Barkley Hendricks, 'Black River from the Elgin Road View' (2005), o/c. Courtesy the artist & Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking.

Eleven of these scenes share a single tight space in the gallery. Not crowded, the varied shapes of the canvases obviously invite congregation, like an assemblage of mezzotints on a Victorian parlor wall. Each tondo and oval and lunette is like a shifting image in a lantern slide show, introducing a distant country to a dazzled audience. artes fine arts magazine

'My Back to the Bulldozer' (2008), o/c. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

This is Jamaica, but it is also resonant of Vietnam or any colonial landscape with violence just beneath its fantasy of paradise. On one canvas where an unpainted edge reveals the impasto around it, there is a literal equivalent to the many strata of memory that the surfaces of things can keep from us. But the process of exposing this underground is not all the work of nature; Hendricks is reading excavation, and not erosion, in the piece entitled My Back to the Bulldozer. The machine is made visible by the damage it has done. One single gouge of red earth across a wounded field tells the story of every other ravaged ground. A human mark has remade in the earth, and is now remarked by the hand of the painter.

These multiple small panels move the observer from stone to meadow to surf to darkening clouds, all the fragments from which the world is assembled. But each one is as complete in itself, as any of John Constable’s studies for patches of sky. A separate series of larger watercolors achieves a similar effect by different means. In both Turquoise Sky and Three Trees, the thin edge of a verdant horizon forces the eye up to the airy processions that push out over the paper’s end.

’Turquoise Sky’ (Lovers Leap Series) (1991), w/c on paper. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY.

Two of Hendricks’ signature full length portraits are hung at either side of the landscape grouping, making a frame out of another of the artist’s visions of the world. Set apart that way, they even more emphatically evoke the tradition which celebrates those figures of self-confident splendor found in the court paintings of Goya and Thomas Lawrence.

There is a further variation on that theme in two large format color photographs (The Twins and Swimming Pool Attendant) which go beyond being a record of a tourist’s encounter – or an anthropologist’s – to measure out the balance of stance and demeanor in the human figure. They are a reminder that the mysteries of affect have long been one of this artist’s central subjects.

‘Swimming Pool Attendant’ (1977), Chromographic print. Courtesy W. Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, CT.

Another grouping of work assembles a small constellation of unfamiliar fruits, and although only one of them includes the term ‘erotic’ in its title (and suggested by its framing) all of them are sensually charged, their taste and smell made tactile. But these are not Nature’s version of adult toys. Rather, they might serve as sexual reliquaries or votives – especially where the image is touched with gold leaf – small, but deeply felt prayers of thanks for passion’s gift.

There is thanksgiving, too, in the banana leaves which are both botanical record and exercises in form. That these are domesticated plants is a surprise revealed in the delicate pencil outline of their clay pots.

But for all the varieties of mastery here, the landscapes are what I went to again before I left, making sure of my remembering. There should be room for them in anyone’s memory.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Barkley L. Hendricks: Some Like it Hot, focuses on the artist’s work created in response to his travels to Jamaica and West Africa. With their compelling scenery and inhabitants, these tropical regions have provided him with a wealth of inspiration, and the resulting photographs and paintings represent a significant portion of his creative output. The exhibition includes large-scale figurative paintings, a series of landscapes on lunette and tondo shaped canvases, renderings in oil and watercolor of fruits and vegetation, and photographs selected from his prolific production in that medium—among them a suite of photographs of activist and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti  (left) that will be exhibited for the first time.

Now, through December 18, 2011

The William Benton Museum of Art,

University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

860-486-1705

www.thebenton.org

Enola Gay, restored & ready for exhibition (2004)

 Editor’s Note: Occasionally, an article published in ARTES evokes a profoundly personal and instructive reply by a reader. On very rare occasions, that response is crafted by a fellow writer and regular contributor to the magazine.  Recently (November, 2011), we ran a feature-length article by curator and consultant, Ken Yellis, as an expanded article originally appearing in Curator Magazine (2009).  Then, as now, he reflects on the social responsibility of collection-based and historical-oriented institutions to accurately represent our cultural and natural history in authentic and illuminating ways—even if it touches the ‘third rail’ of painful or controversial facets of our collective consciousness.  The myths we construct for ourselves—repeated with such frequency that they become our shared reality—are often at odds with the factual record. The nexus of these two world—fact and fable—serves as fertile ground for dialogue, debate, and even open conflict. artes fine arts magazine

Here, Stephen Vincent Kobasa evinces Smithsonian’s recent Enola Gay exhibition, drawing poignant and powerful associations in his own life; as well as on the warp and weft of the social fabric in which we, as a society, often choose to cloak ourselves. The first of these essays was originally published, in a somewhat different form, in the September, 1995 issue of Peacework; the second in the August 1, 2004 issue of The Nuclear Resister. After several years, they appear now on the pages of ARTES,  at the request of this editor. Their relevancy today—with historical facts and partisan emotions being played so fast and loose by our 21st century politicians—is that the first-person, singular narrative must continue to serve our communities as a powerful beacon for our responsibility as museums and institutions-of-learning to find balance in our story-telling. And it also reminds us that, while the historical record is cumulative and often anonymous, it is an unfolding saga that manifests itself each day, often in singular and profoundly personal ways.

A Machine for Lying: Reflections on the Enola Gay

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Guest Editorial Contributor

English school children in air raid trenches, 1942.

Sometimes, what we inherit from our parents are lies, not so much malevolent as they are necessary fictions, devices meant to convince us that our lives have found justification in situations where we are deeply afraid that there is no justification available.

In the early summer of 1945, my father was in Germany, having survived the violence of war for over one year. I have heard only fragments of his life during that time – he would recount one or two comic interludes (a tent collapsing under the weight of a heavy rain, leaving him muffled in a muddy ditch) – but only rarely would other moments surface: the soldier crouching alone in the middle of an English field as the rest of his unit drove away in the dark; the line of corpses like a tide mark along a Normandy beach; the accidental slaughter recorded in the British voice over my father’s headphones, “You’ve shot down one of ours.” This is all by way of evidence that I can never know the terror my father learned, somehow, to live with during that time – the ways in which he had to strip his humanity away in order to keep himself from madness. So when the war ended in Europe it must have seemed to him a release beyond measure – while the word which came soon after, that he would be shipping out to the violence which continued in the Pacific – can only have come as a brutal betrayal.

