Martha Wilson . . . from page 1
The Gaze: glass half-empty . . .
While Martha Wilson’s selection of twenty photos from thousands produced by these two esteemed craftsmen strongly argues that at least one man and one woman see the world in a certain way, such logically flawed methods cannot prove her point. How can we possibly know her choices are representative even of the work of these two individuals, let alone the other billions of humans on the earth? The only person who could be convinced by this is one who shares her prejudices. Her exhibit implicitly condemns men for having an incomplete view of the world: one lacking an interest in the consequences of their actions. But what about the woman’s view? Isn’t it also lacking a vital part of life? If men were not drawn to women sexually, where would those families Levitt likes to photograph come from?
Human societies are everywhere racist, sexist, homophobic, given to status stratification and the formation of arbitrary in-groups lethally intolerant toward outsiders. Whether these behaviors are biological, and can only be fought individually, or are socialized into being and can be outgrown the same way resists investigation and remains unclear. Perhaps that’s why the topic has become one of the foremost subjects for art in the last half century. If language is a virus, art is a parasite, invading and inhabiting questions that cannot be answered, or even accurately quantified. It may be true, as Auden said of poetry, that art makes nothing happen, yet poetry and art can show us to ourselves. That can be good or bad: the central narrative Martha Wilson came to Utah to share with an enthusiastic feminist and humanist audience on Wednesday, September 18, was about the outmaneuvering and exhaustion of artists by the forces of repression—opposition the artists themselves kindled by their power to instill identity in foes as well as friends. But if her career-long experience as a working artist ran downhill, she clearly wasn’t about to end it in the dumps. Most of the audience stayed till the end of her presentation, when they heard her say she always knew her era wouldn’t last, but that the great thing about being an artist is knowing you can always invent something new to take its place.
Staging the Self, the traveling Martha Wilson retrospective at the UMFA until November 10, covers not only forty years of personal art making, during which she was never far from the leading edge of such burgeoning genres as video and performance art, but in those same years financing, staging, and curating uncounted contemporary works by her peers and collaborators through Franklin Furnace, which she founded in 1976. The exhibit, though arbitrarily cut off at thirty projects, is too large to take in all at once; by means of photos, video clips, posters, cards, clippings, charts, diagrams, and other artifacts, Staging the Self probably encompasses more artists than any previous group show at the museum. Indeed, one of Wilson’s more surprising revelations was that the drying up of National Endowment for the Arts money under relentless pressure from self-styled moral activists has coincided with increasing funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, not for original works but for the labor of archiving the history of half a century’s activism, both pro- and anti-art. Given the propensity of the political right in America for lying not just about its intentions and motives, but its actions, the final victory in the struggle for human rights and equality could take the shape of its complete and accurate history.
How much that history was made by art is another question. Assessments of social progress tend to reflect the experience of the assessor more than available facts—or, as British novelist Sam Byers has it, ‘We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.’ Before assessing how much racial progress in this country owes to the powerful performances of William Pope.L, we’d first have to agree that there had been any racial progress. Pope.L, whose work at Franklin Furnace in 1991 wasn’t essentially different from that presented at the final Ephraim exhibition of the Central Utah Art Center last year, might argue that if little was different, it only shows how little has changed. In other areas, progress is undeniable, and so, too, the contribution of art. Strong majority acceptance of gay marriage among young Americans is surely due in large part to the issue’s exposure in movies and television, popular media that have responded to artist’s books and films, videos, and provocative acts of civil disobedience by activist artists.
A century ago, James Joyce, writing in A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, restated for a modern audience the classical aesthetic principle that only an inferior work of art strives to induce action by the viewer. Most visual art through the ages also observed this rule: Cubism, Abstract-Expressionism, even Dada and Pop strove to induce often-powerful feelings in their audiences, but did not encourage deeds. Only art artificially injected with political propaganda—art officially sanctioned by Fascist and Communist governments in particular—deliberately set forth behavioral goals. Just recently, the reputation of Jackson Pollock, one of America’s most respected artists, was damaged by the revelation that the CIA had clandestinely promoted his work as part of the Cold War. So at the very least, the avowed activism presented in Staging the Self marks a genuine departure, if not a complete reversal, of attitudes toward art that can be traced all the way back to the invention of aesthetic reasoning by the Greeks. So the disorientation many readers of 15 Bytes may feel in these galleries—the sense that art has been hijacked for non-art purposes, even if the theft is well done—is more than just a predictable reaction against artistic progress.
Then there is the restless feeling some will encounter at the archival nature of this show. Some of the works on view, notably the videos and photography, are presented in their complete and original forms, and are, frankly, wonderful. Real women mocking ‘ladies’—first, second, or whatever—gives rise to joy. But most of what Franklin Furnace promoted can be seen only in incomplete form, if at all. The academics who discussed her work with Wilson on the 18th, who dwelled at length on Performance, did so not just because that mode of art making played so large a part in her activities. They also struggled to measure an inherently ephemeral art form. Performance differs from theater in its rejection of willing disbelief; we know what we see in the theater is not real, but a performance is supposed to be actually happening here and now. So can it be saved, or even repeated? Those who raised these questions failed to come up with answers.
Marcel Duchamp, who created the theoretical scaffolding on which performance art stands, also wrote that the lifespan of a work of art is similar to a human lifespan, but that when artworks die, they become antiques suitable for display in museums. If he meant that as well of the arts he helped create, then in Staging The Self we may be witnessing their passing.
Martha Wilson: Staging the Self is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. Guest curator for the exhibition is Peter Dykhuis. It is at the Utah Musuem of Fine Arts through November 10.
