Monthly Archives: May 2010

Looking for art to love, MoMA: A Tale of Two Egos

It’s weird, I wanted to write about a moment of inspiration and instigation I felt in front of one of William Kentridge’s films but for the moment Marina has crowded him out. It’s rare that a woman’s ego trumps a man’s, particularly in the context of one-person retrospectives in a major museum. My title therefore was first intended to highlight the battle for attention between two major artists. But, as this blurred picture suggests, that battle has been won.

Marina and William

But Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present is itself a tale of two egos: downstairs, that of the individual living woman whose body you can witness and potentially engage with at some level, and, upstairs, the projected ego of the woman who has hijacked curatorial common sense, whose many incarnations are screaming at you in an unpardonably cacophonous, unedited installation, who has created a kind of Disneyworld of the Spanish Inquisition through her use of re-enactors in stressful situations while rewriting the history of performance art so that she exists sui generis, without any historical context.

I plan to stay downstairs with the living woman but the wall of noise that hit me at the door of the first room in the upstairs show, the trembling naked re-enactors, and the lack of historical contextualization in the wall text will stay with me as well. I will continue to wonder why the museum has not provided visitors with any information about international performance artworks that would seem to be of immediate relevance to this work, from contemporary women performance artists such as Gina Pane and Valie Export, and Action artists such as Herman Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. The tableaux vivant re-enactment of Nude with Skeleton (2002-2005) is for me haunted by Frida Kahlo’s The Dream (or the Bed) (1940). Women artists, nudity, and pain are recurring thematics of feminist art as well as personal obsessions of individual performers. It would be useful to offer that context even if Marina denies it.

Frida Kahlo, The Dream or The Bed, 1940

Even before you get up to the level of the spectacle taking place in the square arena marked by a line of the floor, guards, warning signs, and four stands of film lights, the bright white light from the atrium is already beautiful and enticing seen from the lobby below:

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, from the lobby MoMA May 2010

The first time I went to see the show, April 29, there was still a table installed between Abramovic and those sitting opposite her. I was with Susan Bee. We have seen many exhibitions together over many years and I always value her insights. We circled the square, surveying Marina from all sides — oops, I’ve lapsed into something that is against the rules of scholarly writing: you do not refer to artists by their first name, you do not talk about what “Pablo” was doing in Guernica, but I’ve noticed that a lot of women artists and art historians, whether they know — Marina — personally or not, are referring to her by her first name, sort as if it was her only name, like Cher or Madonna.

I found some of the visuals distracting, especially Marina’s red ecclesiastical garment, which one friend has compared to one of those snuggies, the blankets with sleeves advertised on TV. Many women viewers are concerned about how Marina pees: one artist is absolutely persuaded that the (I’m told it’s a Prada) dress is designed like an astronaut’ s suit with special receptacle panels and some catherization going on in there, another is as certain that she pees into the chair (if you visualize this in further detail it would mean there’s a big hole cut out of the back of her dress, which somehow I doubt).

Nevertheless as we circled the scene with interest, Susan’s comment, after a short while, that  “it’s sort of dignified in a way” echoed my own thoughts: perhaps we had come with a bit of snarky attitude about the hype surrounding the show and were surprised at our response once we were standing there (we did not chose to sit and in any case would never have made the effort to get there early enough or pulled enough strings to score a privileged spot at the head of the list to face Marina).

There is something hypnotically appealing about the whole scene, the lights, the square, the faces of both participants,  the strange shift between proximity to and distance from the two seated figures — it may be an optical illusion but you definitely feel closer to the figures and see the details of their faces and skin in better focus from the South side of the square even though the chairs appear to be centered. The hypnotic atmosphere must also emanate from the artist who is presumably present, intent on each viewer — that is after all the premise of the work —  yet undoubtedly self-hypnotized.

I’m not sure she is responding to the viewers any more intimately than Queen Elizabeth on a receiving line — if anything, the Queen may feel more duty bound to work a display of connection. Yet Marina’s face has a melting blankness which is quite fascinating and there must inevitably be a mirroring that takes place when two beings face each other for any length of time in silence.

