Installation view, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., January 28–May 13, 2018
Read my new review “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” Levels the Playing Field in Burnaway Magazine. I saw the Outliers exhibition at the National Gallery of Art this past spring, and it opens today at the High Museum in Atlanta. The exhibition is truly exciting for the myriad ways it offers to unravel the modernist canon, opening up rich possibilities for a new understanding of American modern art.
“Outliers and American Vanguard Art”—from the title, it is not immediately clear that this exhibition reconsiders art often referred to as outsider, visionary, or folk, in order to examine its relationship to the development of modern art in America. Curator Lynne Cooke chose the term “outlier” to counter the dismissive or limiting connotations that previous descriptors have taken on. It also stakes out a theoretical position. “Outlier” suggests that an artist’s distance from centers of institutional power can create space for different goals or values. The exhibition debuted at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this spring, and opens on June 24 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, a museum known for its strong holdings in self-taught artists from the South. Comprising some 250 works — with slight variations between the venues — the show opens up the definition of American art, from the beginning of modernism to today, and challenges familiar notions of what modernism can look like.
Installation view of The Last Resort, 2017 by Anri Sala. 42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers; 58 min. 28 sec.
When you step into the Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th street, you walk into an open room carpeted in soft grey and hear low music. Entering further, you see 30-odd snare drums installed on the ceiling, seemingly playing themselves to a Mozart concerto being broadcast in the space at the same time. A soft but dramatic light shines up and across at the reflective drumheads, which reflect back the grey of the carpet. There is a quirky joy in the upside down, mechanical drummers and a beauty to the classical adagio that almost seems like sleight of hand, keeping hidden the concept that led artist Anri Sala to create the piece, called The Last Resort.
Installation view of The Last Resort, 2017 by Anri Sala. 42-channel sound installation including 38 altered snare drums, loudspeaker parts, snare stands, drumsticks, soundtrack and 4 speakers; 58 min. 28 sec.
The Last Resort is more complex than it seems—it consists not only of 38 snare drums, but a 42-channel sound installation in which the drumsticks respond to the vibrations emanating from the speakers. The specific piece of music is an adagio from Mozart’s Clarinet concerto in A major. The concerto was written at the end of Mozart’s life, just before the English colonized Australia, and it incorporated a new instrument, the clarinet. Commissioned and first exhibited in Australia, Sala was thinking not just of the Enlightment-era politics that surrounded it when it first was played, but its physical and temporal journeys since then. Sala altered Mozart’s composition based on a journal by a passenger on a ship from England to Australia in 1838, letting his copious notes on the wind during the voyage replace Mozart’s tempo indicators. In this way, time replicates a journey in the work. The press release states:
Sala wanted to imagine how a fictional journey through the winds, the waves, and the water currents of the high seas would affect a musical masterpiece of the age of Enlightenment; what would become of Mozart’s Clarinet concerto if it were to float and drift like a message in a bottle.
A lovely analogy, which, to me, begs the questions: does that message becomes blurred or lost along the way?
Sala’s body of work has been described as examining supra-linguistic forms of communication through installations with moving image and sound. Such a description fails to indicate the gentle humor and homage to beauty that envelop his complex ideas and forms; he has a great talent for synthesizing, so much so that an underlying complexity might go unnoticed. At the same time, the work is indeed supra-linguistic, in that he tries to convey big ideas without words, or perhaps as if they were beyond words. The title The Last Resort suggests a kind of desperate hope—that the message in the bottle may indeed reach anyone, that the music transformed over time still makes sound even while reception is not guaranteed. It suggests a belief in the permanence of the thing over time and in the sea change it must undergo, perhaps also implying the wreck of Enlightenment dreams such as reason, nation, and the colony.
Installation view of Anri Sala at Museo Tamayo; September 6, 2017-January 7, 2018.
I had the pleasure of seeing a solo exhibition of Anri Sala at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in December. A few similar drums made an appearance there, forming a coda to five film and video works that explore the relationship between music, politics, and social space. There was a similar emphasis of an experiential level of hearing, as if to get at the nature or texture of sound itself. Why the mechanical operation of the drums? Whose unseen hand is at play, animating history across time? To me, the hand is the anonymous forces that shape our histories and our cultures, a turning away from the solitary genius of a Mozart and toward broader collective movements.
Anri Sala, If and Only If (pair), 2018. Film still milled on wood textile printing stamps
The exhibition includes a new video installation and three objects by Sala in addition to The Last Resort. The viewer encounters a room featuring reliefs by the artist before coming upon Sala’s new video If and Only If at the end of the corridor. The forms of a snail and a bow—protagonists borrowed from the new video—are carved into vintage wooden plates. These relatively simple sculptures translate new and immaterial footage into a seemingly weathered object that suggests fossilization and age.
