Elizabeth Turk

Elizabeth Turk got a MacArthur prize! In 2006 we saw her exhibition at Hirschl and Adler gallery of collars made of elaborately, impossibly carved white marble. We were amazed at her virtuosity. I wrote briefly about her in the August 2006 issue of Kansas City's Review magazine.

As a person with a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance sculpture, I first connected her to the 16th-century Milanese virtuoso artist Augustino Busti, called Il Bambaia, whose extraordinarily high relief and detailed sculptures amazed me many years ago. Many of his works were vandalized by having their tiny heads pulled off.

Of course, for virtuoso marble carving, Gianlorenzo Bernini is the first name that comes to mind, but Turk's work is far more adventurous than even his. Her collars are like lace, vines, skeletons, or DNA models, all of which inspire her. Two of the collars referred to 9/11, with plan and flower forms entwined around skeletal ones. I thought the combination of fragility and strength in the same sculpture had some of the tough delicacy of Petah Coyne's wax chandeliers.

A couple of years ago, I visited Hirschl and Adler to see another exhibition of Turk's carvings. These were ribbons; while they did not have all the complex associations of the collars, they were still amazingly carved. Marble is a hard but  fragile stone and it is difficult to believe it can be carved the way Turk does without breaking. She is an artist who makes beautiful objects, pushing the limits of a most traditional medium far beyond what we thought possible.

Why is contemporary art so challenging?

When I was thinking about what to say about Ann Hamilton, I heard a discussion on the radio by arts professionals trying to guide a general audience as to how they can appreciate contemporary art. The speakers confirmed that reading about art, looking at as much art as possible, and keeping an open mind, are helpful in appreciating what we see. They also recommended reading about the artists specifically to understand their intentions. It was when the professionals started talking about the difficulties many people have appreciating performance art that I started thinking about how the idea of art has expanded so dramatically in the last, say 50 years. And I don't think the other arts, performing or literary, have taken such diverse paths as have visual arts.

You can still go into a museum or gallery and expect to see paintings on the wall and sculptures on the floor, or wall. And there are prints and drawings and photographs. These aspects of visual art continue. as do public art installations outside the museum context. But, and Tom and I often disagree about this, artists can conceive projects which have no physical components, no objects, just an idea or an action. Many of them use found objects, but also found or created sounds, words, their own bodies, actions as art. To some extent I think some artists struggle to see how far removed their creations can be from the standard media of visual art. Artist do performances; actors do not display paintings on stage. Marina Abramovic sat in a chair at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and faced visitors who chose to sit opposite her. It's unlikely that this would happen in a theater and it would not have the same impact in the context of theater. Sophie Calle asked distinguished women to respond to her boyfriend's breakup email ("Take care of yourself") in the French Pavilion of the 2006 Venice Biennale. It might have been a book, but had to be an art installation (that kept the female audience, myself included, engrossed for hours while their male companions [mine too] waited outside).

Artists do video and film and also use video and film in installations (Nam Jun Paik for example) but videographers and film makers don't replace their works with objects. You still go to the theater and usually sit and watch a play, a movie, or a music performance. But going to a museum can also involve listening to musical sounds, as at the Ann Hamilton show, reading texts, seeing documentation about Tehching Tsieh, who spent a year living in a cage as a work of art, or seeing a preserved shark in a tank of formaldehyde (or its replacement). Writers may use the internet to communicate and they may write with computers rather than a quill pen, but words are still their tools. Artists also use words, as Ann Hamilton does in many parts of her Pulitzer installation, as On Kawara has with his date paintings or as Jenny Holzer does, often using LED displays. The opportunities for visual artists to expand their media and their conceptualization of what they do seem to be limitless, while those who work in the other arts seem primarily to have remained committed to their original discipline, media and basic materials.

