One-Way Street

Fun Friday

At the end of every week my family has "Fun Friday," an evening of pizza, popcorn, and movies. My kids are age two and five, so the movies are invariably animated and the pizza cheese only. (I make a pizza with grownup toppings for my wife and me.) In the spirit of Fun Friday, here are some tasty items for your own Fun Friday.

Michael Hulse, who translated Herta Müller into English, says the 2009 Nobel Prize winner may be obscure, but not to everyone everywhere. Only four or five of her novels have been translated into English, yet all of them have been translated into Polish, for instance. Shamefully few novels are translated into English, Hulse says, and the ones left behind are usually dismissed as too difficult or too culturally specific. He also argues that since English is the most international of languages, it should disseminate works from less widely-spoken languages (Swedish, Estonian, etc) through translation.

Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's biography of the Gilded Age architect Grosvenor Atterbury has just appeared. (Buy here, read about here.) Atterbury apprenticed at McKim, Mead & White, where he learned how to design houses as a long series of rolling bays sheltered by a deep shingled roof, a prototype of the McMansion style. He was also the architect for Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, developed as part of the Garden City movement: curving streets, green parks, compact lots, mixed housing types.

Alain de Botton has a weakness for tough-minded philosophers. He introduces La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the 17th-century book that gave the French their taste for philosophical reflection. La Rochefoucauld's brand of bracing skepticism is laid out in forceful, sometimes sardonic aphorisms. He was equally unsentimental about helping others ("We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others") and falling in love ("There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard that there was such a thing").  

After abandoning the cinema for years, Peter Greenaway is back with J'Accuse, a Dan Brown-style examination of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. (A still from the film is at top.) Greenaway argues that a murder has been committed before our eyes in the painting, and all 34 characters in the painting are suspects. If J'Accuse isn't playing at a theater near you and you've never seen a Greenaway film, for your own Fun Friday watch Drowning by Numbers (1988) and/or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) for a good introduction to his work. But send the kids to bed first.

Announcements:

Half Gallery in New York City will hold an opening reception for its Ry Fyan show on Monday, October 26. Details here. (At left: Fyan's The Reasons I Can't..., [2009])

Guernica magazine, a terrific art and politics journal, will host a Guernica at 5! benefit on Wednesday, October 28 in Brooklyn. Among those making an appearance are Jonathan Ames, the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, and the 3-piece band Brazilian Girls (only one woman, and no one is Brazilian, in case you were wondering). Details here.

The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO will hold a Portraits Exhibition starting November 6 and ending on the 28th. The exhibit is juried by Mary Ellen Mark. Among the 2,500 images from seven different countries on display is a portrait by Whitney Yeager, a talented photographer who also happens to be my sister-in-law. Her contribution is at left.

Metropolis magazine has issued a call for entries for its 2010 Next Generation Design Competition. The theme is One Design Fix for the Future. Come up with one design for an object that will have a positive positive impact in the future and you could win $10,000.

Speaking of competitions, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture won the competition to design Rotterdam’s Stadskantoor, a multi-use municipal building in OMA's home town. Reinier de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas designed the proposal. De Graaf says, "Rather than posing as the city's next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right."

The Optical Unconscious

As I mentioned in my last post, it's commonplace to argue that at some point in history--maybe when MTV debuted--we lost the ability to tell the difference between the image and the world, between the real and the artificial. Writing in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin was working with an older opposition, one derived from György Lukács, between first nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of thunderstorms) and second nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of the global economy). Benjamin was also highly influenced by Surrealism, which, like Lukács' theory of reification, asserted our view of reality is clouded by a faulty rationality. We don't prefer the artificial to the real because we're simpletons duped by the irresistible lure of the image, but because we've reshaped our reality so totally and so perfectly that we no longer recognize it as our own.

This is why Benjamin admired the work of the early 20th-century photographer Eugène Atget, a favorite of the Surrealists as well. Atget wasn't naive, but he saw himself as a tradesman making a living photographing ordinary street scenes in Paris. Oftentimes his photographs had no people in them, a motif that fascinated Benjamin and the Surrealists. (That's Atget's "Coin de la Rue Valette et Pantheon" [1925] above.) Before Atget, the human face and body were the primary subject matter of photography. Atget banished people from photography and with them the last vestiges of cult value in the medium. His photographs of a deserted Paris were like the scenes of a crime, Benjamin noticed. Atget's photographs provided no ground for contemplation. They were signposts, but without direction. The everyday objects of ordinary experience were revealed as strange and unsettling. In this way photographs acquired the first traces of political significance, that all was not as it appeared at first glance. To control meaning, captions became necessary for the first time. As Benjamin put it in "Little History of Photography" (1931), Atget "looked for what was unremarked, a forgotten, cast adrift.  And thus such pictures . . . work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship."

