Harvard Art Museum

Something is in the air – and I am not just referring to mobiles, although every museum I set foot in during a short trip to the East Coast seemed to have something floating about.

Philadelphia Museum of Art MFA Boston

Rather, the air is suffused with a desire to take stock of periods of the past that just might inform us about how to handle the present, in our understanding of art history as well as that of our times. Two current exhibits are perfect examples of this: Inventur at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, MA and Modern Times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(All photographs are paired from the exhibits, Inventur in first position, followed by my best match from Modern Times.)

Wilhelm Rudolph Drawings of Dresden 1945-46/Diverse Industrial Scenes by Benton Murdock Spruance, Charles Turk, Jolan Gross Bettelheim, Ida Abelman mid 193os to 1943

Inventur (I) focusses on German art, while Modern Times (MT) covers the American departure into modernity. There are striking parallels of curatorial choices and artistic achievements in both of these exhibitions. They cover a limited period of time (1943 – 1955 for I, 1920s to the 1950s for MT,) display an incredible diversity of artists active during those periods, include painting, photography, collage and sculpture, and rely on core themes equally important for the artistic developments in both countries during the first half of the last century.

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/visit/exhibitions/5388/inventurart-in-germany-194355

http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/866.html?page=2

Harald Duve Carnival Feast 1952/George Biddle  Whopee at Sloppy Joes 1933

The mood, in turn, is strikingly different. And how could it not be? Modern Times reflects the optimism,  dynamism and daring of the American art scene of its epoch. Inventur, on the other hand, conveys the trauma, pain, but also resilience of German artists digging themselves, sometime literally, out of the rubble of the post-war years.

Karl Hofer Nights Of Ruins, 1947/ Kay Sage Tanguy Unicorns came down to the Sea 1948

Both exhibits make room for experimentation, architecture, urban scenery and the race towards industrialization.

Erwin Spuler Bombed out Buildings 1946-48/Arnold Rönnebeck Wall Street 1925

Both represent women artists, those known and those less familiar, including two of my favorite queens of subversion, Hannah Höch and Dorothea Tanning.

Hannah Höch Poetry around a Smokestack 1956/Dorothea Tanning Birthday 1942

As someone who grew up in Germany during the the latter years covered in Inventur, I felt a stronger pull to the themes of that show: the artistic reaction to the horrors, destruction, fear, disbelief and eventually hope of those living through the aftermath of the war in Germany.

The title of the exhibit (Taking Inventory) was borrowed from a 1945 poem by Günther Eich, which I am attaching in English translation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52394/inventory-56d230d30ccb8

This is a strange choice, to be frank. Eich, born in 1907, preached before the war that poets should not be political, and yet showed extreme conservative opinions in his scathing literary criticism of others. In 1933 he applied for membership in the NSDAP, but was rejected. He then produced some 160 radio plays that very much spoke to Nazi issues and values and were widely broadcast. After the war, he opportunistically claimed one had to be critical of the fallen regime – and went on to be a celebrated writer, winning honors ad awards, while considered by others to have been a Mitläufer, a Nazi hanger-on. To have this turn-coat’s poem spearhead an exhibit of true dissenters is puzzling, to say the least.The power of the exhibit has you forgive this, however.

The visual works take inventory, indeed. They depict the destroyed landscapes, the vagaries of every day life, the attempts to escape the post-war reality of hunger, illness and despair by either documenting the catastrophic conditions or escaping from them into fantasy worlds. There are also hints of the unquenchable desire to return to some kind of normalcy, to rebuild a sense of home and focus on things like modern furniture, car ownership and the like, to move forward.

Konrad Klapheck Typewriter 1955/Charles Sheeler Cactus 1931

The curators note that the exhibit conveys not just an artistic, but also a physical and moral stocktaking of artists who stayed – and were endangered – during the Nazi regime and the hard years that followed, with a Nazi-indoctrinated public and critics trying to suppress their work way into the 50ies. I completely agree – many of the paintings I saw were testimonials in the truest sense of a world destroyed by fascistic ideals and action – something worthwhile to remember here and now.

Modern Times, in contrast, leaves you buoyed with a sense of energy. Where the German art makes you hold your breath, the American exuberance makes your heart beat faster. Given the vast collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it also allows glimpses of lesser known artists beyond the panoply of the famous cohort.

In the end both shows pull off something extremely valuable: they evoke feelings without giving in to  irritating pathos and they link to critical thoughts about our past without yielding to nostalgia.

If you happen to be traveling to Boston or Philadelphia in the near future, I recommend you make time for a visit.

