Category Archives: MoMA

Skeletons and Masks: Ensor at MoMA

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Light, pure colors are floating, happy things until they are paradoxically combined with death. Then the light intense red become hysterical as it floats about carpets, drapes and fruit. Belgian painter James Ensor‘s works is many things, but above all he is hard to classify. Rubens, Van Gogh, William Blake, Breughel, el Dio de los Muertos, William Hogarth, Carnival and its masks…

I was swimming it an otherworldly sea of comparisons when I went to see the exhibition at MoMA yesterday. Here are some of them:

Here he poses as the Old Master painter Rubens, in a flowered and plumed hat, beginning the process of his self-fashioning, in which he gradually becomes a tormented artist plagued by thoughts of death.

Early works; Ensor’s The Drinker’s next to Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters

In these later works, both artists have shifted to pure pigment in bright, crowded interiors. Ensor has added himself as a skeleton in The Skeleton Painter.

The Fireworks doesn’t share the Biblical theme that some of Ensor’s harder to find images do with Blake, but it does share a simplicity of composition that is elemental and wondrous.
Although its hard to see the details here, Ensor’s Baths at Ostend is swarming with cavorting tiny figures rather like earlier Flemish painter Breughel’s Maypole Dance, which also takes a large, contemporary social scene as his subject before imbuing it with meaning.

You might have noticed, Ensor likes his skeletons up walking and talking or here, Skeletons Warming Themselves by the Fire. This sort of celebration of death among the living reminds me of El Dio de los Muertos both in the skeletons and the colors.

The irony of the former scene descends to pure satire in Ensor’s The Banquet of the Starving. Although the British artist William Hogarth’s The Humours of an Election was lampooning a more specific occasion, the two shared a minute dedication to attacking social and political systems.

And everywhere in Ensor, along with skeletons, you find masks. A theme throughout his life, inspired by the novelty store he lived above his whole life, here the masked people crowd around Death in Masks Confronting Death. Much good may it do them.
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On through September 21 at MoMA, check it out and see what connections you can dream up.

Scattered Things in MoMA’s Atrium: Song Dong and Martin Kippenberger

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I was looking for Performance 4: Roman Ondak, above, which MoMA tucked away on the 2nd floor without telling any of the staff, but instead was struck by another opening. Beijing-based Conceptual artist Song Dong has taken over the atrium of MoMA with a sprawl of things. Things is the best word I have for the old furniture, shopping bags, stuffed animals, plastic containers, etc. that cover most of the floor.

(Note: I’ve always held a steely reserve against conceptual art; for an artist to focus on the idea behind the work above the physical form it takes strips away the very essence of the visual arts. It’s like visual philosophy that downplays the visual…but I digress…)

I was talking about Song Dong at MoMA. So my first thought on seeing the new atrium?

Martin Kippenberger.

See what I mean?

Song Dong’s objects, above left, are smaller and more plentiful, but you can see the same line of chairs and carefully ordered lines of ready made furniture in both her piece and Kippenberger’s piece, above right. Both look like they had fallen out of an especially providential hurricane–the human hand and organizing principle behind them are removed enough to render them obtuse if you don’t know the story behind them. (In Kippenberger’s case, perhaps even if you do.)

Except while Kippenberger’s amalgamation left me coldly bemused, I found this ragtag assortment of anything and everything old and worn rather moving. Even poetic in its row upon row shoes. It reminded me of New York City streets. Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ seems shiny and calculated in comparison.

And that was my thought process before I read the story behind Song Dong’s work. The objects are actually the contents of her mother’s house. After the death of Song Dong’s father, her mother took her habit of not wasting anything to extremes. This exhibition was a way of letting go, both of the items and their grief. Fueled by this knowledge, the objects become more emotionally loaded the more you look at them and register the number of useless items. Knowing the story certainly changes the way you view the piece, but what impresses me most is how much was communicated by simply looking at the piece before I knew any background.

So perhaps Conceptual art can have visual integrity and I’ll have to revise my opinion. Perhaps. If you have the chance to see it, I’d love to know what your reaction was.

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Ravels in Review Friday

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Here we are again, two weeks into June and no sign of the rain letting up. Rain, rain, rain….

Anyhow, what did we talk about this week? Looks like we were all over the place.

  • No consensus was reached over a top 200 artist list by the Times. (No Surprise there).
  • My formula for how to destroy a cocktail party or create change looks like art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page.

This constant rain is especially annoying as I was going to go get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park this morning. Now I have a conundrum. Not only if I should wait in the rain, but is the performance going to get rained out? Alas, our frailty is the cause of such concern, as Viola would say, and I think I’m go find an anarok and trudge out there.