Later, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) Benjamin made a similar but more sweeping claim about the cinema. A different nature presents itself to the movie camera than to the naked eye. Instead of being something we enter into unconsciously or vaguely, in film we enter nature analytically. While a painter lovely caresses the surfaces of nature, the cameraman chucks a piece of dynamite at it, then reassembles the pieces:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

A movie camera can be mounted on a speeding locomotive, dropped down a sewer, or secreted in a valise and carried surreptitiously around a city.  The camera reveals aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. Film changed how we view the least significant minutiae of reality just as surely as Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life changed how we look at incidental phenomenon like slips of the tongue. In other words, film serves as an optical unconscious. Benjamin asserts the film camera "introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."

In Benjamin's lifetime photographic and cinematographic technologies improved dramatically, thus widening the spectrum of visual experience that can be caught on film. The idea that improved technology can expand our sense perception and make the unconscious visible continues today. Digital video has improved to the point at which an entire television series can be devoted to the filming of ghosts. 

Perhaps one day we'll have a revelatory film made from an iPod Nano video camera. More likely, though, we'll continue to get snippets of little kids doing allegedly cute things and locker-room peep shows. In either case, the result will probably get dumped into YouTube and forgotten. For all his bold assertions about the potential of rapidly evolving photographic technology, Benjamin equivocates at the conclusion of his Artwork essay. Film presents a whole new world to the masses, but the masses aren't necessarily paying attention. "The public is an examiner," he writes, "but an absent-minded one."

The Distracted Gaze

Generally when you hear people referring to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" essay, they talk about how the mass reproduction of artworks allows them to be placed into different contexts, thereby changing their meaning. This isn't a bad summary of the Artwork essay, but there's a lot more to it than that. Benjamin's main subject in the essay is the cinema.

As I discussed in my previous entry, Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of artworks. Aura lies in the perception of distance, that a work of art is somehow mysterious and remote. Reproduction literally and figuratively brings art closer to the masses. Because a reproduction doesn't carry with it the sense of being in the presence of artistic genius, and because of the sheer wealth of images in the mass media, no one really contemplates a work of art anymore.  One pages through a book about Florentine art of the Renaissance, but the experience is nothing like seeing the Mona Lisa in the context for which it was originally created.

Reproduction disperses the image to the masses, who absorb it in a distracted manner, as one of a number of images. Benjamin noted--remember, he was writing in 1936, before the society of the spectacle was fully in place--that the masses have come to prefer an artificial reality to the real one. It's now commonplace to argue that we can no longer distinguish between the real and the artificial because of the sheer wealth of images in contemporary culture. However, Benjamin differs from this line of argumentation in that he claimed that the preference for images over reality came from the distracted manner in which people in modern societies take in their world. Reproduction has created a new sensibility, the desire "to pry an object from its shell," which is the mark of a perception that sees "the universal equality of things." 

Virtually since their inception, the movies have been denounced as mere entertainment for people who simply want to be distracted. Contemplation and the ability to make fine distinctions are reserved for elite tastes. Benjamin counters this opposition by asserting that film opened up a whole new way of perceiving reality (I'll expand upon this point in my next post). He also claimed that moviegoers identify with the camera, making their point of view that of a critic. Popular cinema is crafted to make everyone who sees it an instant expert. The masses may react negatively to Picasso, but they love Charlie Chaplin because he fuses visual and emotional pleasure for an audience that's an expert in the cinema. The lower the social significance of an art form, the more an audience can mix criticism and enjoyment.

This isn't to say that movies don't have their retrograde aspects as well. Whenever people try to argue film is an art form, Benjamin points out, they ascribe ritual qualities to it. One example is the entire phenomenon of the cult film, which developed in parallel with the concept of the cinephile. Auteur theory has left us with a pantheon of film geniuses, from Howard Hawks to Martin Scorcese.  Hollywood studios compensate for the cheap reproducibility of their product by creating a cult around the movie star, "the phony spell of a commodity" as Benjamin puts it.