That the possibilities are so open for visual artists is a wonderful, exciting thing to think about. But it also makes it quite difficult for anyone - including specialists - to evaluate or understand their work, to have the patience to give it adequate attention, to suspend disbelief long enough to give it a chance to reverberate with their experience and expectations, and to question intelligently whether what the artist is doing has any real worth beyond being different. It will take decades. In the meantime visual artists continue to explore an unprecedented variety of media and methods.

Ann Hamilton "Stylus" at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis

I still remember jokes that puzzled me in my youth and I only figured out some 10 or 20 years later. Similarly, sometimes it takes a while to grasp what is going on in an exhibition. So perhaps the Ann Hamilton exhibition we saw at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis in August will suddenly be revealed to me in due time. I’ve been fascinated by Ann Hamilton and what she says about her work, the depth, thoughtfulness, and philosophical approach she takes, as well as by the respect she has earned from the art world, evidenced by the Pulitzer’s choice of her for their first artist installation exhibition.

However, the only work I’ve seen by her, her installation at the 1999 Venice Biennale, did not elicit a good response from me. I remember being fascinated and delighted by pink powder floating down the walls and piling up at the edges of the floor of the American Pavilion. But when I - and my two companions - read the label, which explained that the point of the installation was to demonstrate how difficult it is for people to communicate with each other, all three of us walked out, not just puzzled, but infuriated. I don’t know about them, but I was angry that such a lovely abstract environment was loaded with such complicated non-visual content and that the content was totally inaccessible without the label, although having read the explanation, one still didn’t really “see” the meaning she intended to convey. There was more to it: I think a recording a man reading the Declaration of Independence that had been slowed down to sound like a low growl and Braille inscriptions on the walls.

We went to the Pulitzer with curiosity and with fairly open minds, despite this previous disappointment. The Pulitzer is an eccentric institution, open only two days a week (now expanded to include Thursday evenings). So it was not unusual that the attendant at the desk explained a bit about the show and asked us to sign in. When we signed the register, we heard a discordant possibly musical sound coming from far away.

A second attendant asked us to choose a record from a file of unlabeled records. We each took one and she played them while she explained the weekly newspaper-like concordance-related publications Hamilton is producing for the exhibition. Each week she gathers from English-language newspapers around the world phrases containing a word she has chosen from a statement of purpose (we never found the statement). Our week the word was “Be.” The phrases were listed with the chosen word in a column down the center of the page. For $2 we purchased the concordance from August 6 that used “Reveal, Say, Sing, Singing, Song Speak, Speaking, State, Suggest, Tell, Utter, Voice, and World,” much more interesting than “Be,” but nonsensical nonetheless. On the wall behind the record player and the concordance is a video of an arm waving back and forth.

In the big gallery were metal staircases with projectors on top, some of which revolved. They showed fuzzy, vague images mostly of a pencil point moving on paper, sometimes with accompanying scratchy sounds. You could also heard sounds coming from microphones under the air handling system vents that run along the floor of the building. Shelves occupied one very long wall, that square shelving you often see in museum shops because it holds both books and objects well. Maybe 300 shelves, each with two or more papier maché hands, all in shades of beige and taupe. The attendant suggests that you may touch or try on the hands. I tried moving them around; I couldn’t fit my hand into them. Following the shelves down the wall you come to a small gallery with a piano inside, which you are welcome to play.

Going downstairs, we watched another attendant playing with a gadget that had four little metal balls on a small platform. She was busily rotating the platform so the balls rolled around on it. A microphone caught the sound of the balls rolling and magnified and broadcast it. If the attendant touched the microphone one of the pianos would play a few notes. She encouraged us to play with this gadget, which she was only demonstrating. She explained also that there is a second piano in the downstairs gallery and the two pianos are somehow connected so that sometimes playing one will activate the other. People signing in activate them also, as did touching her microphone.

