Letter from London: The Eighties Revival
Julian Schnabel via the Times Online
The new thing at Tate Modern, three rooms of mainly huge paintings from the 1980s, is timelier than it knows. These works are taken from the UBS collection, the investment bank that has funded the rehang of the Tate Modern permanent collection. As part of the deal, excerpts from UBS’ massive collection of works of art from the 50s to today are to be intermittently displayed to—this from the UBS website—”complement and strengthen the gallery’s own permanent collection.” UBS performed a similar feat in 2005 at the then just-opened MoMA in New York, displaying a large number of mainly huge paintings as the inaugural show in the top-floor exhibition spaces (to, it has to be said, a largely negative response). Now, not all of UBS’ collection consists of mainly huge paintings; it’s just that mainly huge paintings have of late taken on an unexpectedly affecting archaism, even anachronism. I walked around the three rooms of the display as though in a hall full of dinosaur bones. I overheard people saying, “Whoa – are those plates?” and “God, that’s a lot of paint,” much as kids say “Is that its head?” and “That was really alive once?”
It’s fatuous fun to play connect-the-dots between these stegosaurian remnants of a flush decade and the art of our own recent history, substituting Koons, Hirst, and Murakami for Paladino, Penck, and Salle. Yet there’s no doubt that textbooks written on the art of the pre-recession 2000s will use either a bejeweled skull, aluminum puppy, or Vuitton bag as its symbolic cover image. It’s also probably too much of a cheap shot to mentally relocate these vast works back to the boardrooms and corner offices in which they and works like them formed a splashy backdrop for billion-dollar deals. It’s not the art’s fault that it’s become, in the popular imagination, as inextricably linked with an idea of what the 80s were like as precipitous shoulderpads and stonewashed jeans. Potted versions of history hinder really looking at things, and art can’t be held responsible for its provenance nor be made to epitomize its epoch—one marked not by uniformity but by multifariousness in all strands of culture. All periods of time are cursed by history, doomed to be distilled into a succession of single moments, and the 80s always gets off worst. The UBS website neatly sums it up as “the decade of greed, hostile takeovers, rising share prices, and junk bonds.” Mental images are great for theme parties but a little misleading when it comes to art, and the 80s, more than any other decade, survives as a series of embarrassing stills, like a slideshow of a bad holiday.
The 80s revival of expressionistic painting must be the most maligned of all moments in art history. Its patron saint, Julian Schnabel, has managed to about-face his career to such an extent that new audiences will discover his output in reverse, which many people would say isn’t such a bad thing. Schnabel has received, and continues to receive, a critical kicking for his perceived (ok, actual) arrogance about the importance of his work, most notably from Robert Hughes (he still refuses to discuss Hughes, as seen in his tantrum on 60 Minutes recently). The Tate is showing Schnabel’s Humanity Asleep from 1982, one of the works in the display owned by the gallery, and almost certainly the first time it’s been dragged out of the storeroom since about 1986. (The works in the show owned by Tate—Christopher leBrun and AR Penck among them—were all acquired within a year of their making, perhaps to recompense for the timidity of British art buying in the first half of the century, and have rarely been shown since then). Humanity Asleep is a massive (get used to it) painting on a plane of smashed saucers, showing the head of fellow artist Francesco Clemente alongside an unidentifiable other floating on a raft beneath a hovering St. Michael. The reference to classic history painting (the raft/The Raft) is of a piece with the historical brassiness of its time. It’s an unlovely painting that doesn’t aim to be loved but to be as awesome and dynamic as a wall-sized Gericault. And it is exciting to look at, in a kind of irrefutable muscular way: it’s a piece of self-mythologizing on a par with Matthew Barney, taking as its source the flotsam of a restless historical memory. It’s a bit facile to see the shards of crockery as representations of the fragmented modern consciousness, as Schnabel apologists often do (regurgitating that TS Eliot quote every time). What Schnabel is doing is not introspective and “irony-inflected” but energetic and assertive, giving painting a workout, telling it to get down and give him twenty. I nearly did.
The show’s big flaw is its lack of any work by female painters, the few figurative painters of that time whose star appears not to have waned, at least not as dramatically as those of their muscle-flexing male counterparts. The absence of work by Susan Rothenberg, Ida Applebroog, and Elizabeth Murray leaves a gaping hole in the show’s claims to encapsulate its time, giving it a lopsidedness and portentousness that would have been leavened by these artists’ more tentative and playful approaches. Clemente’s hilarious 1984 Self Portrait—a portrait of the artist as pensive troll—does lighten the load somewhat, and Enzo Cucchi’s fiery Leone dei Mari Mediterranea from 1979-80 sets a beaming masklike face (a Demoiselle on a good day) hurtling over a tiny green horse in a boat on a crimson sea. It’s a piece of whimsical myth-making told with a fluttering brush that’s a world away from the ham-fisted Sandro Chia on the opposite wall. What they share, though, is an urgency: to reassert painting’s role as supreme storyteller, something rarely found within the avant-garde tradition.
Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the show takes a reductive approach, slotting these wildly divergent artists into a historical continuum as though all of them swore a solemn oath to react against minimalism by asserting the creepy-sounding “artist’s hand.” The brochure for the show (no catalogue, sadly) claims that “what these artists share, in spite of their age and geographical differences, is their reaction to the art that dominated the preceding decade…minimalism and conceptualism.” The UBS collection website sums up the work along similar lines: “Turning against minimalism, the eighties see a return to more expressive forms of art.”
The dialectic of action/reaction is the dominant one in discussions of 20th-century art, and it makes all artists look like angsty teenagers trying to wind up their parents. Of course, the physicality of painting—and physicality is very much in evidence here; it’s a bit like going into a gym after Christmas, all mad sweaty grunting—can be just as conceptual, just as ideas-led as anything hands-off and self-consciously intellectual produced under the banner of conceptualism. It’s an old argument, which goes back to da Vinci’s paragones, his sniffy separation of making and thinking which values ideas over production. And it’s one that dominates our (still) post-Duchampian expectations of what art should be about (a standpoint held in place by institutions like the Tate), which leaves artists who assert making and telling somewhat in the shade. It’s also what makes them worth looking at, now of all times.
Save Us from Ourselves (Making a Mess)
Elizabeth Murray, "Empire," 2001 watercolor, 18" x 7 1/2" x 1 3/4"
I’m not very religious, but just the other day I was “given” a prayer that somehow spoke volumes about life, the life of teaching, and the life of artist-educators. Eleanor Roosevelt recited this prayer each night before she went to sleep:
Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of the world made new.
Now I’m not sure how religious Eleanor was, but each time I read it, it says something new so I hope you’ll enjoy it over the next week (month? year?) and perhaps pull from the words some of the reasons we’re all here in the first place—we love what art can be; we revel in the new classics; we love investigating possibilities and big questions; we believe every subject is major; we value multiple literacies; we love discovering ways of doing things and not necessarily the way. Somehow, if we are able to share and teach this in the classroom, we might even get to the beginning of spring and feel like we’re in pretty good shape.
Elizabeth Murray once described her process and said,
You’re posing problems for yourself. It’s kind of like a battle of you against you, and you are trying to figure it out. And that’s when it gets painful, when it’s not coming together. And I have no idea how I am going to bring it together. It starts to feel like a mess. Like, I’ll think I have it and I’ll change one color and instead of it being the solution it becomes this big mess.
Teaching about contemporary art and the desire to make contemporary art with others involves enjoying making a mess, actually loving the mess, and seeking even more.
Expanding the Definition(s): Some Days Are Easier Than Others
Many thanks to those who have helped get the Teaching with Contemporary Art column off to a smooth start! Recently, a few friends and colleagues have mentioned (even e-mailed) about the fact that, well, while Season 4 of Art:21 has won quite a few prestigious awards, the selection of artists chosen can be difficult to transition into the classroom. As educators, how do we get our collective heads around teaching with Season 4 artists such as Mark Dion, Alfredo Jaar, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Laurie Simmons? These aren’t artists that lend themselves easily to K-12 or university-level curriculum, particularly if the course is production-based. How can artists like these, as well as artists such as Ann Hamilton (Season 1), Martin Puryear (Season 2), and Fred Wilson (Season 3) help us work with students in our classrooms?
First… they can help us redefine and expand on what art is and what it’s becoming in the 21st century. There aren’t too many neat little projects that fit perfectly with what some of these artists do, but the segments and related materials on art21.org help us work with students to consider new possibilities for subject matter and ways of working with traditional and non-traditional media. These segments can inspire writing in the classroom just as well as Elizabeth Murray may inspire students to paint in new ways. They can be the catalyst for spirited debate much like Trenton Doyle Hancock can act as a starting point for understanding cartooning or how artists develop/illustrate alter-egos. Mark Dion can teach about the relationship between art and ecology, as well as blurring the line between artist and curator. Alfredo Jaar can teach about public art and how contemporary art often needs a particular setting much like a great work of fiction. Ursula von Rydingsvard teaches how an artist today can create work that relates to landscapes, the human body and psychological states… sometimes simultaneously. And Laurie Simmons can teach that there is a difference between photographers as artists and artists that use photography as a tool.
While it’s hard to incorporate the ever-increasing number of artists that can meaningfully inspire and help guide students, it’s hard to NOT include artists that will help them open up definitions and engage in dialogue about what art is and what constitutes an artist to begin with. Bringing these artists into discussions and/or socratic seminars in the art classroom can have surprising and wonderful benefits. Is it easy? Never. Some days are easier than others. But it’s always worth it. I can tell you stories…..
