Art Institute of Chicago, Rachel Harrison, label

We were in Chicago last weekend and spent a day at the Art Institute. Wandering through the permanent collection, we came upon this sculpture by Rachel Harrison.

As always, wondering what it was about, we looked at the label. I was interested to learn that the work is one from a series of works named after prominent men; this one is titled Pablo Escobar, and the label reminded me that he was a famous drug lord.

As I wandered away, Tom started snorting at the label, and, of course, I read it again. As Tom said, the sculpture hardly seems a "biting critique of cultural representations and stereotypes," although its bright colors and souvenir ceramic ristra (a string of peppers) certainly are stereotypical Latin American tropes. Perhaps the label writer was suggesting that the sculpture calls attention to the stereotype of Latin Americans as liking bright colors and cheap souvenirs, and being drug dealers? It has taken me 5 days to come up with that explanation and that was only possible because I photographed the object and the label in response to Tom's disdain. Given the small number of words allowed for museum labels in some institutions, I wondered why the writer did not give a clearer explanation of Harrison's purpose rather than refer to the other  people depicted in the series. On one side of the sculpture is a shelf, where one would imagine the artist had placed something, but it is empty. The sculpture of Al Gore is a bright colored mass with a thermostat attached and that of Tiger Woods is a bright colored blob with a can of golf balls on a decorated pedestal. So those seem more playful than biting and not particularly stereotypical.
 I was amused that the ristra still has its sales tag. Oh, and by the way, the label says the figure "holds a bouquet," but I think the ristra is just attached to him. No hands.

Of course, having copied the label, I'm now wondering about another sentence: "Stubbornly physical yet highly conceptual, Harrison's sculptures evoke ancient memorials and reflect the influence of today's celebrity-centric culture." It's a nice-sounding sentence, but I wonder why her works are stubbornly physical, as opposed to just plain physical and why the writer seems to think that physical things aren't usually also conceptual. I don't see the evocation of ancient memorials beyond that naming a work after a person who is dead makes it a memorial, and I have no idea how  they "reflect the influence of today's celebrity-centric culture" except that the work is named after a person who is well-known (but not well-known enough that I could remember who he was).

I was struck by the size of the sculpture and like the way it evokes a human being without being very specific: the top suggests a tilted head, there are shoulders, a narrowed part that could be a waist, the shelf suggests buttocks, and the lower part could be slightly bent legs. The painted colors copy the colors of the peppers in the ceramic ristra, an object that can be found in shops carrying Mexican tchotchkes.

Here's the label:

Pirandello on Things

In preparation for a trip to Sicily later this spring, I’ve been reading some books about the island and by Sicilians. One of them is The Late Mattia Pascal¸ an early novel by Luigi Pirandello. Today I came upon the following passage, which very clearly explains why it is so difficult to throw things away. I’m surprised that he thought and wrote this in 1904. Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

“Every object is transformed within us according to the images it evokes, the sensations that cluster around it. To be sure, an object may please us for itself alone, for the pleasant feelings that a harmonious sight inspires in us, but far more often the pleasure that an object affords us does not derive from the object in itself. Our fantasy embellishes it, surrounding it, making it resplendent with images dear to us. Then we no longer see it for what it is, but animated by the images it arouses in us or by the things we associate with it. In short, what we love about the object is what we put in it of ourselves, the harmony established between it and us, the soul that it acquires only through us, a soul composed of our memories.”

(Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, translated by William Weaver, 1964. Hygiene, Colorado: Eridanos Press, Inc. 1987, p. 100).

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, Whitney Museum

I very much wanted to see the Jimmie Durham retrospective at the Whitney Museum. I’ve known about Jimmie Durham as an American Indian artist for at least 30 years and his relocation to Europe in the 1980s seemed a loss for the art world of the United States. No one I know has heard of him. I’ve seen his work occasionally in European museums, but it was a surprise that major museums in the United States would mount a show. There has been some controversy about his self-identification as American Indian, and that aspect of his work was not emphasized in the exhibition until near the end. That made sense because his work address many subjects and aspects of his identity.

Although I was eager to see the exhibition, I expected to be disappointed because I know Durham makes extensive use of found objects and thought I would see a lot of abstract constructions of detritus. In fact, I found the exhibition riveting, fascinating, touching, amusing, and both personal and universal. The first room captured me with a video of Durham hacking away at a chunk of obsidian, making an abstract sculpture from this very hard stone, used to make amazingly sharp tools in ancient Mexico.