B-29 dropping bombs on Germany, 1944.

Here, then, the histories of my father and the Enola Gay come together, as they do for many other veterans of that time, and for their children. The atomic explosion over Hiroshima became an image of salvation, a terrible parody of the Crucifixion, in which the dying of a city spared their lives. And the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb, was transformed into the icon of their escape, a machine not only for destruction, but for lying. The skillful technology of the plane and the bomb was read as evidence of their worthiness, and the degree of the slaughter was proportionate to the value of their survival.

But these soldiers, now veterans, were not unaware of the horror the bomb had caused, and as details of the destruction became gradually available, their need for a myth to explain them away became more and more desperate. Atrocities carried out by the Japanese were essential to this rationalizing, although these arguments never acknowledged their assumption that our actions were atrocities as well; and that, for all our assertions of moral superiority, we actually yearned to become our enemy, to become capable of the crimes our enemy committed. We had begun to measure the world in competing levels of terror, and the atomic bomb now meant that our terror could be absolute.*

Horoshima civilians near hypocenter 3 hours after bomb, August 6, 1945.

These are not mere abstractions. They play themselves out in the realities of parents and children of that time – for if my father’s logic prevailed, then my survival, too, was linked to the incineration of vast numbers of human beings and the slow dying of many thousands more.In this version of the story, the Enola Gay carried me to safety. This is the unforgiving inheritance that the children of many World War II veterans (and their spouses – I think of my mother’s role as companion to my father’s need for the lie) find imposed on their experience of the past.

And so, outrage at the original proposal for the 1995 exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian must be seen as an act of self-defense on the part of those veterans who are as yet unprepared to let the lie go. In order to preserve a fragile fiction of moral sanity, the veterans who believe what my father does could not tolerate any threat to their attempt at self-justification. And while the much reduced form of that first exhibition of sections of the plane –echoed in the current display of the aircraft intact – does not recount their version of history in any great detail, it still serves their purposes through its silence – the myth remains intact.

Restored cockpit, Enola Gay, 2004.

How would it be possible, then, to confront that myth in the only way that is really essential – to ask what it means to live out lives that we believe depend entirely upon our willingness to undertake, at this very moment, an act of nuclear genocide? Although the machines themselves have evolved into Trident ballistic missile submarines, the lie of the Enola Gay is unchanged, and the exhibition is complicit in it.

Museums like the ones devoted to Air and Space on the Mall in Washington, D.C. – and now in the recently opened Udvar -Hazy facility near Dulles Airport – are, in one sense at least, as great a threat as any of our current working armaments. While obsolete as a weapon, the Enola Gay retains its power to deceive. It has not been so much restored as recreated in the form of a storytelling mechanism which depicts the reality of total war as a glittering prop in a theatre meant to indoctrinate and reassure. When Kathy Boylan, Anne Quintano and I undertook a direct action at the Smithsonian on July 2, 1995, it was not our purpose to damage that object – that thing – known as the Enola Gay (although we were, of course, charged with just such a crime). It would have been pointless to mangle a machine that is not capable of functioning, but even though our gesture was symbolic, it had a real object. We were after the illusion of the Enola Gay with our blood and ashes; not to destroy the “property” which was the government’s controlling notion about its museum artifact, but to expose it as a self-justifying fabrication, and reveal, in some small way, the horrible reality it attempts to suppress.

Crew autographs, photo of Little Boy, Hiroshima Atomic Bomb, 1945.

When, at our trial, the state’s attorney used the word ‘desecrate’ to describe what we had done to the airplane, he dramatically, if inadvertently, confirmed the necessity for our action. In an extraordinary perversion of the sacred, the machine that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima had been transformed into an object of worship, a relic of salvation through terror.

But where was the legal argument that would counter this idolatry? The necessity defense does not apply in the same way that it would for a plowshares action against a Minuteman missile silo – a working machine of the present moment. The Enola Gay is simply a lying story that helps this culture explain away the horrors it has committed in the past, while serving to give license for both our current willingness to commit nuclear genocide and our uncritical acceptance of the the claim that violence is inevitable in all human affairs.

And where in the constrained procedure of the court was there a place for arguments in defense of historical and moral truth? There have been suits successfully brought against revisionist historians who claimed that the Holocaust had not taken place. During our trial, Kathy Boylan described “the blood of the victims of Hiroshima finally reaching up to touch the plane,” but we were granted no legal formula that would acknowledge the voices of the dead as there is in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashômon, where a ghost testifies at a murder investigation.

Autographed photo, explosion over Hiroshima, 1945

We attempted to put the Smithsonian Institution itself on trial. What obligation does a museum have to present accurate information in its exhibits? Can it be held legally responsible for failing to do that? In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, visitors are confronted with the fatal indifference of the United States’ denial of asylum to Jewish refugees on board the ship St. Louis in 1939, and the later refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz because, according to a 1944 War Department letter, “it would not warrant the use of our resources.” Do the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve any less of an acknowledgement from our collective conscience?

We argued that our action was meant to repair a display that was in a vandalized condition when we came to it, with its real history mutilated by censorship and fear. If there was any alteration in value to the plane as a result of what we did, it was in restoring its importance as evidence of a crime. Our hope was that the museum leave the plane permanently transformed as a way of acknowledging – finally – its own part in the conspiracy to keep us from the truth…and from repentance. That did not happen. But our action is a part of the Enola Gay’s history now, and brief as it was, the plane can never be quite the same again to those who witnessed its moment of exposure.

