[ad_1]
When the lockdown was lifted last spring, some of our major museums in New York City were able to set up large, pending exhibits. The Guggenheim was not so lucky. A traveling Joan Mitchell retrospective that was to fill her rotunda had been canceled. Perhaps the museum would have organized an exhibition of modernist chestnuts from the collection that everyone will enjoy. Instead, he did something more interesting. It has turned into an old-fashioned alternative space.
There were already a few small side gallery exhibits in place or on track, including a selection of gnarly and captivating photographs by 2020 Hugo Boss Award winner Deana Lawson. But to fill its central spiral space – tall and wide, a combination of cathedral and chasm – the museum had to be inventive, and it did so in a series of multi-part installations called “Re / Screenings: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda. “
In part, the program was designed to facilitate social distancing. The bays of the ramps, which usually house paintings or sculptures, were left empty. With an emphasis on projected imagery, the rotunda skylight was covered and internal lighting was kept low. And because some video works were as much about sound as they were sight, benches were provided. (In more than one visit, I found people lying on benches, just listening.)
All of these adjustments gave the space an improvisational feel. They make Frank Lloyd Wright’s design livable in a way I can’t remember before. They also create a sense of offbeat tension, as can unexpected behavior in a familiar place. And this tension filters through the shows installed in a more conventional manner in the off-ramp galleries. You find a certain art that you thought you knew, and the museum it’s in, looking a little less predictable.
The rotunda project began last March with a program of short videos from the museum’s collection, selected by performance and media curator Nat Trotman and projected on a large suspended screen. This was followed in May by a first screening in New York of films and audio works by Rwandan-born Dutch artist Christian Nyampeta, which transformed Wright’s great spiral into the equivalent of a lecture hall. university and a Pan-African video festival. The presentation was fascinating, a real gift of confinement.
The same was true for a live performance entitled “Romantic Songs of the Patriarchate”, orchestrated by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson and repeated over four days in early July. In it, two dozen singer-guitarists, all female and non-binary, were stationed along the ramp and performed old-fashioned pop love songs for hours. The singers were great; the songs, from Bruce Springsteen, Cat Stevens and Lil Wayne, sounded sweet, but – why hadn’t you noticed? – many words were deeply misogynistic.
And the current and final presentation of the project, “Wu Tsang: Anthem”, turns out to be another pandemic fluke. Curated by Guggenheim Assistant Curator X Zhu-Nowell, its main visual element is a looping short film directed by transgender American artist and performer Wu Tsang of another pioneering trans figure, African-American composer and activist Beverly Glenn. -Copeland, whose image is projected onto an 84-foot pleated curtain that hangs from the ceiling of the Guggenheim.
We first see Glenn-Copeland, who is 77, perform his own sung music, then sing an a cappella version of the witty “Deep River”. In both cases, her voice is woven into a sonic and instrumental tapestry created by Tsang and musical collaborators Kelsey Lu, Asma Maroof and Daniel Pineda. Swoony and supernatural in its visual and sound effect and one of the most moving things I’ve seen in this space, “Anthem” was commissioned by the Guggenheim as the lockdown began and ended just in time for this presentation.
Deana Lawson’s exhibit, housed in one of the many outlet galleries, is also supernatural, albeit in a very different way. Born in Rochester, NY, in 1979, Lawson is a combination of portrait painter and fabulist, documentary filmmaker and storyteller. His subjects are black; most of them are strangers whom she sees on the streets and in other public places during her travels in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and Brooklyn, where she lives. In collaboration with her subjects, she sets up paintings, usually in domestic settings, which combine sensual and disturbing glamorous details.
A naked and pregnant young woman at rest in the 2019 photo titled “Daenare”, taken in Brazil, wears what looks like a police surveillance monitor on her ankle. The woman, partly naked, possibly also pregnant, in “Deleon?” Unknown ”(2020) is lying face down with his eyes closed. She could be unconscious or even dead. And an older woman, all dressed in black, in “Monetta Passing” (2021), really is dead and lying undisturbed, surrounded by flowers, in a cluttered room. James Van Der Zee’s unforgettable Harlem funeral portraits immediately spring to mind here.