I’ll close this week on art tidbits with two items that might interest you.

One is an exhibit in NYC (friends there: you have exactly 2 days to catch this show at Bookstein Projects….) that focusses on how a deviation from a traditional art subject can make things more interesting. Reversing the trend, in some ways.

Artists Who Unlocked the Modernist Grid

As someone who uses lines and circles as geometric anchors a lot in my own work, the art in this exhibit was mind-opening. Grids have been a staple in modern art ever since the Russian painter Kazemir Malevich and of course Piet Mondrian established them ass anchors in their work. The link below gives a short and fascinating art-history overview of the grid’s evolution in contemporary painting.

https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/art_market/how_the_grid_conquered_contemporary_art-51540

To see several blue chip artists finding creative ways to break the grid while still using its visual power just spoke to me. Here are some samples from the show.

The second item of some kind of reversal has to do with photography.

In the normal progression of things, you come to a moment that catches your attention and you try to preserve it with your photograph. In the – fun! – link below, the photographer in some ways reversed that sequence. He stood in place, waiting for the moment to come to him.

(If you open the link  you need to push the cursor a bit to the right to get to the photographs – at least that was the case on my computer)

http://www.jonathanhigbee.com/coincidences  

When I first saw these pictures I was was assuming that they were staged. No one would have so much luck chancing upon so many meaningfully matching constellations. But when I read that Higbee visits certain promising locations (advertisement posters etc.) several times a week, waiting for hours, sometimes across two months, it all made sense. Of course he has one of the most photogenic and variable populations at his disposal: the citizens of NYC.

But perhaps hanging out on the street corners of PDX might yield just as delightful results…..

Photographs are my own grids, caught here or there.

If you and I had a bit of foresight, we would have gotten our yellow fever inoculation about 8 weeks ago. That way we could happily travel to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to attend this week’s most intriguing art fair: SP-Arte/2018. It started yesterday and lasts for 4 days, but the satellite shows in the local galleries, museums and collections are up for several months. Galleries, museums and cultural centers in São Paulo feature a wide variety of events including exhibition openings, institutional collection visits, panel discussions, book launches, performances and guided tours fostering a unique art immersion week.

It’s become one of these it occasions, where the rich, the famous, the wannabes and the hanger-ons all congregate, not to mention the dealers, the connoisseurs, the investors and the art students. (Yes, I am jealous that I can’t be there. And no, I’m not going to reveal into which of the above categories I might fall.)

SP-Arte is known for showing Latin-american artists that have otherwise little exposure, in addition to the many already famous. The two shows I’d be certain to catch are one by Franz Manata and Saulo Laudares, ‘After Nature’ and Paulo Nimer Pjota’s ‘Medley’. You’ll easily discern why these two are of interest to me.

Pjota first: He used to be a graffiti artist and has turned into an installation artist with a focus on painting. His work is full of socio-political commentary, he uses found or recycled objects to interact with his paintings, and he has a sense of humor that appeals to me.

http://paulopjota.com

He’s also not above milking the it crowd for their money; you can buy a small volume of photographs together with an XL tshirt and some decals representing his paintings for a mere 150 Euros…. between philosophy and crime, indeed. Making me smile.

Manata and Laudares, my second choice, will have a 20 year retrospective at the fair. They are true multimedia artists, who have an affinity for works including sounds, but add to that everything imaginable in the realm of installations. In 2008 in a work called After Nature they placed speakers in the trees of Brazilian parks which had been invaded by parakeets who drove out the indigenous population of song birds. The speakers played the songs of the latter, much to the pleasure of people visiting the parks – until they discovered that these were artificial sounds….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qVCdWbiWY0

Graffiti, birds, art, travel – why am I not in Sao Paulo as we speak????

Photomontages are my own after nature versions…. from an older series called Feux Follets.

Riddle me that: what does nimble mean in the context of an art museum’s mission? 

I found this on the website of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, since I was drawn to explore the current exhibition, Dangerous Women. The  museum is associated with the Florida International University and housed in an interesting building  designed by Yann Weymouth who was the chief of design on the I.M. Pei Grand Louvre Project. With 46,000 square feet of energy efficient exhibition, storage, and programming space, the museum achieved LEED silver certification.

https://frost.fiu.edu/exhibitions/index.html

After getting over my surprise that they mix nouns, verbs and adjectives in their value statement, and list them in no particular context and/or order, I was left with the real puzzle what is the value of nimble and how would an academic institution pursue it? Did they perhaps mean risk taking, as in showing controversial work? Or does it mean they are aware of current public taste and nimbly trying to accommodate it? Whatever – the current show is perhaps nimble in its title but less so in its contents.

