Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Artists

Menil Repurposes Sacred Space For Contemporary Art

When the Byzantine Fresco Chapel at the Menil Collection in Houston opened in 1997, it displayed a group of 13th-century Greek Orthodox frescoes. But after restoration of the works, which the Menil had rescued from looters for the Church of Cyprus, the museum returned the frescoes to Cyprus as a donation when the agreed loan expired in 2012.

ByzantineChapelMuseumSo what to do with that chapel (at right), which has now been deconsecrated? The Menil has commissioned a year-long installation from the team of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet has been a hit wherever it is installed, but especially when in 2013 it was place in the Cloisters’s 12th-century Spanish chapel, as the first work of contemporary art ever to be shown at the Met’s medieval art branch.

So perhaps this was a natural. The duo, says the Menil release:

will fill the now-deconsecrated space with a sonic and visual experience inspired by ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras’s concept of “the music of the spheres.” This theory that the movement of celestial bodies creates harmonies has recently been corroborated by scientists. Visitors will hear an audio collage including recordings collected by the NASA spacecraft Voyager when monitoring the interaction of solar winds and Earth’s ionosphere. Because the ions vibrate within the range of frequencies audible to the human ear, it has been possible to convert their resonances into sounds, which will become part of the aural experience. Among the objects suspended in the mobile will be an array of mirrors and a small player piano.

The Chapel, meant as a sacred space, will from now on house these long-term, contemporary installations, the museum said. This one, I hope, will be more like Forty-Part Motet than like Cardiff’s Murder of Crows.  We will see on Jan. 31, when it opens.

 

 

Mass MoCA Closes In On Its Original Promise

“It’s really exciting to see a lot of the promise of that project being realized,” Michael Govan told me the other day. I was telling him that, tomorrow, the Massachusetts Museum of Contempory Art plans to announce six new partnerships with artists and artists’ foundations that will fill 90,000 square feet. That’s a huge chunk of the new space being renovated in the expansion that I wrote about in August for The New York Times.

TurrellMass MoCA’s new partners are big names: James Turrell, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, plus the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Easton Foundation of Louise Bourgeois, and Bang on Can, which is handling the late instrument maker Gunnar Schonbeck. And Govan, now director of the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, was there at the creation of Mass MoCA, along with Tom Krens, who usually gets credit for the idea, and Joe Thompson, its first and only director.

I write much more about tomorrow’s news in an article posted a short time ago on the website of the Times, headlined Vast Space and Art to Fill It: Mass MoCA Partners With Major Contemporary Artists. It will be in tomorrow’s paper.

With these partnership, Thompson has taken Mass MoCA a turn away from its early years–when it curated its own exhibits and usually commissioned or helped create new artworks on site. But these partnerships, which are not common and may be unique, or close to unique, seem a sound way for Mass MoCA to expand at low cost.

For its first two partnerships, with Yale Art Gallery and the Hall Art Foundation–for exhibitions of art by Sol LeWitt and Anselm Kiefer, respectively–Mass MoCA incurred little added costs, mostly things like security. The YAG and the Hall picked up the other costs.

Mass MoCA is cost-sharing on three of the new deals–with Rauschenberg, Easton and Bang on a Can. Turrell will donate one or two works–they are site-specific. But Mass MoCA plans to raise money for the Holzer and Anderson installations, and most of Turrell, too.

The slight danger here for Mass MoCA in displaying such masters is that it loses its identify as an “art factory,” as the headline on my summer article put it so well.  It will still curate its own exhibitions–in fact, that aprt of the museum is gaining space too.

“It was always posed as an alternative place, not trying to be a regular museum,” Govan said. On the other hand, he added. “Mass MoCA was always supposed to be flexible and to be changing with the times, and it is.”

 

A Few Differences With the Met Re: Madame Cezanne

Not me, of course. I haven’t seen the exhibit Madame Cezanne, which opens next Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum*–though you can bet I will get there soon. Seeing  twenty-four of the MCin aRed Dressartist’s twenty-nine known portraits of his wife Hortense sounds inviting to me.

