A Cosmopolitan Synthesis of Form: Jack Whitten at the Met Breuer

My review of the Jack Whitten exhibition at the Met Breuer is up on Burnaway Magazine:

As is recounted in the epic Homeric poem, it took the Greek hero Odysseus ten wandering years to return home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. The exhibition “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017,” on view at the Met Breuer in New York through December 2, similarly presents the artist’s life as a personal voyage and widely cosmopolitan journey. Born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama, (famously known as the home of self-taught artists including Thornton Dial, Ronald Lockett, and Lonnie Holley), Whitten became a civil rights activist as a young Black man growing up in the segregated South. Until his death at the beginning of this year, he lived in New York City and regularly spent time in Greece. “Odyssey” brings together forty of Whitten’s sculptures—which have never been assembled in such a large number and presented publicly—deftly merging associations with African American history, African sculpture, and Greek mythology. Whitten is known as New York-based artist who brought politics and history into conversation with abstract painting, but here it is his deeply personal wood carving practice that enriches how we can see his better-known paintings.

Keep reading here, and make sure you go see Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017 before it closes this Sunday, December 2.

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Tableau of Human Existence: Marguerite Humeau at New Museum

Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Now on view at New Museum are ten amorphous sculptures that recall both the Venus of Willendorf and Brancusi, highlighted on ledges and shelves built into the irregularly shaped exhibition space. Raking light and the contorted space direct the viewer into the immersive environment of Birth Canal, the first museum presentation in the U.S. of work by French artist Marguerite Humeau. What is not seen but which carefully envelops the viewing experience is a custom scent called Birth Canal (Venus body odour), The scent of the birth of humankind (2018) and a ten-channel sound installation titled The Venuses envision the extinction of their offspring, humankind (2018). The titles themselves frame an epic story about birth and death rooted in both anthropology and fiction.

Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

If the individual female body is the physical site of generation, here Humeau posits the female writ large as the primogeniture of mankind. There is no male presence. To be human, here, is to be female. The exhibition spins a tale about how humankind developed, an imaginative invocation of a scientific theory that early humans ate animal brains for their psychoactive effects. Humeau based her work on anthropological research from around the time that early humans were making venus figurines, like the famous Venus of Willendorf statue, whose function is debated. One possible function of ancient Venus figurines—or these more cerebellum-shaped, glossy sculptures by Humeau—is to guide the experience a person has in an altered state.

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The titles of the sculptures likewise guide the imagination of the viewer. Venus of Hohle Fels, A 70-year-old female human has ingested a sloth’s brain in brown alabaster, Two-Headed Venus, A 25-year-old pregnant female human and herself as a 90-year-old have ingested as tortoise’s brain in bronze, Venus of Kotenski, A 35-year-old female human has ingested a marmoset’s brain in pink alabaster (all 2018) specify individual narratives behind each form, although nothing as literal as a sloth or marmoset is represented. While we are told the statues are different female forms, they look only vaguely anthropomorphic: metaphors for the human rather than representations of the human. The descriptive titles of the venuses recall the displays of an ethnographic museum, as if these sculptures were actually ritual objects that had survived thousands of years. Yet the digitally rendered quality of the sculptures, with their gorgeous high-polish, machine-made curves, are strikingly of out sync with what was technically possible for early humans. The theatrical environment with its black walls and spotlights, and the sound and scent that work affectively on the viewer, also dispel the impression of a scientific history.

Installation view of “Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” at New Museum, September 4, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Like a synthetic Greek chorus, the voices of the sound installation wail about the extinction of their offspring. While the voices speak of death, a scent like a new-born baby diffused throughout the space invokes birth. They help to elevate the tableau to a metaphor or parable: the voices foretell a possible extinction of humankind itself, even while the scent drives home viscerally the lived experience in all its first sweetness. And, I would argue, the way time works in Birth Canal forces us to see Humeau’s work as a metaphorical tableau that speaks beyond specific histories, real or imagined. The dark environment where the Venuses float as if in a void enables the metaphorical tale to creep over your sight, smell, and hearing as your body melts into the darkness. It creates space for a kind of disembodied consciousness, perhaps exactly what is needed  for the viewer to feel akin to early humans, who might have been in an altered state in a cave with similar figurines. Stepping outside time is essential. Humeau cites an ancient ancestor and the scope of humankind’s existence, conjuring up a huge sweep of geologic time in the mind of the viewer. Yet the vision itself is distinctly futuristic. The sculptures are too glossy. The haunting, almost screeching artificial wails approximate the human but do not bear the trace of actual human voices. Outside of the teleological existence of humankind (that, as a member of the species we exist within), the viewer smells the beginning and hears the end all at once, past and future combined.

