Category Archives: contemporary art

“The Forever Now” at MoMA: Death, Atemporality, and Zombies

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Installation shot with works by Kerstin Bratsch

 

Critic Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker dates the last contemporary painting show at MoMA to 1958, over 50 years ago. Which is to say, an exhibition of contemporary painting seems timely, if not overdue. Enter “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World,” an exhibition of recent work by 17 contemporary painters up through April 5. Yet reviews of the show are hardly celebratory. Instead, they ring a death knell.

Installation view of The Forever Now Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view including works by Oscar Murillo, Kerstin Bratsch, and Mary Weatherford, from left to right.

Schjeldahl writes of “dismay,” the “plight of painting,” and “crisis.” Thomas Micchelli, in his Hyperallergic review titled “The Death of Painting: All-New, 2014 Edition,” argues that the show affirms “the inability of painting to do anything surprising or new—aka painting is dead.” Schjeldahl, on the other hand, argues that painting is not dead, but rather that it has “lost symbolic force and function in a culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information.” Oh, well, great. From such statements, one can see why there have been no surveys of contemporary painting at MoMA. Painting is on its deathbed; somehow the medium has exhausted itself and is merely preparing to die, safely archived in the depths of MoMA’s warehouses where it can be brought out and examined as a historical curiosity.

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Installation view with Variable Foot (2014) by Matt Connors and Carlotta (2013) by Charline von Heyl.

However, if you visit “The Forever Now,” you might not glean that painting is dead–at least I didn’t. The works on view are big, bold paintings that are not afraid to embrace the medium and use color and size to declare their presence. Jam-packed as they are, they overwhelm MoMA’s space, and, unfortunately, each other. Sticking true to MoMA’s modus operendi to canonize taste, the show’s safe roster includes current art world favorites, such as the Germans Charline von Heyl and Kerstin Bratsch, Americans Julie Mehretu, Rashid Johnson, Mark Grotjahn, and Amy Sillman, and a new-favorite, the young (28-year-old) Columbian Oscar Murillo. Within them, there are some great paintings, and certainly a lot to talk about, but the curation fails to provide a good context for doing so.

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Nine canvases by Josh Smith.

More than review after review carping on the death of painting, what irks me most about the exhibition is its subtitle: “Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World.” “Atemporal” seems a vague, but much cooler way of saying post-modern, while avoiding the complex burden that using the much-debated P-word would entail. Curator Laura Hoptman took the word “atemporal” from Sci-fi writer William Gibson, who, per the exhibition catalog, “in 2003 used the word atemporality to describe a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” Sci-fi and the Internet would indeed provide a great context for a show of contemporary painting, but they are not strongly in evidence here. Hoptman glorifies the painting on view as zombie painting, half-dead and half-alive. While, again, the terminology is cool, the concept is thin, and all it does is reinforce the notion that nothing new can be done in painting (while presenting the acceptance of that as a new freedom).

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Installation view with three paintings by Mark Grotjahn on left.

“Atemporality” seems like purgatory, sentencing painting to the ennui of repeated gestures. But to freely use elements of art historical tradition does not have to equate to a death sentence, or even a half-death sentence. It is glib to say that these works are “atemporal,” that is, post-modern, and leave the relationship to the past with a mere reference to the Internet (capital “I”). Atemporality, zombies, and the Internet feel like a jargon-y sidestep that puts off dealing with what happens to art history when we discard the Modernist progress narrative and cult of originality. Certainly, of all places, MoMA could do a little better by the breadth of work being made today.

Chris Ofili at the New Museum

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An immersive, powerful experience of large-scale colorful canvases sounds like a step back in time to the New York City of the 1950s and ’60s, when color field artists like Mark Rothko were trying to paint a sublime experience. This retrospective at the New Museum of Chris Ofili, the British-born, 46 year-old painter, is neither abstract nor transcendental, but in new ways it suggests similar values of color and painterliness. The three floors of the museum feature works from throughout the artist’s career in this decadent and lush exhibition on view through January 25.

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P1160073P1160080The artist’s early provocative works with elephant dung, paintings from his installation at the British Pavilion done in the red, green, and black of the Pan-African flag, as well as a wall of watercolor portraits and a few choice (and for me surprising) sculptures are displayed roughly chronologically. These are all visually lush, intricately made, and well-worth a long look. What I enjoy very much about all the works in the exhibition is their merging of the figurative with the decorative in a way that, rather than eroding the content of the work, rather displaces it into a narrative realm of story and symbol. That is, rather than loosing content through the decorative and abstract–all highlighted by the colorful, wrought surfaces–new possibilities are opened up by it.