What right do we, or any, have to demand that this country confront the horrors of its own creating? What consolation can be offered to veterans like my father in return for abandoning the lie? Our acts of resistance are always, if not only, in the form of stories meant to bring people, not simply to their senses, but to their consciences. To tell the secret of the Enola Gay is to drain that machine of its power over us to accept it as an inevitability in our lives. And when the fatalism of violence is broken – then real salvation is possible.

July, 1995– August, 2004

*This has its obvious contemporary parallels, most succinctly stated by John K. Stoner: “A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”

_________________________________________

More Lies from a Machine: Revisiting the Enola Gay

25 milliseconds after detonation, Trinity test site, Aug. 17, 1945

But I have words

That would be howled out in the desert air,

Where hearing should not latch them.” – Macbeth, IV, iii

Crowded in the vast museum hangar, a war toy now, the Enola Gay is once again intact. The weapon proved restorable, but not the world it destroyed. This is an example of those ironies which, along with violence, are our culture’s most notable products. But what protest is adequate to the outrage?

Eight years ago, when a part of the Enola Gay’s fuselage was first displayed at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, three of us marked it with blood and ashes, part of the history of resistance to the exhibit which has been lost in the same way the plane’s history has been erased by the Smithsonian curators.

For a brief moment, the plane was like one of those legendary sites of murder which ooze the evidence of the crimes committed there.

Cockpit, B-29 "Superfortress" Enola Gay 1945. Photo: David Polermo

Now the plane has been once again washed clean, and the academics have gathered to beg for words, demanding that a more complete history of the plane’s use be included in a display which now praises it as merely a triumph of technology.

But what printed narrative would be complete? What list of the dead? How account for the mutilated conscience of a man like the one for whose mother the plane is named and who, when asked his opinion of the more contemporary demands for the use of nuclear weapons, replied:

“Oh, I wouldn’t hesitate if I had the choice.”

How will the Hibakusha present at the opening of this new museum console the dead with their message that they have seen the distant machine a second time, now displayed as near and wonderful?

A possible answer would be to drag the plane into the desert to be scoured by sand to a metal skeleton, puzzled over by wandering naturalists, and explained by no documents other than the screaming of ghosts.  – S.V.K., January, 2004

___________________________________

Editor’s Footnote: I think the reason that Stephen’s narrative stikes such a strong emotional cord with me is that the deeply engrainedveil of fear we lived, under as a generation of children during the Cold War `50s and `60s, seemed to know no rational bounds.  Global annihilation was a reality that post-war generations came to accept as a distinct possibility.  The U.S. government was principally responsible for shaping and managing public awareness regarding the devastating consequences of a nuclear stike on any major city in the country.  Mutually Assurred Destruction was the watch-word–an unsettling claim that an ever-expanding atomic arms program was essential to insure that any enemy (assumed to be the Soviets) would be dissuaded from a pre-emptive strike–if they understood an equally-destructive counter-attack as a virtual certainty. 

Pulic education became a priority in the face of this looming Armagedon.  The language adopted to address the threat of nuclear war was carefully crafted to impart information aimed at survival strategies.  Popular notions of ‘Duck and Cover’ were practiced in all public schools and businesses in the 1950s.  The public felt reassured and prepared (my father built a fall-out shelter in our celler), while the reality confronting all those in range of a nuclear attack would have been certian incineration, or lingering death from burns, radiation and the calamatous failure of the societal infrastructure.

What follows is a brief exerpt from a national education program for children in the `50s that exemplifies the “lies” and “myths” alluded to in the esssays above.  I recall that we all allowed ourselves to be convinced that survival was possible after the awful reality of a nearby nucelar explosion; because to consider the alternative was just too unimaginable: http://youtu.be/u1MQ4eyg6U4

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What is to be made of this invented landscape, fundamentally disconnected from the world around it (as in Trisha Baga’s photograph 10.22.11 where the notion of being misplaced is made definitive, rather than exceptional)? Nothing quite fits here. Buildings are disembodied by design, with the reflecting glass of office towers that never show themselves, but only what surrounds them.

Left: Trisha Baga, 10.22.11. (2011). Photo: Courtesy the artist. artes fine arts magazine

Lukas Geronomias, Silhouette from the series Comfortable (Stamford), 2011. Inkjet on textile (rolled). Courtesy of artist.

Lukas Geronimas registers these facades in his Comfortable (Stamford) series with urban wallpapers of splendidly gridded uniformity, as in the image Landmark. Laid down on textile, the patterns evoke madras cottons, simplified into architectural dress. Another of the series, entitled Silhouette, is displayed as a rolled scroll, with its patterns almost entirely invisible. It has the attraction of those secrets we know are being contrived inside of every corporation office that we pass.

One more of Geronimas’ printed plots incorporates what might be a parody of the Papal keys and the miscreant Vatican Bank, but has a more local connection to the icon adopted by the Union Bank of Switzerland with its massive Stamford office, monetary losses, fines, and rogue traders.

There is a 15th century rendering of an ideal city, variously ascribed to the painter Piero della Francesca or the architect Leon Battista Alberti, which possesses more visual splendor than Stamford’s corporate standards would embrace. But what it has in common with urban Connecticut is an absence of visible human presence. As is the nature of bureaucracies, all the activity is indoors, out of sight.

Lukas Geronomias, Rita (2011). African mahogany, brass, fasteners, adhesives, pipe cleaner. Courtesy of artist.

This theme is moderated through another work by Geronimas, Rita, a rustic cellular antenna or astronomical instrument with a star fragment trapped on one of its armatures. Here is the vehicle for unseen conversations, the financial chatter that makes and unmakes the lives of the surrounding community.

This gallery, newly established, is itself a combination of former domestic spaces whose past has become a fantasy. A square of carpet at the base of one brick column is not clearly incorporated into the exhibition, yet gives a note of warning that it should be avoided. It has gone from useful decoration to pure object by virtue of the works which surround it. Its innocence is lost.

This stripping away of obvious purpose is clearly deliberate in the fragments of vaguely dysfunctional office furniture by Geronimas that are scattered around the space. Included are two useless chairs identified as indigenous to the locality. As wall pieces, they suggest small scale piano lids or architectural templates for concrete benches on a distinctly uncomfortable plaza.

