Art and the One-Trick Pony

Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003)

I just read Karen Rosenberg’s review of the Yinka Shonibare show at the Brooklyn Museum.  (See “Fashions of a Postcolonial Provocateur,” July 2, 2009).  Rosenberg’s criticism of Shonibare’s work is as follows:  ”Once you grasp the essential concept of his art…the rest is window dressing.”  Having recently seen the Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, I was left wondering about the expectations that we hold for contemporary artists in comparison to artists from the past.  I am often turned off by contemporary art in which the concept is so easily grasped that it fails to engage me either intellectually or emotionally.  But I’m not in agreement with Rosenberg that this type of criticism applies to Shonibare’s work.  Shonibare raises questions about “post” colonial culture that continue to resonate.  Rosenberg notes that his use of fabric creates a compelling visual display, and I suggest we compare this  to the use of color by painters.  Let me get to the point.  As Shonibare is viewed as “straight up” by Rosenberg, might we also view the three rivals on view at the Museum of Fine Arts?  After all, how often have these Renaissance artists reverted to the same subject matter in their work?  Why does this repeated subject matter continue to resonate?  Because, I believe, we value the subject being explored.  Why do we get so quickly tired of postcolonial issues when we (almost) never cease to tire of the same old subjects that have permeated art making practice for centuries?  Could you imagine Rosenberg’s criticism of Shonibare being applied to Titian?  I’m reminded of a dharma talk that I heard a few years ago by a Buddhist monk in which he recounted the story of a great Buddhist master.  The master’s student came to hear dharma talks regularly but then started to complain.  He said, “I keep coming to these talks, but you just keep repeating the same basic ideas about Buddhist practice again and again.”  The master replied, “Well, have you been following the practice I keep describing?”  The student answered, “No.”  Enough said.  Maybe when we truly are in a “post” colonial world, Shonibare’s repeated return to this subject will seem redundant.  But until then, his subjects remain powerful reminders of the colonial past that continues to inform our present.

Dan Graham and Conceptual Art

The Whitney Museum currently has on view an excellent retrospective of the work of Dan Graham.  My own appreciation of Graham’s work is grounded in one of his most well known works, his 1966 Homes for America.  The Whitney exhibition provides a fantastic opportunity to review this work in full, including the original slide show of suburban homes and the layout for the work to be published in Esquire magazine.  In Homes for America, Graham reveals the celebrated geometry that characterized much modernist work to be as significant as the suburban homes that by this time had come to define the American landscape for all of its mundanity.  Graham brilliantly appropriates the language of modernism to reveal its own limitations.  The fact that he hoped to publish this work in a magazine further reveals his efforts to deconstruct the modernist celebration of so-called high art.  

The Whitney show, however, does much more than exhibit Graham’s best known works.  Instead, it takes us throughout his entire career  and into the present moment, including Graham’s latest installations that serve as challenges to the way that we experience space.  There are also many must see videos of some of Graham’s most interesting performances.  In one work (sorry I don’t have the title), Graham holds a camera close to his body as he rolls around on the ground in Central Park, thus recording his actions as intimate bodily experiences.  At the same time, he positions another camera to record his actions from a distance.  What results is a reflection on the differences between how we perceive and experience the world.  This is one of the central themes of many of Graham’s works, and the Whitney provides us with fascinating examples of this throughout the exhibition.  

Dan Graham:  Beyond is on view until October 9, 2009.

James Ensor and Francis Bacon: A Perfect Complement

Francis Bacon, Study for a Baboon (1953)

James Ensor, Masks Confronting Death (1888)

The concurrent exhibitions in New York of James Ensor at the Museum of Modern Art and Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are a perfect complement.  I’d encourage anyone visiting New York to plan their day around seeing both exhibitions in close time proximity so that the rich comparisons between the two painters will most readily emerge.  Just as Ensor dismissed the Impressionists as superficial, Bacon dismissed Abstract Expressionism for the same.  What results in both cases are two unnerving groups of paintings that reveal some of the horrors of life during their respective times.   Many people may be familiar with Ensor’s paintings of masked people, but seeing so many of them together as a group leaves one with a haunted feeling.  The skeleton paintings add to this feeling.  However, this is not meant to play down the sarcastic humor that is also evident in many of Ensor’s paintings.  Overall, the Ensor exhibition provides an excellent survey of the artist’s work.  Similarly, the Bacon exhibition is outstanding in the collection on display.  The themes selected by the museum were a useful way to organize the show.  It was refreshing that the Met chose to focus on the impact that Bacon’s relationships with key men in his life had on his work, since so often in the past museums have chosen to downplay the signifance of love relationships for gay and lesbian artists.  Personally, I was left most haunted by Bacon’s paintings of animals that appear more human at times than his human subjects.

Francis Bacon: A Retrospective is up until August 16; James Ensor until September 21.

Titus Kaphar: History in the Making

 

Titus Kaphar, Descent

In June, I had the opportunity to see the Titus Kaphar: History in the Making exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.  Kaphar’s artistic strategy is a reconsideration of paintings from the past through his own intervention into these works through the act of cutting canvas and literally tarring his paintings.   I went to the exhibition with thoughts of paintings by Robert Colescott in mind, since Colescott’s most well known work uses the strategy of inserting African American figures into paintings by celebrated white artists.  His painting Les Desmoiselles d’Alabama (1985) serves as one example.  But Kaphar takes an interesting and different approach to his selected paintings for consideration, approaching his paintings as sculptures rather than two-dimensional surfaces.  Figures are cut from one painting and inserted in another; a figure in one painting literally falls to the floor of the gallery; and other paintings are cut into long shreds that are piled on the canvas to create a three-dimensional quality.  Kaphar is well aware of the problematic nature of painting in the postmodern art world.  But he notes, “If painting is dead, then I want to do the autopsy.”  The content of his works serves as a reminder of the racism embedded in many of the celebrated paintings of the Western world and a suggestion of the possibility of an alternative.  Kaphar’s work is beautifully executed and powerful in intellectual and emotional content.

 

The Seattle Art Museum website has three short videos in which Kaphar discusses his work.  Check them out:  http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/exhibit/exhibitDetail.asp?eventID=15647

Also, check out this brief discussion of his work that includes an example of his  Conversations Between Paintings:  http://www.thecampuschronicle.com/arts/profiles/080307s.cfm

The exhibiton ends on September 7, 2009