On the top floor is a large table covered with Mexican jumping beans and microphones to catch the sound when they jump. The attendant here explained that the jumping beans are refrigerated when the gallery is closed, and that there are two sets, so one is kept cool while the other is on view, in order to give them rest and delay hatching. She also explained that we could read the concordance into a microphone in that area that I imagine would broadcast through the museum, but we didn’t try it. She said the jumping beans are the only thing in the installation that visitors may not touch.

I had noticed loudspeakers outside the building that broadcast someone saying something, just one sentence. We were given the opportunity to record something for broadcast, but chose not to. As I said to the attendant, I’m really used to not touching works of art and generally prefer not to be part of an art installation, but rather to look at it from outside. Perhaps my reticence is what the exhibition is trying to counter.

So, thinking about the installation in Venice, I figure this exhibition has something to do with communication, which Director Matthias Waschek confirms in his statement: “....the project deals with the raw material of communication. Familiar forms of interaction are de-contextualized, then stitched back together into a new, poetic entity that resonates with our most basic experience.”

O.k., I can see that the attendants speak to us, the videos are visual and depict writing, there are sounds and some fragments of music, and these elements appear randomly, without meaning. I could appreciate that the installation is subtly interactive, but none of the things I was invited to touch or play actually seemed like fun. The attendants were very friendly and talking with them was the best part of the project for me. Is it about the pervasiveness of mindless activity in our society? The videos of writing don’t show anything written or drawn, the pianos don’t play music, the concordances are random, the paper maché hands don’t fit, jumping beans are a fascinating but pointless thing to watch.

The exhibition involves extensive collaborations with other individuals and organizations in St. Louis and it may be these associated performance programs that fill out and enrich the experience. I can imagine that richness from a distance, but am limited to the physical experience of the exhibition and its booklet for my own appreciation of the project.

Looking at the beautifully produced documentation for the project, and reading the poetry Hamilton provided for the catalogue, I can’t avoid feeling that this is important, profound, evocative, emotionally fulfilling stuff. But I remain untouched, befuddled, and disappointed at the visual and experiential emptiness of the installation. On the other hand, a month later I’m still chewing on it.

Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey

The Montclair Art Museum, like many in the U.S., specializes in American art. For many years I had read notes about its significant collection of American Indian art, and have wanted to see it for a long time. This weekend, Tom and I were in New York for a wedding and had some free time on Saturday and a car, so we drove to Montclair to see the museum. I always have some trepidation about visiting small museums because they often do not exhibit much of their best-known collections, and I was doubly concerned when the information desk person said admission was free because some of the galleries are closed.

But the museum was a fascinating surprise. Small, with only three galleries open and only a couple more closed, it really celebrates its collection of Native American works. We looked into one small closed gallery that contained a selection of Pueblo pottery, much of it contemporary. Flanking the entrance to the larger permanent collection gallery of American Indian works were two totem poles, one dating from the beginning of the 20th century and the other from the end. This juxtaposition of older work with contemporary work in similar style, format, or media, is a recurring trope in the Montclair installations. I found it instructive and compelling, giving one a chance to think about change and continuity and permitting me to focus my attention on two objects at a time. Immediately inside the American Indian Gallery was a pairing of shirts, one from the early 20th century, made of buckskin with fringes, horsehair tassles, beautifully geometric beadwork, and significant traces of paint. The other, similar in form, consisted of color photographs, plastic rings and strips, compact disks, computer chips and other manufactured media. I neglected to write down the artist's name and the website does not give a caption for the images of it. And all I can do is link to the Native American collections at the website, where images of the front and back of the shirt come up eventually.

