TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity & Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas

If you'd like to read my review of the TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity exhibit at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian through December 28, 2008, and Timbuktu to Tibet: Rugs and Textiles of the Hajji Babas at the Textile Museum through March 8, 2009, please click here.

Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum

One highlight of my east coast tour was a visit to the Brooklyn Museum expressly to see the Gilbert & George exhibit.

Jeffrey Yamaguchi of 52 Projects has some great pictures from Gilbert & George at the Brooklyn Museum. Additionally, on the Brooklyn Museum's website there is a video of Tim Marlow interviewing Gilbert & George at Target First Saturday on October 4, 2008. There is also a video of a conversation with the artists Gilbert & George and Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008.

To the extent I knew anything about Gilbert & George before walking into this exhibit, I thought of them as well-dressed performance artists. They call themselves living sculptures. In the center of the first room of the exhibition display cases house ephemera from their early, what I'll call performance pieces. At the beginning and in the middle of the exhibition there are videos of their singing sculptures and other performances. So to some extent, they are performance artists.

Gilbert & George designed the installation at the Brooklyn Museum, responding to the architectural layout of the galleries. The presentation in not chronological. Often their series are designed around the space that they will be first exhibited. Here the series are, for the most part, not shown together. So what is the governing principle behind the design of the installation? While I navigated the first room, before I had even read that the artists had designed the installation, I suspected that the design was intended to guide the viewer around in a very specific pattern. Around the outside walls was the series The Nature of Our Looking. Around the interior walls were a number of postcard collages. In the center was a circle of display cases. The labels on the ephemera in the display cases were not in standard museum order - left to right, all facing the same side of the case, as close to the object it described as possible, as close to the edge of the case as possible. Instead the arrangement of the labels and the narrative of the labels - there was always a clear starting point - forced the viewer to move around the cases is a specific direction which varied for each case. Once I recognized this, I started to wonder if the objects in the case were the art at all, or if the dance of viewer around the cases was the art. In their interview with Tim Marlow they confirmed my suspicions. In designing the installation they were concerned with how the viewer comes into the room and how they move through. They intended to guide the viewer through.

Having been exposed to Andy Warhol's work in film school, I questioned whether their manifesto-like declarations about art, that art should be democratic, have subject matter, meaning, have a moral character and the idea of "Art for All," are sincere. To illustrate their idea of Art for All, they described coming into a gallery the day after their exhibition opened only to find the gallery owner looking quite unwell. When asked why the long face he replied that the woman who comes to clean the gallery loved their exhibition.

Can two people who describe themselves not as a collaboration, but as one artist be serious? Can an artist who describes everything they do as sculpture when nothing they do fits within the traditional definition of sculpture be anything but ironic? When asked at the Members Preview and Reception held on October 2, 2008, whether they were influenced by Andy Warhol they responded,

Andy Warhol and Pop Art in general was a celebration of consumerism. We want to be a celebration of humanism.

They're images appear in almost every piece of photographic work. But they insist that the works are not self-portraits. Rather, to paraphrase their interview with Tim Marlow, they are visual letters to the viewer - Gilbert & George speaking to the viewer. They are the subject of all of their thoughts. They take what is in their brains and show it on the wall.

We have no plan when we go to the studio in the morning. However we are that day, that is how the pictures will be. Ours are all coming from the inside. We're always looking for the moral dimension of the subject matter. It has to have a human moral issue.

They strive for human, moral subject matter in response to the abstraction that was prevalent in the art world when they began in 1968 and is still going strong today. Like my friend Mary, they're not into Rothko, what Mary calls my stripes.

But Gilbert & George are not without formal structures. Their largest, both figuratively and literally, contribution to the art world is multiple series of large scale photographic works. The vast majority of their works consist of photographs in thin black frames tiled next to other photographs in thin black frames. This results in the appearance of a black grid. Gilbert & George explain this structure as purely the result of their means of production. They started in a small studio with no money. The only way they could make larger works was to make a big picture out of small fragments. Also that was the only way they could transport such large works. But once the grid came into being it came to control the composition slightly.

That slight discipline gives us a good way to make a controlled design.

Their works are almost uniformly based on symmetry and reflections. When they say the grid came to control the composition slightly, I feel they must be making a radical understatement. Between the ability to print multiple images inherent in the photographic or computer graphic media and the repetitive structure of the grid, their pictures have very quilt-like qualities.

I saw Gilbert & George after I saw the Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum. Both address the idea of collecting the uncollectable. In the first room of the Gilbert & George exhibit the display cases full of ephemera from their early performance work reminded me of Hamish Fulton's works in the Panza Collection. Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. Similarly, the invitation to Gilbert & George's dinner is not the art. The dinner is the art. But what we have left after the dinner is this collection of invitations and menus. How is that any less abstract than Frank Stella's stripes? How is that any more accessible to all?

