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Ritchie started to think about the universe and its possible artistic representation in the 1990s by merging physics, art, mythology, philosophy, religion and history. His starting point was that science is the new art, as well as the new religion, creating multiple parallel mythologies and theories of creation, or cosmogonies. Ritchie creates a spectacular visual world guiding us through the stories of the beginning and the end.

Left: 1. Matthew Ritchie, Monster of the East (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74” x 56”. Monstrance, 2011, L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles. artes fine arts magazine

Artist, Matthew Ritchie, undated photo

He said about the beginning, “Since it is almost impossible to understand them as they were then; as infinite points, bound in an indecomposable continuum, let’s look at them as they would become. They were so many and they had waited for so long. Their bodies interleaved as closely as pages in a book, they slipped and slid in and out of each other, all through the endless day of the beginning, inside the heart of naked singularity. It was before years, before history, before time: it was the whole universe; the birth; the hope; the blame; the dream; the betrayal; the revenge: all waiting inside one tiny, hot little dot.”

Matinal (video still), 2011. Music, 'Augur,' by A & B Dessner; vocals, S. Worden. See End Note #2.

Ritchie thinks that the world is at its worst at the beginning and the end. In his apocalyptic video projections, like Augur (L & M Art, 2011) we see the sun from the deepness of the murky water, then closer to the surface a single cell outline and later, creatures emerge from the water and starting to move. Then tremendous winds whip over the landscape, fires burn living things into metal sculptural skeletons, while a huge wire ball—an atomic model of some chemical—rolls over everything. In this vision, the world remains, but without humans—a very sad conclusion. But this unpopulated world doesn’t ‘feel’ sad watching, while listening to the music of Bryce Dessner, with Shara Worden’s vocals: sounding sometimes ethereal; sometimes beautifully-baroque; sometimes merely a noisy, cacophonic composition that could be the sound of parallel universes. Ritchie makes the viewer think about all the possible complexities of life: physical, biological and socio-ecological.

Hard Way, Day 3, 1996 (detail), 1996. See End Note #3.

Ritchie started his career in London as a painter, with drawing as his base. But, after moving to New York,he expanded his work to include sculptures, digital images, light boxes, musical compositions, creative writing and structures that function as architecture. In 1995, in an interview with Owen Drolet, Ritchie described his Working Model. It consists of seven vertical and horizontal rows that include physics equations, colours, characters, emotions and/or typically human characteristics and physical properties of the universe. The equations line the top and the colors are listed vertically. Each shape can correspond to each color, which in turn can represent seven different groupings of three: character, emotion/human characteristics, and physical property. This matrix gives the artist 49 possible different combinations that he calls a map. The paintings of The Hard Way (1996) were among the first to use this map to create a mythological struggle of gods, fighting over the creation of Earth.

Ritchie stated that he wanted to break away from linear storytelling and create a more structured and formulaic narrative, a scientifically correct mythology as a base for his complex visual stories. He knows physics very well. In 2009, he was the only artist invited to speak to an audience of Nobel laureates discussing Einstein’s theories and how they can be applied in the 21th century. According to the laws of physics we only recognize one reality and it can be predicted. Edward Lorenz’s “Butterfly effect” that the “flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas” made chaos theory popular, bringing the idea of randomness into science. The Morning Line, among others, is an excellent example of how Ritchie transforms his scientific ideas into art.

The Universal Cell and Remote Viewing (2004). See End Note #4.

The Morning Line, a sonic, Gothic-like temple is an imposing 10 meters high and 20 meters long, built of 20 tons of black coated aluminum, intended to draw in the expanding universe that surrounds us. Ritchie started it all with black and white drawings that evolved into something really large (The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2004). The Universal Cell and Remote Viewing (2006) was the next step into a truly three dimensional structure. Ritchie collected all possible data about the human cell—the sacred unit of our measurement on the human scale. He recognized that everything was designed around this geometrical pattern. He saw a similarity between ‘imprisonment’ in our own genetic make-up and actual prison cell design. He made several different drawings of all these things, then layered the semi-transparent papers, one on top of the other, until they created a kind of information tunnel. In the end, he scanned them into the computer and created the final image, which he sent to a metal-shop to be cut out and assembled. The final product is an amazing structure which captures not only the dimensions of space, but its moving energies, as well. Ritchie’s artistic goal was no less ambitious than to represent the entire universe, as well as our beliefs and knowledge about it. Ritchie’s approach is philosophical, involving religion, occult practices and scientific principles. As he said in an interview, he wants to “describe the whole spectrum of experience, simultaneously.”

The Morning Line (2008-2009). See End Note #5.

The idea in The Morning Line is “drawing in space” and to make the drawing stand in space and become a part of the universe. Ritchie involved design innovators Aranda/Lash, the Music Research Centre of York University and Arup AGU to create a fully programmable three-dimensional sculpture, which is also moveable. From his drawings, they designed a structure in which each part can be replicated at a smaller and smaller scale, until it reaches the size of a nano-spectrum,and from that starting point, you can build anything. Ritchie called it a quantum building, because one piece (tetrahedra) can support 22 other smaller ones, and so on, toward infinity. With this method you can “build a cathedral which involves the universe.”

Interior, The Morning Line (2008-2009). See End Note #6.

The structure of The Morning Line is amazing! Standing in it is a once-in-a-lifetime artistic experience. You can see the sky, but what you are really looking at is the metal curves drawn on the sky. There is a glass wall as part of the structure and on it, images of the universe and apocalyptic videos are projected. You hear stories, told by various voices, about different situations, and above all is the music: classical music pieces mixed with sounds, created by the structure itself, or composed by contemporary musicians inspired by the sculpture and improvised, on-site. The Morning Line is also sensitive to time, street noise, you and the other visitors; so you can never have the same light and sound experience twice. It is a complex, amazing and really universal experience. It has been installed in three very specific sites: Center for Contemporary Art, Seville (2008); Eminönü Square, Istanbul (2010); Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna (2011).

Monstrance (2011). See End Note #7.

While The Morning Line tries to reconstruct the universe in a physical way, Monstrance, Ritchie’s recently-closed show at L & M Art in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, returns to mythological interpretation. Monstrance—meaning show in Latin—is a medieval-period ritual vessel used in the public display of relics. In the performance at the opening, a masked singer represented the many forms of sun, including the setting sun. The show also dealt with one of Hollywood’s own myths: The Fallen Star. Upon entering the gallery, there were eight paintings of golden angels. These hybrids of feathered humans and gaseous nebula represented “high energy states” such as solar storms, pole dancers and female athletes. The figures were accompanied by dots showing the position of constellations over Los Angeles on the opening day, November 2nd, 2011, The Feast of All Souls. The lone sculpture in the gallery could be the figure of a fallen angel, or, more likely, what was left of him after falling from the sky. Stepping to the east gallery, it was a very different world, more like a dark, subterranean cave at the beginning of time. There were water pools projected onto the floor and their reflections on the walls. Prehistoric drawings covered the ground, interrupted by meteorite-like sculptures, while images floated and music played. There were also four paintings of monsters in this gallery: and their dots showed the position of constellations on October 31st, Halloween. They represented “negative energy states” such as terror attacks, ecological disasters, surgery and video games. In this show Ritchie combined all his previous artistic elements: drawing, painting, sculpture, video projection, sound effect and performance, to create a meaningful and complex site-specific view of the gallery and its place in the universe.

The Long Count (2009). See End Note #8.

Ritchie participated in two performances as stage designer. In the summer of 2009, Hypermusic Prologue, A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, debuted in Paris; then was performed again in 2010, at the Guggenheim in New York. The other was The Long Count, a 70-minute multimedia piece (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival [2009]; Holland Festival [2010]; Barbican Art Centre, London, [2012]). Ritchie set the scene by projecting an apocalyptical video on three giant screens that enveloped the musicians on stage. These hallucinatory videos showed whole trees uprooted and other “mad tales of creation and resurrection.”

Ritchie said that, in the work of painters like David Salle and Julian Schnabel, he saw the last of the generation of artists who had to follow “the master narrative of the west.” For him, that meant a new artistic era had begun, thereby freeing him to start his own quest into the Universe.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos, Contributing Writer

Emese is an art critic and on-line publisher living in Toronto, Canada. Read more of her views at www.artoronto.ca

Matthew Ritchie, Monstrance, L & M Art, Los Angeles, Venice Beach, November 2- January 15, 2012

The Morning Line, Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna, Austria, Organized by Thyssen-Bornemissza Art Contemporary, June 7- November 20, 2011

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End Notes:

1. Matthew Ritchie, Monster of the East (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74” x 56”. Monstrance, 2011, L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

2. Matthew Ritchie, Matinal (2011), video. Animation Duration: 16:50; Animation: Nick Roth; Editing: James Case; Music: ‘Augur,’ by Aaron & Bryce Dessner. Exhibited: Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011.

3. Matthew Ritchie, Hard Way, Day 3, 1996 (detail), 1996, enamel on sintra, 114”x165”x90”. Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

4. Matthew Ritchie, The Universal Cell (2004), powder coated aluminum, stainless steel, gypsum, 11’x 12’ 6”x 12’ 6” (installation view from : Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, June 2 – September, 2005). Photo by Rob Kassabian. ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York RM Whitney 2005 Remote Viewing Installation.

5. Matthew Ritchie, with Aranda\ Lasch Arup AGU, The Morning Line (2008-2009). Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Installation view: Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna June 7 – November 20, 2011. Photo by Jacob Polacsek

6. Matthew Ritchie, with Aranda\ Lasch Arup AGU, The Morning Line (2008-2009). Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Installation view: Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna June 7 – November 20, 2011. Photo by Jacob Polacsek

7. Matthew Ritchie, Monstrance (2011), projected multi-channel, film vinyl and animation. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles, CA.

8. Matthew Ritchie, with Aaron and Bryce Dessner, The Long Count, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York, October 28 – 31, 2009. ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

9. Above, right: Matthew Ritchie, The Hour of the Apple (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74”x 56”. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

10. Left: Matthew Ritchie, The Unconquered Sun (2011), aluminum structural units, epoxy coating, steel, sintered polyamid and enamel 135 ½ x 60” (overall). Photo: Joshua White. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

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Left: Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Guáimaro, Cuba, 1957– Miami, Florida, 1996), Untitled (Last Night ), 1993, 24 10W/120V satin-white light bulbs, electric wire, transformer. MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Long term loan of Colección Alfonso Pons Soler. artes fine arts magazine

Guggenhein Bilbao, Spain. A Frank Gehry design

The Guggenheim, Bilbao has organized the exhibition by way of six themes, some chronological and others conceptually or formally constructed. Each theme is intended to be a“probe”, examining a specific area of both collections. The show derives its title from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s, Archittetura dello Specchio, a work included in the exhibition, and, to quote the exhibition’s curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, a piece that “summarizes the potentiality of collection, whilst the idea of the mirror is a metaphor for the accumulation, transfer and interference that are fundamental to the birth and development of the act of collecting and the merging of two independently-formed collections.”

Yet presenting two collections as a collaborative venture poses a number of compelling questions about the parameters and processes of such projects. The fact that this is not the product of a singular vision becomes an inextricable component of evaluating and understanding the work. Furthermore, deliberating upon artistic alliances, inevitably begs the question: what, in point of fact, constitutes collaboration? How do we differentiate collaboration between institutions versus collaboration by the artists represented? It seems relevant to seek answers when the artists in this exhibition are largely contemporary, and Contemporary Art practice continues to place enormous value on the artist as an individual.

Antonio Saura, Large Nude (Grand nu), 1960–61. See End Note #1.

This certainly appears to be a concept that the curators have grappled with, in a show that seeks to document both the rise of significant trends, and simultaneously, reveals meeting points and divergences between the two collections. The exhibition also attempts a dialogue between certain international developments and Spanish art, in, at times, a rather fragile and, it must be said, somewhat superficial guise. The works of fifty-two artists offer a survey of art from the late 1940s to the present to include painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

Antoni Tàpies,Two Black Crosses (Dues creus negres ), 1973. See End Note #2.

Gallery 304 concentrates on two movements that sought to renew the language of art in Spain after the Civil War: Dau al Set and El Paso. Dau al Set (1948-1954) emerged in Barcelona around the magazine of the same name and originally consisted of a set of Catalan artists and writers: Joan Brossa, Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies and Joan-Josep Tharrats. Subsequently, a number of artists and art critics, among them, Antonio Saura and Juan Eduardo Cirlot, collaborated with the movement, in effect, advancing the development of contemporary art in Catalonia. For its part, El Paso was founded in Madrid in 1957 with the adoption of a manifesto advocating, among other things, the freedom of art and the artist. This movement, which dissolved in 1960, had as its principal members, prominent figures on the international art scene including Antonio Saura, Manuel Millares, Martín Chirino, Manuel Rivera and Rafael Canogar. Several fine examples of their work are display here, chief among them Antonio Saura’s Grand Nu (1960-1961) and Canogar’s Joyo (1959), both from the La Caixa Collection, and a 1959 Tàpies, Dues Creus Negres, which is showcased in the adjacent gallery alongside La Taula Blanca (1989), by Miquel Barceló.

The idea of gravity and levity is clearly the common denominator of the works grouped in Gallery 302: A series of sculptures and installations by Ernesto Neto, Gego, Tony Cragg, Damián Ortega and a painting by Ettore Spalletti. Reticulárea Square (1971), and a major sculpture by Venezuelan artist, Gego, use vectors, meshes and mathematical planes in three dimensions, contrasting the organic nature and novelty of Ernesto Neto’s installation, Globulocell (2001) composed of Lycra tulle. Besides the importance of the formal aspects of these creations, this section includes political, social and economic comment in Damian Ortega’s Movimiento en Falso (1999-2003); the artist´s reflection on the oil economy of our era. These, in turn, are complemented by the architectural modalism of Spaletti’s painting, Stanza, Rosso, Porpora (1992); a remarkable feat in its intelligent and innovate use of architectural form (image below, in End Notes, see #5). The swelling, curvature of the painting´s middle section creates a play on perception and relates structurally to the curving walls of the Guggenheim´s design.

