The Rosmarie Trockel show at the New Museum, which closed this weekend, was one of their better exhibitions in recent years. Called "A Cosmos," the name resembles Mickalene Thomas's recent show "Origin of the Cosmos" and both include a variant of the well known Courbet painting "Origin of the World." Trockel's version (above) shows the female anatomy replaced by a poisonous spider.
A Cosmos is a welcome overview of Trockel's art, but it is also a window onto the cosmologies of other creative individuals. That is it's greatest virtue. Co-curated by Trockel and Lynne Cooke of the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the exhibition showcases the work of numerous characters on the fringes of the artworld, including a team of anonymous botanists, several outsider artists, and a glass-model maker. These are people who have inspired Trockel, and they more than earn their keep when displayed along-side her impressive and chameleonic work. Indeed, they overshadow her contributions to the show. As a self-curatorial effort this is an exercise in humility, and Trockel has done museum-goers a service by drawing attention to some underappreciated artists, including at least one whose work has not been exhibited before.

Trockel and Cooke also give prominent place to outsider artists. Among them, Morton Bartlett, who has recently gained visibility, including a major show last year at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. (The image above is from the New Museum web page.) Mostly working in the 1950s, Bartlett was a self-taught artist who crafted exquisite clay models of children, which he painted and dressed in painstakingly sewn outfits. He then took vaguely erotic photographs of these models, which he never shared with the outside world. Both the sculptures and the photos were discovered in 1993, a year after Barlett's death.
The exhibition also profiles less known outsider artists. On view for the first time (I believe) are books created by Manual Montalvo, a Spaniard who was trained as an artist before a psychological break that lead him start creating remarkable hand-drawn books. These were, for me, the highlight of the show. Each contains countless pages of densely packed illustrations, covering a specific class of objects, such as mammals, birds, vessels, famous monuments, famous people, and national flags. Only one page of each was on view, unfortunately, but these suffice to indicate that Montalvo is a major talent whose books will soon be well known by connoisseurs of artists working outside the artworld. They are like visual encyclopedias, drawn in miniature, with tiny captions that would put Medieval manuscript illuminators to shame.
Another revelation for me was Judith Scott, an artist who cannot hear or speak and suffers from Down syndrome. When she was 40 years old, she began making sculptures of out yarn. Sometimes monochrome and sometimes multi-colored, they are unlike anything I've ever seen. Their forms are organic, but full of irregularities that would not exist in nature, suggesting some mysterious function. They look, as Kant would say, both purposive and purposeless. The curators placed these in a room with Trockel's acclaimed "yarn paintings." Pictured in the background above, these are usually described as a feminist critique of minimalist abstraction--they are like Barnett Newman paintings only made out of a material that has been denigrated as feminine, and hence only worthy of craft. The yarn paintings in the show are impressive. Juxtaposed with Scott's creations, their political punch is softened, and they seem instead to serve as a bridge between the work of this isolated artist and works in the modernist canon.


I wonder if Leopold Blaschka can make a design of a glass kitchen since he was a glass artist. If I will be remodeling my kitchen, I will install a glass kitchen splashback.
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