Mads Lynnerup, Reflection (the angle of incidence), 2011. Installation: Five mirrors and 5:28 min video. Courtesy of artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery

Mads Lynnerup’s Reflection (the angle of incidence), with its five mirrors (in another echo of corporate invisibility) and video projection, documents and multiplies a solar cooker being put to use. An usual scene for an urban parking lot, there is something ominous in its narrative. But the initial mystery of the liquid being heated – can it be toxic ? flammable? – is resolved in the surprise of a tea bag. The climax is both sentimental and unsettling.

Trisha Baga, Ferñañdo (2011). Video projection with Chinatown ink drawing. Courtesy of artist.

Baga creates a minor planetarium with her video of, the green light at the end of the dock, channeling F. Scott Fitzgerald alongside a scrolling star show catalog of local personages which renders the community as an inclusive, flickering genealogy.

This latter piece serves as a physical conclusion to the show which opens with an entryway work also created by Baga, and eponymously entitled Ferñañdo. Here, texts crawl in parallel above and below a Chinatown ink drawing redolent of adolescent obsessions and mass produced restaurant calendars. Multiple languages suggest diversity and incomprehension in equal measure, the beginning and the end of the world so inventively depicted in this show, all illuminated by the lights of an imaginary city.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

 Fernando

‘On the Town: Seeing as Only Strangers Can’

Franklin Street Works, 41 Franklin Street, Stamford, CT

Visit the Franklin Street Works site at www.franklinstreetworks.org

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Left: 1) Whitfield Lovell, Ode (1999). Mixed media on wood with chairs. Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund. fine arts magazine

2) Willie Cole, Man (1999). See detail below

For me this piece is the icon of this exhibition. Everything here is etched with violence and disappearances. The price of history is never paid in full, and especially not for this country’s debacle of race. All the bodies depicted here would once have been saleable. So the question inevitably arises in front of the image entitled Man, from a triptych Man, Spirit, Mask by Willie Cole, are the features maimed by ritual or brutality? Is the title itself an assertion or an irony?

These uncertainties are the defining characteristic of our inheritance from slavery, and they pull at us from every piece in this show. In Kerry James Marshall’s untitled painting the subject means to become her own portraitist but the paint-by-numbers plot seals her fate as a graceful stereotype; only on the smeared palette is she freed.

3) Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2009). Detail below.

In a group of four etchings with aquatint, Kara Walker renders her small theatres of cruelty as pages out of a censored Matthew Brady comic book. In Cotton, the cotton bolls are speckled with barbs waiting to impale the falling child, like a revision of Brer Rabbit who is no longer immune to the briar patch. In another, the executioner’s rope around his neck, John Brown appears to feast, like the Greek god Cronus, on a proffered infant. There is feasting, too, in Vanishing Act, with a black woman swallowing a white child, python-like, on stage. And a child gives birth under the bemused gaze of armed men in Li’l Patch of Woods. Each grotesque meant to remind us of how much more grotesque is the history of our racism itself.

4) Kara Walker,Cotton (1996-97). Detail below.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untitled drawing holds the memory of a kindergartner’s terror, almost as if fashioned in response to one of those therapeutic suggestions accompanied by a sheet of paper and a box of crayons. A bright failure in self-defense, it cuts to the heart.

There is more, of course, and on the surface, this exhibition is simply about a museum playing catch up in its collection of African-American art, while giving students their scholarly way with objects that resist them at every turn. But beneath it all is the hard story that we have yet to read to the end.

By Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Now, through June 26, 2011

Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT

203-432-0600

http://www.artgallery.yale.edu/

Additional image citation information follows:

1) Whitfield Lovell, Ode (1999). Mixed media on wood with chairs. Yale University Art Gallery, Katharine Ordway Fund.

2)  Willie Cole, Man from the triptych Man, Spirit, and Mask (1999). Photoetching and embossing with hand additions. Yale University Art Gallery, A. Conger Goodyear, B.A. 1899, Fund. 

3) Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (2009). Acrylic on PVC. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979.

4) Kara Walker,Cotton (1996-97). Etching and aquatint on chine collé. Yale University Art Gallery, A. Conger Goodyear, B.A. 1899, Fund.

Above: 5) Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1981). Oil stick. Yale University Art Gallery, Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection.

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Although, in his 1927 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Isamu Noguchi proclaimed for his art a “desire to view nature through nature’s eyes and to ignore man as an object of special veneration,” the evidence displayed is here that he was closer to the 19th century writer in fashioning a wide circle of acquaintance where he expected, as Emerson did, to find his own identity confirmed. 

Above: Berenice Abbott, Isamu Noguchi with Glad Day (c. 1930), Gelatin silver print. Photo: © Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics, NYC; Collection The Noguchi Museum fine arts magazine 

The Noguchi Museum, Area 1 (l. to r.) Deepening Knowledge, 1969, Brilliance, 1982, Venus, 1980

This exhibition, with its expansive taxonomy of friendships, raises the question of a particular artist’s community in ways that are alternately poignant and unnerving. The album of biographies which serves as a lesser catalogue to the exhibition invites a negotiation between art and ephemera that does not always spare Noguchi’s works from being taken as simple illustrations to the narrative of his relationships. 

But there are shorter stories within the larger one that leave the art to itself. Miss Expanding Universe, 1932, a figure pitching itself into space with entire confidence, finds its contrast in Death (Lynched Figure) 1934 with its rictus of metal. But biography reasserts itself in Frida Kahlo’s Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939). Kahlo’s relationship with Noguchi brings her here, as does Noguchi’s intimacy with the suicide. Kahlo makes a memorial that evokes some 15th century Sienese painting of a saint’s life, collapsing time and space in a woman’s leap to her death. 

Isamu Noguchi, R. Buckminster Fuller (1929), Chrome-plated bronze, 13 x 8 x 10”.