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Certainly, that’s something in itself. But what I most enjoyed was the artist-designed staging of the paintings on the third and fourth floors of the museum. I have some pictures of the fourth floor, a room of recent paintings from 2007 to 2014 displayed on a surprise of violet patterned walls that look like blown-up gouache by Gaugin. While the pictures hardly do it justice, you can at least get a sense of the overall effect: how the walls encase the paintings like velvet in a jewelry box and how the patterned surfaces play against one another in such a sensuous manner that the figurative elements within it remains slippery and suggestive rather than didactic.

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But for me the third floor held the most interesting experience. It’s also the most difficult to photograph. My photos of it, no flash allowed and taken in low light, all came out black, but I found one (below). Ofili designed a deep blue circular room to hang nine of his “The Blue Rider” paintings in. The paintings in this series, its name taken from the early Modernist journal in which Kandinsky preached his spiritual abstractions, are composed in deep shades of blue, apparently inspired by the colors of twilight and culture of Trinidad where the artist now lives.

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW via the New Museum's tumblr

Photo by Maris Hutchinson/EPW via the New Museum’s tumblr

Between the low light and dark colors it is difficult to see the paintings–but to great effect. Your vision adjusts to some degree. Only in walking around the paintings, however, was I able to make out the shapes as the light shifted on the surface. These paintings seem like spiritual and formal exercises in perception and the meaning of color on one hand, but, like all Ofili’s works, were not without content. Houses, people, landscape all glimmered out of the dusky twilight. The subject matter reference films, biblical stories, and scenes from everyday life in Trinidad as well as Ofili’s imagination. The difficult perceptual experience was highly rewarding as it forces the viewer to actively pursue the suggested narrative while moving around it. Rather than being distracting, it was provocative and elusive. And very beautiful.

Curating “do it UGA”

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Installation view

I had the chance to give a gallery talk last week about do it UGA, a show I curated with fellow art history graduate student Brooke Leeton at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and it gave me a chance to think back about the whole process. I first came across do it at a one-night event hosted by tranzit in Budapest; I was fascinated by the artists making food, drinks, drawing on walls, and dancing—all based on other artists’ instructions. do it is a curatorial project of Hans Ulrich Obrist who, beginning in the 90s, began to ask artists to write instructions by which other artists could make a work of art. The instruction-based art project has spawned many iterations around the globe, functioning as a kind of open-source, proliferating and ongoing project. Working off the 2012 do it: the compendium book, my co-curator and I asked seven artists to select an instruction from this collection of 200+ instructions by artists from Marina Abramovic to Franz West.

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One of the questions I was asked was about the amount of trust we put in the artists, as we planned a show with no idea as to how it might materialize until the very end. And in a sense, that’s true, and at times was a cause for anxiety. Normally, a curator might do studio visits and ask for specific works or pieces from a body of work to be shown. Not only were we not starting from objects, we framed the project to the artists as a way to step outside their normal practice and experiment. In doing so, I feel we were working better with the nature of the project: instructions-based art is totally different from the normal, self-driven approach to making and it offers a chance to play and reconsider process.

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Instructions might seem like rules, specific and limiting to creative freedom, and thus against the grain of art itself. On the contrary though, the works the resulted from this show speak more of interpretive freedom and the inevitable personal mark attached to things we make. We placed an orange photocopy of the instruction from the book next to the artwork interpreting it, so viewers could see for themselves both the starting and end points. In the photograph above, on the right, is a board with two telephones that connect to a total of six telephones, part of Courtney McCracken‘s installation that provides elaborate mechanics for communal performing of Stephen Kaltenbach’s simple instruction: “Start a rumor.” All of the works have a similarly interesting degree of separation from the instructions.

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Many of the works were performative in nature, and the presence of the artists during the opening helped activate the space and suggest the freedom to interact (that even got, rather gloriously, misinterpreted at one point as guests started drawing on the walls). Above is a photograph of a dance performance by Hilary Schroeder, following Joan Jonas’s instruction that begins “dance with a large piece of chalk.” Below is a photograph of Allan Innman, who created the beauty mark that accentuates both the wall of the exhibition and his own face, adding a bit of wry humor to the Beauty Marks instruction by Hreinn Fridfinnsson.

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A final performative aspect of the opening occurred when I and my co-curator picked up brooms and swept confetti “evenly distributing it along one wall,” to signify the end of our contribution to the show, Amalia Pica’s do it (party). This instruction appealed to us, because, as we rather cheekily say in the exhibition hand-out, throwing a party and cleaning up afterword is “curating in a nutshell.”

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