Above left: Ernesto Neto, Globulocell (2001), see End Note #3; above right: Damian Ortega, Movimiento en Falso (1999-2003), see End Note #4.

Left: Julian Schnabel, Against God (Contro Dio)... (1989); right: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mirror Architecture (1990). See End Notes # 6-7.

The architectural theme extends into Gallery 303 where The Architecture of the Mirror (1990), by Michelangelo Pistoletto, dominates a set of works of monumental proportions, executed between 1988 and 1990. These pieces have a commonality in experimentation through materials, both pictorial and non-pictorial, cinematic scale and the evocation of religious/altar-pieces in their design-structure of triptychs, and polyptychs. In the case of Gehry’s building, the architecture and the design of the gallery work in favor of this type of art—with the architecture assuming an active role in our perception of the work.

Sigmar Polke, Triptych (1989). See End Note #8.

In the triptych Gums I, III, II (1987), Enzo Cucchi investigates the appropriation of new materials like latex and metal, incorporating these into pictorial language problems previously confined to the medium of sculpture. Similarly, Julian Schnabel employs military fabrics from bedding to create four monumental works, Contro Mio, Contro Dio, Everyday is the Beast with Iron Teeth and Ten Horns and 70th Week (1989). Each of Schnabel´s paintings is titled with words and phrases taken from the Old Testament. Finally, in Triptych (1989), the artist Sigmar Polke, uses a lacquer-based paint on transparent fabric to inject an updated regeneration into the large color-field paintings of Abstract Expressionism from the late 1950s.

Andreas Gursky, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (1994). See End Note #9.

Photography is the main exponent of Galleries 305 and 306, which constitute the ‘classical’ spaces of the Museum, where the walls maintain a regularity of design and are flat, rather than curving. This type of space adjusts well to smaller formats and allows for a different type of interaction, which is more subtle; based on visual memory rather than impact. In the first gallery, the genre of landscape is explored by the Vancouver School, German Objective Photography and others, working out with the movements, but adopting similar philosophies: Manolo Laguillo, Jean-Marc Bustamante and Xavier Ribas. The German contingent, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, developed the style of documentary photographic techniques which dealt primarily with the treatment of human groups and their relationship to architecture or desolate urban landscapes. Access to new technologies in photo printing allowed the use of large formats and Hong Kong Shanghai Bank (1994) by Gursky is an outstanding example of the conglomeration between corporate architecture and urban landscapes.

The moving focus of Photography is extended into Gallery 306 with a perspective that shifts from landscape and architecture to an introspective series of self-portraits exploring identity, race and gender. Spanning from the 20th Century to the present, Cindy Sherman, Gillian Wearing, Geneviève Cadieux, Craigie Horsfield and Vanessa Beecroft are some of the artists to explore the genre from varying points of view.

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975). See End Note # 10.

The final exhibition space addresses a wide range of contemporary art media from the late 1960s and 1970s: photography, film, video, installation and performance art, with occasional props to document a medium that has several conceptual branches. These include Body Art, feminism in art, and the relationship between action and nature. Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) by Martha Rosler , Vito Acconci´s Three Adaptation Studies (1970) and Joan Jonas´s Wind (1968), video imagery broadcast loop from black and white television sets, are the most successful pieces in this group. This is primarily due to the incorporation of the television tube, which, when confined to black and white, can project a remarkably vivid illusion of three-dimensional relief suggesting tactility or the type of space in which tactile experience is possible. This, in point-of-fact, should be the main constituent of any successful Performative experience. In any case, Performative ‘abstract’ art has come out more successfully so far, in moving pictures than in still printed matter. As a consequence, works such as Angels Ribé´s Six Possibilities of Occupying a Given Space ,1973 (right- See End Note #11) which constitutes six Gelatin prints of a ‘hand in movement,’ only serve to emphasize the point.

In a culture now so largely dominated by ideologies of race, class, and gender, where the doctrines of multiculturalism and political correctness have consigned the concept of quality in art to the netherworld of invidious discrimination, and all criticism tends to be judged according to its conformity to current political orthodoxies, even to suggest that aesthetic considerations be given priority in the evaluation of an exhibition dedicated primarily to that of Contemporary Art, is to invite the most categorical disapprobation. Yet the success of this exhibition ultimately rests on the curator´s ability to do just that. By laying emphases on aesthetic worth, the Guggenheim Museum has successfully deflected the obvious disparities between the two collections, allowing them to present two eclectic ‘International Collections’ simultaneously, without diminishing the integrity of the artist’s critical voice.

By Natalie Maria Roncone, Ph.D., Contributing Writer

Dr. Roncone completed her Ph.D. in Art History at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, focusing on the work of Jackson Pollock. She is primarily interested in the relationship between Old Master Art and that of the Abstract Expressionists. Her doctoral thesis explored Pollock’s dependence on an infrastructure in the post1940 works built around the architectonics of paintings by Tintoretto and El Greco.

The Exhibition: The Inverted Mirror: Art from “La Caixa and MACBA Collection, will run from January 30 – September 2, 2012 at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain.

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End Notes:

Opening Image: Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Guáimaro, Cuba, 1957– Miami, Florida, 1996), Untitled (Last Night ), 1993, 24 10W/120V satin-white light bulbs, electric wire, transformer. MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Long term loan of Colección Alfonso Pons Soler.

1. Antonio Saura (Huesca, Spain, 1930–Cuenca, Spain, 1998), Large Nude (Grand nu), 1960–61, Oil on canvas, 195 x 237 cm. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

2. Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, Spain, 1923) Two Black Crosses (Dues creus negres ), 1973, Mixed media on canvas, 235 x 150 cm. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

3. Ernesto Neto (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1964), Globulocell, 2001, Lycra tulle, polystyrene spheres, and sand, 490 x 420 x 230 cm. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

4. Damián Ortega (Mexico City, 1967), False Movement (Stability and Economic Growth ) [Movimientoen falso (estabilidad y crecimiento económico)], 1999–2003, 3 oil barrels, rotary base with engine, and wooden platform, Diameter: 340 x 300 cm; 300 kg. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

5. Left: Ettore Spaletti, Stanza, Rosso, Porpora, 1992, 200 x 570 cm. Collection of the La Caixa Contemporary Art Foundation.

6-7. Julian Schnabel (New York, 1951), Contro Mio, Contro Dio, Everyday is the Beast with Iron Teeth and Ten Horns, 70th Week, 1989, Oil and plaster on cloth, 335 x 295 cm. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation; Michelangelo Pistoletto (Biella, Italy, 1933), Mirror Architecture (Architettura dello Specchio), 1990 Mirror and golden frame, 360 x 800 cm; 2 mirror: 325 x 184 cm; 2 mirrors: 325 x 200 cm; 2 frames: 360 x 201.5 x 10.5 cm. MACBA Collection. Government of Catalonia Art Fund.

8. Sigmar Polke (Oels, Silesia, Germany [now, Olesnica, Poland], 1941–Colonia, Germany, 2010) Triptych, 1989, Paint and lacquer on canvas, 300.5 x 675 cm. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

9. Andreas Gursky (Leipzig, Germany, 1955), Hong Kong Shanghai Bank , 1994, Chromogenic print, cibachrome, 225.5 x 175 cm (framed). Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation.

10. Martha Rosler (Brooklyn, New York, 1943), Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, Single-channel video, black-and-white, with sound, 6 min 9 sec. MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Gift of Rumeu Family.

11. Àngels Ribé (Barcelona, 1943), Six possibilities of Occupying a Given Space (detail), 1973, Gelatin silver print, 2 prints, 43.2 x 60.8 cm each. MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Gift of Dinath de Grandi de Grijalbo.

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 Left: Tarshito (Italy), Applauses (2007) Made at Tarshito studio with Isabella De Chiara, Roma e Agnieszka Blazy, Polonia, Angela Ferrara,Bari; Martinelli Corato, and Bari, metal structure and ceramic hands. Photo: Edward Rubin. artes fine arts magazine

Marc Quinn (England), The Chromatic Archaeology of Desire (2008) Painted Bronze. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 The show was founded fourteen years ago by Paolo De Grandis, and cleverly scheduled by that chief curator to run alongside the Venice Film Festival and overlap exhibition dates with the Venice Art and Architectural Biennales; the exhibition hosts thousands during its month-long run. This year, OPEN 14 was co-curated by Carlotta Scarpa, Ebadur Rahman, Nevia Capello, Christos Savvidis, and Gloria Vallese. Vallese also curated the highly-touted Cracked Culture? The Quest for Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art , with Wang Lin. The Venice Biennale Collateral Event featured twenty-eight artists from Albania, Bangladesh, China, England, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Romania, and Switzerland.

Feng Feng (China), W Fountain 2010 installation. Photo: Courtesy Arte Communications

The first work was visible even before the boat docked—The Chromatic Archaeology of Desire (2008), London-based artist Marc Quinn’s super realistic painted orchid. Perched atop a tall pedestal, it was an elegant poem in bronze, speaking to the beauty and fragility of everyday life. Down the road, were 3000 of Romanian artist Martin-Emilian Balint’s laminated cardboard figures, housed in a small, multi-level vitrine on wheels. Titled Embrace (2011), the marching figures stood shoulder-to-shoulder, seeming to offer an expression of love as they welcomed visitors to the island. Across the street, echoing similar sentiment, was Applauses (2007), above, a tall metal vase covered with hundreds of ceramic-crafted open hands. Created by Italian artist Tarshito, the vase was significantly placed at the entrance to the Grande Albergo Ausonia & Hungaria Hotel, where it appeared to applaud the arrival of its guests.

Filippo Zuriato (Italy), “Hey?!!” (2011), painted terracotta. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Several show-stopping and intellectually-challenging works welcomed viewers to the Lungomare G. Marconi, the section of the exhibition most densely arrayed with art. In city terms, it runs some five-or-six blocks. First to catch our eye, and especially hypnotic when lit up at night, was Chinese artist Feng Feng’s stunning W Fountain (2010), an intensely-bright yellow McDonald’s sign, the iconic form turned upside down. Also prominently featured in Vallese’s Cracked Culture exhibition, W Fountain is the artist’s comment on the rampant spread of Western culture—in this case, fast food. Some ten feet away, separated by a tree and some foliage—as were most of the works along this botanical stretch—was, Hey?!!, Italian artist Filippo Zuriato’s terracotta sculpture of a young Chinese boy enclosed in a wire cage. Dressed in the ubiquitous outfit of the American West—a T-shirt and jeans—the boy points to his almond-shaped eyes. The work, in which the boy boldly calls attention to himself, was open to a myriad of interpretations: possible loss of identity one; loss of freedom, another.

Ronni Ahmmed (Bangladesh), The Tomb of Qara Köz (2011), eggs, acrylic sheets, wood. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Across the avenue, enticingly situated at the entrance to the beach, was Bangladesh artist Ronni Ahmmed’s intricately constructed sculpture, The Tomb of Qara Köz (2011). Rooted in Opera Aperta, or ‘open work of art,’ as set forth by Umberto Eco’s book of the same name, and traditional Bengali theatre (both of which use history to tell their stories), Tomb was composed of three layers of 1254 glasses, each holding a cartoon-painted egg in the manner of Bassano, Veronese, and Tintoretto. The pyramidal sculpture, top-heavy in meaning, was meant to recall, as the catalog informed us, the campaign of the Mughal princess Qara Köz, who exerted powerful influence amid the Medici’s Florence. The sculpture’s three planes paid homage to Venice’s Bengali immigrants, the adventures of Pinocchio, and Fairytale, Ai Weiwei’s 2007 Documenta installation. This trio of influences inspired Ahmmed, in emulation of Weiwei, to invite 101 Bengalis visitors to his tomb, to record their secret desires, pay alms, and make their wishes come true.

Alfred Milot Mirashi (Albania), Do, Try (2011) - iron, aluminium, glue, plaster, jute, foam, gold paint, fibre glass. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 Back to the residential side of Lungomare G. Marconi—lined with a steady stream of stately mansions—could be seen Albanian artist, Alfred Milot Mirashi’s Do, Try (2011), a large, severely- bent, partially-painted golden key, reminiscent of Oldenburg’s sculptures of everyday objects. Though minimally constructed, it maximized the ideas it conjured, as everybody the world over, not only deals with keys, but uses that word in many contexts. ‘Key to my heart’ quickly came to mind, as did ‘key to the city’, among others. Though these are popular uses, according to curator Rahman, Mirashi, the artist is thinking about the human body— the twisted, tormented people “who reach out, body and soul, in their yearning for peace.” Given the key’s contorted anatomical referencing, it seems the artist’s wish for universal peace would be a long-time coming.

Marina Gavazzi (Italy), His Holiness (2011) tubes, digital print on plastic support. Photo: Sergio Martucci

Italian artist Marina Gavazzi set her incendiary sights on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, in her four-sided installation, His Holiness (2011), particularly the shameful attempt by the Vatican’s highest echelons to cover up sex crimes against minors by priests, especially in the United States. Digital prints of the pope were printed on plastic panels, the Holy See engulfed in flames. Presumably in hell, he faced punishment for centuries of violence inflicted by the Church, in the name of their creed, against the people. The artist cited the Inquisition in her catalog essay, but the legion countries—both past and present—complicit with the Vatican’s actions, remained unnamed. Perhaps there were just too many to list, especially in such proximity to the Vatican.

Puni (Italy), Openings (2011), wood, PMMA, brass, enamel. Photo: Sergio Martucci

 The conceptual works of Puni and Marilena Vita, two Italian artists, added a bit of levity to the exhibition. Openings (2011), Puni’s installation comprised a common door, set upright on a patch of green grass. Like Mirashi’s key, Do, Try, serves as an everyday object and a universal symbol; like the key and its many interpretations, the viewer was encouraged to make of it what they would. Our first thought, given the door’s bucolic setting, was one of freedom, entering a new world. On closer examination, the words ‘Emergency Exit’ appeared on the door, exposing the other side of the coin, alerting us to the ever-present possibility of imminent danger. Also playing with our minds, as well as our eyes, was Marilena Vita’s Legs (2011), a compelling, surreal photograph, printed on vinyl, of the artist’s long legs. One set of legs is real, the other, reflected in a mirror and appearing in reverse, seems to be growing out of the first set of legs. With our perspective disoriented, our eyes work overtime to make sense of what we were looking at.