This week the scene was visually reduced: the ecclesiastical garment is white  and the table is gone, which exposed both participants to each other and the audience. Since photography is forbidden despite (or because of) the fact that the whole thing is a photo-shoot set, I did a quick sketch of the scene:

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, seen from the North side of the atrium MoMA May 6, 2010

I’m amused that the artist’s effort to control documentation of her work forced me to turn to that old representational technology, drawing. And through the act of drawing, I experienced a strange apprehension of the scene, a perception that I might not have had if I had just held my camera up and waved it in the general direction of the subject. As I drew, I felt that I recognized a familiar form, something about the white dress, the slumping body, the prominent nose:

Jacques-Louis David, sketch of Marie Antoinette on the way to the Guillotine, October 16, 1793

I was not sure of the orientation of Marie-Antoinette’s face in the David drawing until I got home, but meanwhile I walked around the room to draw the scene from the other side.

Mira Schor, sketch of Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, from the South of the Atrium, MOMA, May 6, 2010

I draw no meaning from this coincidental resemblance between an exhausted looking Marina and a doomed Marie-Antoinette although there is certainly a generous dose of violent martyrdom on view in the work exhibited upstairs! If, despite the self-hagiographic-monarchical-ecclesiastical set-up of The Artist is Present, there is “something dignified” about Marina’s effort not to fall asleep in her chair and keel over, and something eerily pleasant in wandering around a light flooded public square, I don’t feel there is anything either dignified or interestingly desublimated about the spectacle of a woman pinned high on a spotlit wall, balanced on a bicycle seat, her arms held up in a pose of crucifixion, trembling with pain.

….

Meanwhile in the back room … see my next post about Kentridge and creativity.

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Looking for art to love, day two: uptown

Uptown, at the Met, April 22

I arrived at the Met late in the afternoon, having stopped first at Acquavella Gallery to see Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection. I feel like I knew the Sculls personally because I show Emile de Antonio’s 1973 great documentary film Painters Painting whenever I teach about the New York School, which means often. The Scull’s appearance is a highlight of a film full of highlights: I love the scene where Ethel, with a vivacious enthusiasm that seems at once genuinely innocent and rapaciously disingenuous, describes Andy Warhol, armed with bags of coins, creating her portrait by taking her to Times Square to have her picture taken in photobooths in a tacky arcade. So it is great to see the painting in the show:

Andy Warhol, detail, "Ethel Scull 36 Times," 1963, acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 100"x144"

I also feel like I know the Sculls because of Jack Tworkov’s description of them in a diary entry + note scribbled on the back of an American Airlines ticket envelope, returning from a trip to Buffalo for the opening of a new wing at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery:

Friday, January 19, 1962

Took plane with Leo for Buffalo. Sat with Sculls. New People, like cheap bright aluminum pots. For whom is “Avant-Garde” art intended, for them obviously. They never say art without the prefix Avant-Garde.

*Vulgar people—I don’t mean not nice people. They can even be pleasant—nevertheless they can be embarrassing. They are unsure still of their accent, their reading matter, their pleasures, their vacation places. They use all these things for self-improvement which is itself vulgar and I speak as one who has suffered all the self-improvement I can stand. They [are] embarrassed with their own status, eager to acquire through culture what has been denied to them because of family background, race, religion or the unaccustomed uses of recently acquired wealth. Since they are fundamentally embarrassed people they are essentially unaware and make little use of their fundamental strength—what is peculiarly their own (as the elite knows so well how to do) and make a great show of borrowing clothing of what is after all mere social disguises. These people are really new people as new as an aluminum pot. It is for them essentially that avant-art is made. They are the mass market for what chic initiates.

