It's About Time

Fine art tends to exist in three dimensions.  Painting and sculpture are the most traditional media, and both deliver works with spatial, but not temporal qualities (except for the unwelcome fact of deteriotion over time).  Artists have often puzzled over how to bring time into their work, exploring everything from dynamic forms to decay.  Continuing in this tradition, The North Carolina Museum of Art is currently hosting an exhibition called 0-60: The Experience of Time Through Contemporary Art.  Here's a speedy tour of some highlights.

A number of regional artists are featured in the show, like Tom Shields, currently a resident at Penland, North Carolina, whose deconstructed chair appears at the start of this post.  The work by locals holds up well in the show.  I was very taken with the work of Virginia-based Sonya Clark, for example.  The piece above is a digital print, in a scroll of a 30-foot dread lock.  Other work uses hair to track the years since the Emancipation Proclamation.

The show also includes many national and international artists.  It opens with a number of clocks made by the ever-inventive Californian, Tim Hawkinson.  The examples above are a dried banana skin and a medicine cabinet filled with toiletries, all of which have moving parts that keep time.

Hawkinson's banana expresses time through its movement and also it's ongoing process of degeneration.  More subtle--and stunning--is Tara Donovan's cube made of thousands of toothpicks.  Talk about transfiguration of the commonplace!  Donavan is a master at making the mundane marvelous.  This toothpick monolith looks like it is about status rather than temporality, but a brief look at its periphery reveals the fragility of what appears structurally implacable.  The assembly could not survive transportation, and will likely loose parts over the course of the show.

A bit more conservative, but also impressive are some photographs created over long periods of time.  There is an imposing triptych by the German photographer Vera Lutter (not pictured here), which used a camera obscura to document an afternoon at Frankfurt airport.  The image above is a remarkable 3-year (!) exposure made by Michael Wesley using a pin hole camera which remained on during the construction of the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition also included two large installations of the excellent Mexican-born Montreal-based artist, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.  The piece above uses a respirator to inflate a paper bag continuously using the breath of a Cuban singer.  It inflates 10,000 times a day, the breathing rate of a typical human adult.

Another room-sized installation includes a small hole where visitors can insert a finger.  The hole captures the fingertip on video and measures the pulse, resulting in an encompassing montage of fingers and nails.

One of my favorite pieces in the show is a one-room apartment made entirely of sheer fabric by Korean, Do Ho Suh, one of the most interesting artists active today.  Do Ho Suh is interesting in biographical time, and this room is part of a larger project in which he creates fabric scale models of every home he has lived in.


For me, however, best in show was an old classic.  It celebrates a piece by one the legends of performance art, Taiwan-born Brooklyn-based, Tehching (Sam) Hsieh.  Hsieh's performance works of the late 70s and early 80s were true tests of endurance.  In one he avoided anything having to do with art for a year.  In another he lived outside for a year, never entering any enclosed space, including vehicles.  In a third, he spent a year in a wooden cage, not speaking, reading, or watching television.  The exhibition documents another performance from this period, in which Hsieh took a photograph of himself every hour on the hour for a year.  The photos have been assembled into enlarged contact sheets and a video, which document his hair growth, and his amazing punctuality.  Day or night, he managed to be on time for his hourly photo.  The work is about the passage of time, but also about life on the clock--a ineluctable aspect of modern life.  If artists strive to represent the world they live in, the Hsieh's pieces does a better job than any other on display in representing what time has become.

The World of Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas in probably one of the best painters working today.  She has the elements that were prized in Renaissance masters: an impressive and innovative palette, a strong sense of line, a capacity to work well at both monolithic and miniature scales, a flair for portraiture, and a command over complex figural composition.   Despite these classical virtues, she is no throw back.  At least not the the 16th century.  Her aesthetic emerges from the 1970s world into which she was born.  Her muse is her own mother, who has struggled with poverty and addiction.  The "artists" who inspire her include the makers of blaxspoitation films, '70s pornographers, and anonymous neighbors who filled their living rooms with mismatched colors and patterns during that time.  Thomas' world is not Florence or Venice, but Camden, New Jersey, and Portland, Oregon.   Her art education began with the encouragement of a nurturing aunt, continued autodidactically in the aisles of a used bookstore, and ended up at Yale.

There is a major exhibit of Thomas's work closing this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum.  That is a remarkable achievement, given that her first solo show was just three years ago.  In the decade since she completed her MFA, she has produced a massive amount of outstanding work, much of which is monumental in size.  The first work of hers I saw, however, were small collages (one of which appears to the left).  The exhibit includes a wall of these--mostly women sprawled out sensuously in visually complex interiors.  This is also the theme of some of her enormous paintings (below), and throughout the show we see echoes between paintings, collage, installation, and video.  Thomas's strong aesthetic comes through in all these media, and each seems like a sketch pad for the other.

The painting evokes a long history of nudes: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Goya's maja, Ingres, and Monet.  Unlike those, the figure here does not stare back at the viewer, but seems content in her self-appointed urban paradise.  The flattened patchwork background brings to mind Vuillard, African textiles, and kimono aesthetics, but it is also distinctively and unmistakably Thomas.

Zooming in on these extraordinary background patterns is rewarding.  Almost any random segment would work well as an abstract composition  The rectilinear forms in the example above represent paintings but also gesture at constructivism.  Thomas could remove recognizable forms from her work and remain a great painter.  Equally impressive is her preoccupation with texture: plastic beads and sequins are pasted on the canvas, and she sometimes juxtaposes flat and impasto paint.  The delicious detail on the right is from the painting above, and it shows how Thomas plays with texture with meticulous care, creativity, and wit.  Click to see up close.

Thomas is also preoccupied with space.  Almost all of her work represents interiors, and the Brooklyn show includes some paintings of furnished rooms as well as a group of installation pieces, in which Thomas reconstructs '70s living rooms replete with assaulting upholstery, wood paneled walls, and parquet floors.  Each room is detailed with period artifacts including vinyl records, family photos, and Afrocentric books.  In both the paintings and installations, the viewer can parse the space, but it is often difficult to do so.  Patterns and color disrupt the geometry.  Like a collage, Thomas present a world of cut-up fragments pasted together by a process that would look entirely random if it didn't work so well.

The Brooklyn show is called "Origin of the Universe." The title belongs to one Thomas's paintings (below), which is a direct homage to Courbet's "Origin of the World."  Where Courbet's painting shocked audiences, however, Thomas seems almost incidental.  Incidental because its truth is so resolutely confirmed by the paintings in the exhibition.  To produce his painting, Courbet asked a paid lover expose herself so he could profit from telling a condescending mother myth, intended to excite the male art world.  Thomas, who comes from a world of strong women, gives us a different message:  this outpouring of extraordinary work, exploding with originality, vitality, and multi-layered complexity, came from a woman, embodied, situated, and unblinkingly comfortable with physicality.  There is no myth here, and the ensuing thrill comes from the dazzling quality of the art.