Image: Untitled Hot Glue Drawing by Karyl DelMundo
MATRIX/REDUX at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of the MATRIX exhibition program with a year-long series of events, beginning with MATRIX/REDUX (on view through July 6). The MATRIX format—spontaneous, flexible, small-scale, and short-term—was “key to engendering experimentation on the part of both the artists and the institution, resulting in a mix of exhibitions that defied categorization and kept Berkeley at the forefront of international contemporary art,” according to the BAM/PFA website.
MATRIX/REDUX samples from the history of this important program with selections from the Museum’s collection and loans from local collections rarely seen by museum audiences. Included in the exhibition is Crèche (1997), a group of bronze fox, deer, bats, mice, rabbits, and owls, created by Art21 artist Kiki Smith (Season 2). Past participants of the MATRIX program that have also been featured by Art21 include Louise Bourgeois (Season 2), Alfredo Jaar (Season 4), Elizabeth Murray (Season 2), Susan Rothenberg (Season 3), and Richard Serra (Season 1).
2007: a brief recap
2007 was a landmark year for many Art21 artists. Apart from the accolades and prizes bestowed upon such artists as Kara Walker, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jessica Stockholder, Kerry James Marshall, and Cai Guo-Qiang, the multitude of exhibitions featuring Art21 artists reflect the pinnacle stages in many of their careers. While this is an achievement in its own right, we wanted to mention some of the other critical kudos recently published in print and online.
For Robert Ayers of ArtInfo.com, the two sculpture retrospectives organized by MoMA last year, Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years and Martin Puryear (on view through January 14), are the fourth and fifth best shows of 2007. “Having already visited [Serra's] show several times, I actually cancelled all of my plans for its final day so that I could see it one last time,” writes Ayers. About Puryear he notes that the artist, “proves himself here a magician of forms that sit happily at the intersection of abstraction and representation and a poet of implied and suggested appearances and meanings.”
As previously cited in December, the top ten exhibitions of 2007 for Time’s Richard Lacayo include those of artists Richard Serra (#1), Vija Celmins (#3), Martin Puryear (#5), and Kara Walker (#6). For Howard Halle of Time Out New York, Serra’s show at MoMA is one of 2007’s best. “Serra put the me in heavy-metal postminimalism, but in this retro of curving labyrinthine slabs, he put you and I and just about everyone else in there, too.” remarks Halle.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the writers from 24 Hour Museum (to be renamed Culture24 this Spring) have their own opinions. Jon Pratty, 24 Hour Museum’s Editor and Head of Content, selected the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at Tate Modern as his top pick. For Pratty, this show (on display through January 20) “was the first in a long time I have seen bringing to life the peculiar talent, skill and craft of a true artist. Everything in her show had been chosen by her, crafted by her, formed by her. It was really inspiring.”
On a more somber note, 2007 sadly marked the death of Season 2 artist Elizabeth Murray, who passed away on August 12. But as Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in the New York Times, “her paintings will be with us for years and years to come.”
In Memorium: Elizabeth Murray
It brings Art21 great sadness to announce that Elizabeth Murray, a featured artist in Season 2 of Art in the Twenty-First Century, passed away yesterday, August 12, at her home in upstate New York. She was 66 years old.
Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A pioneer in painting, Murray‚Äôs distinctively shaped canvases break with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two-dimensions. Jutting out from the wall and sculptural in form, Murray‚Äôs paintings and watercolors playfully blur the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects. Her still lifes are reminiscent of paintings by masters such as C√©zanne, Picasso, and Matisse; however, like her entire body of work, Murray‚Äôs paintings rejuvenate old art forms. Breathing life into domestic subject matter, Murray‚Äôs paintings often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables. These familiar objects are matched with cartoonish fingers and floating eyeballs‚Äîmacabre images that are as nightmarish as they are goofy. Taken in as a whole, Murray‚Äôs paintings are abstract compositions rendered in bold colors and multiple layers of paint. But the details of the paintings reveal a fascination with dream states and the psychological underbelly of domestic life. The recipient of many awards, Murray received the Skowhegan Medal in Painting in 1986, the Larry Aldrich Prize in Contemporary Art in 1993, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award in 1999. Her work is featured in many collections, including the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective of Murray’s work when the museum reopened in 2005. She also currently has artwork on view in the current Venice Biennale.
Elizabeth Murray is survived by her husband Bob Holman, the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club, their daughters, Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman; her son, Dakota Sunseri of Los Angeles; a sister, Susan Murray Resnick of Taos, N.M.; a brother, Thomas Murray, of St. Marys, Ga.; and two grandchildren.
Read the full New York Times obituary here.
Watch clips from Murray’s Art in the Twenty-First Century segment here.