Slash and Burn, 2007
Collection of Mima and Cesar Reyes

Slash and Burn, detail

The first object I looked at was this one, titled Slash and Burn, 2007, and the label provides very helpful context for the work: “While in residence at the Atelier Calder in the Loire Valley, Durham found a fallen beech tree in Strasbourg, France. Inspired by its physical traces of history – it had declarations of love carved into the bark as well as seven bullets from World War II embedded in it – Durham cut the tree into several planks, which he incorporated into a series of sculptures including this work. Fascinated by the patterns and holes created by insects and fungus growth, he chose to accentuate these natural phenomena by painting them with watercolor. As he has done in a number of other works throughout his career, here Durham includes text that directly addresses the viewer and describes his process of embellishing the beech tree.” The label, the text on the work, and Durham’s additions to the plank of wood all contribute to the depth of both personal (both his own and others), natural, and national history the slab evokes. It was difficult to move away from this very simple object.

Carnivalesque Shark in Venice, 2015, glass, goat leather, piranha teeth, papier-mache and acrylic paint
Collection of Eleanor Heyman Propp

Because we love Venice and collect glass, the second object, Carnivalesque Shark in Venice, 2015 also caught my attention, a glass shark with a painted carnival mask, which was simply amusing. 

The Dangers of Petrification, detail, 1998-2007

 Many of the works are gatherings of found objects with inscriptions that suggest political issues, artistic media, or Durham’s personal issues, often all at once, so that they have both broad and specific context. Sometimes the sculpture or panel composing several found objects was uninteresting until one read Durham’s descriptions of the items. For example, I found  The Dangers of Petrification, 1998-2007, two vitrines of rocks, labeled as petrified states of various unlikely items particularly amusing. The objects played with our assumptions about what things look like, as well as the idea of scientific collecting and categorizing. The rocks seemed possible as petrified everyday foods, but it took a particular kind of vision and imagination on the part of the artist to see them as petrified German black bread, chocolate cake, cheese, or bacon.

Malinche
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Ghent, Belgium

 Malinche, detail

In another gallery was a composite portrait labeled as La Malinche, the woman Cortez took up with in Mexico, considered the ancestor of mixed race Mexicans, mestizos. First planning it as an image of Pocahontas, Durham revised it and added figure representing Cortez. The face of La Malinche is remarkably expressive, considering the simple materials and abstracted style used to create it. A detail of it illustrates Holland Cotter's positive NY Times review of the exhibition, which also includes illustrations of many more works in the exhibition.

Wahya, 1984, detail. Bear Skull and more
Coll. of Luis H. Francia and Midori Yamamura

Wahya, 1984 detail of other side

Then there are the totem-like constructions employing animal skulls and various found objects. Looking at my photographs I was stunned by how completely different they are from each side, as well as how powerfully expressive they are.

I Will Try to Explain, 1970-2012
Private Collection, courtesy of kurimanzutto, Mexico City

 In several of the works, Durham’s inscriptions make them almost literary and certainly biographical, always in an unprepossessing mode. I Will Try to Explain, 2007-2012, a rather simple collage, caught me with the sentence involving the cat skin, but carried through with mention of friends, the struggle to make good art, and the history of the farmer, the cat, the object itself, and the artist. It’s almost like poetry.

Untitled, 1982, baby buffalo skull, beads, goat leather, hawk feather, shells, acrylic paint
Collection Joe Overstreet and Corrine Jennings

 For many of the works the accompanying texts and the context provided by the labels add multiple dimensions to the already sculptural forms. One example is the single skull, remnant of a 1982 installation of  elaborated animal skulls, Manhattan Festival of the Dead, with texts urging the gallery visitor to purchase them for $5 each because the work of dead artists goes up in value and the artist is already approaching the life expectancy of an American Indian, and dedicating the works to the members of the American Indian Movement who were killed after the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee as well as to everyone in New York “killed by subways, .38 slugs, needles or desparate [sic] acts, without any proper ceremonies to help their passage and our passage.”

There is a particularly amusing self-portrait with identifying inscriptions, , 

from Six authentic things, 1989,  Real Obsidian (Private Collection)

Une etude des etoils, 1995
Collection of Herve Lebrun

and A Study of Stars, 1995. The little inscription above says "The Cherokee stars have seven points" in French. I particularly liked the computer key and the starleaf gum leaf.

At this point I realized that I had gone through the exhibition backwards.

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January 2018 in New York, Wiener Werkstätte and Michelangelo

In five days in New York we visited eight museums, twenty-four exhibitions, four plays and the Santiago Calatrava transit hub at the World Trade Center.. We had lovely meals at the Pergola French Restaurant, The Blue Fin, and Sardi’s in the Theater District, Fig and Olive near the Whitney, and the restaurants at the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Neue Galerie, not to mention the friends who provided wonderful dinners for us. We did not spend any time in the permanent collections of any of the museums, due to lack of time, energy, and any compulsion to look again at art we have seen many times before. We expect there will be time for that later.