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Supplemental Reading

My friend Jennifer, who's a professor of comparative literature and specializes in ancient Greek stuff, recommended the following books to supplement our studies of art stuff:

• The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World) by Cathy Gere
  
• Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration by Georges Didi-Huberman and Jane Marie Todd

The Panza Collection at the Hirshhorn Museum

On a last minute whim I stopped by my favorite museum on The Mall in Washington, D.C., The Hirshhorn Museum. Lucky I did because the current exhibit, The Panza Collection, is stunning. As usual, the exhibit is free, and it runs through January 11, 2009.

In The Panza Collection exhibit the Hirshhorn displays thrity-nine examples of Conceptual, Minimal, Light and Space, and Environmental art which the museum recently acquired from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The Hirshhorn has put together a PDF checklist of all the works. The pieces that most moved me were the Conceptual works which favored ideas over the creation of unique objects. In other words, pieces that really push the viewer to question the very idea of art.

For example, Hamish Fulton makes treks through rural spaces. These walks are the art. The photographs with printed texts are artifacts of the walks. I got into a conversation with a super-awesome interpretive guide about this. If I went on a walk with Hamish Fulton, would I be observing art? Arguably the art is his subjective perception of the walk, so I could observe him subjectively perceiving, but is that any closer than viewing a picture he takes on the same walk and labels? Another Fulton piece in the collection is Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985. Basically, he drew a little circle on a piece of paper and the "art" is Fulton's permission to reproduce that however the owner chooses. The Hirshhorn decided to use paint and vinyl lettering on an entire wall.

Fulton's Moonrise Kent England 30 September 1985 is in the same conceptual vein as Lawrence Weiner's works. According to the brochure,

Lawrence Weiner's artwork has consisted solely of what he calls "statements": words, clauses, and phrases that may be realized in any format (written or spoken), in any context, by anyone--or not at all.

When it acquired A rubber ball thrown on the sea, Cat. No. 146, 1969, from Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo The Hirshhorn received a card on which Lawrence Weiner granted the bearer permission to reproduce the words, "A rubber ball thrown on the sea" however they chose. Again, my super-awesome Interpretive Guide and I discussed the intellectual property rights issues surrounding works like this.

A rubber ball thrown on the sea

Did I just steal a piece of art from The Hirshhorn? You can ask Lawrence Weiner December 11th at 7 p.m. in the Hirshhorn's Ring Auditorium.

Douglas Huebler typed letters explaining the process and that the letter was part of "the form of the art." In the letter accompanying Duration Piece #12 Venice, California--Plum Island (Newbury Port), Massachusetts, 1969, Huebler claimed to have transferred sand from a beach in Venice, California, to a beach in Plum Island, Massachusetts, and vice versa. Moreover, he would do so every ten years, though the purchaser of the artwork is financially responsible for all future sand transfers. The letter goes with a picture of darker sand on lighter sand and a picture of lighter sand on darker sand. This in and of itself is amusing. And when I read the letter, I fully believed that Huebler had been to both of those places and transferred the sand just as his letter explained. Then I read the brochure,

Already well-regarded as a sculptor by 1968, Douglas Huebler rejected three-dimensional object-making and began to create pieces comprising snapshots that "picture" the commonplace, often absurd, actions described in the accompanying captions. His work suggests how language can override photography's supposed ability to capture reality and thus ultimately determine our understanding of both events and the images that represent them.

So is transferring sand from a beach in California to a beach in Massachusetts "absurd"? Was I totally gullible to believe the letter? Was the sand in the picture even at a beach? Were Dario Robleto's collections of macabre ephemera, such as charred tape recordings of rare birds, in Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego which I talked about previously, real? Is anything depicted in art "real"? Does it matter? Does realness make art any more or less genuine?

I plan to recreate Jan Dibbets' Flood Tide, 1969, a series of photographs of the tide washing away a mark in sand, at Hilton Head on Thanksgiving.

Continuing my obsession with museum signage, the signage in The Panza Collection was rather large, yellow vinyl letters on the wall. The first few pieces in the exhibit consist of vinyl letters on the wall. This confuses the art and the signage. This was at the request of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. In fact, he actually requested that the letters be even bigger. Curator Evelyn Hankins wanted to use traditional signage: black lettering on white cards attached to the wall and eventually compromised by reducing the size of the vinyl lettering.

If someone could do me a huge favor and go to the Gallery Talk on Friday, January 9th at 12:30 p.m. when Curator Evelyn Hankins will discuss the idea of collecting the uncollectible with Curatorial Research Associate Ryan Hill, I would greatly appreciate a full transcription. Just head to the Hirshhorn Museum Information Desk at 12:30 p.m., January 9th. Thank you!

P.S. The picture at the top of this post is one I took of the brochure cover which depicts Robert Barry's Steel Disc Suspended 1/8 in. Above Floor, 1967.

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Pompeii and the Roman Villa at the National Gallery of Art

My friend Mary and I, the last remaining members of the Art History Reading Group (a.k.a. A(rg)H) had the opportunity to tour the exhibit Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit is free and runs through March 22, 2009.

If you're reading along in the second edition of Marilyn Stokstad's Art History, this exhibit was particularly relevant to pages 203 through 211 in the chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art.