 In Brancusi’s Paris studio in 1927 there is another story, where Noguchi begins his practice of association as well as sculpture. This is a moment well before our current notions of network and contact that turn personal alliances into mechanics. For all that seems obvious about his inheritance from Brancusi, it is Noguchi’s figurative devotions that are full of surprise (and one more betrayal of his Guggenheim oath). 

A bust of Buckminster Fuller in 1929 is a chrome perfection of a portrait all on the surface. 

His rendering of the art dealer Julien Levy in the same year looks as if it has borrowed from Eric Kennington’s bronze memorial to Lawrence of Arabia in the cellar of St. Paul’s Cathedral. And his Uncle Takagi of 1931 finds him in a larger, painful world of age and loss. 

Isamu Noguchi, Model of Riverside Park Playground, final version (1965), Bronze, 4-1/2 x 35 x 22-1/2”. Collection The Noguchi Museum

 Noguchi also writes his story on the landscape. Or hopes to. His model for a Play Mountain, in 1933 with its combination of Aztec temple and Roman amphitheater is never built, but one can imagine Maya Lin learning from it how to make a cross section of sorrow. The Riverside Park Playground of 1965 is a final model for another unrealized project . Like some ancient palace recently uncovered, it would have invented a distant past for a city without one. 

Isamu Noguchi, My Arizona (1943-77) Fiberglass, plastic, 18x18x4". (second state with original elements) Collection of the Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble

But his Garden (Pyramid, Sun and Cube) in the plaza fronting the Beinecke Library at Yale University is constructed in 1963. For anyone familiar with the full scale piece, the model of it here provides the shock of the miniature, especially as it presents contrasting surfaces separating the two standing forms from the low pyramid and the base. At Yale, the work is entirely of marble in a single range of color. Similarly provocative are two earlier proposals Noguchi made for the same sunken space: one, a crater and its inverse; the other, a puddling and bubbling duo of lava forms. 

In red stoneware, The Apartment (1952) is not a model, save as it evokes the miniature towers of Han dynasty tomb ware as well as a Giacometti-style tenement. Noguchi’s furniture has even more to say about city life, with a prismatic table of 1957 with its aluminum shapes to solve the puzzle of a one bedroom studio and a marble top table with metal bowl insert for some domestic liturgy or curious game of chance. 

 The chart on display which details the extended genealogy of Noguchi’s relationships has something of the six degrees of separation mantra attached to it. But the clearer image of what price the artist pays for human connection is a 1939 Bernice Abbot photograph of him, clutching his sculpture Glad Day with one hand, his other arm in a plaster cast. What he makes of others, remakes him. Emerson would have understood. 

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer 

Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a political activist and a contributing writer for Art New England, Big, Red and Shiny, and the New Haven Independent, where he created the series “Object Lessons.” 

On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922-1960 

On exhibit through April 24, 2011 

The Noguchi Museum 

9-01 33rd Road, Long Island City, NY 

718-204-7088 

www.noguchi.org

Andy Warhol, Anne Basse (1981), Collection of Housatonic Museum of Art, Gift of Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program

Who is and who isn’t? What is identity’s price? These are Warhol questions. And the ways in which he poses them are no less charged now, nearly twenty-four years since his death. 

Here is a part of the Diaspora of images created by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts when it chose from among the thousands of photographs that Warhol produced to make a series of gifts to art collections throughout the country, the Housatonic Museum of Art being one of them. 

But Terri C. Smith, the curator of this exhibit, has no interest in a mere celebration of good fortune. The donation is not the only subject here. Rather, Smith has worked to create an expressive history, using other elements from Warhol’s own larger project along with the work of current artists who are now playing variations on his inventiveness. Fine Arts Magazine 

Andy Warhol, Tennis Courts (n.d.), black & white print, Collection Housatonic Museum of Art, gift Andy Warhol Photo Legacy Progr.

Part of the power of what is on display here is that it does not treat Warhol as an artifact. There is more and more to him at every new reading of the work, and our own time keeps looking back at us out of what he found. One tradition at work here is that of Ingres, with his relentless categorizing of social flair and dismay. But as critical as Warhol’s eye could be, he never lacked for empathy. 

There is a Roman Catholic framing of the world with these Polaroid ranks of votive images, in each of which he saw something of his own self, and in which he demands that we see something of ours. That is where the real matter of recognition lies. Among his subjects, does it matter that I know who Rick Ocasek is, but not Anne Basse? And what of the collection of the “unidentified,” among which is obviously a group of waiters who are unknown almost by definition. But there is a democracy to the visual presence that Warhol grants them. Even without names, they are declared as individuals. 

As also are the children whom he portrays as sympathetically human. These are not Diane Arbus’s demons, even though they are not innocent. And he manages the same equanimity in his treatment of objects, as with a knife, more a cleaver, that is as distinct as a Dürer engraving, and registers as a small human splendor, even with its cutting edge. 

Black and white images are often the surprises here, especially since the medium seems so far from the stereotype of Warhol’s more spectacular devices. But he is good with these. In a 1986 photograph of Dianne Brill we see only her back, but it shows us everything. An undated view of a tennis court and its habitués is like one of those mediaeval allegories of the vices, here offering a careful reading of indolence. 

Jeremy Kost, Not Yet Titled (Gaga), 2009

Jeremy Kost’s ‘Not Yet Titled (Gaga),’ a triptych of photographs made last year, records the new evanescence of the public personality, here masked to make herself more visible. As Warhol did for his subjects, Kost presents Lady Gaga’s self-conscious mutations as experiments in evasion. When will she ever be anonymous again? 

In a series of Screen Tests made between 1964 and 1966, not part of the Warhol gift, but included as a wonderfully chosen loan, Warhol records Marcel Duchamp like a unperturbed deer in headlights, some illegible plot of lines inscribed on the wall behind him, with his smile thin-lipped, then pursed. When he turns his head, he becomes a prototype of profile. Paul America’s filmed sequence has the single narrative of his struggle to suppress his laughter. And then there is Lou Reed, sunglassed, Coke bottle in hand, drawing the concoction back to its founding recipe when it actually contained a trace element of cocaine. He is, wonderfully, the Coca Cola Corporation’s worst nightmare. 