Since Benjamin's day movies themselves have succumbed to the universal equality of things. Watching a movie in a darkened theater uninterrupted from beginning to end is becoming increasingly rare. Movies are now everywhere, packaged with additional features on Blu-Ray disks and vying for disk space with MP3 files on an iPod. We watch movies in a distracted state, watching a movie and, at the same time, something else as well.

Movies have adjusted themselves accordingly, dispensing with distinctions large and small. The title character of The Dark Knight constantly struggles to remain in the foreground of the image as the settings alternate abruptly between a gleaming post-industrial metropolis and a grimy, ink-strained industrial city. His opponent is both maniacally focused and a bundle of tics and neuroses. Batman loses the fight against the criminal underworld and the overwhelming phenomenon of the city itself, eventually disappearing into the murky, confused world in which he lives. At the conclusion of the film, it's as if Batman had never existed. Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla is a compendium of tough-guy gestures grafted onto a plot that threatens to lapse into incoherence. There are no good guys or bad guys in the film because we know the genre so well we can dispense with such crude distinctions. All we really want is tough guy poses, and that's all we get, one after the other, immediately and all the time.

Stay tuned for more on the Artwork essay.

Art and Aura

I've been talking about one origin of cinema from the Paris arcades. To continue that line of thought I'd like to consider Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), perhaps his best-known and most enduring work. The Artwork essay is one of the foundational works of film theory. Its contribution to cultural studies is immense. John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing is directly indebted to Benjamin’s essay.

Benjamin traces the history of art, which for him is not only a means of creating a beautiful object, but also a means of perceiving the world. Originally works of art had a role in ritual. Beginning in the fifth century, art began to shed its cult value in favor of display value. The beautiful object continued to have a religious function until the Renaissance, when the semblance of divine perfection began to be secularized into a cult of beauty. According to Benjamin, the Renaissance was the first crisis in the history of beauty.

Whether an artwork was a representation of the divine or the perfect embodiment of the ideal of beauty, the power of a work of art resided in its uniqueness in time and space. Michelangelo’s Statue of David was originally displayed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of secular power in Florence, so the statue’s meaning was entirely tied up in the larger glory of the Florentine city-state.

We now know Michelangelo’s David through its endless reproductions, but in the sixteenth century the statue retained its aura, which Benjamin defined as "the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be." Anyone who visits the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, where the David now resides, can see how the statue retains some of its auratic power. Even though it’s one of the most familiar objects in Western art, the experience of viewing the actual statue is nevertheless enchanting, evident in the hushed mobs circle it respectfully.

But seeing the David in a crowded museum isn’t the same as seeing it in a Renaissance piazza. Much of the attraction of the statue is that it’s the original of a series of copies. Artworks have always been inserted into different contexts with entirely new interpretations, and it’s always been possible to copy an artwork. However, the invention of photography in the nineteenth century introduced a form of reproducibility that, for the most part, destroyed the auratic properties of art.

The nineteenth century saw the second great crisis in beauty. For the first time, it was possible to make a more or less perfect copy of an artwork and distribute it on a mass scale. It was no longer necessary to travel the world to see great artworks. They were suddenly everywhere and available to anyone. During this time there were attempts to turn paintings and sculptures in mass viewing experiences in the manner of the world exhibitions and the proto-cinematic technologies like the panoramas, but the attempts failed. In reaction to the decline of aura the l'art pour l'art movement created a theology of art. "Pure" art denied any social function for art, or any categories. Photography itself initially tried to emulate art's old cult value. Earliest photographs concentrated on the face, which fed the cult of remembrance. Aura has its last stand in the photographed face, Benjamin declared.

No one, Walter Benjamin included, would claim that seeing a photograph of the David is exactly the same experience as seeing it in person. To get the full impact of Claude Monet’s 42-foot-long Water Lilies, it’s necessary to travel to MoMA. But in a world of ubiquitous images we no longer really stand before an artwork to contemplate it. We take it in, then move on. The Rothko Chapel only underlines how far the contemplative value of art has fallen; it’s necessary to construct a special building to filter out the noise of other images.

