be on vacation from Yale with her books still on her desk. I always liked those translations—and again, the story continues next time with more than two hundred years of American art.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.13.24 — The Eagle Takes Flight

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” Thomas Jefferson was speaking of Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising seeking debt relief and back wages from the Revolutionary War, but the Met is well ahead of his schedule in reconceiving history.

Martin Johnson Heade's Approaching Thunder Storm (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1859)Not twelve years after reopening its American wing, the museum celebrates the wing’s centennial with a new look for American art.

In truth, it is less than a revolution. The painting galleries have nominal themes, but with due respect for movements, artists, and their times. Other changes have been in the works for years. One still enters through a bank facade, although the Met has long since added its own money maker, a popular café. One can hardly help entering onto rooms for Native American art, once sorely neglected, along with other rooms for “founding narratives” (aka period rooms). Allow me, then, to offer once more my personal guided tour from January 2012, starting here.

A gilded eagle had an unlikely flight. William Rush carved it in 1809 and 1810, for a Lutheran church in Philadelphia, where it supported a sounding board behind the pulpit with its iron tongue. By mid-century it had come to rest in Independence Hall, not far from Rush’s own statue of Washington. Now, still suspended by a chain and still atop its gilded sphere, it presides over the first room in the Met’s new American wing, which soars.

Of course, its meaning has changed—from an attribute of Saint John to the American eagle to the spirit of American art. Rush understood national symbols all along, though, and so does the Met. It centers the wing on a single floor for painting and sculpture, from the colonial era to the Ashcan school. And it centers that floor on its hoariest display of patriotism, Emanuel Leutze’s life-size Washington Crossing the Delaware. It does so with a knowing wink at its audience, too, like that of Robert Colescott to embody the painting in blackface. The press would not have insisted so often on Leutze as icon rather than art without the museum’s prompting.

Of course, too, the painting is storytelling, and the renovation is telling stories as well. Lots of them, in fact, and they overlap. By bringing painting together on one floor, the Met sets out American history as a series of unfolding themes. The same characters often reappear in new roles, as artists or as subjects. By moving the Ashcan painters here as well, it also says that the evolution of American themes did not end abruptly with Modernism. The museum gets to boast of its collection as at once authoritative and open-ended, and it makes for a terrific reintroduction to American art.

The American wing took its present shape less than thirty years ago, with the museum’s first distinct galleries for painting and sculpture. The Met could simply have shut the place down and started over, as it did for Islam. Instead, change has come gradually over ten years, with a reopening in stages since 2007. The new painting galleries merely complete the job. The basic architecture has not changed either, although the firm of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo has found another three thousand or so square feet of display space. Yet this time small changes matter big time.

From changing images of Washington to changing images of the wilderness and the city, Met does not just present a history. It makes painting look good, by making paintings look at each other. It places sculpture in almost every room, from portrait busts to duck decoys. It shows the American eagle still in flight, not quite ready to land, with the textbook triumph of American painting another fifty years away. With luck, the wing’s stories will keep changing. Will Washington Crossing the Delaware be their centerpiece forever?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.11.24 — There Are Limits

Remember when America was on the verge of civil war, with right-wing armies ready to take it back? Unfortunately, Donald J. Trump won the election, so no one will ever know, but fighting in the street rages on.

You could call it a revolution in video. Only this time the marching, charging feet, boy, belong almost entirely to the police. Right on the way in, at Bitforms through January 11, a small screen barely contains the damage. And that screen is only a trailer for an exploration of the medium to come.

Then again, that may be why things are out of control: police themselves are breaking the law. For Marco Brambilla, they are the ones setting the fires and striking the blows. Something like it, I could argue, has happened on actual city streets. Had law enforcement done its job rather than raged at peaceful protests in favor of Black Lives Matter, maybe there would have been fewer lootings and more justice. And still, Brambilla knows, there are limits to control.

Already the short video had me afraid. It is not just the cuts back and forth between police geared for action and strangely quiet streets. It is also the cuts to a silhouette in fiery colors—of a man launching by hand a flare or grenade. In this context, the title screen looks more disturbing than the ocean in sunlight might otherwise suggest. Its ripples and crests are disturbance enough themselves, like a fire about to spread. Given the video loop, I hesitate to call it a beginning or an end.