Andy Warhol, Pia Zadora (1983) Housatonic Museum of Art, Warhol Photo Legacy Program

At the time that I walked through this show the space had been put into service as the background for a fashion photo shoot. The model had some vocal exercises obviously meant to shape her face properly for the camera. So my progress was accompanied by a litany of “hi, hi,” “aw, aw,” and “you’re so cute.” There was something strangely appropriate to these empty gestures pretending not to be so as an accompaniment and contrast to what I was seeing in these galleries, particularly after I sat down with headphones to listen to the more arresting chants recorded in Rashaad Newsome’s 2009 work, ‘Shade Compositions (Screen Test 2)’. But this was simply further evidence of how sensitive the exhibition was to Warhol’s thoroughgoing curiosity. Even accidents immediately found their proper place in the story. 

At one point in an episode from Andy Warhol’s TV of 1981 that was also on view, the film director John Waters affirms that “I like to eavesdrop.” The visual equivalent of that is found in these photographs, with Warhol the voracious, forgiving auditor. Each small museum like this one that received a careful sampling of his work now possesses an equally precise testimony. But not every one of them will let us listen in as clearly as this exhibition does. 

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer 

At the Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT through October 15, 2010 at www.hcc.commnet.edu 

Or visit the museum blog at: http://inthecompanyofhcc.blogspot.com

Tula Telfair, Non Invasive Methods of Examination Were Lacking, o/c (2010) Photo: Griswold Museum

Imagine a medieval troupe with a pageant cart carrying the universe inside, waiting to be unpacked. Tula Telfair could be their set designer. The borders to each of her canvases are marked by alternating strips of solid color, save for the lower edges, creating a series of proscenium stages. This is scenery in several senses, then, waiting for performances as well as observers.

But the players never appear, only the audience. These paintings throw what is the forgotten obvious into high relief; we make them appear by looking. For many of them, our observation becomes the only recognizable human presence. There is something here of the 19th century passion for the panorama, encompassing the world in a single view.Fine Arts Magazine

Telfair Exhibit, Krieble Gallery, Griswold Museum

But there is also a warning that echoes G.K. Chesterton’s: “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.” Our humanity is diminished at a distance. In the paintings “Order is a Necessary Counterpoint to Sensuality” and “The Structure of Matter” there are dots and scatterings of light that might well be read as traceries of settlement. A photograph from the air in William Eggleston’s series, ‘The Democratic Forest’, shows the same bright dust scattered across fields of color.

But there is a thin line that divides streets alight from streets aflame. Will the end of the world look very much different from the beginning? That is a question for every one of the works collected here. While Telfair’s landscapes are not particularly apocalyptic, they are still ominous without being threatening, unnerving without being ravaged.

John Frederick Kensett, Fort Dumpling, o/c (ca. 1871). Gift of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Co. Photo: Griswold Museum

In ‘Non-Invasive Methods of Examination Are Lacking’ (above) a small grid of what might be service roads to some secret government project appear in one small plot of ground. It is as if Robert Smithson had been at work on a landlocked jetty. The outlines are ambiguous and incomplete, with all culture’s experiments left unfinished.

Here are excesses of sky with clouds that boil and press down against the mountain ranges, with never a strict horizontal at the intersection. The topography is always invasive, with jagged intrusions of land into the resisting air. Other boundaries like those in the piece entitled “Between Sensual and Conceptual” are lost in an indeterminate foggy light, misted by invisible hot springs, leaving only the artifice of the painted three-sided frame to mark an unconvincing limit to space. We are sure that the painting extends outside the narrow opening of canvas.

Tula Telfair, Pure Formal Manipulation, o/c (2010) Photo courtesy Griswold Museum

In dialogue with her own work, Telfair has compiled in an adjacent gallery an anthology of influence from the museum’s holdings. A work by John Frederick Kensett is a concise summary of several defining attributes in Telfair’s compositions, especially the prodding irregularity of line between earth and sky But the references are clearly limited by what was available in the permanent collection. There is nothing certainly to match her scale, which more resembles Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire than it does the small study in oils by him that Telfair chose.

James Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge (1870)

And because there are no examples of his work in the Griswold collection, what goes unacknowledged are the ways in which Telfair reinvents the apparently artificial skyscapes of Maxfield Parrish, where what appears grotesque in tonality and contrast turns out to be an unexpected accuracy the first time one notices a summer sunset with the same spectrum. In the painting “Essential Elements,” she also pays homage to James McNeil Whistler’s “Nocturnes” with their meditations on color at the edge of darkness. And Telfair finds the means to to put the impressionist technique of a Pissarro sunset to realist ends. This incorporation of various painterly traditions is unselfconscious and exuberant. It accounts for the past without either mimicry or fawning.

The titles to the paintings often seem like small comedies, benign attempts to delude an observer into a fiction of understanding. This is particularly true with an example such as “Pure Formal Manipulation,” which is accurate, while at the same time unrevealing. The forms are pure enough, although the manipulation is not entirely so. There are tricks being played here, but we are willing to be fooled by them. And this creates one final parallel to the central demand of theater: our willing suspension of disbelief in the presence of these fantasies. We are conspirators in the possibility of a world that would not exist without the artist—or without us.

By Stephen Kobasa, Contributing Writer

The Strip seen from the desert with Robert Venturi's silhouette, 1966. Photograph by Denise Scott Brown.

There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover, as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.     

What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wandered the Strip (since renamed Las Vegas Boulevard) with an assortment of Yale architecture students, has vanished, like the Stardust Hotel into its imploding cloud.     

So there is a reluctant dismay – more like a nostalgia begrudged – that accompanies this Yale exhibition, a composite of two separate retrospectives of work by the architects.     

Hotel Mielparque Nikko Kirifuri, 1992-97, Nikko, Japan, "Village street" interior. Photograph by Kawasumi Architectural Photograph Office.