…the exhibition explores the profound impact she had on Cézanne’s portrait practice.

The works on view were painted over a period of more than twenty years, but despite this long liaison, Hortense Fiquet’s prevailing presence is often disregarded and frequently diminished in the narrative of Cézanne’s life and work. Her expression in the painted portraits has been variously described as remote, inscrutable, dismissive, and even surly. And yet the portraits are at once alluring and confounding, recording a complex working dialogue that this unprecedented exhibition and accompanying publication explore on many levels.

…the portraits attest to the constancy of a relationship that was critical to the artist’s practice and development.

Yet Susan Sidlauskas, a professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, still takes issue with the Met show. She says that Hortense Fiquet has for too long been a divisive figure to art historians, that she has been unjustly vilified her for her non-muse-like qualities, and that her role in art history is more important than she receives credit for.

Sidlauskas wants publicity for her 2009 book, of course, but while I don’t see that much difference between her and the Met, I guess she adds some details about Hortense. In a Q&A conducted by Rutgers, for example, she says, of Hortense:

  • She was possibly a bookbinder by trade and thus occupied a considerably lower social rank than Cézanne, whose father owned a successful bank….Believing the relationship would jeopardize the financial support he depended on from his father, Cézanne kept her secret and lived in a separate residence. The couple married 17 years after they met, likely to legitimize Cézanne’s son for inheritance purposes. The irony is that Cézanne’s father knew about their relationship the whole time.
  • Traditionally, art historians have emphasized Hortense’s irrelevance to the artist, and her own self-absorption. To this day they like to tell the story – never proven – that she missed seeing Cézanne on his deathbed because she had to keep an appointment with her dressmaker.
  • …Cezanne’s portraits of Fiquet were not conventionally attractive. They did not conform to the prevailing concept of a “muse” to the male artist of genius. If they were not conventionally pretty, they should at least be erotically appealing. To our eye, Fiquet was neither. She has been much maligned for her regrettable lack of conventional beauty, her sour disposition and her failure to smile – a refusal to ingratiate that many writers have considered her most damning offense.
  • Fiquet was a crucial presence to Cézanne. He needed a subject to whom he was attached but who was not of his flesh…She historically was assumed to possess a personality so nondescript that Cézanne could project whatever he wished onto her. I am convinced that the reverse is true: that in this prolonged series of portraits, it was precisely her physical presence, her quietude and containment, that allowed the painter to fully experience a visceral and perceptual engagement in the presence of the other.
  • Everyone thinks that it was Picasso who revolutionized portraiture, but these nontraditional depictions of a woman show that it was Cézanne, nearly 20 years earlier.

More here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Rutgers

Early Word On “Mr. Turner”–Movie, Good; Art, Bad

Not too long ago, I was in a movie theater when up came a preview for a film called “Mr. Turner,” which would be J.M.W. Tuner to RCA readers. I checked it out and discovered that it was set to open today (Oct. 31) in Britain (after being shown at at Cannes) and in the U.S. on Dec. 19. Early word: it’s good.

2014, MR. TURNERThe movie focuses on the last 25 years of Turner’s life, up until his death in 1851. Rated R, it’s described this way:

Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies. Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty.

Turner is played by Timothy Spall; other art world luminaries in it include John Constable (James Fleet), John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) and Sir John Soane (Nicholas Jones). Here’s the trailer.

I checked the British papers, and the Telegraph gives it 5 stars, saying:

…Leigh’s film is a supremely enjoyable biopic of the English artist known as “the painter of light”… Timothy Spall…gives the finest performance of his career to date… beyond the troughfuls of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human, which has the effect of making his artistic talents seem even more God-given.

And here’s a teaser about the art:

The painting process, though, is very different: Leigh shoots it in a way that it sometimes resembles an occult ritual.

 The Guardian also gives it 5 stars.

…Timothy Spall is JMW Turner! He is the triumphant star of Mike Leigh’s richly and intensely enjoyable study of the great artist’s final years.