Mechanical reproducibility means that art is now appreciated in a distracted manner. The same may be said for our entire environment. As a result of the rise of mechanical reproduction, the seminal art form of the twentieth century was an art based entirely on distracted viewing: the cinema. More on that in my next post.

On Ugliness

Over at the Reading Experience Daniel Green considers Roger Scruton's recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration" in which the philosopher urges us to "rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness." In brief, Scruton's argument is that the fundamental role of art is to "magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty," but modern art and popular culture have instilled the "habit of desecration," which leads to moral chaos. Once landscape painters like Poussin and Turner portrayed the "joy that lies incipient in decay and to the eternal implied in the transient." Now we have an adaptation of Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail set in a Berlin brothel. But as Green points out, when Scruton demands that art return to its pre-modernist role of reconciling us to the order inherent in nature, he forgets "the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent." Beauty may be truth, but it is a partial truth.

Green is right to charge Scruton with confusing moral and aesthetic crimes. I would add that Scruton underestimates the value of ugliness, which, like beauty itself, has a history. Very early art was full of ugly images in order to enforce taboos by scaring people. As human subjectivity became stronger and the old primitive fears subsided, the ugly became a taboo itself, in this case against crude forms and dissonance. But when the promised freedom of the subject never quite developed fully, the old taboos returned so that the subject could both submit to old fears and rebel against them.

Scruton is correct in pointing out that the ugly took a qualitatively different form in Modernism, although I disagree with the lesson he draws. For traditional aesthetics, the ugly disrupts the harmony and unity of form; consequently, the ugly may appear, but it has to be subsumed under an overall form to reaffirm the mastery of the artist over his or her material. In Modernism, by contrast, the ugly is no longer something that can be recuperated into formal unity. In the Modernism of Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn, and Beckett the ugly becomes a dynamic principle in place of beauty. The ugly incorporates beauty in the same form-giving processes.

Arguably, there's nothing that is intrinsically ugly, that something appears to be ugly only through reference, directly or indirectly, to art. Without the ugly, a couple of things happen to beauty: one, purified of the ugly, beauty becomes kitsch, and two, without the ugly beauty has nothing to counterbalance the spurious spiritualization of beauty. Beauty thus becomes little more than "a spell on a spell," as Adorno put it.

Art, as Nietzsche said, is cruel. It changes materials and imposes form on them. Telling an artist that he or she should produce art without any traces of cruelty or ugliness is really just a demand to conform to the tastes of an audience. Ugliness in modern art is an expression of the cruelty of art, of our own botched relationship to nature under globalized capitalism, and of the mythic forces still lurking beneath the surface of modern society, just as the ugly was an expression of the threat of the malevolent divine in early Greek art.

The Angel of History in Revolutionary Times

Today in the Huffington Post Bernard Henri-Lévy waxes poetically, perhaps too poetically, on the situation in Iran. His basic point is that Iran will never be the same no matter how the current turmoil is resolved. He describes the uprising, in terms reminiscent of Foucault's remarks about the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, as "a miracle," which was

endowed under this circumstance with the blind mimetism and un-self-consciousness that is peculiar to the Angel of History when it thinks it is going forward, but is actually looking backward--will seem to have reproduced topsy-turvy the very scene in the same streets, surrounding the same barracks and the same shops, that was described thirty years ago by Michel Foucault, who never imagined that the real revolution was still to come, and that it would be the exact opposite of what he described.

Henri-Lévy's invocation of the Angel of History derives, there can be no doubt, from Walter Benjamin, but not quite accurately. Benjamin interpreted Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus (1920) as a symbol of progress, not history per se. Looking backward toward the past, where "a chain of events appears to us," Benjamin writes, "he sees a single catastrophe which relentlessly piles wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls them before his feet." The Angelus Novus is propelled forward by the storm from paradise, which "drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. That which we call progress is this storm."

Henri-Lévy invokes Benjamin in the hope that the present uprising in Iran won't repeat an earlier--and unsuccessful, from a Western, liberal point of view--revolution that Foucault regarded as a radical break from previous revolutionary practice, at least for a moment. However, when he remarked upon the Angel of History, Benjamin was looking back at a long series of failed revolutions in France--1830, 1848, 1854, 1870--in which street protests succeeded only to usher in a new order that was just as repressive and unjust as the one it replaced. Will the revolutionary fervor of the uprising in Iran end up being just another piece of wreckage of the feet of the Angel of History? Will it end up just like the first one--simply replace one repressive order with another?

