Category Archives: museum

Little Grand Canyon Yellow: Earth Pigments from Places

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Called Little Grand Canyon Yellow, this 1964 painting by Howard Thomas is hung next to a vitrine of small, re-purposed glass jars at the Georgia Museum of Art. The title of the work was intended literally. The artist made the yellow pigment from earth from the Grand Canyon. Perhaps it is not coincidental this painting preceded the earthworks of Robert Smithson and Ana Mendieta of the 1970s.  Although still on canvas, Thomas engages with site through the locally sourced pigment that are referenced in the title. The style of the work, however, rather than being a fragmented areal view, seems to me more like formalist play because of the  centered shapes bounded by the canvas, suggesting no expansive horizon, and the disjointed layerings that creates a tone-on-tone sense of motion or depth.

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The glass jars showing Thomas’s pigments have fascinating labels, like the one below labelled “Frat House.” What kind of painting might that have been used in versus the one above, I wonder.

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Spaceships: Vehicles to the Future, to Escape, to Utopia

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Before I got sidetracked by humorous Russian news of strikingly different varieties, I wanted to continue to talk about spaceships. Méliès’s 1902 Trip to the Moon worked like a canon. The spaceship available at the New Museum right now are of a much more technically sophisticated variety. Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module is a new exhibition on the fifth floor of the New Museum. The exhibition itself recreates the interior of the spaceship Ikarie XB-1, after the 1963 Czechoslovakian film of the same name.

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Above, stills from Ikarie XB 1, below interior of New Museum

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Between post-WWII and pre-1989, space could be an escape valve for countries of the Eastern Bloc, as they imagined Socialist utopias on Mars, reached through the inevitable progress of science and society. These fantasies were represented in science fiction films and novels, of course, but also reflected in the visual arts. The premise is fascinating. However, this thematic was only partially engaged in in the works on view, as the exhibition organizers, tranzit, also wanted to show their organization’s practice and growth in the Eastern European region. The show felt fractured because of that, and perhaps hard to grasp even if you didn’t know that was one of the aims of the show.

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But more unfortunately, information about the art was not well communicated. For example, detailed  information about individual artworks, usually handled via wall text, is not easily accessible. This would seem to be the natural result of the way the objects in one small room were piled on top of each other on shelves while the large room was given over to video. I  would have benefited from more than a laminated sheet identifying the title and artist of a work, which I could then match up to a newspaper containing the exhibition checklist to learn more about an artist. Certainly, the space is not large, but is this the best way to handle it?

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The largest room is given over to a single screen with five hours of mixed videos highlighting all the different efforts tranzit has made in the region. When new content appears the original title scene and opening credits are all you have to go on–not a lot of contextualization for what seems to be a broad base of material. Obviously, five hours is more than the average visitor will spend there, and there isn’t a way to view only segments of particular interest. Assuming this isn’t intentional mystification, then unfortunately this show does not unpack the treasure trove of materials, many never seen in the United States. More could have been done with much less. If you have the stamina to dig for information and/or wait, or perhaps just enjoy serendipity, then the exhibition certainly contains a lot of fascinating material. I just had more hope for the spaceship.

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William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time at the Met

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A recent acquisition by the Met, William Kentridge’s five-channel video installation The Refusal of Time is currently on display until late Spring. Like his work in general, I love it and highly recommend you go see it. It is drawing-based, as his work tends to be, intentionally rough to look handmade and refer to the process of making and artist himself. Kentridge makes an appearance as the artist, and orchestrator of this immersive video installation that harnesses both sound and movement to call on all your senses. While he does so, though, he locks you into the chairs screwed to the floor, so that your view is limited, and uses all the walls of the gallery so that it is physically impossible for the viewer to see it all. It becomes a manifestation of time and its refusal to be contained.

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There is a narrative, although despite having sat through it twice I couldn’t outline it for you. It involves, yes, time, but also colonization and South Africa, an implied romance, the proliferation of knowledge and the ambitions of man. Its crescendo and finale is an energetic march of silhouetted characters, who pump instruments, take showers, and dance to the inevitable and unstoppable march of time.

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Perhaps a solid criticism would be that Kentridge has matured into a recognizable style, with reoccurring motifs, and rather than innovate he uses his success to do more lavish versions of the same thing. A friend of mine argued that the essence of his work remains in the early drawings and films. Maybe that is true, but I think one reason people might distrust his work is because it is so enjoyable. There’s a sense that it can’t be “serious” or “good” art if the viewer can just lose themselves in the experience: that to do so is shallow. To my mind, that doesn’t do justify to a work that is slippery, unstable, philosophical, and complex even while it lulls you into pleasurable viewing.

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