More and more, and openly, Lawson deals with spirituality: African, Afro-Caribbean, Afrofuturist. Images and religious references appear everywhere. The photographs are displayed in mirrored frames that send out prismatic halos floating across the gallery floor. At the center of the installation is the artist’s first freestanding hologram, a nugget of pulsating abstract light around which the show revolves, curated by Katherine Brinson and Ashley James. The paintings of some images are more staged than in others; some push, uncomfortably, towards the grotesque. But Lawson’s most memorable portraits have always walked a precariously thin thread on the politics of photographic privacy.
Politics of a different, more public kind is the theme of “Off the Record”, a group exhibition of 13 artists – from the collection of James, the museum’s associate curator of contemporary art – which challenges the much vaunted “objectivity” of journalistic reporting and historical “fact”. Here, the confusion of truth and fiction that Lawson’s work bluntly manipulates is also at play, but as a political weapon in the realm of commercial mass media and establishment record keeping.
In the show’s first play, “Herald Tribune: November 1977,” concept artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947-2013) visually edited a month’s front page of newspapers to isolate a recurring, though officially unrecognized, theme. : the prevalence of male violence. . In a series of prints titled “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008,” Hank Willis Thomas explores insidious truths at work in a racist advertisement. And, in an ongoing project, California artist Sadie Barnette reviews and annotates a 500-page FBI file on her father, Rodney Barnette, a former Black Panther, to expose the document as the instrument of harassment that he was. .
The show comes at the right time for the era of “fake news” denying the reality that we have lived. But even if artists can diagnose post-truth as a problem, can they do something about it, get the word out? At least one, Carlos Motta, born in Colombia, tries to do it in a text entitled “A brief history of American interventions in Latin America since 1946”. To do this, he compiled his own scathing timeline of government misdeeds, printed it out as a handout, and left a stack of copies to take in the gallery. Pick one. Read it. Pass it.
In most large general interest art museums, a mid-size show like “Off the Record” would be one item on a varied tasting menu, its arguments and urgencies overlooked when you move on to the next attraction. . (The roots of the museum of modern art are in the modern department store, and that model remains strong.) But at the Guggenheim, in its current pandemic-forced “experimental” mode, all exhibits feel politically bound. shared, including the little historical investigation titled “Knotted, Torn, Scattered: Sculpture After Abstract Expressionism”.
Organized by Lauren Hinkson, this is a snapshot of a late 1960s American movement – post-minimalism – sampled through the work of six artists: Lynda Benglis, Maren Hassinger, Robert Morris, Senga Nengudi , Richard Serra and Tony Smith. The work, made of rubber, strings and body, was considered innovative in its time, a thumbs up of minimalist monumentality. And the mini-survey has its own innovative features (for the Guggenheim).
Three of the six artists are women; and among them, two are African-American; and of these two, one, Hassinger, has only recently started, after a long career – she is around 70 years old – to gain the institutional attention it deserves. His piece in the exhibition was only acquired by the museum last year, and it’s a beauty: a graceful network of ropes draped at ceiling height that could serve as a dance backdrop. (She’s a performance artist as well as a sculptor.) And today, in a Black Lives Matter world, it’s impossible not to see that many of the lengths of rope she uses end in nooses. .
Black Lives Matter has definitely changed our cultural institutions. The Covid-19 and the disinformation campaigns surrounding it have also changed them. So in a way that has yet to be clarified, January 6th. There is no going back to an old “normal”. Art is not normal, if it is indeed good. I like to think of the post-containment Guggenheim, which is home to the city’s most charismatic art space, is a looser and less loving museum than it once was. We will see. Meanwhile, its summer lineup gives a taste of what could be.
The following exhibits are at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, (212) 423-3500; guggenheim.org.
Wu Tsang: Hymn (until September 6);
The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy (until October 11);
Off the Record (until September 27);
Knotted, torn, scattered: sculpture after abstract expressionism (until September 19).
[ad_2]
Source link