As reports of nighttime street battles across Tehran, a la the July Revolution, filter in, the Iranian Twitter feed wonders aloud, "the only question now is how will the end happen - peacefully or with civil war." As the Angel of History might say, either way, it still might not end.

Take Your Time

In his exhibition “Take Your Time,” Olafur Eliasson seems determined to upend museum art and our habituated responses to it. His work is immersive in the spatial sense. Eliasson creates what he calls “devices for the experience of reality.” However, in the exhibition currently running at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Eliasson’s reality experiences inadvertently reveal the awkwardness of the museum space itself. The MCA version of the exhibition succeeds in creating fascinating sensory experiences, but it is less rich as a temporal experience.

The problem can be traced to 360 Room for All Colours, which is one of the more pleasurable installations in “Take Your Time.” Eliasson updates the panorama, a form that first appeared in the Paris arcades in the early nineteenth century. Originally painted landscapes that rotated to simulate a riding tour, the panoramas were an important proto-cinematic technology. Eliasson strips out the images, leaving only a warm glow of subtly shifting hues—the glow of a television but without the sterile harshness.  The instillation gently reorients your senses away from a dependence on vision, the primary sensory mode for apprehending art. You can almost feel the light striking your eyes. The acoustics make it seem like the walls are talking. In fact, the voices are echoes of other people in the space. You can’t help but lean in to hear what’s being said. You also want to touch the foil surface of the artwork, but you don’t because it’s too perfect and a museum guard will yell at you. You exit the space feeling better than when you went in, which is more than one can say for a television show.

But then there’s the rest of the room and the other artworks. The MCA space is cavernous and, because of the internal illumination of 360 Room, very dim. Located nearby is Multiple Grotto, another enveloping space made of up stainless steel that’s supposed to reflect light. Unfortunately, in the shadow of 360 Room Grotto has all the ambiance of a bus stop shelter on a cloudy day. The room’s dimness made me miss Beauty, the earliest work in the exhibition and one of Eliasson’s best known works. It’s an instillation of mist and Fresnel lamps. It captures the ephemeral, insubstantial quality of Eliasson’s art. Alas, the entryway is hidden behind drawn black curtains, making it seem like a dead end in the exhibition. Another couple and I hesitated before the heavy black curtains, and we decided not to risk parting them, assuming that some sort of construction was going on. Indeed, it’s the nature of the MCA space, a converted armory, to feel perpetually under construction.

Other artworks occupy their spaces more comfortably. Ventilator has a room to itself, which at first seems to be another instance of a container that’s just a little too big for its instillation. Here, though, a fan is suspended from a ceiling and swings wildly just a few inches about your head. It’s a witty gesture worthy of Duchamp. Moss Wall is another one-to-a-room instillation, but the light is more even and natural, perfectly illuminating an entire wall covered in Icelandic moss. Sensory surprises await here as well: it smells good. One woman got so close to the moss she seemed to want to disappear into it.

Experiences like these are what Eliasson’s art is all about. Yet, because of the ill-fitting spaces, the exhibition doesn’t flow well enough to feel like one’s sense of time is being altered. “Take Your Time” doesn’t have the magical seamlessness of an exhibition of Vermeer paintings I once attended in the Smithsonian, which I couldn’t go through slowly enough. There’s dead space and some installations that seem out of place, like Model Room, which isn't a room at all, merely a shelf displaying a collection of wire models that are supposed to shed light on Eliasson’s creative process, but don’t. Room for One Colour feels like a cheapskate version of his famous Weather Project at the Tate Modern in 2003. You don’t want to linger under the yellow monofrequency lights because you quickly realize nothing else is going to happen, in contrast to other works in the exhibition. If there's an experience here, it's the experience of having stomach flu.

Even as you pass quickly through Room for One Colour, there are other moments when “Take Your Time” really does seduce you into slowing down and reconsidering the reality around you. It’s weird to refer to free-standing studio lights and exposed projectors as old fashioned, yet Eliasson exposes the sources of his illusions without seeming gimmicky, without seeming like the projection equipment was purchased with art school materials fees, then dumped into a room, leaving us to puzzle through what’s expected of us as spectators. We stand or sit and let the experience unfold in a manner that’s reassuringly familiar—maybe too familiar for some tastes. There’s not much frisson to Eliasson. Then again, he doesn’t create neo-junk artworks so common in other contemporary art exhibitions. His work is also free of post-ironic references to consumer culture—provided one forgets about his work for BMW. You want to touch the artwork, but don’t dare, of course. Instead, you wait until it reaches out and touches you.