The main event takes place behind a black curtain, on a doubly wide screen. Side by side, its two channels both reinforce and disrupt the video collage. This is Limit of Control, in the singular, but the efforts at control continue to multiply, and so do their limits. Not all of it takes place all that obviously on TV, although the talking heads include (repeatedly) Bill Clinton. Not all of it is made for TV either, although it has its costume drama. All of it, though, is found footage.

Brambilla relied on AI to collect the clips, although I might call it searching the Web. And that, too, leads to limits of control. Ever wonder what would have happened had the past unfolded in a 24/7 news cycle? Would the United States still have turned Jews away at the start of World War II? But then are mass killings any less likely today? Artists look less and less like masters of the created universe themselves.

Limit of Control has its own limits. It comes in a sometimes tradition of new media as theater, going back to Bill Viola. (The older artist happens to have a new video on the Lower East Side, too, at James Cohan through December 21. People enter in Viola’s characteristic slow motion, just in time to be swept away by titanic waters.) What exactly is Brambilla saying? Is he questioning a world filtered through TV or celebrating it? Or could theater, too, be a metaphor for inhuman control and perpetual war?

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

12.9.24 — Networking with the Gods

Nour Mobarak may not sound like a candidate for nostalgia. Born in Cairo, she identifies as a Lebanese American, works (mostly) in LA, and seems no closer to settling down, no more than a sadly conflicted world. Among her media are fungi.

Yet she sees them as an emblem of the geopolitical struggles that divide but also give hope. They nestle in soil, laying down mycelium, much like roots. She must like it, too, that the word for its fibers, hyphae, nearly rhymes with Daphne Phono, her installation at MoMA, in its studio through January 8. Nour Mobarak's Dafne Phono (photo by Stathis Mamalakis, Municipal Theatre of Piraeus, 2023)

Her work stops just short of nostalgia, too. Who can remember when a proper home put a phonograph record on the phono—the “talking phonograph” that Thomas Edison invented long ago? Contemporary DJs and a retro admiration for turntables and vinyl cannot make the old vocabulary any more vivid. Yet Mobarak has many time frames, in a disorderly room of “singing sculpture.” And what they are singing is Dafne, a candidate for the first opera, nearly ten years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo. They may not sing in anything close to harmony or unison, but those are to be found as well. “These are,” she insists, “the cadences of life.”

The opera itself can claim a resolution, at the expense of its heroine, Daphne. And it, too, has widely separated points of origin. Greek myth spoke of the sea nymph, or naiad, and her pursuit by Apollo, but it has survived thanks to Roman poets long after like Ovid. It may have grown more wistful in the process. Greek gods, particularly Zeus, had a sorry habit of lusting after lesser beings, stirring up jealousy among the gods and wars among humans. Ovid’s Phoebus (or Apollo) cries out to Daphne. He means no harm, for he brings a god’s love.

In the end, he transforms her into a laurel, a symbol of Apollo himself. Could the transformation explain the contrast between Mobarak’s snake-like sculptures? The largest winds through the air, while a shiny green one lies flat to the floor. Do fungi contribute to either one? The first has a thick, mottled surface like discolored concrete, but its snaking and mottling could echo her dreams of roots. She describes it as akin to a biological system, a technological network, or linguistics.

I would add song. Not that Daphne Phono sounds the least like early Baroque opera. Unlike Monteverdi’s breakthrough from modal to tonal music, with key changes and a twelve-tone scale, it sounds more like an incantation. I am still uncertain what to make of it or to name its language. Museum displays of sound art run counter to the arc of musical theater anyway. You can, after all, enter in the middle and exit at will. For once MOMA’s studio takes down its front wall as if to encourage you.

The remaining objects, roughly pots and pillars, share the rugged shapes and colors of concrete or stone. Wall text identifies them with the other characters in the story, including Venus and Eros. (Hey, someone had to set off a tragic love.) Never forget, though, that Apollo was the god of light, music, and beauty, which the myth in turn brings to love. As war in the Middle East widens, Mobarak must hope that they will reach there as well. She gives peace a voice, if not any more of a chance.

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