(The Extreme of the Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 130)

All the more amusing then that the show is installed in such elegant upper East side mansion style rooms with ornate moldings, parquet floors, French windows, and gilt-framed mirrors. Nouveau Riche meets Edith Wharton New York. Two excellent early Rosenquist paintings were a nice surprise, both very restrained in color, both working from the photographic but not yet based on commodity or military spectacle: the flat color and use of disappearance and deletion within the appropriated photographic image in Untitled (Blue Sky), 1962, reminded me of much more recent works by John Baldessari . Another surprise: Jasper Johns did paint some bad paintings back in the day! Johns’ Double Flag from 1962 is in my opinion a rare stinker from that period, I’m not sure whether this is because of the particularly pedestrian use of realistic color in this work or the rather slack paint surface quality (the gallery web site perhaps wisely does not include an image of this work).

James Rosenquist, "Untitled (Blue Sky)," oil on canvas, 84"x72," 1962

At the Met, with only forty-five minutes before closing time, I decided to just look at the The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry. An amazing show which required more time than I could give it since each miniature painting necessitates careful examination with one of the magnifying glasses supplied by the museum in order to fully experience its monumentality, but the surprise for me were a group of astounding and curious sculptures I encountered unexpectedly in passing as I was speeding back through the Medieval Sculpture Hall towards The Art of Illumination, which is in the Lehman Wing: in the center of the hall, on a simple platform, stands an eerie procession of thirty-six small alabaster figurines, lined up two by two, led by two even smaller figures. These are The Mourners, Tomb Sculptures carved by Jean de La Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier between 1443 and 1456 to adorn the tomb of Duke John the Fearless and Margaret of Bavaria. They’re usually set into Gothic architectural niches so this exhibition offers an unusual opportunity to see them in the round.

I have a weakness for representations of drapery in painting and sculpture. Here the style of representation is realistic though with a trace of Gothic elegance, caught in time between the massive sculptural rendering of drapery on many figures in the work of Giotto of the early fourteenth century and that of Zurbaran’s more naturalistic and yet also more dramatic depiction of similarly garbed and hooded monks, from the early to mid-1600s. These figures were once polychrome: this and much more historical context for these figures can be found in a recent book review by Anthony Grafton of The Mourners and the catalogue of The Art of Illumination.

Mourner with drawn hood, alabaster, 16 1/2"x 6 1/8" x 5 1/8," Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, 1443-1456

There is a weird resemblance to Obi-Wan Kenobi in the exquisitely rendered drapery of the monks’ robes with cowls often completely obscuring their faces (though if one peers into the shadow of the cowl, their features are as delicately carved as the most expensive nineteeth-century porcelain doll): of course the train of influence runs in the other direction but you can’t help but think of Star Wars for a minute, until you experience the specific features and accoutrements of each mourner. Because of the dominance of drapery these sculptures are as abstract as they are figurative, and as monumental as they are doll-like. They are really fascinating little figures, mourners but poker-faced. Despite the drama of their depicted grief, they have a precise kind of calm in their form.

Mourner, Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, 1443-1456

Mira Schor, sketch of what I think is the figure above, seen from the side

I was particularly interested in the figures holding open books, since this is an image I have recently been working with, a figure — myself — who, among other things, is a mourner reading the book of the past while walking into the future. Despite the fact that I am in fact drawing such figures in my work, I was irritated that photography was not permitted at the Met (and annoyed at the vigor which the guard applied to her enforcement of this rule) so that I had to make do with some quick sketches, which proved particularly ineffective: usually my sketches of artworks recall the work in a more vivid and embodied way for me than any pictures I take at the same time, but even when looking at the special website for this exhibition, which allows you to rotate the figures 360 degrees and look at them from three vantage points (from above, eye level, and from below), I still can’t be sure I recognize one of the figures I drew, attracted by the Gothic elegance of a slightly slouching slim pose.

I feel there is something very useful to me about these sculptures, individually and their grouping, here particularly the idea of the isolation and privacy of individual mourning in relation to the rituals of collective mourning. Because they’re resonant of some aspects of work I am doing, they suggest something about what I might do, as yet unknown to me .

Mourner with drawn hood, reading a book, Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier, 1443-1456

Mira Schor, 38th spread, Grey Summer Notebook, ink and gesso on paper, 9 7/8”x14”, 2009

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