Casagrande & Recalcati (Italy), Fiori (2011), oil on board. Photo: Courtesy Arte Communications

I ended my tour of OPEN 14—which began, upon my arrival in Venice, with an orchid, and finished in the lobby of the Excelsior– just in time for a cocktail at the hotel’s renowned Blue Bar, I might add—as I stood mesmerized in front of another floral work, Fiori (2011), an astonishingly beautiful painting of flowering peonies by Milan-based artists, Sandra Casagrande and Roberto Recalcati. Melding a color palette of luxurious creams and pinks, evoking the voluptuous imagery of French Rococo painters Jean Honoré Fragonard and Francois Boucher, together with the kind of lingering Hollywood close-ups that forever etched Greta Garbo’s face in our collective memory—the artists have rendered a cinematically-exquisite floral motif in paint, whose silky petals actually appear to be opening in slow-motion. It is here, imaginatively savoring the heady aroma of the perfumed bouquet, where we get to experience the magic of art in all its multi-sensory glory. . .

By Edward Rubin, Contributing Writer

OPEN, International Exhibition of Sculpture and Installations is held In Venice, Italy in the fall of each year.

Carole Feuerman, Grand Catalina (2005-11) oil paint on resin (o/r), 62x38x17"

My first encounter with Grand Catalina (2005-11) came unexpectedly, as I thumbed through the pages of the gallery section of an art magazine. Her uplifted face, eyes closed, suited and capped for laps in the pool, skin still moist with droplets of water as she appears to slip from the water, riveted me in an unexpected moment of intimacy with this life-like image. Lashes and brows neatly arrayed, the pouting lips appeared ready to gasp for a breath of pool-side air. If her eyes were to finally open, I wondered if she would be surprised to see me—a stranger, so close by!? The work conveyed a sense of strength and capability, while also offering an alluring vulnerability and sensuality. In the few moments that I studied the image, I imagined that this larger-than-life-sized figure, seemingly brimming with self-assurance, would have no difficulty managing whatever the world handed her, once she finally emerged from her momentary reverie. artes fine arts magazine

Carole Feuerman with Survival of Serena, Green Cap (2006-11), o/r, 38x84x32" Photo: Alvaro Corzo V.

This, I would soon learn, was the work of New York realist sculptor, Carole Feuerman. A veteran of over four decades of creative work in many sculptural mediums—including resin, marble and bronze—Feuerman sculpts life-sized, monumental and smaller-scale works that encompass her signature trompe-l’oeil technique. Feuerman shares a hyper-realism tradition with artists like Duane Hanson and George Segal, but with a critical difference: approachability.

Reflections (1985), o/r, 75x21x21" Photo:David Finn

When hyper-realistic sculpture first appeared on the gallery and museum scene in the 1980s, these iconographic figures served as a timely, three-dimensional narrative for a human condition steeped in stereotyping and emotional objectification. It was time for the Me Generation, characterized by self-absorption and enhancing personal status. Reflecting that contemporaneous motif, Duane Hanson’s Tourists or Queeny were works based on social and class-based stereotypes, to be mentally catalogued and observed from a distant, carefully-proscribed insular world—like characters in a wax museum—seen, but seldom touched. George Segal ‘s somber, unpainted plaster cast figures were often arranged in groups, appearing like actors in an urban drama, suggesting alienation, latent aggression and indifference; or as single, expressionless figures trapped in a world of secretiveness, isolation and emotional alienation—quietly-despairing characters in a disconnected world.

For Feuerman’s work—sculpted first in plaster, then cast in bronze or resin, before being meticulously painted—the effect is not alienation, but intimacy. Her mostly-female forms appear to radiate an inner life, one of both mysterious sensuality and self-possessed consciousness, all-the-while inviting inclusion in their personal space. If the eyes are the window to the soul, her sculptures, portrayed predominantly with eyes closed, are denying us access to those deepest realms-of-consciousness that might resolve the mystery. Instead, Feuerman tantalizes and seduces the viewer, offering a voyeuristic connection to the personal space behind the eyelids of her figures. We are invited to watch a lone female figure emerging from a shower as she wraps a towel around her hair; another floating languidly in an inner tube; another appearing to stand waist-deep in a pool, hugging a large beach ball; yet another grips the end of a surfboard as a wave presumably surges around her. The artist draws the line at the act of seeing; engaging the viewer, while depriving us of the ability to ever ‘know’ the true spirit of the character. Herein lies the power of the artist’s statement.

Blue Venus (1996), o/r, 36x24x16"

Feuerman’s figures, in spite of their nakedness or isolation, exude confidence and personal power. Freshly emerged from their cleansing bath or pool, her Eve-like creations are still dripping with fresh droplets of water—a symbol of their close ties to nature’s life-giving force. As David Rubin, of the San Antonio Museum of Art said, in a recent review, “As females, these figures personify heroic archetypes, women who are proud of their bodies and triumphant in their achievements. As metaphors, they are expressive of hope and determination, and of the faith that accompanies the drive to push forward on life’s journey, regardless of the challenges or obstacles that threaten to deter us.”

Paradise (1997), o/r, 26x16x9" Photo:Alvaro Corzo V.

In no small way, this critique of Feuerman’s work is a reflection on the trajectory of her career as a sculptor. Emerging as an artist in the early years of the Feminist movement, she decided early-on to produce work that challenged the tiresome cliché of the woman as ‘the weaker sex.’ From the beginning, Feuerman committed herself to working with the human form. The raw power of her imagery, more literal and figurative than symbolic, she worked to transcend the ascription of erotic or provocative and instead, represent personal power and the pure narrative essence of objective realism in her rendering of the human body. The risks in becoming a hyper-realist were great. Functioning artistically on the verge of the simulacram threatens to produce an empty, representational shell—imitative and convincing—but devoid of emotional intent. But, Feuerman’s sculptures exceed the bounds of mere mimicry to become powerful symbols for the human experience. The philosopher, Nietzche warned that any effort to imitate reality relies too heavily on constructs of reason and language, to the exclusion of the senses. The result, he claimed, would be a mere perversion of the truth.

City Slicker (1982), o/r, 31x21x14"

But, Feuerman’s hyper-reality, guided by keen sensory instincts, borne of life experience, and finely-tuned artistic sensibilities, results in sculpture that achieves a universal truth: a strong emotional tie between subject and object—between the viewer and the viewed—that invites an intimacy and level of empathy not often found in a creative endeavor such as this. Far from detachment, a figurative work like Paradise (1997), invites us all to imagine a time when we could once again (or wished we could) float thoughtfully on a raft in a warn sea on a languorous August afternoon.

On a recent visit to Carole Feuerman’s studio, we discussed the primary motivation for her work. While one of the foremost hyper-realist sculptors in the world, she is yet modest and unassuming. She does not view her work so much erotic or sexual, as sensual and meditative. “I want to capture the universal feeling of the fleeting moment. When my figures are rendered with their eyes closed and deep in thought, it’s like I’m presenting a story in the making. I want the viewer to complete the narrative, she tells me.” Her studio assistants busy themselves during the time I am there, shaping plaster forms, readying molds, applying base coats on nearly-completed figures, all under her careful direction. “I am the only one who can paint the final layers of the skin. The difficulty comes when it is time to represent those subtle features, like veins and blemishes, which lie just below the surface and help to create a feeling of authenticity.”

Feuerman studio, interior

Tree (detail), 2009-11, o/r, 62x37x29"

In fact, Feuerman’s studio is part gallery, too. Work from several periods of her prolific career are on display, offering up a gathering of now-familiar personas who have turned out to see what comes next! The sculpting room is generously confectioned, from floor to ceiling, with plaster dust. Row upon row of shelves are stacked high with errant body parts of every type: spare heads, torsos, hands, ears and feet—a surreal, contemporary laboratory-setting for creating the next Prometheus. A work-in-progress lies prone on a work table: a life-sized male figure in plaster, slated to become an athlete doing a hand-stand. Together, we lift and balance the figure against a column, as Feuerman checks for anatomical accuracy with a view to balletic grace in the final product. This is art by consensus, as the whole production team (including this author) weighs in on the details of the final execution. Nearby, a serene female figure Tree (2009-11), nude except for a bathing cap, patiently observes. As though having just risen from the sea, in a perfectly-proportioned, 21st century version of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, she appears to be quietly marveling at all the fuss.

Across from the showroom and office area, and far-removed from the welter of plaster appendages, is the painting room. There, Feuerman’s assistants sit meditatively—like monastic scribes toiling over illuminated manuscripts—applying layer-upon-layer of paint to figures now waiting patiently for their turn to be ‘brought to life.’ Mounted on panels or sitting on table tops, the addition of lashes, brows, hair and (in some cases) acrylic water droplets, the artist’s final touches, completed with her signature style, will be the jolt of creative energy that finally animates these figures.

Butterfly (2008), o/r, 21x22.5x21" Photo:Ali Elai

Feuerman’s sculpture walks the fine line between reality and deception, inviting us to explore our emotional response to this nexus. The syncretic link is the artist’s realization of the intense physicality, passion and sensuality found in her figures’ otherwise mundane poses. “My work is about relationships,” Feuerman explains, “exploring the secret interiority of the individual and a woman’s relationship to herself. I hope to touch an emotional level that might otherwise be inaccessible. My objective is to do more than breathe life into my sculptures, but to explore the inner life of the character, much like a novel might.” Is it autobiographical, I ask? “Perhaps, but, I like to think of my works as larger than life—gods and goddesses of the Everyday.”

Critic, John Yau addressed the material connection between the viewer and Feuerman’s figures in a recent review. He states that, “[her sculptures] evoke an inner life, one that invites the viewer’s speculation as well as signals the distance between them and us. We can never know what they might be thinking. And that perhaps is the point. […] We see their bodies, but not their souls. By having their eyes closed, Feuerman inflects a fundamental aspect of her sculptures: they exist in the same physical world as we do, but they are also removed from us. This inflection causes the viewer to become self-conscious; looking is framed as an act of voyeurism.” But, unlike the voyeur, these figures are inviting us to share in the ecstasy arising from the simple sensual pleasures of water, sun and air—leading by example, rather than inclusion in their private reverie.

Water Sports (2011), o/r sculptures with interactive floor projection of water

Feuerman has recently begun to explore the kinetic effects of water on her bathing figures. “Water is the universal connection to life,” she tells me. “An important new phase in my work will be to incorporate computer technology developed recently that projects an image on the floor or wall and will respond realistically to physical touch. Sculpted figures can be bathed in a large field of blue light that realistically ripples when the movement of a toe or hand is introduced. “This kind of interactive sculpture can heighten the sense of connection to the work and give the viewer a real-time experience with the installation,” she explains. Feuerman said the technology is ready and hopes to introduce it in a number of upcoming shows, both in the U.S. and Europe.

Hands on Face (c. 2008), o/r

This latest phase in Feuerman’s oeuvre represents another round of experimentation in hyper-realistic sculpture’s ability to extend beyond the boundaries of literalism and mimicry, to endure as a rich commentary on contemporary life. Her keen observations of the smallest gesture, the portrayal of flesh as a complex, viable organ capable of sweat, blemishes and myriad flaws, the private joy of sensuality, eroticism and self-assuredness portrayed through subtle gestures and the narrative elements of her work—inviting a push-pull between the visual and tactile— have continued to resonate. As the critic, David Bourdon wrote, “What makes [Feuerman’s technical proficiency] all the more powerful is that everything she does is in the service of the figure; all her attention is devoted to achieving verisimilitude. The works are like mirrors, but, like the mirror one encounters in fairytales and myths, they reveal a deeper truth about us.”

The General's Daughter (detail), 2008, o/r. Photo:David Finn

In her conversation with me, the artist underscored that she wants her sculptures to function as a book, revealing glimpses of the inner life of her characters. But, while messaging in the visual arts, unlike story-telling, is denied the luxury of unfolding over time, Feuerman’s work nevertheless embodies the element of time as an essential component of its impact on the viewer. Her narrative is never fully disclosed, often hidden behind closed eyes and self-satisfied gestures of confidence and eroticism. This rarified atmosphere of self-confidence, mystery and anticipation opens the door to a range of reactions and feelings. Each work, carefully crafted to defy simple interpretation and deflect full disclosure, becomes a Rorschach test—or perhaps a tabula rasa—onto which we project our own impulses, thoughts and emotions. Feuerman’s sculptures may seem frozen in time, but they persist in revealing themselves at particular moments of intimacy, heightened sensory awareness and vulnerability; thereby inviting us to consider our physicality, and our own stories, during an encounter with her work; asking whether we could embrace, once again, the sensual world that we, too, once knew this well.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Carole Feuerman’s awards and schedule of past, present and future exhibitions are too numerous to mention here. To see more of her work and learn more about the artist and her accomplishments, go to: http://www.carolefeuerman.com/

Or Jim Kemper Fine Art’s artnet site at: http://www.jimkempnerfineart.com/

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Left: Chris Antemann (detail), A Tea Party (2010), porcelain, decals, luster. Kamm Teapot Foundation Collection. artes fine arts magazine

Fuller Crafts Museum, Brockton, MA

When figurines succeed in pushing the envelope of our assumptions, they do so because the radical social narrative staked out by much of today’s contemporary art has not typically considered the artist working in clay, particularly on a diminutive scale. But, this exhibit challenges that premise, doing so in ways that open doors for a powerful body of work from figurative artists working in the ceramic medium. According to Gail Brown, with a long history of curating in the crafts world, “the work of these contemporary artists features diverse ideas, arresting forms, and provocative subjects [which] illustrate the continually-evolving tradition of figurative ceramics. These monumental and meaningful statements in small formats hold a fascinating disproportionate power—adding dramatic resonance and a sense of intimate communication.”

