So yeah. I've visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City several times in the past year to see special exhibits (including one on Yugoslavian minimalist performance art was a baffling and unhappy accident, complete with WARNING SIGNS about LIVE NEKKIDITY WITHIN), and while it's a privilege and a pleasure to see art that's been key to the shaping of Contemporary Western Culture, I find visiting this particular museum to be a frustrating experience. And no--not just because it's full of rubes getting their photos taken in front of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" (although that doesn't help, I assure thee).
I can imagine only imagine the kinds of difficulties one would encounter when curating a special exhibit are enormous. Between getting permission to exhibit the right pieces to formulating a thesis to link seemingly disparate parts of an artist's career to physically assembling the space needed for the show, it's the kind of daunting undertaking I've explicitly avoided throughout my life. That having been said, I've seen two recent shows that left me feeling as though there were a couple of really specific tactics that could have been taken to improve... well, to improve *my* viewing experience, anyway (as in all things--Your Respective Mileage May Vary).
"Keeping Other Humans Out" was not part of my strategy, so BITE YOUR TONGUE.
The James Ensor retrospective provided an incredible opportunity to get up-close-and-personal with pieces by a painter whose mastery of the grotesque--and I do mean really, profoundly, scatologically grotesque--in many ways characterized his career. Ensor's aggressive use of images to convey death, decay, and a general distaste for humanity are what I came to see, and while many of these works were on display, I couldn't help but feel the overall mood and tone of the show was appreciably sunnier than I'd have liked. It felt as though there was an effort to legitimize the artist by pairing his more horrific works with still lifes and scenes of domesticity. But... let's be frank here: I like my Boschian excess, and while this decision ultimately emphasized the fact that Ensor's images still have the power to shock, it felt unfortunate to me.
As to the Tim Burton show that's going on right now (in the Photography Special Exhibition Area, which I'd guess is about a third the size of the 6th Floor Special Exhibition Area--just FYI)... it feels a lot like looking at someone's DeviantArt.com page. Seriously--if I ever get famous, I BEG you not to display my seventh grade cartooning experiments. And you can also lose track of high-school-age submissions to the academic art and literary journal. About twenty percent of the show is devoted to Burton's adolescent doodlings, and to be honest, it kinda made me and my show-going companion a little embarrassed for the artist. The show just felt very commercial, and was a bit more like going to Planet Hollywood and ooh-ing over the collected props than it was like attending an artist's career retrospective. Also, it was suspiciously free of images of Burton's long-time partner Lisa Marie.
So what's our takeaway from all this? Allow me to elaborate:
- I wish curators would embrace the innate bizarreness of art. Everybody LOOOOOOVES art, but artists are a pain in the ass, with their Ideas and Eccentricities.
- Anything can be part of your artistic legacy, so be careful what you draw because inevitably, someone who hates you will put it in MoMA solely to embarrass you.
- Don't photobomb Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon."
Weirdly enough, I LOVED the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I can't collect my thoughts on that enough for a write-up. I hate the way my brain works sometimes.
Note: I decided to illustrate this entry entirely with images created by James Ensor, mainly because I felt like looking at them today. Hope you dug that as I much as I did.
14 comments:
Oooh, art nerdery! I've been thinking about curation and how art is presented lately. To save money on traveling exhibitions, the National Gallery and Smithsonian have been doing some interesting things with their permanent collections, re-contextualizing works in different themes. Sometimes it works better than others, though.
@joanarkham
The Tate does something similar. Particularly effective was "Let's put all the Ophelias in one room!" I do so love an Ophelia.
Kate, re: Ensor and sunniness. Keep in mind that the exhibit probably wasn't aimed at goths, heh.
@Jack, everything is aimed at Goths. They power the economy.
And, besides, by not aiming to goths, they are denying their inadvertant target audience.
The Show-Going Companion Zone notes:
The TB area did not allow pix--that said, others have put up some on Facebook etc which i nabbed and will send to You separately ;)
Joan, I love those recontextualized shows! My faves are the shows that take a similar theme and follow it across different art styles to see how different artists approached ideas. Very cool, and sometimes really enlightening.
Jack, I'm going to have to side with Simon--Goths keep the economy strong! Seriously, you should SEE my footwear budget ;) But yes, I do have to confess that I'm probably in the minority in my desire to see an unrelentingly misanthropic art show...
Bless yer heart, Joey Zone! I must say that your company was much welcome in viewing this show. Your delight and enthusiasm made my grinchy little heart swell at least half a size.
Ideally, curators would be ballsy enough to know that in order to make a splash they must be deliberately offensive and misanthropic! They should be getting Giuliani or whomever's mayor condemn it as indecent and all that jazz.