The MCA Chicago "Take Your Time" exhibition continues through September 13, 2009.

Big Art: The Second Floor of the Modern Wing

Last week I spent an hour and a half on the third floor of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing (more on that here), where European Modernism from 1900-1950 is exhibited. By the time I made it down to the second floor it was just after noon, and the place was packed. One minute I stood with my nose pressed against Jackson Pollack's Greyed Rainbow, and the next minute my view of a large Mark Rothko painting was blocked by a guy who went through the entire museum wearing his bike helmet. However, getting jostled by the crowds led me to notice something I might not have noticed otherwise: after World War II artists painted a lot of really big paintings. The lesson I got from the second floor was that art's relation to cultural institutions changed after High Modernism.

The second floor is split into two main galleries, Contemporary Art 1945-1960 and Contemporary Art after 1960. The 1945-60 gallery is particularly small, just one long, narrow room. Fortunately, the paintings are huge. The post-1960 gallery has even more elephantine works. These paintings were made for gallery spaces. Greyed Rainbow commands an entire wall, while upstairs important Braques and Matisses are lined up together, each a leaflet for an entire artistic revolution. They're like a hundred rabbit punches.

Most Modernist artworks faced uncertain exhibition fates. René Magritte was exasperated by the patron who owned his Time Transfixed (1938). Magritte wanted the painting hung on a stairway so that the train would appear to jab people. The owner hung the painting over his fireplace to Magritte's eternal frustation. The blockbuster Les Demoiselles d'Avignon sat in a corner of the artist's studio for nine years before the public got its first glimpse of Picasso's masterwork, and it wasn't on permanent public display until 1939.

Pollock and de Kooning knew their work would find its way to a big wall. Their successors worked under the same assumption. A lot of impressive work resulted. However, this means that in a museum context every painting thinks it's Rocky Marciano and it can knock you out in one punch. One can grant Franz Kline his big canvases, but there are more than a few works that are bigger than they need to be. Hanne Darboven's Seven Panels and Index (1973) is a virtuoso display of graphomania, but the way it's mounted in the Modern Wing it's hard to see the top panels very clearly. In isolation the vastness of Darboven's work would be meaningful in itself, but less so when every other work in the room is huge, too. Cy Twombley's paintings not only want to take up a lot of space, they seem to want to be space. Largeness isn't always convincing.

Perhaps the size of the contemporary paintings led the curators to change their pedagogical approach to post-war art. Upstairs in the Modernism galleries selected paintings have individual explanatory notes mounted next to them. Downstairs a brief essay on an artist's entire career is printed high up on a wall. This approach makes sense for artists whose paintings tend to look the same, but for a more protean artist like Gerhard Richter one can drift through his gallery and wonder what holds these disparate works together.

Not all the gestures on the second floor are so broad. The curators stage some interesting confrontations between individual artworks. Margherita Manzelli's enigmatic Dopo la fine (2008; not available in the AIC's online catalog) gazes steadily at Lucian Freud's blunt Sunny Morning–Eight Legs (1997). Too bad periodization prevents a call out from the Manzelli to Nathalija Gontcharov’s Spanish Dancer (1916), located upstairs.

After the disappointment of not seeing any Egon Schiele drawings on the third floor, they appear unexpectedly on the second. One problem, though: they're not drawn by Schiele. Sherrie Levine replicated 18 different drawings by Schiele, complete with gauche smears. Levine understands Schiele's line, but her figures lack the haunted glamor of Schiele's self-portraits and, therefore, a critical element in Schiele's unique form of narcissicism. Levine's faces look like male models; they're too clear-eyed, too well-fed to be fully convincing evocations of the Austrian artist's self-regard. Levine's images may refer to male narcissism, but not necessarily Schiele's.