The museum labels say the American Indian collection initially had some 2000 objects (there are 4000 now); fewer than 200 were on view, but they represent an obviously impressive collection. There were three groupings: ceremonial objects, everyday objects, and collectible objects. Each of them is a superb example of its genre and each is adequately, if briefly described in the labels. I was especially taken by some of the northwest headdresses and contemporary masks, as well as the feathered Pomo baskets, among the traditional works. Among the collector’s items is a beautiful small jar by the great Hopi potter Nampeyo with an unusual design. Marcus Amerman’s Indian in a Bottle evoked stereotypes of Indians and was a surprise as a glass sculpture by an artist primary known for his beadwork. Three pots, one by each of the Folwell family, are excellent examples of their innovative designs, and the Diego Romero bowl depicts a grisly moment in the history of the Pueblo relationship to the Spanish invaders rather than his more humorous contemporary subjects.

The surprise of the museum, and its distinguishing and distinguished characteristic, however, is the complete integration of American Indian, African American, and Anglo American painting and sculpture in the exhibitions of the permanent collection and the museum handbook, Selected Works. On view was an exhibition of landscapes, Engaging with Nature: American and Native American Artists (A.D. 1200-2004)(May 16, 2010 - September 25, 2011) and we could glimpse the installation in progress of a show of portraiture. In both exhibitions my sense was of nearly equal percentages of Native American and Anglo-American works. Selected Works makes the diversity of the collections even more evident, with strong images of important works by Latino, African-American, Native American, and Anglo artists constantly interspersed in the section on American painting and sculpture and then a separate American Indian section for work in other media.

When we got back to Kansas I found a review of the show in the online New Jersey section of the New York Times. The writer rightly criticized the landscape exhibition for its repeated use of words like “spiritual” and “sublime,” and suggested that it needed a more specific and nuanced discussion of the context for the works, addressing the diverse points of view of the American Indian and non-Indian makers. On the other hand, I was most impressed that the exhibition provided some quotations from the artists about their work and addressed each work without forcing it into a stereotypical slot of interpretation. Indeed, the spectacular Shasta doctor’s basket may not exactly belong in a landscape exhibition, but it is an extraordinary object and I’m so glad I got to see it. Major paintings by Emmi Whitehorse, Kay Walkingstick, Dan Namingha and Tony Abeyta held their own with those of Hans Hofmann, early Mark Rothko and Oscar Bluemner. I read and enjoyed the labels explaining the Louise Lawler and Hiroshi Sugimoto photographs. We loved the Charles Simonds imagined tiny ancient American ruin, suspended horizontally in a vitrine and were surprised to find a drawing by our hometown Baldwin City, Kansas artist Stephen Graber displayed next to the Louise Lawler photograph. If you want to see the label texts, object list, and a few images, they are available online.

In a side gallery I loved the juxtaposition of Dan Namingha and Allan Houser sculptures with The Whirlwind by J. Scott Hartley and Harriet Frismuth’s Joy of the Waters, as I love the pairing of Allan Houser with Melvin Edwards in Selected Works. And Philip Pearlstein opposite Carrie Mae Weems.

Critics, artists, and art historians often complain about the lack of diversity in art museum collections. Many museums have exhibitions or set aside areas for works by subgroups of the American population. I cannot think of another general art museum in this country that is displaying such full diversity and integration of works of art in meaningful, engaging, and even thought-provoking ways.

Finally, the museum has a small gallery with a fine selection of paintings by George Inness (1825-1894), who lived his last eleven years in Montclair (we saw a school named after him while searching for the museum). Inness is an artist I’ve never warmed to, but Montclair’s simple explanation of his association with Barbizon painting and then with the theories of Swedenborgianism that natural forms are manifestations of the divine (Selected Works, p. 39), as well as the range and beauty of their Inness paintings, has opened my mind to his possibilities.

Marc Leuthold ceramics at the Daum Museum

The Daum Museum has been at State Fair Community College in Sedalia, Missouri, about an hour from Kansas City, since 2001. Despite its reputation for excellent collections and exhibitions, I could never remember to make a visit until we were on our way to St. Louis this past weekend. (Because of photography restrictions, I can only show the outside of the museum, but have made links to many of the works we saw.)