Ronna Neuenschwander, an artist exhibiting in the show (below, left), provides a prospective on mankind’s long-standing fascination with the creation of figurative talismans: “Humans have had the urge to create and possess figurines since prehistoric times. The Venus of Hohls Fels, the first of the venus figurines was made approximately 40,000 years ago, and is the oldest example of figurative prehistoric art. This figure was presumed to be an amulet related to sexuality and fertility. Likewise, the Venus of Willendorf, created in 22,000 BCE holds a power mysterious and intriguing. It is believed that people created and carried or wore figurines to give protection or the powers they desired. The attraction of figurines then and now tends to be one of identifying with certain attributes one wants to acquire. Today we create and collect these figurines to identify with their qualities- be they elite, genteel and refined, or exotic and provocative-they are powerful and desirable. By taking the gamut of these images, and disassembling them, we may get a fresh look at who we are and what we yearn to be.”

Left: (far) Ronna Neuenschwander, Breaking  the Mold I (2011), ceramic mosaic, grout. Courtesy of the artist; (near) Venus of Willendorf (24-22,000 BCE, stone. Collection Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Inspired by the past, yet distanced from it, Fresh Figurines is redolent with contemporary political and popular cultural messaging, intent on recasting gender roles, social mores and self image; re-worked with a generous infusion of traditional glazes, eerily-familiar motifs (for those of us who remember that knick-knack shelf of our childhood) and re-appropriated classical themes. Curator, Brown, makes the point in her overview of the exhibition that, “Throughout history, small-scale, self-contained article endure: from artifacts, effigies and tomb objects to exquisitely-crafted handmade figures and scenarios referencing life style and social mores, the pop culture of the day and the celebration of tribal figures, in situ. From European porcelain houses, Chinese export porcelain, and English folk ceramics, to the glut of manufactured collectibles with retail goals focused on the mantle piece and, since the days of the Grand Tour, the unrelenting, international plethora of tawdry and ubiquitous tourist souvenirs, figurines reign. The presence and persistence of these formats—from objet d’art to the commodities of the day—inspire and/or provoke.”

In its historical context, the name ‘china’ is a direct reference to the origins of porcelain in China over 3000 years ago. In the seventeenth century, trading routes were established between the Far East and Europe introducing this refined and translucent ceramic to a new continent.

The Painting Room, Meissen Factory, ca. late 19th C.

Europeans were fascinated by the beauty and mystery of porcelain. The tremendous demand for porcelain as well as the inherent difficulty in transport inspired many Europeans to attempt to replicate its qualities. Unlike cruder forms of earthenware, porcelain is industrially made, specifically with the fine, white clay of decomposed granite rock. This white clay is what gives porcelain its beautiful translucency. It was not until 1709 that German chemist, Johann Friedrich Böttger, in collaboration with two other chemists, devised a formula for porcelain. The following year, production commenced in the small town of Dresden. The factory was later moved to the more metropolitan city of Meissen as insulation from the political turmoil that was taking place in the European countries, east of Germany.

In its first few decades, the Meissen factory manufactured mostly table service. It wasn’t until the late 1730′s that a talented young sculptor by the name of Johann Joachim Kändler created small figurines in porcelain. Soon, the entire royal court community had their likenesses reproduced as delicate figurines. For many generations to follow, these intricately-executed porcelain figures served as a principle main-stay for the original Meissen Company, inspiring many other manufacturers on the Continent and in England to follow suit.

Chris Antemann (detail), A Tea Party (2010), porcelain, decals, luster. Kamm Teapot Foundation Collection

Among the forty-two artists whose sculpture makes up the eye-opening Fresh Figurines exhibit, certain pieces garnered particular attention. The show’s pièce de résistance is a multi-figure work, clearly informed by the Meissen legacy: Chris Antemann’s A Tea Party. In a cleverly-conceived display of overstatement, a banquet table is heaped with confections of every imaginable variety. This is action-central for a gathering of naked men and barely-clothed, coquettish women, languishing over tea and titillation, reminiscent of the salacious dinner-seduction scene from ThomasFielding’s 1749 fictional narrative, Tom Jones. The drama and sexual energy being played out between party guests is skillfully captured by Antemann’s deft manipulation of clay at the subtlest level. The ‘fourth wall’ is clandestinely breached by an alluring seductress, who invites the viewer into the party. She sits astride her chair, semi-concealed from her naked courtier by a fan, making sly eye contact with museum-goers, as we vicariously—if only momentarily—become part of the festivities. The artist summarizes the work when he writes, “I am expanding upon my previous parodies of decorative figurines by delving into the darker side of relationships and domestic rites: twisted tales of master and servant, the innocence of the maid, the dominance of patriarchal desire. Tricked out in frilly camouflage, these characters disregard tradition, exposing society’s cistern of unmentionables.”

Pavel Amromin, The Photographer (2008), porcelain, glaze, underglaze, luster. Courtesy, the artist.

Another work that addresses the curatorial observation of “added drama and inverse power to the diminution of size by the material prowess, complexity of narrative, uninhibited natures and significant social comment,” is The Photographer, one of a series of works on display by Pavel Amromin. Benign-looking, floppy-eared domesticated creatures, depicted in soft, earth-tone pastel glaze, play out their small dramas on Baroque gold-trimmed stands, lush with delicate beds of grass and fanciful flowers. On closer examination, though, they are strangely hybridized human figures with dog-like heads, engaged in acts of atrocity and inhumanity. In one scene, a weapon-bearing creature, naked except for black combat boots, blithely photographs another naked, dead body—thoughtless and insensitive, perhaps; but symptomatic of our “war breaks out, details at 11!” cultural ethic.

For Amromin, the artist, “There is a long tradition in art, literature and film by which the act of war is venerated and integrated into the social fabric. Gore and terror of combat are transformed into a bittersweet adventure of shared courage, sacrifice and nobility. Chaos is turned into order and the senseless gains meaning. The same transformation occurs in the work, however while some things are sanitized and glazed over, some are left in plain sight. The figurine has long been an object representing the jubilant self-image of the patron. It asks: ‘Is this glory? Is this the dignity, purity and beauty of a soldier’s mission?’”

Cynthia Consentino, Virgin II (2011), commercial figurine, dolls legs, mixed media. Courtesy, the artist.

Fresh Figurines brings home the message of the sacred, as well as the profane. A piece by Cynthia Consentino offers a gently humanizing perspective on a familiar icon; although the artist expressed a concern at the show’s opening that it might offend some. Her Virgin II invites a reconsideration of the classic, prayerful pose of Mary, mother of the Christ Child, with parting blue robes and oversized legs in plain view. This theantropic interpretation is designed to shed light on our humanity, as well as on the subject, herself. It calls the question of idealizing our New Testament heroine and invites a more immediate (and perhaps genuine) connection to universal motherhood—someone without the trappings of myth, and capable of ‘standing on her own two feet.’

Consentino notes, “Virgin II is part of a new series of sculptures incorporating commercial figurines with sculpted parts. Taking the ubiquitous knick knack, or religious statue and altering it allows for new meaning and a broadened role for the familiar. Originally a white porcelain figurine (stopping below elbows) her lower body was sculpted and commercial doll legs were added to complete her figure. It is not meant to be irreverent but rather be a playful re-examination of an influential figure.”

Jeremy R. Brooks, Form-Form (2011), cast plaster, paint. Courtesy, the artist.

Equally as compelling as Virgin II, but for different reasons, is Jeremy Brooks’s Form-Form, an enigmatic work whose flowing organic, blue-gray painted form stands out in marked contrast to other more figurative pieces in the exhibit. Perhaps informed by Edward Tufte’s Negative Space studies or Rachael Whiteread’s 1993 groundbreaking, House, Form-Form explores a hidden construct that undergirds a familiar object: the space beneath a garden statue of Jesus. Denatured through transformation, this subtly-conceived form of rolling contours and intriguing shifts of light and dark becomes a discourse on one of many hidden structural underpinnings, forever unnoticed in our daily rituals (imagine: bridge girders beneath your commuter route; the shapes on the underside of your dining room table, the dank tunnel complex beneath a steam-emitting manhole cover).

Rachael Whiteread, House (1993), concrete.

Brooks challenges the viewer to find beauty in the mundane, in the same way that the visible Jesus that inspired his work—an iconic all-weather figure of Christian salvation—is slip-cast in Hydrocal and painted to achieve mimetic value as a model for beauty, truth and salvation. By virtue of its ubiquity, it then becomes a numbingly-familiar fixture in the landscape. What is hidden, and subsequently revealed, he believes, can also achieve renewed relevance and aesthetic appeal. He describes it this way: “Form-Form is a cast interior space of a slip-cast figurine (Jesus in the Garden). It testifies to a shifted use of material, form and concept. The work is categorized by a search for the tension that exists between an initial iconographic source […] and a related abstract form—the cast interior space of the figurine.”

Hide Sadohara, Untitled (2011), Recycled Stoneware. Courtesy, the artist.

Mortality may be the message of Hide Sadohara’s wall sculptures, Untitled: images of an aging Popeye and Olive Oyle, constructed of recycled stoneware. Reminiscent of animated cartoon shorts from the 1950s and 60s, we are asked to recall a pre-pubescent time when notions of immortality and invincibility went unexamined; a pre-politically correct period in our history when villains with black hats and curly mustaches could pummel the hero with impunity, only to then see him miraculously return to normal and save the girl! Sadohara stares into the faces of these mythic figures and imagines their humanity. No slick airbrush or forgiving artist’s hand here. In defiance of the once-heroic gods and goddesses of ancient Olympus, the tribulations of aging can be seen extracting a toll on our contemporary version of a muscle-bound, spinich-guzzling Zeus and demurring Aphrodite.

Abraham Lincoln said, “By age forty, you get the face you deserve.” For Sadohara’s once-ageless Popeye character, a hard life, fear and conflict—a roadmap of furrows, wrinkles and contorted features—seem writ large on the face of the figure. More a metaphor for the human condition than a caricature, Sadohara’s work reminds the viewer (who is compelled to make eye contact because of the way the piece is hung), that Popeye (and Olive, also on display) may have been heroes for another, simpler time; and that for each of us, the passage of time brings us closer to confronting our own frailties and demise. As the artist describes it, “My intention for this particular piece is to provoke the sense of irony by making them life size, especially when the (invited) artists were asked to execute their work within the context of the figurine format/size. I also decided to finish my work with the realistic rendition of the human anatomy. There is something unnerving about seeing cartoon characters brought to life when those same features are stuck on the face of a realistic depiction of that character.”

Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), o/c. National Gallery, London.

I am reminded of Paul Delaroche’s monumental 1833 narrative painting, The Execution of Lady Jane Gray—a poignant study of adolescent innocence and courage in the face of royal predatory ambition—when I view Jessica Stoller’s Untitled, in the exhibit. For generations of National Gallery visitors, the work has served as reminder of the expendable role of women at the dawn of an age when enlightened thinking would not-quite-soon-enough redefine gender and social roles, as Western Europe inched toward modernism. Stoller evokes tales of risk and mortality linked to beauty and social station in her figurative representation of a severed head resting beneath the frivolous adornments of privilege. Vibrant and attractive women gone missing, later to be found dead and dismembered, could be story ripped from today’s headlines, and then rendered here in clay.

Jessica Stoller, Untitled (2010), porcelain, china paint, luster. Courtesy, the artist.

And so, Stoller applies the modeling techniques of another, more romantic era, to weave a tale of death and perverted ambition, proffering a dose of irony in the process. Deceptively charming and initially perplexing, it is only with more careful study of the piece does the realization dawn that something is amiss here.

Stoller’s oeuvre, as she describes it (only one piece appeared in Fresh Figurines), would likely resonate with the London crowds often found studying Delaroche’s Jane Gray—a painting with appeal to generations of museum-goers—as a study in the fine line between virtuous innocence and feminine ambition, power and its perversion. As she puts it, “The figures in my work range from Rococo nobility and adolescent girls in petticoats and bows, to women evoking religious martyrs of the past. The notion of these collected objects as predominantly decorative, weak and inherently female are subverted as the figures depicted are purposely innocent and sexual, self-sacrificing and violent, powerful and unaware of the power they possess. Through figures with contorted facelifts, bound feet with miniature dimensions and oddities which inspire imitation and awe, I examine cultural ideas of perfected beauty and its relationship to the grotesque. Through seemingly benign in content and size, my figurines hint at an alternate world of intricate perversion.”

Linda Cordell, Jolie Laide Masquerade (2011), porcelain, bronze, foam. Courtesy, the artist.

With just a partial sampling of the wide variety of works on display at the Fuller Craft Museum’s Fresh Figurines reviewed here, it is well worth the trip to discover, in Gail Brown’s curated show, the enduring power of small-scale works to enthrall in the world where the focus is often on BIG. Figurative ceramics appeal, for reasons linked to our collective unconscious as a symbol-rich civilization, for their effigaic properties, their paired-association to childhood memories and comforting domiciles long-vanished, as well as to our instinctive propensity to collect. This last point ushers in a connection to the work in Fresh Figurines worth underscoring. With many of the companies producing figurines for decades, if not hundreds of years (i.e.-Meissen, Hummel, Nymphenburg, Della Robbia, Chinese traditional porcelain, to name a few), links to a contemporary audience are well-established and well-known. But, once again, these are not your grandmother’s porcelains.