…Mr Turner is funny, humane and visually immaculate, hitting its confident stride straight away. It combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep, and a lyrical gentleness pervades each scene, tragic or comic. Every line, every detail, every minor character, however casual or apparently superfluous, is absolutely necessary.

And he adds:

Since Mr Turner first appeared, the Late Turner exhibition at Tate Britain has established a new context for watching the film, encouraging us to see his later canvases as something other than proto-modernism, or a late Victorian variation on a Romantic theme. Their almost narcotic grandeur is Turner’s own: a transcendental refinement of the natural world, somehow existing in both the age of steam and the medieval world’s cloud of unknowing….

But Andrew Wilton, chairman of the Turner Society and a trustee of the Turner’s House Trust. has quibbles. As a movie, he thinks Mr. Turner is “a deeply moving and beautiful film… but it’s not quite the Turner I know.” He later says:

Spall went to great lengths to get his drawing and painting right, and sort of succeeds. He misses the crucial point, though: that Turner was a miniaturist by temperament. He made innumerable watercolours on a tiny scale, compressing astonishing amounts of topographical and atmospheric detail into them, and the sketchbooks he took with him on tours usually function in the same way. If you look closely at his oil paintings, you find them equally detailed.

Wilton may be right–we can all judge in December–but I do think that’s asking a lot of a movie made for general audiences.

Turner has never been a favorite of mine, but I still want to see this movie and I still hope it bring more people to art.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of AllStar via The Guardian

ArtPrize: The People And the Jury Pick Same Winner

-1e78abae0ca8f699In a remarkable development, the Grand, No. 1 ArtPrize–the open, two-track competition in Grand Rapids–went to the same artist: Anila Quayyum Agha’s entry was chosen by both the public and a jury of art experts. Her piece, called Intersections, uses light to project Islamic imagery in shadows.  Or as she wrote:

…the geometrical patterning in Islamic sacred spaces, associated with certitude is explored in a way that reveals it fluidity. The viewer is invited to confront the contradictory nature of all intersections, while simultaneously exploring boundaries. My goal is to explore the binaries of public and private, light and shadow, and static and dynamic by relying on the purity and inner symmetry of geometric design, and the interpretation of the cast shadows. The form of the design and its layered, multidimensional variations will depend both on the space in which it is installed, the arrangement of the installation, and the various paths that individuals take while experiencing the space. The Intersections project takes the seminal experience of exclusion as a woman from a space of community and creativity such as a Mosque and translates the complex expressions of both wonder and exclusion that have been my experience while growing up in Pakistan. The wooden frieze emulates a pattern from the Alhambra, which was poised at the intersection of history, culture and art and was a place where Islamic and Western discourses, met and co-existed in harmony and served as a testament to the symbiosis of difference….

Alltold, ArtPrize winner this year were awarded $540,000. and Agha, who teaches drawing in Indianapolis, took home $300,000 of that. There’s asterisk, however, because the experts–Susan Sollins, Leonardo Drew, and Katharina Grosse–split their Juried Grand Prizem and gave half the $200,000 prize money to a piece called The Haircraft Project by Sonya Clark.

-7d3bf733b3cecf88When ArtPrize announced a change in this year’s contest, namely that the public prize and the expert prize would be equal in size, it also said “ArtPrize hopes to amplify and expand the conversation about the differences and similarities in the public’s and experts’ opinions.” I thought that was a good thing. I did not anticipate that the two would be decide the same, but that is far from a bad thing.

More than 41,000 individuals cast votes in this year’s contest.

The Grand Rapids Press has the story, with slides, and also a series of about 30 photos of Intersections, and it’s well worth a look. Interstingly, Michigan Gov., Republican Rick Snyder, who after months of suspense thankfully helped save the Detroit Institute of Arts during the ongoing Detroit bankruptcy case, showed up at the ArtPrize awards in Grand Rapids. Of course, he is in a race to continue as governor, and it was a good place to campaign. Still, there were probably other good places to campaign last week, when the prize was announced.

Here’s a list of all winners.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Grand Rapids Press