Raiding, Mining, and Resurrecting: Maurizio Cattelan at The Menil Collection
Maurizio Cattelan, "Untitled," 2003. © Maurizio Cattelan. Photo: George Hixson, Houston. Installation view, The Menil Collection, Houston, TX.
The current Maurizio Cattelan exhibition at The Menil Collection, Houston (February 12– August 15, 2010) marks the U.S. debut of recent large-scale works, site-specific installations, and four new works. Cattelan’s first solo show in this country since 2003 celebrates the artist’s return to sculpture after several years of publishing and curatorial work, including his 2002 co-founding of The Wrong Gallery in Chelsea, New York, his collaborations on Permanent Food (an occasional journal comprised of altered pages torn from other magazines) from 1996-2007, his co-editorship of Charley (a conceptual project and independent series on international contemporary artists) from 2002–present, and his curation of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006. The notion of revisiting to give new life–suggested by Cattelan’s own turning back to his past artistic practice –is provocatively carried through the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, Maurizio Cattelan: Is There Life Before Death? on a number of levels.
The exhibition consists of large-scale works first seen in Europe in 2007, along with recent sculptures, including works created in response to Cattelan’s site visits to the Menil that riff on the museum’s renowned Surrealist holdings. Organized by Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s former Curator of Modern and Contemporary art, the exhibition juxtaposes a range of objects–mostly from the 1960s and 70s–that Cattelan, in collaboration with Sirmans, selected from the Menil’s large permanent collection. They are suggestively installed to create conversations with the artist’s own new and recent works. This installation strategy trips up the typical arrangement of a solo artist show—an arrangement that, more often than not, isolates the featured artist’s work from examples of artistic predecessors and contemporaries in order to foreground the sense of an internal, exclusively personal, development.
Rather than confining Cattelan’s artworks to a couple of galleries, the exhibition has examples of the artist’s works sprinkled throughout, even on the Menil’s main building. Some are buried in the intimate recesses of Antiquities and Surrealist galleries, others are more visibly displayed, including Cattelan’s Untitled (2003), depicting a “drummer boy,” which has been relocated from its usual position atop The Rachofsky House in Dallas to perch coyly upon the roof of the Menil’s Renzo Piano building.
The Menil Collection: 20th and 21st Century Art as “Daily Companions”
“Art: Take it off its marble pedestal and show it as a daily companion, refreshing, human and rich: witness of its time and prophet of times to come.” – John de Menil
On the evening of Friday, February 5, the director of the Menil Collection, Joseph Helfenstein, and the Menil’s former curator of modern and contemporary art and new chief curator of contemporary art at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Franklin Sirmans, hosted a twenty-first century conversation about the Menil’s installation of twentieth century art. Discussing the philosophy informing the arrangement of the twentieth-century galleries, the two gave an overview of their choices while highlighting the significant divergence of the Menil’s collecting and exhibition strategies from other art institutions, like MoMA, that are committed to an encyclopedic overview and didactic presentation of the history of modernism.
The evening began in the entrance room of the Renzo Piano designed building (1982–86) where the dark wood floors, diffused lighting, and the surrounding park-like setting of the Menil offered a relaxed, contemplative environment for the approximately 100 visitors. After a brief introduction, the two led the visitors into the galleries where the artworks are, as Helfenstein pointed out, exhibited without the typical barriers that tend to prescribe the viewing experience and ensure that viewers never come too dangerously close to the art. Through a lack of didactic wall panels, docent tours, and audio guides, the institutional philosophy of the Menil Collection aims to allow its art objects to take the lead and withhold a sense of a single narrative direction. Helfenstein and Sirmans discussed how specific juxtapositions of twentieth-century and contemporary works–such as those by René Magritte and Robert Gober–generate visual and intellectual dialogues without making explicit connections or foregrounding any single concept.
Unlike MoMA, the Menil Collection is a considerably more intimate space to encounter modern and contemporary art and unlike that much larger institution, the Menil also has limited holdings in classical European modernism, specifically Cubism. Helfenstein frames these differences in terms of positive potentialities, drawing attention to the Menil’s exceptional examples of two alternative lineages, each of which weaves a significant path through modernism’s history. The first is a trend toward spiritual abstraction—represented in works by Piet Mondrian, Barnett Newman, and Bryce Marsden, among others. This impulse extends beyond the displays in the Piano building to the Rothko Chapel, resonates in the stunning Dan Flavin installation at Richmond Hall, and reverberates with the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. The second alternative Helfenstein identifies is what he refers to as figurative Surrealism, a tendency he aligns with a more political, activist impulse. This trend is reflected not only in the Menil’s rich holdings of Surrealism and non-Western art–specifically the arts of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Pacific Northwest coast–from which Surrealism drew considerable inspiration, but also in the examples of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Robert Gober.
The current exhibition of the work of Maurizio Cattelan (February 12– August 15, 2010) weaves its own unique way in and out of this Surrealist narrative, reflecting upon the Menil’s holdings, perhaps unraveling some preconceptions about several well-known works, and opening up multi-directional dialogues with other works in the Collection. In the next post, I will discuss this exhibition in relation to these issues.