The undifferentiated sweep of time and the disembodied environment creates a porous and evocative space for a set of ideas about the human and the animal, time and existence, magic and science. In that sense, Birth Canal invokes the kind of the totemic guidance that venus figurines may once have held.

Marguerite Humeau: Birth Canal” is on view at the New Museum through January 6, 2019.

Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Pregnant Sarcophagi at Storm King

Installation view with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Yellow Abakan (1967-8), in the exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction on view at The Museum of Modern Art April 15–August 13, 2017

The career of Magdalena Abakanowicz arced from imposing rough textile sculptures of the 1960s to figurative sculptural groups in the 1990s and on. The first work I encountered by the artist was Yellow Abakan, a hanging sisal work from 1967-8 in the galleries of MoMA’s exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction in 2017, the year she died. A representative work from this period of her career, abakans (a shortening of the artist’s last name) are woven constructions hung on the wall or suspended from the ceiling whose folds, gaps, and layerings evoke the body, particularly the female body. Abakanowicz turned to textiles in the ’60s. It was a less regulated medium than more traditional fine arts in Soviet-dominated Poland, and such works could be rolled up for easy storage in her limited space. Abstract, dominating masses, they were difficult to situate at the time because they stake out a dramatically different artistic realm from the proscribed Socialist Realism. Over the course of her career, Abakanowicz expanded her practice from textile works to sculptures in other materials, and from the abstract to the more clearly figurative. A work by Abakanowicz on permanent display at Storm King rests between these two poles.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.

Recently, among the bright angular sculptures that populate the meadows of Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, I came across the low-lying, reclusive set of glass and metal enclosures that make up Sarcophagi in Glass Houses. Sited on low ground in a meadow surrounded by trees, the work is less prominent than many of the monumental, vertical works by Alexander Calder and Mark Di Suvero. Sarcophagi in Glass Houses is a 1989 work by Abkanowicz that the artist installed on Storm King’s grounds in 1994. Four glass houses enclose beetle-shaped structures made of rough, dark wood. The horizontal masses suggests great weight, in opposition to their light container. From a distance, I mistook them for greenhouses. Up close, the glass merely encircles the over-sized objects that fill its interior space. The wood tombs have rounded lids that seemed to have been sealed over something, implying a body. Yet, like the abakans, the scale exceeds the individual, magnifying the human form into something grander. The secluded site and its superhuman size create the sense that I had stumbled across something otherworldly and powerful.

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The unusual shape of the sarcophagi comes from an arms factory in France that Abakanowicz worked with the early 1980s. In her examination of the factory’s equipment, she discovered a large engine part that reminded her of a belly. Abakanowicz used the engine as a model for these half-barrel shaped oak pieces with curved edges. Both an engine and the female belly are sites of generation. Here, the evocation of a pregnant belly as a site of generation and power is restrained here by the glass and metal shell, which both protects the work and contains it. And while the form evokes birth, the title of the work suggests burial and death. What is created is a state of suspension.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.

Abakanowicz began working with metal in the late 1980s. The glass and metal structures of Sarcophagi in Glass Houses were built around the wood coffins on site. The Storm King Art Center Archives has some great photographs of installing the work and of the artist with the work. The glass suggests preservation, like an insect in amber. It also introduces the idea of display and viewership. Access is only possible through the clear glass—this remove from the tactile sensation of the rough wood tombs heightens a sense of reverence. However, the focus is still on the objects inside, the hulking masses that evoke pharaohonic tombs more than modern graves, as the title “sarcophagi” suggests. Yet nature and the weather have entered, with dirt seeping onto the concrete floor and visible degradation of the wood. Wood, like the body itself, decays over time. Sarcophagi in Glass Houses becomes a memento mori on the grounds of Storm King, reminding us that time claims the ultimate power over life and art.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, 1989. Wood, glass, and iron. 8 ft. 6 1/2 in. x 17 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 143 ft. 3 in.