Once the arts start catering their shows to the ugly masses, what's next, "30 Years of Garfield & Marmaduke"? all hope is lost. I've not seen the Burton, but I was dragged to the Star Wars exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum back in 02 or so and felt the same thing "why am I looking at props? this stuff should be at a fan convention not a museum" - I did like the "Pulp art" show they had there the same year, but all the paintings were behind glass, what's the point if you can't appreciate those pulpy brushstrokes?
re: Ensor - why can't they let grotesque be grotesque? "Sure, he was a deviant nut-bag, but look at this bowl of fruit he did."
Anytime I go to a major museum I feel like a rube, but try my best not to act like one. A few years ago we were at Chicago's Field Museum, and it was a hillbilly hootenanny. Packed with people in jorts and Crocs saying "oooh." I will never understand taking your five year-old to an art museum, unless you are pretty sure they want to go. And if the kid is not old enough to make complete sentences, get a fucking baby sitter.
Sorry about that. While my skills at producing and appreciating art are limited, museums are my church.
Loved Karlof/Fu Manchu BTW, if I have not mentioned. ;-)
I noticed the same thing too, but actually had just about the opposite reaction. I thought that by showing Ensor's less grotesque works, they were underscoring that he engagement with the grotesque was a deliberate and valid artistic choice.
Too often artists that tackle dark material (Poe, Kafka, Ensor, and so on) end up being treated less like artists and more like psych ward patients who leave behind not works, but rather evidence of their pathology. They get treated like they couldn't help themselves and their work was just what happened when they spilled their naked, tortured minds on to the canvas.
By pathologizing them, critics render them as less than true artists. They become outsider freakshow exhibits.
By showing that Ensor had a broad range and that he tackled multiple emotional registers with the same level of depth and skill, the curators help place his more shocking works into context. He wasn't a shockmeister or an obsessive neurotic; he was an artist whose subject matter choices deserve the same respect one would give an artist who focused strictly on more traditional material.
(I think Goya is a good example of an artist whose darker works get more respect because they are seen in context. This exhibit was trying to give Ensor the same benefit.)
When somebody thinks everything is fucked up all the time, you tend to dismiss it when he tells you something is fucked up. When a man reserves that judgment for that in life which is truly and deeply fucked up, you take it to heart when he tells something is fucked up.
That was just my take away though.
The WorkingRightNowAtLiberry Zone say:
The First Rule of Ensor Klub...
read this--or get someONE beautiful to buy Ye a copy ;D
>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875871992/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0870707523&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=05QEJ4JGY3C42CCX3XDJ
Kind of relieved to hear that the Burton exhibit isn't necessarily worth trekking my way downtown and fighting hordes of tourists on a free Friday or coughing up $20 and going off hours. By any chance, did you catch the Matthew Barney Cremaster Cycle exhibit at the Guggenheim a few years back? I found it brilliant and the only time a guest exhibit really did a whole lot for me. Look it up and see if you can find some of the imagery and video from it. You might dig it, and there's even an Ursula Andress cameo at one point.
Jack, I'm going to have to side with Simon--Goths keep the economy strong!"
By "economy" you must mean "the snack cake industry" and "the people who make ball-jointed dolls," hehe.
I'm with CRwM on this one. "Look at this freaky shit!" isn't a very good way to celebrate an artist's work, in my opinion.
Erich, you're damn right! Get somebody on top of making Virgin Mary portraits adorned with pornography and elephant shit again. Those were the good old days, weren't they?
Darius, glad you liked the tiny painting--I've owed you one for some time now :)
CRwM, this is a really excellent observation:
"by showing Ensor's less grotesque works, they were underscoring that he engagement with the grotesque was a deliberate and valid artistic choice."
And you're right that a lot of critics will dismiss artists who work in this kind of darker material out-of-hand. See also "artists whose works exhibit a sense of humor." I think this is reflective of a larger problem with the art world, but that's a Whole 'Nother Oprah. It just frustrates me that critics need to execute this elaborate kind of *justification* when interesting art is just interesting art. Under-valuing confrontationally bizarre images reflects bias on the parts of critics and it's something that, on a personal level, I have a hard time embracing. I can't help but contrast the Ensor show with the Bacon show--an equally career-spanning presentation that brimmed with the artist's misanthropy, queer sexuality, eccentricity and personal tragedy.
Burton and Bacon on the same day?
Did you gallery trip go a little something like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tgxIWgJ_DE
I saw the travelling Ensor exhibit at the Getty Center in LA a few years back and was very taken by the work. I'd agree that the setting did not match the art, but I think that is a consistant drawback of large museums. Alas, they're the ones with the cred to get the art...
If you ever find yourself out west, LA's Museum of Jurassic Technology doesn't suffer from this problem. Perfect setting for the head-scratchingly entertaining subject matter. http://www.mjt.org/
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