While glazing and firing techniques have remained largely unchanged over the years, contemporary works imagined and executed by ceramicists are extending the boundaries of the art form to new frontiers. Politically and socially informed, technically agile and heaped with narrative purpose, today’s Fresh Figurines are not merely anchored in the past, but act as powerful and compelling messengers about a post-modern world-in-flux. I believe exhibiting artist, Linda Cordell (above left), summarizes the agenda of the contemporary ceramicist best when she says, “Figurines are social propaganda; carefully displayed vignettes announce beliefs, ideals and desires of the owners. The artifice of portraying an animal in an idealized setting defies our unease and contentious relationship with nature. The distortion and abstraction of the platform contrasts with the diminished masked object—nothing is what it seems.”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Fresh Figurines: A New Look at an Historic Art Form

Fuller Crafts Museum, Brockton, MA

Now through February 5, 2012

View their diverse collection and exhibition schedule at www.fullercraft.org

Edgar Degas, La Toilette (1884-86) Private Collection. See End Note #1

 “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine…of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament—temperament is the word—I know nothing.” ~Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas, best known in the public imagination for his more sentimental, impressionistic works—ballet scenes, race tracks, opera and music hall scenes—was, first and foremost, a student of the human figure. With the current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), Degas and the Nude, a first-ever sweeping survey of some of his best and also least-known figurative works, here is an artist who still has the capacity to shock and surprise. Pulled from the extensive holdings of the MFA, The Musee D’Orsay, in Paris and dozens of other private and public collections, Degas and the Nude offers a retrospective of his work over a fifty-year time frame, from his days as a classically-trained student, to his ‘modern’ work at the turn of the 20th century. Much to the dismay of many late 19th century critics and the Parisian public-at-large, Degas, the radically-inventive artist, challenged a then, time-honored establishment’s approach to representing nude subjects, as he relentlessly strove to capture the most intimate and disarmingly candid moments in their private lives. artes fine arts magazine

Edgar Degas, Self-Portrait (1886)

The nude figure was, in fact, critically important to the art of Degas from the beginning of his career in the 1850s to the end of his working life at the dawn of the 20th century. The MFA exhibition presents works in every medium that Degas practiced: drawings, both academic and experimental; paintings made for official exhibitions and those never seen by the public in his lifetime; pictures in pastel, the medium most associated with the artist; sculpture, both in wax and bronze; printed media, including etchings, lithographs, and the monotype which he mastered. This common thread throughout the show is the human figure, transformed in his hands from the classically portrayed symbol of perfection and grace—to the most modern of demystified subjects—where composition, color and objectivity became his signature style. But, this was to be an approach to subject matter that, for Degas, would be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

E, Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), Musee d'Orsay. End Note #2

In his student years, Degas was captive to the nostalgic tastes of the past, as were so many French artists working and learning in the state-sanctioned, tradition-bound ecole d’art. Like so many Romantic era painters who went before, he initially wanted to be a history painter: to paint monumental stories from the past, the Bible and classical mythology. The exhibit features drawings from those years, as he studied the nude form in both the classroom and abroad, in the museums of Paris and Italy. Following the traditional plan of a young artist, he sketched classical sculpture and works by renaissance masters, like Michelangelo and Botticelli. Also working with live models, he began to adopt his own style, capturing likenesses that would soon appear in his own paintings. He later painted his only ‘historical’ work, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, showcasing the use of nudes in support of his desire to create an important work. Exhibited in the annual show of the Academie des Beaux Arts, in Paris in 1865, its portrayal of violence and complex action can be broadly understood as an illustration of war’s atrocities, but also an examination of man’s inhumanity toward women in a time of war. It would be Degas’s first and last historic painting, as he was about to step off in a new direction: interpreting the nude body—not in classical or historical terms—but as a contemporary figure in her own setting.

According to show curator and MFA’s Chair, Art of Europe, George Shackelford, “For Degas, these early years weren’t just an education in history, technique and anatomy, but something much more. As he relentlessly copied the nudes of the Old Masters and drew from live models, he developed a desire to be rigorous, but also rigorously original: a desire he would bring to bear in his important early paining of the nude, Young Spartans Exercising, and that would continue for the rest of his career.” Degas was in many ways, his own teacher, insisting critically, “that I get it into my head that I know nothing at all. That is the only way to go forward.”

Edouard Manet, Effect of Snow, Montrouge, Dec. 28, 1870

The son of a Parisian banker, Degas was closer to Manet than any other Impressionist in age and social background. Manet, who he met in 1862, and his artistic circle gradually persuaded Degas to turn from history painting to the depiction of contemporary life. The two artists were present and involved in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the humiliating siege and blockade of Paris that brought the city’s population to near starvation. The civil war that immediately followed, pitting Socialist Communards against Republican monarchists, led to further wide-spread death and chaos in the streets, leaving an indelible mark on both artists and the intellectual community as a whole. With the restoration of government and civil order, the Impressionists once again turned their attention to pastoral and bourgeois themes—in celebration of the ‘new’ France, while Degas headed in a very different direction.

The Serious Client (1876-77). End Note #3.

In the 1870s, Degas set out to work on a series of nudes that were neither classically-based nor studies for larger paintings. In fact, this series of monotypes were decidedly anti-classical, even as the idealized body of his earlier works gave way to more natural interpretations. Largely unknown until after his death, the works depict prostitutes in Paris’s high-class brothels. The pictures are explicit in detail—emphasizing the prostitutes’ heavy, full breasts, large bodies, and luxuriant pubic hair—and sometimes sexually explicit as well. Degas never intended these pictures to be seen publically. Both intimate and revealing of both subject and artist, they represent an extended engagement by the artist with an indecent, but widely accepted, underbelly of Paris bourgeoisie society. They were based on observation and study, but also on contemporary public opinion regarding sanitation, disease, morality and social standing.

Upon closer examination of a work like The Serious Client (1876-77), Degas may be invoking a role that John House (Impressionism: Paint and Politics, 2oo4), calls the flâneur-detective. Always the objective observer, the artist enters the forbidden world of the brothel “to find order and meaning in the seeming incoherence of the modern urban environment.” The standard markers of difference—class, sex and race—are very much at play in many of Degas’s works, and his brothel monotype series is no exception. Given the context of the pictures, the artist is making clear distinctions between male and female, working and upper class, master and servant. The women are portrayed through posture and dress as being clear about their functionary role. The setting, by extension, is pictured as conspicuously overdone, yet hermetically sealed from the outside world by mutual agreement among all parties. Men of influence move through the space—typecast as in control, on view…and fully dressed to reflect their professional status in society.

The Siesta-Scene from a Brothel (1870-80). End Note #4.

For a brief period of time, in the 1870s, Degas embraced the view of certain members of the scientific community, who believed that physical characteristics were seen to relate to social standing and typecasting. Individual physiognomy was thought to predetermine such traits as intelligence, criminality, and emotional stability. Ironically, this male-generated theory was held to be particularly attributable to members of the opposite sex. In the brothel series, as well as in some early ballet drawings and painting, Degas was inclined toward typecasting, where working-class dancers were shown with snub noses and slightly simian features, conforming closely to stereotypical ideas of the physiognomy of the lower classes. Fortunately, for his career and reputation, Degas ultimately rejected these theories, going on to become a leading proponent of artistic representation of the working poor.

As an employed technique, monotype was considered an experimental and contemporary medium. Lacking an etched or engraved plate, the process depended on paint or ink being applied directly to a smooth metal plate, which was then run through a press. Special effects and changes in the images were an inherent part of the process, with certain parts of the finished image left to chance. Degas fully exploited this characteristic in his use of monotypes to represent the settings and figures in the brothels. Spontaneity and loosely-defined details characterized the finished product—an important step for the artist as he moved away from his classical training and into the realm of sensory impressionism.

Degas’s focus shifted again in the late 1870s, when he turned his attention to the outside world. Here, his female models were pictured in private settings, often alone: lounging, reading, stepping into or out of the bath. Recurring themes became a feature of his work, with naturalism ‘coloring’ his style as he moved farther away from the classical traditions that were his roots. Still enamored of monotypes, Degas continued to rely on the medium as he broadened his repertoire of subjects. But now, he was running inked plates through the press twice, creating ambiguous, sensual and shadowy images that could then be further enhanced with chalk and colored pastels.

Nude Woman Standing, ca. 1878 (left: See End Note 5) invites the viewer to share a private moment with his model. In this remarkable work, consciousness, rather than nudity, is the principle theme. As if caught unaware, the woman has withdrawn into herself, appearing to forget for the moment that she is in the presence of another. We marvel, today, at reality TV participants, as they reveal all in front of prying cameras; yet this work illustrates how easily we can slip the reins of self-consciousness and retreat into our own thoughts and emotions. Cool flesh tones on pale blue paper help to avert the simmering sensuality that would ordinarily accompany a drawing of this kind. The figure grips her temples, elbows resting on her knee. Posed against a stark background, evidence of her toilette is nowhere to be seen. She is frozen in contemplation—a static drama unfolding before our eyes. Degas’s mastery of the human gesture is in evidence here: the artist’s machinery of illusion in full swing as he asks us to consider this simple scene as an homage to everyday life and our own vulnerability, uniting us in our humanity.

Degas exhibited small pastel nudes in the Impressionist exhibit of 1877. Now affiliated with the Impressionists, he sought safety and expanded recognition in their numbers. Nude Woman Drying Herself, 1884-92 (near right, End Note #6) was completed during that time in the hopes that it would serve as a showpiece for his skills and garner the attention of buyers and the critics, either with the Impressionists, or on his own.

His friend Henri Gervex had exhibited a large painting of a nude, Rola, in 1878; its treatment of a naked prostitute provoking both public admiration and criticism. At the same time, painter and collector, Gustave Caillebotte was finishing large-scale male and female nudes, including Man at His Bath, 1884 (above right, End Note #7). Degas’s unfinished Nude Woman Drying Herself is evidence of his intention to create a modern oil painting with the scale of Gervex’s canvas, but with a greater sense of narrative detachment than he had demonstrated in the pastels, monotypes and etchings of the previous decade, in keeping with Caillebotte’s unabashed realism.

Henri Gervex, Rolla (1878). End Note #8.

The last Impressionist Exhibition in 1886 was a pivotal moment for Degas. He showed new works—including a group of bathers. The exhibition checklist announced a “Suite of female nudes” by Degas: “bathing, washing, drying themselves, wiping themselves, combing themselves or being combed.” These works represent one of Degas’s highest achievements as an artist. Executed in pastel, the medium held strong appeal for him since it yielded effects of line, tone and color simultaneously. As he had done with monotype, the artist fully exploited the expressive possibilities of the medium: wiping and blending colors, smudging and carving into the surface with the butt-end of his paint brush.

As most contemporary museum visitors know, dancers were a favorite subject of Degas. He remained fascinated with the moving body throughout his career—specifically the dancer’s body. First, he would sketch them nude, or work their images in clay or wax. Carefully studying these gestures, movements and poses at moments of stillness, he would then clothe the dancers in tutus for final versions in oil or pastel. While no longer actively portraying prostitutes, his interest in ballet was not far removed from this unseemly side of Paris culture. Unlike today’s classical dancers, 19th century ballerinas generally came from working class families and, because they exhibited their scantily-clad bodies in public—something that ‘respectable’ bourgeois women did not do—they were widely assumed to be sexually available. They were often ‘sponsored’ by wealthy businessmen, who exchanged their patronage for sexual favors. Several of Degas’s paintings contain images of these men, sitting on the sidelines of a rehearsal; or conversely, mothers of the dancers hovering nearby at rehearsals and performances in order to safeguard their daughters’s virtue.

Right: After the Bath, Woman with a Towel (1893-97). See End Note # 9.

This careful analysis of his subject, and strong reliance on the studio setting to achieve a finished piece becomes an important way to understand that, while Degas was a champion of the Impressionist movement (and accepted as one of their own in exhibitions and in personal friendships), his working style did not qualify him for what contemporaneous critic, Jules-Antoine Castegnary called, “modern forms of naturalism.” By this he meant a certain spontaneity-of-response by the artist (plein air painting, for example), together with an objectivity of representation. While Degas certainly qualified in the latter, his allegiance to draftsmanship, boldly-calculated compositions, and a methodical (classically-styled) approach to repeatedly rendering his subject, placed him in a unique category. Yet, as a consequence of his studio-based use of seemingly-spontaneous mark-making, his bold use of color and loosely-configured drawing techniques, today we consider Degas’s work an important part of the Impressionist genre.

Jean Auguste Ingres,The Valpincon Bather (1808). Louvre, Paris.

Drawings and paintings during this period highlight Degas’s continuing focus on the backs of his models. Trained in the tradition—and an admirer—of neo-classicist painter, Jean Auguste Ingres, who famously extolled the female back as a sensual anatomical feature (see: The Valpincon Bather, 1812), Degas, too, was to follow in the footsteps of this master of the neglected side of the nude, throughout his career. Since the 1870s, Degas had used the back as a locus of character and expression: in depictions of women walking, of mounted jockeys or dancers in the wings. But the bather’s back is more complex. Degas almost never depicted his bathers, except from behind. Perhaps he did not want to show their faces, to create identifiable individuals—women with names, identities and personalities. The female form, for Degas, was now more iconic or symbolic, than real, as they focused on the same everyday tasks, like bathing or drying, common to everyone. By stripping his bathers of specifics, the back served as a locus for the body’s expressive powers and poetic center.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, Degas’s art making underwent a transformation—one that was subtle, but also completely revelatory. His nudes became a vehicle for experimentation, in style and method, as well as impact. His earlier, methodical etchings gave way to expressive lithography. Drawing, the cornerstone of his practice, shifted from the careful pencil academies to strokes of charcoal or black chalk for forceful studies of nude bathers. He tossed aside the care with which he had approached Scene of War in the Middle Ages in the 1860s to create oil paintings with celebratory swaths and daubs of paint. As a key sign of the times, Impressionism transitioned to the more personalized work of the Post-Impressionists. And perhaps, (like Monet during this same period) Degas began fell prey to failing eye sight, dogging him as he aged. Anatomical accuracy became less important to the artist than expressing emotion and feeling that were palpable in the work.

The Tub (1886) Musee d'Orsay. End Note #10.

On exhibit, The Tub (1886), like other works in which Degas achieves drama with unusual perspectives on his subject, assumes an oblique—even severely geometric angle: the tub and the crouching woman, both vigorously outlined, form a circle within a square. The remainder of the rectangular format is filled by a shelf so sharply tilted at an unnatural angle that nearly shares the plane of the picture, itself. On this shelf Degas has placed two pitchers (note the curve of the small one fitting into the handle of the other), which are not in-the-least foreshortened. Here, the tension between two-dimensions and three—surface and depth—comes close to the breaking point. The carelessly placed brush, with its handle hanging precariously over the edge, tempts the viewer to reach out and grab it before it tumbles to the floor.