There are many small surprises here: the cut paper assemblages presented as architectural drafts in dimensionality, the incorporation of manga technique into the design of a Japanese hotel, a proposed boulevard of giant Disney characters for the French Disneyland, that would have been an unimpeachable rendering of imperialism. And there are a variety of mediations on the charged relationship between drawing and execution, where the former seems to have satisfied them even more than the latter.     

There are also indisputable successes among works of theirs that have been realized, such as the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, in its bright, comic balance with the, “Giant Three Way Plug”, by Claes Oldenburg, an artist for whom they have an obvious and particular kinship.     

The walls filled with the visual diary of what they happened on in Nevada over forty years ago reminds us that the raucous energy of that landscape has evolved today into only an inflated parody of itself. These images include something like the haunting documentary of the ordinary that Edward Hopper found in his streets. As he was, they are journalists of memory.     

Fremont Street, 'The Strip', Las Vegas, 1948. Collection of Univ. Nevada, Las Vegas

But what is on display in these galleries is less important than a reflection on the ideas which inspired the work, especially those which emerged out of the book Learning from Las Vegas. Reading through it again, what’s striking about it is the “modesty” that Scott Brown describes as one of the deep purposes of their exercise. She and Venturi were committed, above all else, to move away from the arrogance of an imposed architecture.     

For them, Las Vegas was what the vernacular created when it thought itself imaginative, an untrained fantasy. “Decoration is cheaper,” as they put it, but it also serves to diminish space as a central architectural notion. Las Vegas domesticates the desert, adding brightness to the emptiness. That contrast of the billboard in the desert is not merely ironic. The sign painter alone against the horizon in the Terence Malick film, “Badlands”, is only able to see the world when it becomes a depiction. This is what Venturi means by the symbolic value of making architecture. It has no value if it does not tell us where we are. And we always know that in Las Vegas.     

But there is more, and it suggests that while human desires are central to what Venturi and Scott Brown found compelling about Las Vegas, the moral isolation which accompanied them rarely appears. They never ask what it means to walk through a parking lot that has no instructions for pedestrians. And the displays they make the most of are often erased by daylight.     

Venturi and Scott Brown’s assertion that, “if you take away the signs, there is no place”,  comes very close to Gertrude Stein’s, ‘there’s no there, there’.  But Stein was looking for where she had lived in Oakland as a child. No one looks for the past in Las Vegas. Or for home.     

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer     

What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates     

through February 5 at Yale School of Architecture Gallery     

180 York Street, New Haven, CT   203-432-2288     

www.architecture.yale.edu     

Editor’s Note:  During the late 60′s, Robert Venturi saw Las Vegas as a model for new design, presenting its roadside culture of signs—bright, clashing and ugly—as a vocabulary for contemporary style.      

right: Sheraton Chair for Knoll, 1978-84. Bent laminated wood, plastic laminate with applied pattern, and upholstery. Photograph by Matt Wargo.     

He created riotous furniture for Knoll, a range of postmodern chairs that recalled famous historical chair styles from Chippendale, to the moderns. Often silkscreen-printed in bright patterns, the colors reflected the Memphis style of ancient Egypt, all the way to the silkscreen prints of Andy Warhol.     

The chairs relied on silhouettes and printed patterns to create their personalities, being otherwise simple, bent plywood constructions. Like stage sets, from the front view the chairs look substantial, but from the side they appear as they are made, simple thin molded plywood forms. Venturi’s chairs embodied the postmodern characteristics of ‘quoting’ other design styles, displaying his furniture as props for deeper ideas and meanings.     

Quote from Venturi’s, Learning from Las Vegas (1972): “The mechanical movement of neon lights is quicker than mosaic glitter, which depends on the passage of the sun and the pace of the observer; and the intensity of light on the Strip as well as  the tempo of its movement is greater to accommodate the greater spaces, greater speeds and greater impacts that our technology permits and our sensibilities respond to.”[Learning from Las Vegas, 116]

Philip Pearlstein, Study for Model with Butterfly Kite, 2007, watercolor on paper

 There are artists who protest too much. And they often find an audience, half-grateful, willing to defer to the presumed authority of their declarations on meaning. This simplifies matters. Or so Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) would have one think.

 His canvases, heaped with images, are offered as meaningless. One might dismiss this as merely disingenuous, and leave it at that. But while the artist may disown his metaphors, the world cannot so easily be stripped of them. Pearlstein’s consistent pairing of objects and naked human bodies is not merely a series inventive, but empty, free associations.

Representation has its price. One does not escape allegory either by edict or by wishing. Myths will have their way, even if – like the neglected witch of Sleeping Beauty – they are not invited. A nude woman in the company of a swan is always Leda, though in one of Pearlstein’s renderings, the fable is made wooden with what might be a shooting gallery target. In another version, now accompanied by a statue of the god Mercury and an accordion, the bestiality becomes comic. In several variants of another ancient story, the sirens are made gigantic by miniature boats.

Philip Pearlstein, Mickey Mouse, White House as Bird House, Male and Female Models, 2001, oil on canvas

The thin line between rape and gynecology is drawn in one watercolor study where a butterfly hangs over a nude woman in an examination chair. Such a piece of furniture cannot be an accident of interior decoration; it demands to be recognized for what it is if the incongruity, and the threat, are to take shape. A dirigible, a kiddie car, airplane and two models become a heap of limbs and wreckage; the aftermath of a disaster, with corpses as large as the broken machines.

Superman, Nefertiti, a gargoyle and a horse that could be a plaything from Troy are the debris of Western culture, gazed upon by their naked companion, like Rembrandt’s Aristotle wondering over Homer. The difference is a world like Macbeth’s where “all is but toys,” and what mattered once, no longer does. This records an emptiness with value, and is not simply an abstraction by artist’s edict. Every choice here is charged with loss.