The dangerous women in the show are all biblical characters, as painted by 16th and 17th century artists. Described variously in the exhibit introduction as purveyors of sin, harlots or hussies, or deadly temptresses and seductresses, they are given credit at shaping biblical history. Maybe we could think of the vocabulary as nimble?

Or the advertised coda: The exhibition will conclude with a modern and contemporary coda: Robert Henri’s sensuous Salome from 1901 and Mickalene Thomas’ Portrait of Madame Mama Bush 1, 2010, a reminder of the tenacious appeal of the subject. 

https://frost.fiu.edu/exhibitions/2018/dangerous-women.html

The Miami Press commented:The show promotes new ways of seeing many historic female characters, whose power to topple the strongest of male rulers made them “dangerous” but whose strength serves as an historical foundation for thinking about contemporary issues. Though the exhibition was organized well in advance of trending conversations and emerging movements such as #Me Too, “Dangerous Women” could not be more opportune or compelling.

– Aha. I thought those were already pretty established ways of seeing. But what do I know. (Link below is a compendium of feminist biblical studies in the 20th century. Countless scholars have assessed the strength of biblical female rebels for at least a century.)

https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/pubs/066002P-front.pdf

Jordana Pomeroy, director of the Frost Art Museum, adds, “’Dangerous Women’ demonstrates how throughout history, men have feared women who wield power through their intellect and sexuality. This new exhibition of old-master paintings demonstrates how powerful women were feared even when their acts were heroic.”

Maybe they were too nimble.

Which can also be said for the graffiti artists of Miami who certainly depict a nice subset of dangerous women, photographed a few years ago. (And who, no doubt, provide instantaneous joy for a subset of pubescent and not so pubescent boys who can innocently bask in the art rather than secretly surfing the net.)

I figured after some weeks of heavy-duty politics I’ll turn to some events in the art world that caught my attention. Do I hear a collective sigh of relief?

You might have read about a recent incident at Honk Kong’s Harbour Art Fair. Cleaners mistook a sculpture by Carol May for thrash and threw it out; when they realized their error, it was too late, the sculpture was already compacted and destroyed. I don’t blame them – the object was a screen-printed cardboard box with the McDonalds Logo on it – looking like the real thing, with the twist of an unhappy mouth instead of a happy one.

I can’t help but grinning at the irony – this is not the first time that art focussed on the throw-away mentality and excesses of our society experiences that very fate.

In 2015 an art installation by Goldie Chiari of empty booze bottles and party favors, titled Where shall we go dancing tonight, was removed by the cleaners. Luckily the champagne bottles and party poppers survived their trip in the trash bags and dustbins, and were re-installed after discovery of the mishap. https://nypost.com/2015/10/27/modern-art-exhibit-mistaken-for-trash-and-thrown-away/ 

The director of the Museion Bozen Bolzano even touted this mishap as a great opportunity to discuss what is art. A question I am unable to answer, in this and so many other cases…. and I am seemingly not the only one.

In 2008 someone fell into a 9ft tall ceramic sculpture by Tatiana Fernandez at London’s Royal Academy and broke it. Subsequent museum visitors and staff thought that the hundreds of shards and larger broken pieces lying around were part of the exhibition. We have clearly added refuse to our schema of what constitutes modern art.

Except for the cleaning crews. Untouched by the intricacies of the evolution of art, they blithely go about their business.

It has happened to Damien Hirst – in 2001 a janitor at London’s Eyestorm Gallery cleared away his pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups (meant to represent the life of an artist).

It has happened to Gustav Metzger –  in 2004, the German artist’s installation Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art was on display at the Tate Britain. A museum employee accidentally threw part of it away, a trash bag standing in close proximity to the sculpture. The bag was later recovered, but it was too damaged to display. What is an artist to do? Well, Metzger replaced it  with another bag full of trash. Go figure.

My favorite of all times, though, are mishasps based on good old German Hausfrau values. “In 1986 a 400,000-euro grease stain by Josef Beuys was simply mopped up in Duesseldorf. In 1973 two women cleaned up a baby bathtub Beuys had wrapped in gauze and bandages so they could use the container to wash dishes after an event.” And in 2001 a cleaning lady scrubbed away the “dirt,” a thin layer of paint, in an installation of a bathtub in Dortmund by the late Martin Kippenberger .

http://www.dw.com/en/cleaning-lady-destroys-contemporary-sculpture-with-her-scrubbing/a-15510231

Photographs are of  “art pieces” in another universe, perhaps.