Category Archives: contemporary art

Female Guises: Suzanne Bocanegra at the Fabric Workshop

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Suzanne Bocanegra, Installation view of La Fille, 2018

Suzanne Bocanegra has filled the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia with tongue-in-cheek meditations on the nature of womanhood in an exhibition titled Poorly Watched Girls. The title derives from 18th c. French ballet La Fille mal gardée about a young girl who manages to evade her mother’s gaze to pursue an unsanctioned love affair. Bocanegra’s girls are often invoked presences rather than actual people, for example in the costumed mannequins of La Fille (pictured above), which conceptually restages the inspirational ballet, or in photographs of Catholic nuns (pictured below) in Dialogue of the Carmelites. The highlight of the exhibition for me is Valley, featuring simultaneous facing projections of women mimicking an off-kilter Judy Garland. Posing women in many guises, and many situations: romantic, spiritual, or otherwise, Bocanegra suggests the unstable and circumstantial nature of the female condition, something that can be created or discarded, not unlike a costume.


Suzanne Bocanegra, detail,
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018
Suzanne Bocanegra, detail,
Dialogue of the Carmelites, 2018

If La Fille is deliberately and campily theatrical in its plays on costumes and stage sets, the installation Dialogue of the Carmelites creates a more contemplative, intimate atmosphere. Dialogue of the Carmelites is a 20th c. opera, which in Bocanegra’s hands transforms into an installation of book pages from the 1955 edition of Guide to the Catholic Sisterhoods in the United States. Bocanegra has embroidered the pages, causing the nuns in their orders’ habits to look even more alien. A sound installation haunts the room with the phrase “when I am alone.”

Suzanne Bocanegra, Valley, 2018

Valley recalls two different kinds of valleys: the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, for which Judy Garland did the awkward screen test that is recreated here by different actors, and the uncanny valley. Garland’s screen test is notable because of the deeply uncomfortable way she inhabits the space, twitching and laughing awkwardly as she models four outfits. She was later fired from the film. By this point in her life, the child star had become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and the screen test happened only a couple years before Garland overdosed and died at the age of 47. Valley sets eight projections facing each other down a long room, with benches in the middle for the viewer to engage with the different clips.

Bocanegra brings together creative woman from across the arts to mimic the unfortunate screen test: visual artists Carrie Mae Weems and Joan Jonas, choreographer Deborah Hay, actor Kate Valk, poet Anne Carson, dancer Wendy Whelan, singer Alicia Hall Moran, and writer Tanya Selvaratnam. Chosen by Bocanegra as “strong women artists,” they act out Garland’s wardrobe test convincingly to the last second and detail, each modeling the outfits that Garland wore (and which were recreated by Bocanegra in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop). It places these strong women artists in the vulnerable position that Garland had found herself. The uncanny valley is often cited as the unsettling feeling one gets when AI veers too close to the human. Here eight shining simulacra of Judy Garland are similarly unsettling in the close way that their gestures echo each other as well as Garland. Bocanegra has created a hall-of-mirrors effect as we consider the slippery, insubstantial projections and their tenuous relation to the original subject, who for most people exists, then as now, mainly on the silver screen. Garland, like her impersonators, was also putting on a guise for the camera, albeit with hints as to the strain it caused her.

Suzanne Bocanegra, Valley, 2018

Each of these installations, as well as a fourth work on view (Lemonade, Roses, Satchel) stems from a specific touchstone full of rich associations and with its own storyline. Moving easily through medium and with beautiful attention to textural details, Bocanegra provides a provocative, heart-felt, yet light consideration of what it means to be a girl, in culture. The exhibition Poorly Watched Girls is on view through February 17 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Tableau of Human Existence: Marguerite Humeau at New Museum

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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

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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.