Degas would revisit the same theme and position with his models, over a period of two decades. With slight variations, all would be placed in the same anonymous pose, with strict physical demands placed on the women during the posing process. The pose he demanded was difficult to hold. “Standing on her left leg, her knee slightly bent, [the model] lifts her other foot behind her with a strong movement, graspsher foot with her right hand, while her left elbow shoots out to maintain her balance,” as one observer described it. “For a whole minute, she remains almost immobile, her muscles all taut; but suddenly her left leg shifts and—in order not to fall—she has to give it up.”

After the bath, Woman drying Her Neck (1895-98). End Note #11.

In the 1890s, Degas’s propensity to revisit familiar poses reached new levels. Repetition intrigued him, as did (in all likelihood) the enthusiastic market for his work by galleries and collectors. He began copying himself by placing smooth tracing paper over previous works to translate poses, one to the other. During this time he also began using recent charcoal drawings and tracings as the basis for finished pastels, as he had done with monotypes earlier in his career. Repetition could simply be a matter of revisiting favorite poses, but for Degas, the concept was more complicated. With changing times and shifting social values in the face of Western Europe’s industrialization and modernization, themes of war’s inhumanity and the abuses of women meant that motifs embodied in some of Degas’s work, going back decades, were still resonant. The image of a woman in one bathing scene—head bent, one arm curved across her chest, the other lifted into the air, palm upward—as though gesturing, partly in defense, partly as a warning, was reminiscent of a figure in his violent 1963-65, Scene of War in the Middle Ages. Across thirty years, the emotions remain constant, while the social context changes.

Dancer...(1896-1911) Note #12.

By the late 1880s, Degas’s eyesight had begun to fail, perhaps a result of an injury suffered during his service in defending Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After that time he focused almost exclusively on dancers and nudes, increasingly turning to sculpture as his eyesight weakened. In his later years, he was concerned chiefly with women bathing, entirely without self-consciousness and emphatically, not posed. Despite the seemingly fleeting glimpses he portrayed, he achieved a solidity in his figures that is almost sculptural.

In later life, Degas became reclusive, morose, and given to bouts of depression, probably a consequence of his increasing blindness. His monotype Coastal Landscape ,c. 1892 (left, below, End Note #13) an unusual work from this period, is an unexpected instance of Degas presenting an outdoor scene with no obvious figures, showing an imaginative and expressive use of color and freedom-of-line that may have arisen, at least in part, as a result of his struggle to adapt to his deteriorating vision. Show organizers invite viewers to detect the subtle suggestion of a reclining figure disguised in the hillside, however; positing that it served as a gentle send-up to Monet, the consummate landscape painter, from an old colleague and adversary who made the representation of the human form his life’s work

Near the end of his career, Degas was already well-known throughout Europe and in North America. Collectors from Paris, London, New York Chicago and Boston vied for his work, many purchasing his bathers from the 1880s and 90s. His reputation was also strong among his peers, bridging the generations between the Paris avant garde and a new generation of artists for a new century. In 1918, at the sale of Degas’s atelier after his death, the broader public viewed many of his works for the first time. Most connoisseurs were shocked by what they saw—dozens of works by this painter of dancers on the stage, of jockeys, laundresses, and milliners. “We looked at these walls,” wrote one of Degas’s friends, “covered with works that were powerful but horrible, which frightened us all the more because the energy of their lines and the beauty of their tones kept us from looking at or thinking of anything else.”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Rare film footage of Edgar Degas, Paris, c. 1914:

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END NOTES:

1. Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917), La Toilette (1884-86), pastel over monotype laid down on board. Private collection. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
2. Edgar Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages (1863-65), oil on paper. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. ©Photo: Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
3. Edgar Degas, The Serious Client (1876-77), monotype on woven paper. National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa. Purchases 1977. Photo ©National Gallery of Canada. National gallery of Canada, Ottowa. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
4. Edgar Degas, The Siesta—Scene from a Brothel (1878-80), monotype in black ink. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Katerine E. Bullard Fund in memory of Francis Bullard 61.1215. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
5. Edgar Degas, Nude Woman Standing (ca. 1878), black chalk and pastel on blue wove paper. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo: © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
6. Edgar Degas, Nude Woman Drying Herself (1884-92), oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Carl H. de Silver Fund 31.813. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
7. Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894), Man at His Bath (1884), oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Museum purchase with funds by exchange and from the Charles H. Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, Edward Jackson Holmes Fund, Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin, Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, Gift of Mrs. Samuel Parkmen Oliver—Eliza R. Oliver Fund, Sophie F. Friedman Fund, Robert M. Rosenberg Family Fund, and Mary L. Cornille and John F. Cogan Jr. Fund for the Art of Europe. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
8. Henri Gervex (French, 1852-1929), Rolla (1878), oil on canvas. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (on deposit at Musée des Beaux Arts des Bordeaux). Bequest of M. Bérardi, 1926 BX E 1455. Photo: Musée des Beaux Arts des Bordeaux/Art resource, NY.
9. Edgar Degas, After the Bath, Woman with a Towel (1893-97), pastel on brown cardboard. Harvard Art museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of mrs. J. Montgomery Sears. Photo: Allan Macintyre ©President and Fellows of Harvard College. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
10. Edgar Degas, The Tub (1886), pastel. Paris, Musée d’Orday, Bequest of Comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911. Photo: © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
11. Edgar Degas, After the Bath, Woman Drying Her Neck (1895-98), pastel on woven paper. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Bequest of Comte Isaac de Camondo, 1911 RF 4044. Photo: Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN; photographed by Patrice Schmidt.
12. Edgar Degas, Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot (modeled between 1896-1911, cast between 1921-31), bronze. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, acquired through the generosity of the heirs of the artist and of Hébrard. Photo © Musée d’Orsay/rmn. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
13. Edgar Degas, Coastal Landscape (ca. 1892), pastel on paper. Collection Marie-Anne Krugier-Poniatowski.  Boston only.

Controversial Smithsonian Air & Space 2011 Military Unmanned Aircraft Exhibit

Editor’s Note: Here, Ken Yellis’ analysis of the museum world gains particular currency in today’s political climate: because, most recently, on Saturday, October 8, 2011, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington was closed after anti-war demonstrators swarmed the building to protest a drone exhibit. Security guards used pepper spray to repel them, sickening a number of protesters.

The museum’s exhibition, “Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” covers the history of unmanned aircraft and their current use as offensive weapons. Drones are often called the weapon of choice of the Obama administration, which quadrupled drone strikes against al-Qaida targets in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, up from less than 50 under the Bush administration to more than 220 in the past three years.

In an increasingly polarized political and social atmosphere of American values-in-transition, an exhibition of this kind can often serve as a hair-trigger for shaping public opinion. The questions surrounding the role of the museum, acting as a venue for an exposition of often-controversial facts—on display for public consideration—appears ever more cogent.

I have to ask myself: Did I let a teachable moment slip away? artes fine arts magazine

Col. Paul Tibbets, pilot of Enola Gay, plane that dropped atomic bomb on Hiroshima, waves from cockpit before takeoff, August 6, 1945. Source: Nat’l Archives

In my 2009 article, Fred Wilson, PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder], and Me: Reflections on the History Wars (Curator: The Museum Journal, 52:4, Fall, 2009), I predicted that an episode like the recent controversy about the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, would soon happen:

“The field has to find a way to heal our professional PTSD. Enola Gay [a controversial exhibition project, The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, that roiled Smithsonian in the mid-1990s] was a cautionary episode. One of the lessons learned from it is that grappling with difficult and contested subject matter need not in itself be fatally toxic — but you’d better be ready. I think we are more wary, but I also sense and hope that we are lately showing a little more willingness to pick an occasional fight. The difference is that now when we go into the saloon, we make sure we are packing and that buddies have our back.”

A-Bomb exploding over Hiroshima, August 6, 1945

As it turned out, my optimism about how such an episode would play out was wholly unjustified. Hide/Seek demonstrated that in the current cultural landscape, you can’t just prepare for one bar fight and stay out of all the others: there are bars all over the place and the air is thick with truculence. To explore the Hide/Seek story in greater detail, a good place to start is the video of the morning session of a conference held on April 9, 2011, Hide/Seek: Museums, Ethics and the Press, organized by the Institute for Museum Ethics at Seton Hall University, available at http://www.museumethics.org/ . At this event, Sullivan described how NPG and Smithsonian prepared for a different fight from the one they found themselves in. The exhibition was intended to push the envelope on forms of gender representation. Smithsonian leadership had not anticipated that the envelope might push back on an entirely different subject: how religious symbols are used in art.

Poster Image of David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), Photo: Andreas Sterzing (1989)

A dimension of the story the conference did not fully address is what I have long considered the great unanswered—because unasked—question of the museum field: what do we mean when we make an exhibition? On January 20, 2011, the Huffington Post reported that Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough stated that he decided to pull A Fire in My Belly from the show, “because the controversy had overshadowed the exhibition and threatened to spiral beyond control into a debate on religious desecration.” Clough and the Smithsonian PR apparatus reiterated that mantra—one is tempted to say cover story—frequently over the following months. I am happy to report that if the removal of the abbreviated version of David Wojnarowicz’ video, A Fire in My Belly, was, indeed, intended to change the subject, Mission Accomplished.

(Editor’s Note: In December, 2010, a short, 4-minute edit of a larger film-work by late artist David Wojnarowicz was removed from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) after it was deemed objectionable by certain religious groups. The 4-minute film featured a 11-second sequence of insects crawling on a crucifix).

Once the video was gone, an entirely new—and potentially more productive—debate developed, centered on an issue Smithsonian was no less unprepared to address: will the Smithsonian—or any cultural institution dependent on taxpayer support—ever be in a position to defend the intellectual integrity of its work and, not incidentally, to honor its commitments to its lenders and private sources of funding?

The answer may turn out to be maybe. On the Smithsonian website, Clough reassured us that he is “committed to improving these processes so that this Institution can meet the challenges of its public mission, including our role in educating about complex topics that involve social transitions or incorporate, in art or objects, cultural or religious symbols.” Not so committed as to educate us about complex topics that incorporate in art or objects cultural or religious symbols in this case, it appears, but in a general way at some uncertain point in the not-so-proximate future, Smithsonian might be up for taking this on.

The B-29, Enola Gay. Part of mid-90s Smithsonian exhibit, The Last Act: The Atomic bomb and the End of World War II

Clough has said several times that if he had it to do again he would make the same decision “but…handle it better.” I suppose experience does equip us to screw up with greater efficiency and less collateral damage. But the Secretary may be wrong in both respects. A different process might well have produced a different disposition, however risk- and conflict-averse the decision-makers and fraught the political environment. For one thing, more of the consequences of caving might have been foreseen—and more allies might have stepped forward. For another, what’s the point of a different process if it doesn’t open up the possibility that you might wind up somewhere else? If Clough is right, however, to say that changing the process would not have produced a different outcome—except for making more people complicit in the decision—what purpose would changing the process serve?

In fact, there was a more deliberative process that might have been followed but was, instead, bypassed. My experience tells me that CEOs often get where they are in life because of their ability to take the hit now and move on, rather than subject themselves to what they perceive as prolonged agony. But future cases may have different outcomes for another reason: Clough and his successors as Secretary may find Smithsonian’s bureau directors less willing to allow their autonomy to be compromised, restoring something more akin to the power balance in effect in the Smithsonian of the 1970s. And there is some evidence that the Hide/Seek episode may have stiffened the Smithsonian bureaucracy’s backbone. The strident voices will not be stilled by attempts to mollify them—they will just find something else to complain about –and the Institution’s leaders may conclude that its support will prove sturdier and more robust if it were actually to stand for something—like, to pick a word at random, excellence. Pandering is no way to build a constituency and has no stakeholders.

It would be a pity if Smithsonian’s sole response to this faux-crisis proved to be organizational reforms, better internal communications, and a more resolute posture, however laudable those measures are. This, too, was a teachable moment when the spiritual dimension of Smithsonian’s work in the world might have been articulated and controverted, and the existing genuine constituency for that work bolstered. But that opportunity went un-seized and may not return; it is not for nothing that Gore Vidal calls this the United States of Amnesia. Still, it is not too late—or too soon—to prepare for the next time by thinking long and hard about that work.

Cri de Coeur and Battle Cry

When I submitted Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars, Curator’s Editor, Zahava Doering, asked, “Why did you write it?” I hemmed and hawed for five minutes without really addressing the question. The correct response would have been, “Beats me.”

The B-29 Superfortress, Enola Gay, with pilot Paul W. Tibbits, Jr. (1945)

But it was a fair question and one I still can’t really the answer. The essay had actually been gestating for a very long time. As it started to take shape, it became clear that it was at least in part about what happened to Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum’s proposed exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the detonation of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, The Final Act. The project, which most museum people refer to in shorthand as Enola Gay (for the airplane that dropped the bomb) and about which much has been written, triggered a lacerating controversy that inflicted deep wounds on the Smithsonian. Its effect on the museum community, especially on history museums—by far the most numerous kind of museum, by the way—was chilling. Most of us seemed to have decided to avoid bar fights by staying out of bars.

A few years later, moreover, in the aftermath of 9/11, the national narrative seemed to have become murkier and the role of museums in clarifying it more uncertain. In that stressed post-traumatic environment, it was hard to know what to say that would be helpful—and all too easy to say very little. But by the mid-2000s, I had started detecting a growing discomfort about this reticence and the hesitancy of museums to tackle big issues and tell big stories. This unease was accompanied by a greater readiness to attempt something that might be contested, to, in fact, provoke controversy.

Behind this, from an emotional perspective, was the fact that life in the DMZ was both boring and tense, warfare with all the terror and none of the glory. More importantly, we were learning that silence on matters of consequence only seemed safe and that we got no points for not ruffling feathers. On the contrary, by making the work of museums less socially relevant and culturally salient, we risked consigning our institutions to the margins of the national debate. That was unsustainable: we were better off under siege than ignored. If museums sought to demonstrate that they were necessary, they had to take risks. Otherwise, who cares?