Because it doesn't have any skylights, the second floor lacks the third floor's architectural panache. Yet there's one second floor gallery that best captures the spirit and intent of the Modern Wing.  The north wall of the Elliott Room has floor-to-ceiling windows looking out upon the Chicago skyline. Exhibited in the room are a set of large canvases painted in simple white.  At first glance, Robert Ryman's Charter Series paintings seem too pale, too insubstantial to stand next to the skyline, but they form a liminal zone that thematizes the entire Modern Wing. The gallery is among the last in the Modern Wing, and by now it's clear that Renzo Piano has been framing the Chicago skyline as an artwork in its own right.

The Third Floor

Renzo Piano's new Modern Wing (see it here) gave the curators at the Art Institute of Chicago 264,000 square feet of extra space to play around with, so they’ve filled it with recently acquired art and some paintings they previously didn’t have room to exhibit. The curators are still toying with the space, trying to figure out which paintings should go where. Mostly the curators have it right.

The elegant third floor of the Modern Wing houses European Modernism from 1900-1950, with American art from this period sequestered in another wing of the museum. Historically for the Art Institute this period represents a tricky jumping off point. The museum is best known for its Impressionist collection. From there the museum fast forwards a bit, zipping through its Picassos, the inescapable Nighthawks, and the AIC’s blockbuster Jackson Pollock, Greyed Rainbow (1953). But with the new space, it can slow down and present a more studied view of European High Modernism.

The third floor collection starts off confidently on familiar ground with a display of Fauvist paintings from the usual suspects along with some surprises, including a Fauvist/Cubist fusion painting by Georges Braque, Little Harbor in Normandy (1909).  The story takes an abrupt turn with Matisse’s Bathers by a River, first painted as a Fauvist fantasy in 1909-10, then repainted in 1913 as Matisse's response to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, then repainted again in 1917. The full force of the artistic crisis in Teens art is exemplified by this single monumental painting: one third Fauvist, one third Cubist, one third chronic despair. But then—maybe I wasn’t proceeding through the gallery correctly—you move on and there’s Picasso back in his Blue Period funk with The Old Guitarist (1903-04).

Beyond the first gallery it becomes clear that while the AIC has a terrific collection of Modernist art, it’s not MoMA. The AIC doesn’t try to present a comprehensive display of Modernism. The AIC’s collection of German Modernism is limited, pretty much, to a pair of Beckmanns: his Reclining Nude (1929), a Cezanne/Matisse mashup painted during a visit to Paris, and a self portrait of the artist glowering in a tux, Beckmann’s last painting before fleeing Nazi Germany. There’s not a single genuine Egon Schiele on display, which is the biggest disappointment of the Modern Wing.  (There are some significant copies, which I’ll get to in the next post on the second floor of the Modern Wing.) It’s left to a handful of Lyonel Feininger paintings (Carnival in Arcueil [1911] in particular) to give a hint of the louche appeal of German Modernism.

What the Modern Wing offers, however, is a tour through some of the lesser known, but still fascinating, tributaries of Modernism. We get to see major artists during their formative years. For instance, there’s an astonishing landscape from Piet Mondrian, Farm Near Duivendrecht (1916). We get to see startling works from unfamiliar artists—in some cases, so unfamiliar they’re not even in the AIC’s online catalog. Nathalija Gontcharov’s Klimt-like Spanish Dancer (1916) is really a painting of a dress, but it’s rendered in such vivid detail that her painting jumps out from the crowd of smoky abstractions of male artists in the gallery.

The third floor galleries offer new insights into familiar Modernists. Three or four examples were enough to convince me that Man Ray was a crummy painter. I saw two terrific Klee paintings from 1929-30. I’ve always liked Klee, but I liked Fleeing Ghost (1929) and Sunset (1930) even more than his later work.  I finally found a Juan Gris painting I liked. Previously whenever I looked at a Gris painting all I ever saw was teal, but The Checkerboard (1915) had greens and browns that existed in nature, and not just in the painter’s head.

Curatorial design re-asserts itself midway through the third floor with a gallery labeled “A Call to Order.” A quick glance around this gallery of post-World War I art and the point is made. However, one gallery later the order quickly dissolves into Surrealism, one of the few Modernist schools AIC has in abundance. The Surrealist collection in the Modern Wing is very good, by which I mean it has not a single Salvador Dali.  Everyone else is there, including, of all people, Le Corbusier. His untitled painting from 1932 is a credible Surrealist pastiche, hung, I noticed, without comment. Next to it was his Purist Still Life Filled with Space (1924), which the curators explained thoroughly. For me the most intriguing Surrealist work on display was a multi-panel wood screen by Yves Tanguy. The screen was supposed to be the entry point into a dream world, but I was transfixed by the thingness of the screen itself—its rough wood, its unoiled hinges. That’s how Surrealism is supposed to work.