With so many exhibitions, I can hardly have delved deeply into any of them, but I did have responses to them all. Four were the keystones of the trip. They were Wiener Werkstätte 1903 to 1932: The Luxury of Beauty at the Neue Galerie, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer at the Metropolitan, Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World at the Whitney, and Josef Albers in Mexico at the Guggenheim. I love the designs of the Vienna Workshops, especially Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser. A vitrine of brooches is spectacular, as well as the room full of earlier mostly silver objects. Although some of the objects designed by Dagobert Peche are lovely, I thought he weakened the coherent image of the movement by adding more floral components and making the objects larger and more colorful. As the workshop struggled to stay afloat by designing for manufacture rather than individual artisanship, the objects became more colorful and the designs seem looser. No photographs are allowed, so I can only link to the Neue Galerie website for images. A review in the New York Review of Books provides a few more images and discussion of the economic and architectural aspects of the works.

Not surprisingly on a Saturday, the Metropolitan was packed and it was almost impossible to see the Michelangelo drawings, definitely impossible to have a leisurely viewing. It made me wish the Met would charge full price for exhibitions, with pay-as-you-wish for general admission. The narrative of the exhibition is coherent and brings up a range of aspects of Michelangelo’s practice, for example drawings for and by students, collaborative works with Sebastiano del Piombo (the subject of a major exhibition at the London National Gallery last year, also with facsimiles used as educational materials), finished drawings for and of the people Michelangelo loved, drawings for paintings by Marcello Venusti, and portraits of the artist. Among the sculptures on view I was particularly taken by the small bronze by Michelangelo’s teacher Bertoldo di Giovanni, of Apollo playing his violin and turning in space, figura serpentinata before it was a thing. I don’t remember seeing drawings showing student copies of Michelangelo examples before and found those enlightening both for the objects themselves and for the sense they provided of the master in teaching mode. The exhibition suggested the degree to which Michelangelo collaborated with other artists, to some degree revising the idea of him as an isolated genius.

The facsimile of the Sistine Ceiling, one-quarter size, attracted considerable attention. I think more people photographed that than the drawings Michelangelo made for it. It was supposed to be helpful in locating the figures for which the drawings were made, but the small photographs included in the labels were probably easier to connect to the drawings. I suppose if you've never seen the actual ceiling, the facsimile is pretty impressive. The labels were helpful and clearer than most of those at the Met, relatively free of jargon, at least for me, but studded with adjectives – “bold, striking, ravishing, vigorous, impressive, forceful, remarkable, finely rendered, powerful, beautifully elaborated, elegant, active” for Michelangelo and “awkward, less subtle, wooly anatomy” for not-Michelangelo. I tend to argue with adjectives in labels and they distract me from experiencing the works of art on my own. I believe that people can figure out if an object is vigorous or ravishing or beautiful without being told.

While this was a most impressive gathering of a great number of Michelangelo works, most of them terrific examples of his drawing style, I wondered still about his working process. Did he produce only this small number of drawings for the Sistine Ceiling or the Medici Tombs? Of course not, and it would have been fascinating to see more examples of how Michelangelo’s conception of figures evolved in the process of designing these monuments, and others. This is not to disparage the exhibition, which must have required near superhuman diplomacy and extraordinary funds to get the important loans on view. It’s the kind of thing that only monumental museums like the Met can mount.

A comparison between Michelangelo’s unfinished bust of Brutus (1539-40) and a finished bust of Julius Caesar (1512-14) by Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci calls the Ferrucci “delicately ornate,” setting up a contrast with the far more muscular, bulked up unfinished face of Brutus. Caesar is approximately life-size, while Brutus is about double life size and on a much higher pedestal, accentuating the curatorial position that the Ferrucci is an inferior work. I found the Ferrucci extremely touching in its expression of thoughtful honesty, and the figure seemed aristocratic as opposed to the rougher aspect of the Brutus. As the label observes, Ferrucci’s mastery of marble carving served him, and Michelangelo, well when he was “head of the workshop in San Lorenzo in 1524.” The sculpture of Julius Caesar is a pretty wonderful object, beautifully executed and not all that much more “delicately ornate” than Michelangelo works closer to it in date, such as the St. Peter’s Pietá and the Bruges Madonna.  

Michelangelo, Brutus, 1539-40, detail (Florence, Bargello)

Michelangelo, Brutus, 1539-40, detail (Florence, Bargello)

Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci, Julius Caesar, 1512-14 (New York, Metropolitan Museum)

Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci, Julius Caesar, 1512-14, detail (New York, Metropolitan Museum)