If we cannot always anticipate what will trigger these fights, it may be in part because we are not sufficiently self-reflexive. Susan Crane has written that: “The unfortunate lesson of the Enola Gay controversy was just how little publics know about what historians ‘really do’…and just how little-used historians are to having to defend their interpretations before non-academic publics.” I think that’s true but I think further that the museum field needs to be clearer about what we think we are doing when we make an exhibition. If we were, we could embrace these fights as opportunities to spend our prestige on something worth buying: a firmer public understanding of our work and why it matters. That’s ground worth shedding blood for.

Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me

Above: Baby Carriage with KKK Mask, Mining the Museum, Maryland Historical Society (MdHS),1992-3. See End Note 2.

Yale Peabody, Ken Yellis, Curator, 'Mixed Blessings: The Complex Social Life of Cliff Swallows' (1992). End Note #2a.

My essay attempted to contribute to this process by raising questions about the exhibition medium and the way it is practiced. Is there something about the nature of the medium, or something about the way museums go about doing what they do, or something about the relationship between museums and their visitors—or, perhaps, all three—that makes these outbreaks more likely and, perhaps, inevitable? What are we missing about what we do? What is it about our medium that we fail to understand?

Fred Wilson, Curator, 'Cabinetmaking 1820-1960,' MdHS. End Note #3.

My method was an extended compare-and-contrast discussion of two exhibitions, both a few years before the Enola Gay fiasco: Fred Wilson’s much-celebrated but also much-controverted 1992-1993 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS), Mining the Museum, and an almost exact contemporary, my own, little controverted exhibition, Mixed Blessings: The Complex Social Life of Cliff Swallows, at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Both Mining the Museum and Mixed Blessings arose out of the same desire to challenge visitors. The fact that while both risked controversy, only one encountered any made the compare-and-contrast discussion a good place to start. The article’s second section, ‘Undermining the Museum,’ analyzed Wilson’s out-of-the-box methods and the theoretical issues they posed—the problem of memory and forgetting, the complex relationship and reciprocal responsibilities between institutions and their communities, the changing role of the museum, how museums can break through boundaries of presentation and chronology while being mindful of visitor expectations and needs, and more. (To follow that discussion, go to <<link>>.) The photos and captions that follow give a sense of the different ways in which these exhibitions challenged visitors.

Entrance, 'Mixed Blessings,' at Yale Peabody. End Note #4.

Though both Mining the Museum and Mixed Blessings were small exhibitions, both tackled big ideas. For Mixed Blessings that idea was trade-offs in nature. It had the potential to change the way visitors looked at the natural world: every characteristic and behavior of animals—or, for that matter, plants—would become the subject of the same sort of marginal utility analysis that cliff swallows do on the wing every day of their lives. If you looked at Mining the Museum with the same attention, it would erode some of the smugness or complacency you might feel about the American past. If you were a museum person, it was likely to shake you to the core and force you to confront the choices we make and the language we use. If, as I think and as others have said to me, people go to museums for insight and not so much for information, both exhibitions were worth the trip.

But only Mining the Museum aroused intense feelings among visitors, both positive and negative. There are several possible reasons for this, each of which may be somewhat true. One is the obvious one: nowadays, people are much less misty-eyed about nature than they are about the past. Mixed Blessings in presenting natural history unsentimentally, anticipated the approach that has become commonplace in museums and in other media, notably television. The settings may have played a role, too: visitors might expect uncompromising science in a university natural history museum.

'Truth and Metalwork,' Mining the Museum, MdHS (1992-3). End Note #5

But in an entity named the Maryland Historical Society they would look for a more traditional, even nostalgic or mythological, narrative about the past. It is pretty clear that, compared to natural history, the emotional stakes in public history are very high. Lisa Corrin, Wilson’s collaborator on Mining the Museum wrote that the exhibition “was about how deconstructing the museum apparatus can transform the museum into a space for ongoing cultural debate…. Our audiences told us that they want to be challenged.” But we know from the responses the Maryland Historical Society collected from visitors that at least some told them the opposite. And, as the feedback I received suggests (see below), Mining the Museum seems to have had more impact on how museum professionals think about their work than on how they actually practice it. It may be that in the current risk-averse environment, Mining the Museum remains a largely unrealized fantasy for museum professionals.

Cliff Swallow Colony, 'Mixed Blessings,' Yale Peabody (1992). End Note #6.

For many of us, too, the straightforward but hard-nosed approach taken in Mixed Blessings is more comfortable than the subversive, ironic and guileful cast of mind that created Mining the Museum. And there may be another reason why it is easier: while museums depend on text to convey their messages, lay people seem to understand intuitively that what exhibitions show is vastly more important than what they say about it. This disconnect, in my view, helps account for both the Enola Gay and Hide/Seek controversies—and it may be that to visitors the uninflected text and harsh view of nature in Mixed Blessings matched each other, so it was okay. Visitors, who live in the world, know that the impact of the visual cannot be wholly mitigated by explanatory text.

When we miscalculate this, we guarantee that the exhibition we intend will be very different from the exhibition the visitor experiences. I believe visitors telling us, either by their anger or their silence, that they come to exhibitions to have another kind of experience from what we typically offer. They are teaching us something about our medium that we ought to have known: that we are telling when we should be showing., that we are didactic when we should be seductive, that we are transmitting data when we should be offering insights.

Are our words saying one thing, our choices another? I think so and, apparently, I am not alone.

Image right: ‘Water Jug, Wicker Basket and Painting,’ Mining the Museum (1992-3), Maryland Historical Society. End Note #7.

Writing Fred Wilson brought two very gratifying rewards. One was the pleasure of working with Zahava, Curator Managing Editor Kay Larson, and the perceptive peer reviewers who read the piece to shape it into publishable form. The other was the response to the essay, the steady stream of scintillating and thoughtful emails and conversations.

One of the reasons for this latter phenomenon is that Curator is one of a small handful of museum publications able to accommodate long-form theoretical writing, a gap much felt by museum professionals. In the course of the correspondence, I was struck again and again by what my correspondents saw that I hadn’t quite seen:

The Carriage and the KKK hat were shocking, then put into context, but still not as shocking as the cliff swallows [in forced copulation] Image, left, Mixed Blessings (`92). See End Note #8.… When I first saw it, and read what it was supposed to be, it was disturbing on so many levels. At first, I thought it was just two dead swallows. That was upsetting enough. But when you read the explanation of their existence, the harshness, no beauty as I have been used to in my avid bird watching days. The savagery of the scene is adequately explained. But it does not take away the horror of that picture. It makes it worse.… When I compare the two exhibits, my first thought goes to your discussion of whether to read about the exhibit first, to be prepared, or to be given something on the way out so that you can digest what you have seen, have time to think about it.… My personal feeling is that I would get more from the Mining exhibit taking something to read away at the end. With your Cliff Swallows thou, I needed to have some kind of explanation as I looked at the picture.… I could not, however, have looked at the exhibit and then read about it entirely after I left. I would have missed much of the sensation that I think you wanted people to take away from the exhibit.

As a related outcome, since professional meetings have become so heavily programmed of late, there are fewer opportunities for conversations about these sorts of issues in general. In a series of workshops that Linda Norris and I conducted at conferences last fall, which grew out of an extended email exchange triggered by the article, we were thrilled by the eagerness of our colleagues to think about these matters. Fred and its companion piece, Cueing the Visitor: The Museum Theater and the Visitor Performance, which appeared in Curator 53:1 (Winter 2010), are now appearing on museum studies course syllabi as well, which is gratifying.

The correspondence and conversations suggest to me that a lot of us think or feel that the field is at some kind of a crossroads whose nature is unclear. At first, I was struck by the intensity, emotionality, and insightfulness of the responses. In re-visiting them for this article, however, I have been more moved by the powerful sense of loss and unrealized possibilities—although that sense was by no means universal. I should add, the same range of feelings ran through a discussion thread on the Museum Ethics Listserv that was in part a response to my article and from which I have taken some entries.

One media developer spoke directly to that sense of loss:

“I’ve been thinking about the sense of loss that I have developed during the birth of tech and a few things stand out. I think this sense of dramaturgy is one of the big casualties. In a world where everything is only two or three clicks away, we’ve lost a big chunk of time that focuses our thoughts, and organizes the drama of life experience. In the arts, it’s the loss of skillful narrative, good writing coming out of rigorous thinking, good films that play with the forms of storytelling (and last longer than three minutes)…. As someone who works in a media business I run the risk of being pegged as a dinosaur when I speak of the virtues of narrative film as opposed to web sites.”

Bull Snake Attacking Cliff Swallow Nest,' Mixed Blessings (1992),Yale Peabody. End Note #10

The internal dynamics of project development arose several times as a contributing factor, as these passages from several different correspondents indicate:

“I was lucky enough to see Mining the Museum and it left quite an impression on me as to what an exhibition could be.… I suppose that many of us wanted to use some of those subversive approaches in exhibits we were developing and designing- I know I certainly wanted to. But when it comes to actually putting those ideas into practice, it is far more difficult to get anything like that passed by a committee. There is nothing like a committee to drain an exhibit of poetry, dumb down an aesthetic and kill new ways of looking at things.”

“I recall casually strolling over there at some point during AAM…for a light break from all the hustle of the conference only to be floored by it all. The brave politics aside, I was simply thrilled to see each display as an explicit puzzle to be figured out, each with a clear ‘Oh, I get it!’ moment. I’ll admit that I even remember not ‘getting’ some stuff only to be clued in which was somewhat of a motivating challenge to ‘look closer’ at the other displays…. While most of our past projects have had comparatively tame themes over these past 25 years, I would like to think that they all have had explicit ‘concepts’ that are hoped to be uncovered by the visitor in some creative way.”

“Unfortunately, in museum schools or conferences or in our back rooms, there is too little awareness of how exhibition esthetics coupled with the excitement of intellectual discovery are a powerful combination. Museums ARE places to convey ideas to audiences in ways that are meaningful and engaging and sometimes uncomfortable and shocking. But in our desire to please, and plan by committee, and compromise, and to get things done with shrinking budgets, we’re not serving the public as well as we could. And many don’t seem to be aware of doing things any other way.”

Pikes Used in John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry and Reward Posters for Runaway Slaves, Mining the Museum (`92-3), MdHS. End Note #13

On the other hand, some of my correspondents and participants in the discussion thread were much more positive and inclined to be proactive about the state of the field in this respect:

“I can say that [Wilson’s] approach has directly changed the way I have worked as a curator and the way the museums I have worked in approach their exhibitions (temporary or permanent).… I believe viewers are often more ready to be challenged than museum staff give them credit for. In my experiences, the resistance more often comes from inside the museum (due to complacency, fear of risk, rigid departmental structures) rather than from audiences. I am a firm believer in providing viewers with an engaging and positive museum experience. But I also feel that museums must attempt to go beyond what audiences want or expect if they are really serious about ENGAGING their audiences. It is important to not only engage our audiences within their comfort zones but also to challenge them to exit their own comfort zones (which Wilson does) for deeper and meaningful learning. It is often in those locations of ‘discomfort’ that the most amount of learning needs to and can take place–and those locations can be frightening (both to museum staff and its audiences).…”

“[Mining the Museum’s]importance for me was in revealing that any artifact can be interpreted through different filters. In Film Studies, it is called ‘gaze’ theory — what you see depends on who is seeing it. When Wilson re-interpreted and re-exhibited the artifacts in Mining the Museum, he took the institutional authority away from the Historical Society and its traditional interpretations. But, he didn’t just use that borrowed authority to impose a[n] outside voice’s new interpretation. He challenged the visitors to interpret for themselves by provided two contrasting but accurate solutions to the ‘what is it?’ question. I found this very liberating as a fairly new museum professional. Looking back on the exhibit, I realized that it was liberating for the general audience as well. Much of the ‘imitation’ of Mining the Museum came in history sites and museums’ staff-led re-interpretations of collections away from “who owned it?” to “who made it?” or “who used it?” and the new value given to artifacts of slave and trade populations. There is also a new expectation in art and general museums for artist/guest curators. Rather than simply curating a show to reflect their tastes, they are now empowered to compile exhibitions from the permanent collections and interpret them in first person.”

'Nestling Covered with Blood-Engorged Swallow Bugs,' Mixed Blessings, Yale Peabody (`92). End Note # 14.

End of the Story—or not

So where are we?

Too early to say, I suppose.

Public Survey Responses, Mining the Museum, MdHS. End Note #15.

Because of the power museums are capable of exercising, it is appropriate and necessary that we have fights about what is presented there. Museums are, after all, where the national narrative is blocked out and staged and where our sense of the world is informed, if not shaped. “Perhaps,” Susan Crane writes, “we can also enjoy museums which confound and confabulate.” Perhaps, but the relationship between museums and their audiences has proved far more difficult to re-negotiate than we thought. We have learned to our regret that there is a torrent of rage and tears waiting to break through the fragile membrane of civility at any time.

Still, while for many museum professionals Mining the Museum has been a path not taken, for others, its rewards have transcended its attendant difficulties and risks. We are still aspiring to decipher what his methods reveal about our medium and its largely unrealized potential. So two years after its publication, Fred Wilson, PTSD and Me has made me more resolute in one of my core convictions.

It appears that for visitors as well as professionals museums can and should act as interlocutors between the past and the present, between ourselves and the other—and that we should be ready to take the consequences of doing so. After all, through our portals pass large numbers of people of diverse backgrounds and conditions and interests and learning styles. Their lives are in the process of changing, whether they know it or not; they are in the constant process of learning, whether they know it or not. Museums can, if we choose, assist in these metamorphoses by opening unseen windows on cloaked realities. Or we can retard them. Museum people, some of them at least, are thinking long and hard about who we are supposed to be in this moment. From my perspective, some at least have concluded we have the right and the duty to choose which role to play in this unfolding, epic drama.

By Ken Yellis, Contributing Writer

___________________________________________

End Notes

1. Fred Wilson (pictured left, in 1992) is an artist with an anthropologist’s cast-of-mind and a lot of experience working for and with museums. His exhibition, Mining the Museum, is only one of many he has created in a wide range of settings, but it has had by far the most impact on the museum community, at least in part because its installation coincided with the 1993 annual meeting of the American Association of Museums.