Philip Pearlstein, Study for Models with Dirigible Weathervane and Kidde Car Airplane, 1991, pencil on paper

Mickey Mouse and a White House for birds read like a gathering of all our country’s demons, repeated in a canvas where the Walt Disney character performs for an uninterested couple, the painter now as puppeteer, insisting that the models are nothing more than toys themselves, forcing us up against the paradox of knowing that they are not.

The wind blows through these works, with their whirligigs and Chinese kites and sailing ships, the air made visible in inflated chairs and balls. But there is also the weight of metal against flesh, an iron butcher sign with its cleaver and saw and a spear-pointed weathervane that dares us into indifference. This is realism of the magical kind, where the bizarre is always hung about with violence.

This brings us to the sense in which Pearlstein is correct in his disdain for content. It has nothing to do with abstraction, but with the brutality of our looking. An early print of his which I once knew well, had the radical amputations of limbs and head that I thought allowed for a clearer grandeur of form, free of personality. But this recent encounter with his work reminds me that he is more a documentarian of perception. He is simply recording our encounters with each other in the streets, where we are drained of what is human. Weary pornographers that we are, we have all seen too much to care.

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

Philip Pearlstein: Recent Works, through November 24, 2009

Chauncey Stillman Gallery

Lyme Academy College of Fine Art

84 Lyme Street, Old Lyme, CT

860-434-5232

www.lymeacademy.edu

 OPINION POLL:

“Time Will Tell: Ethics and Choices in Conservation”

Through September 6, 2009 

Yale University Art Gallery 

1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut

 artgallery.yale.edu

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, Antoine Pevsner, 1926, cellulite and copper (Yale Univ.)

 What might happen to Dorian Gray’s portrait after the story ends? Decayed by age, it has experienced the ultimate restoration, having been returned to a pristine original state by its subject’s effort to destroy it. This is an irony, of course, and one hopes that the murder of the artist and the suicide (if unintended) of the subject are not absolute prerequisites for the kind of resolution being sought by the various curators and conservators whose projects are on view in this necessarily wordy exhibition. 

Insert: Russian sculptor and Constructivist, Antoine Pevsner, with one of his sculptures, 1938

 But it is impossible not to think of the Oscar Wilde novel when looking at Antoine Pevsner’s assembled portrait of Marcel Duchamp, crumpled in upon itself, with parts of it turned to rust and powder. The composition of cellulose, copper nitrate and iron was a recipe for self-destruction. It’s gone, turned to something not unlike a desiccated corpse on the shelf of a monastic catacomb which, if it were displayed vertically as it was meant to be, would immediately disappear.

The Kahn Wing, Yale University Art Center

 But what it has become is extraordinary in its fragile futility. There is nothing to be done. A replica has been fashioned of different materials which current evidence suggest may be more stable than Pevsner’s original choices (the artist was aware of the work’s defects, and made alterations, which only hastened the damage), but is a chill approximation at best. And is there anything but a difference of degree which separates this piece from any other work that is not the “foster-child of Silence and slow Time,” (as Keats’s hidden Grecian urn briefly was) but rather, is held in the abusive care of its actual parent, ruin?

 Conservation begins by giving a definition of loss. But to know that there was a loss is not always to know precisely what the loss was. The absence may be in some way diminished, without being accurate. This is the case for a 1st century Roman figure with a right arm from some other sculpture attached to it. The mistake can be removed, but not corrected. No restoration can be absolute.

 Conservators sometimes develop ideas of salvation that resemble those of the army officer in Vietnam who reported having destroyed a village in order to save it.  A 6th century mosaic removed and embedded in concrete is a hulking fragment, alienated from both past and present. In contrast, repairs made to a Korean tea bowl and Greek drinking cup in their own time were meant simply to preserve them for use, not to guarantee their survival as museum objects. There is also accidental preservation as in the underside of a lid on an Italian wedding chest where the painting of a female figure, nude save for hips bound with a fringe of flowers and pubic leaves, was kept safe for its private audience of forsaken modesty.

 Among the mockeries of restoration and restorations as betrayal included here is a restoration as benign fiction. A 16th century painting, Conversion of St. Paul, not a forgery, was later remounted and then had old worm eaten wood applied to its back in order to make it appear consistent with its history.

 Thomas Wilfred’s early twentieth century light machines made use of a now obsolete technology which, if operated, would accelerate the complete breakdown of his slapdash electronics. But is the real question here one of reconstructing the effects or the mechanism? What would he have used had it been available, given that there was nothing permanent to what he intended?

Before Restoration (above) and After: The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints, from the workshop of Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1305-1310, tempera on panel (restored in 2004) Yale Univ. Art Gallery

 A drawing for Edward Hopper’s painting, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, contains what endangers it in its title – its charcoal on acidic paper, already unstable, is slowly erased by light. The painting itself is also on view, with a graph recording the “Fourier transform infrared spectra” of copal varnish used, and now darkening, on its surface. But I came away angry that I had been given this information. There are things that one should refuse to know for the sake of encountering the work itself, damaged as it might be. 

 The motives for restoration sometimes involve competing strategies, where later choices are a critique of previous ones.  A number of early European paintings in Yale’s collection were at one point reduced to only what was verifiably original work. What resulted in some cases resembled an primitive seafarer’s map, with islands and archipelagos of color isolated on a wooden sea. A 14th century Sienese panel of the, Virgin and Child Enthroned, that was subject to this imperious treatment has now been carefully, if only partly, repainted. Before that, according to one curator’s passionate assertion, it had been “too painful” to look at. 

 But, as I reflected later, perhaps that was the point that actually needed conserving. Losses require our attention, especially when ideal preservation would mean removing every work of art from our sight. This does not require making of the museum some chilled mortuary for dying paintings. Rather, we should stand in front of each and, like Yeats, “for every tatter in its mortal dress,” sing.

by Stephen Vincent Kobasa, Contributing Writer

______________________________________________________

 This essay first appeared in the New Haven Advocate, July 16, 2009

http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=13822

 Learn more about Constructivism as an art movement at: www.wikipedia.org/wiki/constructivism_(art)