There we saw parts of the permanent collection and the remains of a lovely and engaging exhibition of ceramic sculpture by Marc Leuthold. The exhibition was scheduled to close in April but most of it was still on view in August. Of the large installation that had been the centerpiece of the exhibition we saw only the remains: a kind of mobile of white porcelain irregular discs installed in a large light-filled gallery with Coretta Scott King's recollection of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech stencilled in a single line of text completely around the wall. Photos of the complete installation are still at the Daum website accessed through Leuthold's website. I had never heard of this artist and find from the Daum website that the museum director was a student at the State University of New York at Potsdam, where Leuthold is an assistant professor. I have a soft spot for that place because some 33 years ago I declined to be an assistant professor of art history there, choosing to work at the Yale University Art Gallery instead. But I digress.

I was very much drawn to Leuthold's sculptures, particularly to the whole, broken, and partial disks that seemed to be made of thin leaves of porcelain but certainly were sliced rather than layered. The justapositions of the slices with the smooth centers or edges, of bulk vs. delicacy, and the polished or matte finishes of whole discs and partial discs, are both pleasing and calming. I want one. They encourage abstract contemplation at the same time their sensuality invites caressing. Other, smaller sculptures resembled flowers or appeared to consist of the slices piled together; these partially glazed and pale colored tangles also engaged  me.

The museum itself is a contemporary building with very nicely proportioned galleries with varied ceiling heights on three levels. Natural light fills the stairwell and filters into some of the galleries, in a good way. The purple Chihuly chandelier in the stairwell seems de rigeur for this part of the country (think they should trade it for the orange one at K-State). The permanent collection on display downstairs included most of the signature color field artists of the 1970s: Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, Friedel Dzubas, Gene Davis, Dan Christensen, Robert Goodnough, Walter Darby Bannard, and a gorgeously turquoise Helen Frankenthaler, Trespass, 1974. Additionally there were prints by Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Chuck Close, and Sol Lewitt. The museum collection via Dr. Daum  also focuses on ceramic sculpture and the permanent display included a Michael Lucero and a large Ron Nagle.

Works on view on the top floor included major artists, several of them from this area, with ceramic works by Jim Leedy, Ken Ferguson and Don Reitz and two dimensional works either made or donated by Kansas City area people. In a gallery adjacent to the museum a small exhibition of 8 works created with the use of computers also included some interesting regional artists - Jim Sajovic and Larry Thomas to name two - and had very clear and informative labels.

Outside the museum Tom and I were intrigued by a large ceramic sculpture by John Balistreri, several segments fired in and reflecting the shape and use of the anagama kiln, the huge wood-fired kilns used in some traditional Japanese and Korean ceramic firing.  Not only do the segments show the shape of the kiln and the colors of anagama-fired clay, but they also contained fragments of cups and bowls that might have been fired in such a large kiln.  We took several pictures.

Auschwitz-Birkenau

An underlying theme of our Europe trip became World War II and the Holocaust, independent of any plan we may have had. From the ballet in Prague of "Faust" set in Nazi Germany, to the rebuilt Dresden, to the depopulated ghettos in Prague and Krakow we kept being reminded of what had been done and suffered in this part of Europe. Of course the culmination was our day in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oswiecim.

I decided that there's nothing I can add to the literature on Auschwitz based on a day there. So I thought I'd just post a few pictures and mention a couple of logistical aspects. Much helpful materials is on the Auschwitz website. Although visits to Auschwitz are free and it has been possible to make a self-guided tour, it is now required that visitors in the summer take the guided tours, a way of managing the crowds. We took an English-language tour. It was our first experience with the tour in where the guide speaks normally and you hear it on headphones. This was most effective, as you could hear her no matter where you were, although I got a bit confused when I was three rooms back. Because of the guided tour, we did not get to read many of the labels or enter all the buildings, which I only discovered on the website back home.

You don't go to Auschwitz and not Birkenau; they are different, and Birkenau is much bigger..