The exhibition is organized into three sections: Roman houses and villas, Romans' interest in all things Greek, and the influence of ancient Rome on European art after the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii in the 18th century.

In the chapters we've read so far (through chapter 6 Etruscan Art and Roman Art), Stokstad spends a lot more time on architecture than I expected. In her chapter on Etruscan Art and Roman Art she dedicates half the chapter exclusively to architecture. The first part of the Pompeii exhibit ties in nicely with Stokstad's coverage of architecture in ancient Rome in general and her specific coverage of Pompeii.

The houses covered in Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples do not overlap with the houses Stokstad covers. Stokstad covers the House of the Silver Wedding, the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, the House of Julia Feliz, the House of the Vettii, the House of Pansa, and the Villa of the Mysteries. Pompeii and the Roman Villa includes works from the House of the Golden Bracelet, the House of the Centenary, the House of the Tragic Poet, the House of Gaius Cornelius Rufus, the House of the Menander, the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus, and the House of Gaius Julius Polybius as well as some houses in neighboring Herculaneum. To supplement the map on page 204 of Stokstad, I've found a map, posted by Dr. John R. Hoaglund, that shows the location of most of these houses.

Stokstad opens her discussion of The Roman City and Home by stating:

Despite their urbanity, Romans liked to portray themselves as simple country folk who had never lost their love of nature. The middle classes enjoyed their townhome gardens, wealthy city dwellers maintained rural estates, and Roman emperors had country villas that were both functioning farms and places of recreation. Wealthy Romans even brought nature indoors by commissioning artists to paint landscapes on the interior walls of their homes.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa recognizes that same theme. One of the most spectacular artifacts in the exhibit is a fresco of a Garden scene from the House of the Golden Bracelet in Pompeii created sometime between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. According to the brochure,

The painted gardens visually expanded small ones, as in the so-called House of the Golden Bracelet where frescoes of flowering shrubs, birds, and fountains adjoined the real garden behind the house.

The architecture of the houses reflected the Roman's love of nature by locating the the most private domestic areas around the peristyle garden.

Another striking artifact in the Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibit was the recreation of a dining room "or triclinia — so called because they contained three couches on which diners reclined while eating," from Moregine, south of Pompeii. The most striking feature of this triclina are the frescoed walls depicting "the god Apollo, patron of the liberal arts, flanked by the muses." These muses appear on a background of brilliant, deep red that was very popular with Roman painters and is now known as "Pompeian red", according to Stokstad who describes its use in the background of fig. 6-34, Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), detail of a wall painting in the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, c. 50 BCE. According to the Discovery Guide for the exhibit, green and blue were among the most expensive pigment while yellow and red were the most popular. Like fig. 6-37, Detail of a wall painting in the House of M. Lucretius Fronto, Pompeii, mid-1st century CE, the fresco in the triclinia is divided into panels bordered with painted architectural moldings. Unlike the way the figures interact with one another and the architectural details painted in Initiation Rites of the Cult of Bacchus (?), the figures in the fresco in the triclinia do not interact with the architectural details. Instead individual figures float in the middle of the brightly colored background. This arrangement, a figure in the center of a large blank background usually framed by trompe l'oeil architectural details, became known as a "floating maenad."

The muses depicted in the fresco in the triclinia are one example of the Romans' interest in Greek mythology. Like Stokstad, a significant portion of the exhibit was dedicated to the Romans' interest in Greek art, history, and mythology. Specifically with regard to Pompeii the connection between Roman and Greek culture is particularly strong as Pompeii was a former Greek colony, as noted in the brochure for Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Roman art adopted the style of classical and pre-classical Greek art. Roman art depicted Greek subjects, like Plato, Alexander the Great, Homer, The Trojan War, and Theseus Fighting the Centaurs. Roman art patrons imported Greek artists and Greek materials, particularly stone.

A Roman twist on Greek art that I found particularly interesting is the move from public spaces to private spaces. Specifically the brochure noted,

In Greece statues of gods and goddesses were set up in sanctuaries and public places, but in Pompeii a sculpture of Artemis (no. 102), goddess of the hunt, was installed in a colonnade around a domestic garden; formerly public art became private.

Would Greeks have painted Apollo and the Muses around their personal dining room? Or would that have reduced the divine to the merely decorative?

Also like Stokstad, the exhibit drew connections between Greek pieces and Roman pieces to demonstrate what aspects of Greek art ancient Romans adopted. Like the inclusion of works by other contemporaneous portrait artists in the Bernini show at the Getty, I found this comparative approach very helpful.

I was not blown away by the exhibit's coverage of the 18th century reception of the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii. Perhaps it drew a parallel between the Romans at Pompeii in the 1st century obsessed with all things Greek, buying reproductions of Greek art to decorate their homes, to the Western Europeans of the 18th century obsessed with all things Pompeian, buying reproduction of Roman art to decorate their homes. Something about this section reduced all of the exhibit to a cycle of consumption. The fact it opened onto a gift shop probably didn't help any.

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