Dan Phillips: Not Merely Vernacular, Pt. I
Dan Phillips, "Tree House," 2008. Courtesy of Phoenix Commotion.
As a northerner recently transplanted to the Greater Houston area, I admit to having reservations about all things Texan. I have found this a tough place to love at first sight. Yet, this particular region nurtures a unique host of fascinating figures and issues in contemporary art, along with sometimes frustrating contradictions and striking visual treats—including a wealth of handmade signs and arresting juxtapositions of natural beauty confronting the manmade. In this and subsequent posts as a guest blogger, I hope to sketch out some contributions to contemporary art made by the creators, institutions, and museum professionals who have chosen to either make their homes in and around Houston, or have come here to reflect upon the region in site-specific and installation projects. In the process, I will also reflect on some of the ethical issues in contemporary art that living removed from more established art centers has allowed me to better flesh out.
On my first trip to Huntsville, where I teach art history at Sam Houston State University, I was given a drive-by tour of several structures built by Dan Phillips and his Phoenix Commotion team. Intrigued by what I saw, I visited his “tree house” (where my colleague Annie Strader is the current tenant), and last December I invited Phillips to speak to my Contemporary Art class about his project. For the past twelve years, Phillips and members of the Commotion, including his wife Marsha, have been committed to building affordable and visually-distinctive housing out of largely post-consumption building leftovers, waste from the fabrication of industrialized materials (including “landscape timbers,” a plywood by-product), and other free or discarded materials. Examples of Phillips’s sustainable building aesthetic include: a roof made from recycled license plates, floors made from wine corks, an artist’s studio ceiling lined with salvaged picture frame samples, and a range of other less-than-perfect or blemished building materials destined for the landfill that have been recovered and put into unexpected, unanticipated use.
Since 1996, the Phoenix Commotion, a for-profit rather than non-profit organization, has completed thirteen structures in Phillips’s hometown of Huntsville. In 2004, Phillips, with the cooperation of the city, established a warehouse where recyclable building materials are donated, stored, and then accessed by charitable groups and low-income housing projects. To achieve their aesthetic and ethical goal of increasing the availability of out of the ordinary, low-cost housing in Huntsville, Phillips and his crew are not only building, but have also created an alternative infrastructure that enables materials typically considered building “wastes” or “leftovers” to be creatively reused by the community.
Weekly Roundup
James Turrell, "House of Light," 2000. © Photo: Kamome. Courtesy Echigo-Tsumari Triennial
- House of Light (2000), a permanent installation in Kawanishi, Japan by Season 1 artist James Turrell, will be open through September 14 as part of the 2009 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial. The mechanical roof of this popular accommodation facility slides back to reveal the changing light and colors of the sky through a rectangular opening. “In the interior space,” Turrell writes, “one can experience a soft transforming light” by way of “familiar Japanese idioms such as shojii (paper sliding door) and tokonoma (alcove).”
- The Miami gallery O.H.W.O.W. will participate in an exhibition at the Macro Contemporary Art Center in Rome next month by setting up a shop to sell their New York Minute Poster Pack. The bundle includes prints by Barry McGee (Season 1), Aurel Schmidt, Dan Colen, Chris Johanson, Evan Gruzis, Kon Trubkovich, Tauba Auerbach, Ben Jones, JD Samson, and the late Dash Snow. Read more on Slamxhype.
- Juxtapoz Magazine gives a sneak peak at Barry McGee’s installation for the 20th anniversary exhibition at the Armory Center for the Arts. The space, located in Pasadena, Ca., has commissioned 20 contemporary artists that they have worked with in the past, to make new site-specific art works both inside and outside of the Armory.
- Last year, Inhotim Contemporary Art Center in Brazil dedicated an entire gallery to Season 5 artist Doris Salcedo. On September 30, the Center will inaugurate nine new art commissions by Matthew Barney (Season 2), Chris Burden, Doug Aitken, Rivane Neuenschwander and five other artists. Barney’s De Lama Lâmina (2004-09) is situated in a geodesic dome within a eucalyptus forest. Read more about the recent commissions in The Art Newspaper.
- The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will be on view at the Columbia Museum of Art beginning October 23. This gift to the Museum by the New York collectors includes five works on paper by Season 3 artist Richard Tuttle, which are “considered to be among the seminal works of contemporary American art.”
- Pierre Huyghe (Season 4) is included in the exhibition and performance series Høvikodden Live 09 in Oslo, Norway. The annual Henie Onstad Art Centre event takes the interplay between different forms of art as its focus; this year’s curators investigate the voice as medium and metaphor. Concerts and other programs will take place in the galleries alongside static works of art.
- If you missed the Madison Square Park installation Flooded Chambers Maid by Jessica Stockholder (Season 3), you can see images and listen to the artist discuss the piece in a New York Times video.