If and Only If charts a musician playing a viola with a snail on its bow. It is a sumptuous experience—the light, the wood of the instrument, the sound of Igor Stravinsky’s Elegy for Solo Viola as it is played, the slow movement of the snail. The narrative, if it can be called that, is the snail journeying up the length of the bow. The violist Gérard Caussé and the garden snail are caught up in an intimate dance, both in movement, both slightly disturbing the movements of the other as they go about their own tasks. The snail’s presence intervenes in the musical score, lengthening the time it normally takes to play the piece. Like the position of the drums on the ceiling in The Last Resort, the effect is absurd. It is also affirming to watch the expertise of Caussé humbly account for the path of the small and common snail, evoking a harmony of relations between the civilized and natural world that is admittedly precarious, brief, but beautiful.
Anri Sala, If and Only If, 2018. 2 channel HD video and discrete 4.0 surround sound installation, color 9 min. 47 sec
Pablo Helguera, O gran Tlatoani, aqui esta el plan de arte publico, 2009
The exhibition Monuments, anti-monuments, and new public sculpture opens with a joke: Pablo Herlguera’s Artoon about a fictitous pre-Columbian ruler’s plans for a new monument ends with the punch line: “public art is not for the public but for the government.” A healthy skepticism runs throughout the exhibition at the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City, whether looking back at the optimistic modern sculptures erected along the 1968 Ruta de la Amistad for the Olympics games in Mexico to a critical reappraisal of the monument among a later generation of artists across Latin America.
Helen Escobedo & Paolo Gori, exhibition copies from Monumentos mexicanos. De las estatuas de sal y de piedra, 1980
A selection of photographs from a photo book published in 1980 introduces the turn toward critical reappraisal of monuments in public space. The black-and-white images of public sculptures across Mexico suggests their plethora and diverse contexts. In the range of historical figures represented, it also begs the viewer to question the history that it represents: why these men (and they are mostly men), and why these moments from Mexican history? Looking at their dynamic, impressive poses in a serial fashion, one after the other, each becomes less individually powerful. It creates the impetus in the viewer to question the root of society’s desire to memorialize personages who are tied to conquest, now-defunct political parties, and war as well as the manner and style in which the statues are made.
Exhibition view of models for the Ruta de la Amistad
The ambitious project of building monumental sculptures along the Ruta de la Amistad in Mexico City is represented here through models, photographs, and a 1970 dance video with Raquel Welch dancing in a space-age bikini in front of the sculptures. The ebullient tone of the colorful models and the gyrating dance both speak to a hopeful future. The different ways of learning about the Ruta de la Amistad show not just the sculptures, but their reception and later their fall into neglect. Care of public sculpture can easily become a monumental task as well.
Installation view with sculpture by Juan Fernando Herrán and photographs by Iván Argote
As the show broadens out, into the present and beyond Mexico, curator Pablo León de la Barra asks us to rethink the real and symbolic occupation of public space in Latin America. Occupation is a key word for these countries with their colonial histories. Juan Fernando Herrán’s series A Thousand Heroes is represented here with a rough wood base for an absent sculpture. Its function, to subvert the basic mechanism of power on which such monuments rely, speaks to the particular context of the artist’s native Colombia. Many of Colombia’s 100-year-old statues were imported from Europe, so that its nation-building project was made through the techniques and hands of its colonial masters. At the same time, Herrán’s empty pedestal speaks across that particular history to any society where heroes and leaders are absent from memory. Two photographs by Iván Argote, from a series called Turistas, likewise questions the stone leaders of Bogota. Argote photographed sculptures of European leaders, carved in western attire, wearing traditional ponchos. Below, Christopher Colombus points south, but the gesture is hollowed out by the poncho he is wearing. The colors of the poncho echo the colors of the graffiti that has accumulated at the statue’s base.
Iván Argote, Christopher pointing out the South, at Bogata, 2013
Across the course of the show, the optimism of the massive modernist sculptures created for the Olympics in Mexico city in the late ’60s gives way to criticality and suspicion in several works that consider the destruction and movement of monuments. The shows ends on a political jab, bringing the monument, or a satirical reversal of it, into the present moment with a grotesque plaster form of a florid Donald Trump laying on the floor. Created by a collective of Puerto Rican artists in the past year for an exhibition at Proyectos Ultravioletas in Guatamala City, Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, Melvin Laz, and Rafael López use the opposite of the glory and power of the monument by putting a form of the current U.S. president on the floor, shirt unbuttoned over a protruding gut, tongue sticking out. It is titled Bad hombre.
Installation view featuring Radames Juni Figueroa, Melvin Laz, and Rafael Lopez’s Bad hombre (2017)
