Tag Archives: New Museum

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.

A Schematic and Spiritual Early Abstraction: Hilma af Klimt

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Hilma af Klint in her studio, 1895

Swedish painter Hilma af Klint is pictured above at age 33, looking entirely comfortable in her studio space in Stockholm among figurative works and wooden furniture. This conventional photograph does not hint at her other body of work: large and dynamic abstract paintings that preceded work by such pioneers of abstraction in modern art as Kandinsky and Malevich. “The Keeper” exhibition, up at the New Museum through September 25, boasts a beautiful gallery with 16 of these audacious, tactile, spiritually driven exercises in expressing the nature of a godly reality through reduced line and color. They make a case for a kind of abstraction not encompassed by the story of a move toward reduction and simplification in response to an increasingly chaotic modern world.

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Installation view, “The Keeper,” New Museum, 2016

Af Klint was in fact trying to express a complex vision of the world. John Yau describes af Klint’s exhibition history and context wonderfully in this essay on Hyperallergic. Yau clarifies how the artist arrived at the mystic belief that “painting was the best medium for bringing the invisible or occult world into the visible.” Her readings in theosophy led her to pursue schematic illustrations in which color has distinct emotional valences (for example, blue represented masculinity; pink, spiritual love). As the image below suggests, af Klint’s works are tactile and imperfect, as if the artist was unconcerned with rigorous line for its own sake, but rather pursued form to make visible the underlying order she found in the world. Her abstract paintings were not shown publicly until 1986, writing her out the history of modernist abstraction that she pre-dated. Since then her work has been increasingly shown.

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The Swan, No. II, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

Why did Massimiliano Gioni and the other curators include these paintings in “The Keeper”? They don’t suggest an interest in preservation in themselves. Rather than small sketches or drawing diagrams on paper, af Klint choose to work in paint on large canvases, despite the fact that she did not show or sell these works as she did in her concurrent figurative practice. Instead, she preserved these works at home until her death in 1944. Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, also included af Klint’s work in the Central Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. At that time, he defended her mystic occultism, which to many people would separate it from art as such, saying:

“placing a work [of art] next to materials that are difficult to classify [such as af Klint’s], thus repositioning it in a narrative dimension, the reinterpretation of the piece is reactivated as both the trace of a personal experience and a different means through which to conceive our image culture. Thus the work of art returns to its former existence as a mysterious object charged with multiple meanings, and returns to presenting a view on the world.

…What really interested me was to reveal the mysterious and, at time, even mystical fascination with art….To escape from the definition of a work’s quality according to its market value. I believe it is essential that works are inserted into a discourse that embraces the entire system of images, including pieces that do not conform to the rules of the market”

—I Dream of Knowing Everything: An Interview with Massimiliano Gioni on the 55th International Art Exhibition, by Christina Baldacci (Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, 2013)

Perhaps one can interpret preservation more generously, in which case these images display a need of the artist to preserve a vision of inner reality of the world. Their size is impressive. Yet, the square format does not recall the human figure, as is sometimes ascribed to vertically oriented canvases. They remain removed from the human experience in their non-figurative imagery as well–for example, in the dynamic composition of radial swirls spiraling across a red background as in The Swan, No. 9 below. Af Klint also used recognizable elements at times, such as birds or astrological signs. In her hands, these elements serve a symbolic purpose rather than an attempt at illusionism.

The Swan, No. 9, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

The Swan, No. 9, Group IX/SUW, 1914-15

Af Klint’s paintings do an amazing job of unsettling notions of abstraction in art history and the role of mystic diagrams in high art. The paintings do not confirm to the rules of the market, certainly, but they don’t confirm to the story of high art either. I, at least, experienced them as powerful and challenging images. Even at the overwhelming Central Pavilion at the Biennale, af Klint’s few contributions exercised some kind of magnetic appeal. Seeing a larger group of her paintings at the New Museum now is rewarding, as they easily slip into the Modernist, white cube context but still resist clear categorization. It is touching to see the fragile application of paint and imagine the strange tenacity which drove a young Swedish women to create such unconventional works that operate even today on several registers.

Warped Histories: Goshka Macuga at the New Museum

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Detail, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not

What do a snake, curators of an international art biennial in Germany, and a destroyed Afgan palace have in common? Historically, very little. Goshka Macuga is known for weaving such disparate motifs together into photo-realistic tapestries that present semi-fictitious, complex narratives. “Goshka Macuga: Time as Fabric” at the New Museum presents several tapestry works, as well as the stage set from a video work, that highlight the performative and archival threads that undergird Macuga’s body of work.

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Installation view of theatrical environment of Preparatory Notes

The first thing the viewer sees stepping off the elevator at the New Museum is a quirky stage set featuring over-sized elements of pastiche, riffing on art history and politics (not unlike Jim Shaw’s Labyrinth... installed on the 5th Floor of the New Museum not so long ago). Like the tapestries, these backgrounds and props are largely black and white. Retaining this somber grey-scale palette from its photographic source makes an implicit claim to verisimilitude yet the objects and characters are blown up to absurd life-size proportions. Branches carefully prop up faces from a cast of characters ranging from Angela Merkela to the artist. Macuga has reinstalled this theatrical environment from a performance at the 8th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Preparatory Notes (2014). Video documentation of it is screened in the basement theater every Wednesday.

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Tapestry based on Tadeuz Kantor’s The Letter (1967)

Around the rest of the space, tapestries line the walls. They bring together intensely complicated visual–and thereby historical–manipulations onto a large scale. The tapestries, made in Brussels from large composite digital files manipulated in Photoshop, invoke a rich history. For example, Macuga, who was born in Warsaw, recreated Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s 1967 performance in Warsaw, then documented it, and made it into an enormous tapestry. As a medium, tapestries are outmoded wall coverings that once acted as important symbols of prestige and power, often used by rulers to tell stories about themselves. Here, Macuga uses the antiquated form to her own ends, shaping a story from the documentation of the recreation of a performance. This implicates her, and us of the contemporary moment, in the original performance. For the viewer, there is the additional pull of the fine weave and how artfully the collage registers as verisimilitude, almost seeming to be a large print rather than a woven textile until seen up-close.

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Detail, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not

Macuga’s Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not is one of two tapestries that the artist created in 2012 for dOCUMENTA. She showed one in Kassel, Germany and one in Kabul, Afganistan for the duration of the exhibition. The composition reflects these two strange dueling contexts. The destroyed Darul Aman palace in the background resembles a building in Kassel. Standing people in Western clothes (the dOCUMENTA curators) look at the sitting or reclining Afgan people in front of them. The Afgans seem to look toward the center, where an enormous snake, out-of-scale but convincing, raises its head and looks out a the viewer. If tapestry has a history of filling an political function, here the series of gazes points accusingly at the viewer. This vast panorama and impossible history laid out for the viewer suggests the warping of time and historical currents created through art to bring Afganistan and Germany, past and present, art and conflict into uneasy, unsustainable relation. Only through art can you attain that suspension of disbelief, or collapse of distinction, and I would say that the tapestry argues to questionable end.

Detail, The Lost Forty

Detail, The Lost Forty

Macuga creates thoughtfully warped views of history. For more information, a great article about the making of The Lost Forty on the Walker Art Center blog details the complex production of the composite image used as the basis for the tapestry. The Walker invited the artist to spent time in their archives, which led her to the position figures from throughout its history from its founder to herself in 40 acres of pristine forest nearby, the lost forty acres of the work’s title. The article gives a sense of how carefully Macuga creates these fictional scenes with such verisimilitude and historical perversity.

“Goska Macuga: Time as Fabric” is on view through June 26, 2016.