2. The methods Fred Wilson used in Mining the Museum challenged visitors to confront an uncomfortable reality without providing interpretive support or reassurance. Perhaps most upsetting was the placement of a Ku Klux Klan mask in a baby carriage, with a photo nearby of a black nanny caring for a white child. Randi Korn reports overhearing an angry mother saying to her daughter: “I don’t know why they put that thing in there.”

2a. Mixed Blessings started innocently with a flock of more than 150 sculpted swallows swirling through the gothic foyer of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, modeled on the donjon of the medieval Chateau Coucy. A Peabody curator observed that this was entirely appropriate since birds are commonly found roosting and flying in and out of castles, cathedrals, and other buildings.  Since coloniality was the main theme of the exhibition, it made sense that 150 cliff swallow sculptures would also usher visitors from the lobby, up the stairs, to the exhibition on Peabody Museum’s 3rd floor (see image, right).

3. Wilson’s ironically-captioned Cabinetmaking 1820-1960 juxtaposed Victorian chairs with a whipping post for disciplining slaves, making visitors unintentional witnesses of a historical crime.

4. The entrance to Mixed Blessings, conceived by exhibit designer Sarah Buie, frame the exhibition’s centerpiece, a detailed reconstruction of a cliff swallow community, built into the side of a bluff.

5. Juxtaposition and also irony are king here, too, as a silver globe and slave shackles are placed near a model of a slave ship in the Truth and Metalwork section of the exhibition. The visitor is confronted by the oppression that created the wealth that bought the silver.

6. The carefully re-created cliff swallow colony in Mixed Blessings—populated with the skins from the handful of ‘net kills’ (swallows accidentally killed during the course of the research project the exhibition was based on)—displayed the high price cliff swallows pay for living together graphically and unsentimentally.

7. Mining the Museum used typical museum exhibit strategies—object juxtapositions, labels, selective lighting, slide projections, and sound effects—subversively. Thanks to plantation owner inventory book found in the Maryland Historical Society archives, it was possible to add to a label for a rare painting of workers in the fields the names of the depicted slaves—listed in the ledger along with other household property and livestock. Nearby was a water jug and wicker basket some of them might have carried.

8. Another cost of living in a large colony—there are cliff swallow ‘cities’ of more than 4,000 nests—is reproductive interference, which takes many forms. In this scene, a male forces copulation with a female in a neighboring nest to his own, increasing the chances that his genetic material will be passed on and that another male will bear the burden of nurturing some of his offspring.

'Truth Trophy and Pedestals,' Mining the Museum (1992-93) MdHS. End Note #11.

9. “The term ‘mining’ in the exhibition title,” writes Noralee Frankel, “refers to Wilson’s culling of the MHS collections as he created the exhibition. It also suggests the intellectual land mines that place the concept of subjective reality before the visitor through the entire show.” The combination of a punt gun, duck decoys, a doll, and posters offering rewards for runaway slaves exemplifies both meanings of ‘mining’ at work.

10. A voracious bull snake invades a nest to devour eggs, nestlings, and adult swallows. Nests around the colony’s perimeter are especially vulnerable to this kind of predation, against which the birds have no defense.

11. Fred Wilson has said, “I look at the relationship between what is on view and what is not on view.” For him, the busts missing from the pedestals and the Maryland Historical Society collections—Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman—speak volumes about the museum’s unconscious assumptions about the past.

Swallow Destroying Egg from Neighbor's Nest,' Mixed Blessings (`92),Yale Peabody. End Note #12.

12. Many adult swallows remove eggs from neighbors’ nests and replace them with eggs of their own, letting unsuspecting adoptive parents pay the price of feeding their offspring.

13. Fred Wilson has said that “For me, juxtaposition is king. Context is king.” The placement of the pikes used by John Brown’s party in their raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry and reward posters for runaway slaves, whom Brown sought to free, illustrates this principle at work.

14. The highest price cliff swallows pay for their colonial way of life is severe victimization by a particularly nasty and prolific ectoparasite, the bloodsucking Cimicid swallow bug. The only defense the adult swallows have is to abandon the nest; chicks too weak to fly are left behind. The nestling in the photo has fallen out of the nest and is unable to get back in; it will succumb to the swallow bugs or be picked off by a predator.

'Swallow Watching Neighbor Feed Nestling,' Mixed Blessing (`92) Yale Peabody. End Note #16

15. Donald Garfield wrote that the title Mining the Museum “speaks of the effect of Wilson’s approach…to enable disenfranchised communities to at last call a part of the museum ‘mine.’” Randi Korn reported that in the visitor responses collected by the Maryland Historical Society. “There were visitors who were moved to tears by some objects and the meanings that had been hidden from view until now…. African American visitors [found] comfort in the thought that others will now know what they have known for years…. Visitors reported a range of emotions and realizations: some were saddened, some were angry.” Wilson’s colleague Lisa Corrin cited two particular visitor comments: “Mining the Museum has the ability to promote racism and hate in young Blacks and was offensive to me,” wrote one visitor. “I found Mining the Museum ‘artsy’ and pretentious,” stated another. “A museum should answer questions not raise questions unrelated to the subject…. It snookered me”

16. Aggression and strife, parasitism and predation are unavoidable aspects of colonial life, but for cliff swallows living in large colonies improves the survival odds for their offspring. As in the photo, swallows learn the latest whereabouts of insect swarms from their neighbors. In large colonies foraging cliff swallows collect 65 percent of their body weight in insects every hour to feed their young; birds living in solitary nests or small colonies do less than half as well. The more food, the faster nestlings grow, meaning that they will be able to leave the nest before the swallow bugs kill them and they will be strong enough for their long flight to South America at the end of summer.

S

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

The 'Z'-Chair, a Zaha Hadid design, on view at PMA

On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of designers from Hadid Architects. The show reflects Hadid’s seamless work methods, as well as her technological breakthroughs in architecture and design. artes fine arts magazine

Hadid's Opera House, Guangzhou, China (2010)

Born in Bagdad, Iraq, Hadid is known worldwide for her visionary architecture. She is responsible for many breakthroughs in her field, and is the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She is the founder of London-based Zaha Hadid Architects, and has numerous projects completed around the world, most recently including MAXXI: National Museum of XXI Century in Rome (2009), Guangzhaou Opera House in China (2010), and Olympic Aquatics Centre in London (2011). She is now based in London and works internationally in the fields of urbanism, architecture and design.

Mesa Tables, Design by Zaha Hadid

The museum gallery housing the exhibition, in the Perelman building, is completely transformed. The installation greets the viewer with sleek, attention-grabbing furniture and functional objects, such as the Z-Chair, Vortexx Chandeliers and the Mesa Table. To the left, there is a rippling wall—a temporary structure built on site. This undulating form also serves as a shelving unit for Hadid-designed objects, including limited-edition footwear, jewelry and silverware. The silver lines painted on the floor echo the shadows made by the furniture, creating a seamless visual composition.

Lighting plays an important role in this exhibition. The metallic chairs and tables reflect the natural light casted from the window, evolving and morphing as they are viewed from different angle. The functional objects on the shelving unit, including Flatware, Crevasse Vases and other items seem to flash from the light cast through a small opening in the shelves. The Vortexx Chandeliers, continuously changing hues with the use of high-intensity, light emitting diodes LED, cast an ephemeral glow on the surrounding objects and walls.

Flatware, by Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid makes it a goal to integrate her designs to their environment. In this exhibition silver lines painted on the floor fuse the shadows to the objects, at times creating a 3-dimensional effect. The fluidity in her work stems from her creative process. According to curator Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Hadid works on her designs simultaneously, having several computer screens open at a time with various objects and architectural images, resulting the work that is interrelated and flowing. Design similarities can be seen throughout both her architectural and object designs.

Most objects in the exhibition are made from steel, aluminum, and polyurethane, apart from the sofa, which is upholstered with metallic fabric. Despite the hard materials, the objects are surprisingly organic. They walk the line between fine art and product design, and are often viewed as functional sculptures. Hadid sells her objects as both art and useable products.

Hadid's Z-Car I, a Hydrogen-powered, 3-wheel prototype

Some of the highlights of this exhibition are the mini-sculptural jewelry pieces—Celeste Necklace and Cuff and Glace Collection Jewelry—which are both made with Swarowski Crystals. Like most of the objects in the show, the unusual jewelry shapes elevate them beyond mere utility, to become works of art. Another unexpected design offering by Hadid, is the hydrogen-powered, three-wheel vehicle, Z-Car I prototype. It is presented outside the immediate gallery area, gracing the hallway of the Perelman building with its aerodynamically sleek, quirky presence. As if to leave no part of our lives unattended to, the exhibit also features futuristic Hadid footwear designs, produced in conjunction with clothing brand Lacoste.

Not only does this show offer an exclusive look into the future, with spectacular Hadid designs, the museum also honored the architect with a Design of Excellence Award on November 19, 2011. Collab, a volunteer committee specializing in design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be presenting this award to Hadid, with her multi-faceted contributions in the fields of design, architecture and urbanism. The architect used the award event as an opportunity to share her views on design with the audience.

By Ekaterina Popova, Contributing Writer

Visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art at: www.philamuseum.org

See more of Zaha Hadid’s design concepts at: www.zaha-hadid.com

Joseph Wheelwright, Pine Man (2006), 24' tall. Courtesy the artist & Alan Stone Gallery

A dreary October afternoon, the pallid sky hidden under a stained glass tunnel of roadside, scarlet burning bush, mottled sassafras, and a canopy of golden honey locust teardrops; mystery is steeped in the air like fruit-infused vodka. Sculptor, Joseph Wheelwright’s Tree Figures at the Katonah Museum of Art, in Katona, NY have a similar effect—dizzying, somber, jovial and mischievous—a concoction of haunting hallucination and sobering truth: that tree and man share the same breath. In the spirit of Dr. Frankenstein, Wheelwright ‘gives birth’ to his sculptures by carving anthropomorphic features into trees, stones, bones, and other found-objects, collected while walking through woods. He communes deeply with the essence of these forms until he hears a heartbeat, a perceived pulse that appears to then breathe fresh life into his art. artes fine arts magazine

J. Wheelwright, Pine Man, detail

Pheremones of crushed dried white pine needles and freshly sawn wood sap waft under my nose, as I approach the largest of Wheelwright’s tree figures on exhibit on the front lawn. A towering 27’ Christ-like figure, with arms out-stretched, appears to float on air. The crest-fallen head reveals a face with deep, sad eyes, a pronounced nose and chin, and lips that speak the language of anguish. Atop the head, a crown of thorns is sculpted from a dense root ball, whose very features seem to lash wildly in the autumn wind. The hips are concave, as though sagging under the strain of grief, and looking up into its face, I am overcome by a feeling of fear that the structure will stumble and fall. Encircling the tree figure, tension from tip-to-toes pulsates from every angle of the work.

Wheelwright was raised in the natural splendor of western Massachusetts’s Berkshire Hills, a remote area known to harbor countless secrets and legends of New England’s old-growth forests. He expressed a fear of trees as a child, often clinging to the lower trunk to escape being snatched up by the clawing grasp of its branches. After graduating from Yale University’s School of Fine Arts, Wheelwright moved to a commune in Vermont, using sticks and small stones as his medium—finally able to release himself from his childhood fears. Surrounded by endless stands of trees, Wheelwright embraced his presentiment, converting it into creative curiosity and began to identify individual characters and personality traits in the natural forms around him.

Smoke Jumper, detail (2007), Bronze cast from hornbeam and fir trees 16.5x7x6’

Expressive movement is what he looks for, when walking through the forest selecting specimens for his sculptures: the appearance of a bended knee, a twisted torso, or swaying arms. Once in the studio, he often turns the tree upside down, visualizing a newly- conceived anthropoid, where the intricate root system becomes the head, shoulder, armpits, and where, sometimes, fingers and the trunk can metamorphose into legs and body. Wheelwright is not a purist, sometimes transplanting disparate parts, like grafting the ‘head’ of a hornbeam tree onto the ‘body’ of a cherry tree. Instinctively, the artist knows whether a tree is male or female, engendering anatomically correct traits. Lifting the bark, peeling layers, and adding tissue, Wheelwright is intimately familiar with how to create the feminine form. Other figures are more androgynous, mythical, or centaur-like—each tilting to the side of eccentricity.

In the courtyard behind the museum, I sense that I am not alone. My eyes drift up from the ground as I meet the gaze of another 30-foot figure, camouflaged against a weeping Norway spruce. Suddenly transfixed, I sense a connection with this man-made object that is surprisingly empathetic. I am reminded of other creatures of science fiction-past, reclaimed from discarded and unwanted part and yet, assuming human emotions and drives. Here, for a few moments, I sense a desire to communicate on the part of this gargantuan creature, and I find myself listening, watching…and connecting.

Oracle (2008), Pine tree, 26x14x7’

Sublimating scientific observation into artistic expression—evidenced in the relationship between man and nature—is an age-old impulse. An important aspect of that desire to meld man and nature can be found in Wheelwright’s Tree Figures. His sculpture, exploring the biomorphic ‘evolution’ of man from trees, calls into question human superiority in the natural order of things, and promotes greater sensitivity for the fine genetic line that separates all living things. “There’s no question that we are descended from the same organism,” Wheelwright says. “Clearly they are our ancestors. Human hope and design was inspired by trees. The question is, when did we split apart?”

By Michelina Docimo, CSBA, Contributing Writer

“Joseph Wheelwright: Tree Figures,” through May, 2012 in the Marilyn M. Simpson Sculpture Garden and on the South Lawn at the Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay Street (Route 22), Katonah, NY. For more information: www.katonahmuseum.org or (914) 232-9555.

Joseph Wheelwright’s Website: http://www.joewheelwright.com/index.htm

Michelina Docimo is a certified sustainable building advisor and writer. Her focus is on sustainable or “green” architecture, landscape, design, and the representation of nature in art. Her writings have appeared in ARTESMagazine.com, Culture Catch, CT Green Scene, D’Art International, and other industry publications.

Visit her blog http://michelinadocimo.com/myartobiography