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Under Pressure . . . from page 1
As a printmaker myself, and a student of the medium’s history, I was the wide-eyed kid in a candy store at this show. Viewing the Richard Serra prints alone are worth the cost of gas to get to the museum, the cost of admission, and a coffee at the café. True to Serra form, the prints are a monumental force with the presence and physicality seen in his sculptures and drawings. The stand-out piece and highlight of the show, “Vesturey II” (1991) is vertically aligned — a doorway beckoning you in, like a portal to some Serra-esque dimension filled with molten lead and rusted, precariously placed, domineering steel walls. Called an intaglio construction, the piece is arguably THE testament to the experience of viewing art in person, as opposed to viewing a reproduction. At a distance the work appears to be a large black void slightly askew to the straight edges of the paper. Upon closer inspection, details emerge from the void along with the physical weight of its presence. Embossed into the paper, the black ‘void’ raises from the surface what looks like a full quarter to half inch filled with line, texture, and general surface noise. There is detail in the emptiness.
Serra’s other print in the show, “Pasolini” (1987), is horizontally aligned and recalls a stoic architectural cube in a barren landscape. Both prints are like black holes, sucking the noise and life out of the space around them. Austere in presence, they create a sense of cold heaviness in the spaces around and between them — very unfortunate for the three or four pieces separating the two on the adjacent wall, which are remarkable pieces in their own right. Two of these are by Helen Frankenthaler, and deserve their own wall, or own space to occupy. Frankenthaler was one of the few artists who had the foresight to see printmaking as an independent medium with opportunities for chance and discovery not available in painting. Unfortunately, her beautifully delicate lithograph is drowned out by the domineering Serra it shares a space with. Frankenthaler was an amazingly influential artist and one of the few prominent female abstract expressionists in a field dominated by the aggressive, testosterone-fueled male; her pieces positioned as they are in this show are a good metaphor for this unfortunate disparity.
A series of Sol LeWitt linocut prints (“Color Bands” [Wadsworth Portfolio] 2000) pull you into the next gallery. Featuring the artist’s trademark rainbow array of lines laid out in each piece according to his specific instructions, the pieces have a hypnotic effect. Again, this series would show better in its own space, where the exuberant color and the mesmerizing line work would have the full opportunity to engulf the viewer. But the piece also works as a catalyst to draw the audience into further galleries. LeWitt’s work and style are unmistakable, and having it as visual tease across from the gallery entrance is a tantalizing hint at what Under Pressure has to offer.
The proceeding gallery highlights realism in printmaking with a remarkable Richard Estes screenprint and another standout piece, “’68 Nova, From the Documenta Portfolio” (1972) by Robert Bechtle — a full color lithograph of a 1968 Chevy Nova parked in an open, covered stall under an apartment complex, or maybe a motel? Both the Estes and Bechtle use space, line and dimension to depict a sterile and complacent view of Americana. They go a step beyond the camera’s squared off frame of reality and flatten out the scene one step further, creating a familiar landscape that is separated and removed from the reality it depicts.
Walking through the next gallery, it is easy to blow right past the Damien Hirst prints on the wall — they offer no redeeming value to the show, other than their potential marketing purposes. ‘Look! We have a Damien Hirst!’ Meh. Is it a decaying dead beast in formaldehyde? Nope, it is an etching of his spot paintings, which begs the question, why labor over an etching to create one of his spot pieces? The etching process to produce the variety of colors, in as crisp and clean a manner as his paintings and on a scale not normally reserved for etching is, I can tell you from experience, quite an undertaking. That technical aspect is the only reason to potentially stop and ponder as you move through to the next gallery, where you will be greeted by a set of ten Donald Judd woodcut prints that are hung on the wall in two vertical columns, reminiscent of his admired and well-known sculptural stacks. “Untitled (S. 158--166) from 1968,” like the Serra pieces, is a testament to the adaptability of printmaking in conveying a sculptural presence similar to the media these artists are most known for.
The remaining galleries offer similar surprises and a strong finish to the show. Back in the large gallery where the show begins, but at the other end of the room, two Enrique Chagoya lithographs are ripe with satire and socio-political motivation, much in line with printmaking’s tradition as a means of propaganda and the dissemination of information. Chagoya does not shy from sensitive themes and he uses humorous, caricatured figures of religious, political and historical notoriety as his subjects, often times pushing the boundaries and comfort levels of the viewer, sometimes even causing actual physical reactions. A woman with a crowbar attacked one of his pieces in Colorado for what she felt were sacrilegious depictions of Christ. While the pieces on view here might be a touch more tame, they are still very much polemical: “The Pastoral or Arcadian State: Illegal Alien’s Guide to Greater America,” from 2006, shows a figure flayed of his skin addressing a random group of immigrants from different backgrounds. A masked, Lone Ranger Humpty Dumpty — yes the egg character of famed storybook and song — sits in the corner with a speech bubble that reads ‘an infinity of interpretations leading to none.’ This is a commentary not only on contemporary ideas of art but also on Chagoya himself and the continued controversy that surrounds his work.
While you most likely won’t be greeted by Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, or Vanilla Ice, (but let’s not rule it out) while visiting the UMFA, Under Pressure is still a show of collaboration and prominence. There is the obvious collaboration between the master printers’ studios and the artists that made these works possible, the partnership of the museum and Schnitzer to utilize his collection, and finally the relationship between the viewer and the pieces on display. It is like the old philosophical argument, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? A review like this can tell you about the show, what works and what doesn’t, but the exhibit itself is nothing without its audience.
Under Pressure: Contemporary Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation is at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts through January 5, 2014.
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