The Modern Wing’s European Modernism collection concludes thematically and spatially with Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (1954). It’s in an anteroom by itself. A bench has been placed there so that you can contemplate Bacon’s mid-century existential scream. However, the room has at least six closet doors in it, plus two sets of glass doors with egress to the hallway. The painting is haunting, but its spell is broken by proliferation of closed doors and people bumping up against the glass doors as they try to figure out whether they should push or pull.

I hope that the curators will find a better solution to the placement of the Bacon. Generally, however, they’ve done an excellent job of presenting European Modernism. The third floor is such an elegant space that it’s hard to go wrong. The second floor, however, is a very different experience.

The Altermodern

I haven’t taught in a while, so I don’t hear the term Postmodernism much anymore, which has led me, perhaps erroneously, to conclude that cultural epoch has ended. Nicolas Bourriaud certainly thinks so. Bourriaud, the curator of contemporary art at the Tate Britain in London, assembled the fourth Triennial exhibition, which was dedicated to the notion that artists are fumbling their way to a new vision of contemporary culture Bourriaud calls the Altermodern.

Although the exhibition ended last month, Bourriaud intends the term Altermodern to be a starting point for discussion about contemporary culture. In the video interview above (see a larger screen version here and another interview on the same topic here), Bourriaud doesn’t offer a fixed definition of the term Altermodern, nor does he yet propose a firm set of principles to define it. Rather, he says the term is a "dreamcatcher" gathering the characteristics of the modernity for the twenty-first century, the modernity to come.

One of Bourriaud’s objections to the concept of postmodernity is that the term simply describes whatever happened after modernity. He says we should give up a linear concept of history because history is now a “maze.” History, he claims, is a “new continent,” the last frontier of exploration since the earth itself can be explored in Google Earth. Consequently, he’s interested in artists who traverse history as if it were a “jungle” or a “desert.”

One of Bourriaud’s more provocative claims about Altermodernism is that the post-colonial is no longer an operative concept, at least in the sense of artists who are rooted to a particular place. Nowadays artists across the globe have the same set of tools, so it’s inaccurate to speak about a distinctly Ghanaian or Burmese artistic practice.

But if we can no longer easily separate the Ghanaian from the British, Bourriaud’s metaphors still retain connotations of the old, imperialist forms of travel. He proposes, for instance, that our discussions about the modernity to come should focus around these four topics:

1. The term "Altermodern"
2. Exile
3. Traveling
4. Borders

Is he referring to the rootless cosmopolitan masses? Globalized migrant labor? The increasing virtuality of culture experiences?

Or is he talking about an older form of alienation, a sense of being out of touch with one’s own time? A feeling of being an exile in time is a prominent theme in Modernism, if not necessarily modernity itself. Baudelaire, arguably the first truly Modernist poet, frequently conflated history and space. His poem “The Swan” (1852) has a peculiar opening. The speaker gazes upon the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and sees not the triumph of Napoleon followed by an era of peace, but a resumption of the ancient, disruptive violence represented by the destruction of Troy. “I turn my thoughts to you, Andromache,” the speaker declares, and he mulls over the changes the city has recently undergone:

Yes, Paris changes! But my wistful woe
Remains! For me, all becomes allegory:
Faubourg and palace—old, new—come and go;
While my dear memories are heavier than rocks.

Walter Benjamin commented in the Arcades Project that Baudelaire treated Paris as a “desert” upon which the poet wandered, discovering remnants of pre-modernity behind the glittering façade of Second Empire Paris.  The entire Arcades Project is based on the metaphor of history as a lost continent. The Paris arcades were the point of disembarkment for explorations of history as a labyrinth of accreted desires.

I think Bourriaud’s term Alternodern is a promising means to describe twenty-first-century modernity, but only if we take a Benjaminian approach and consider how modernity and postmodernity are embedded within the Altermodern, just as Benjamin argued the pre-modern, the ur-historical, was embedded within modernity. We may eventually come to realize that the Arcades Project was the first Altermodern work, our first glimpse into the modernity to come.