Auschwitz:

Work Makes you Free. The sign had been recently stolen and badly damaged, so this is a copy.

No man's land.

Sign outside a barrack.

We were surprised at how solid the buildings are.

We were not permitted to photograph inside buildings at Auschwitz. We saw the piles of hair, shoes, brushes, eyeglasses, prosthetics, suitcases, the insignia, prison garb, meals, torture cells. Photographs of prisoners on the interior building walls gave their name, date of entry and date of death. Generally prisoners survived about 3 months there. In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge similarly photographed the prisoners in their death camps in Cambodia.

Birkenau:

Barracks - each bunk layer was intended to hold 6 people

Train tracks. You can barely see the camp entrance at the end of the tracks and the single boxcar on the siding where people were divided into slave laborers and those to be gassed.

Ruined barracks. Most of were torn down a long time ago, but the chimneys remain.

Entrance to the "dressing room" for the gas chamber/crematorium.

Ruin of gas chamber/crematorium'

Plan showing efficiency of gas chamber/crematorium

View of Birkenau from entrance watch tower.

View from watch tower of brick buidings.

Hotels Europe, Prague - Hotel Paris

Hotel Paris ($130 including breakfast, free wifi in lobby and bar)

For our last two nights in Prague, we splurged and booked a room in the Hotel Paris. The Paris is an old art nouveau hotel, built in 1905 or so and it retains many of its old fixtures and decorations on the exterior and interior. The rooms have dark wood trim, broadstriped padded fabric wall coverings and a settee with art nouveau patterned green upholstery. As in all the other hotels, the bathroom fixtures are new and functioned well; here they are faux marble and the sink is scalloped.

The lovely sunlit Sarah Bernhardt dining room has historic lamps, mosaic walls, some mother of pearl inlay in the wood paneling. The buffet breakfast is extraordinary among a lot of excellent morning meals – three areas of different types of food, one of meat (including herring rollups, pate, and ham), cheese, cold fruits and vegetables, yogurt and an omelet bar; one of cereals and pastries; and a third with fried and scrambled eggs,, bacon, three kinds of sausage, grilled vegetables, mushrooms, tomatoes, and fried potatoes.

Across the street is the municipal building with interiors designed by the Prague artist Alphonse Mucha, so the entire neighborhood is art nouveau. Looking out the window at breakfast I spotted the shop across the street where we purchased some lovely fabric for chair covers.

Veranakova and Bem

Ivan Stepan, Blue Dream

This last day in Prague was dedicated for the most part to making decisions about our glass purchases. We decided on three objects. The first two were among the first we had seen on our first day in Prague; a sculpture by the partners Ivana Vranakova and Stanislav Bem both of whom studied and have degrees from the glass school at Novy Bor (above), and another glass work by Ivan Stepan (below). These were at the Galerie Brehova, which we remembered from our previous visit to Prague. Many of the glass galleries we thought we would visit have closed since our last time in Prague..

 

Eva Vlckova, Blue Shape

On that first day we had also been very taken by an exhibition at the Gallery Havelka of recent work by the artist Eva Vlckova. I particularly liked a work titled Blue Shape, and Tom and I returned to see it and other works by her several times. It was only after we returned to Kansas that he figured out that we can repair our broken mower instead of getting a new one and therefore we could add Blue Shape to our collection. We did not meet the artist, but received a photo of her holding our sculpture just before it was shipped.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: We celebrated by having dinner at the lovely, and expensive Mlynec Restaurant, by the Charles Bridge. On the way back to the hotel I spied a blue glass donkey in a tchotchke shop. We had to go to the cash machine for an additional $10, but we've added it to my slowly growing collection. This relieved Tom of hearing any further rants on this trip about how all the shops have glass elephants, but never glass donkeys, and from being further concerned about our decision against buying the miniature antique silver donkey encrusted with rubies we had noticed earlier in the trip.