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.

L.I.C.

On a recent trip to Long Island City, I stopped by MOMA PS1 to catch New Pictures of Common Objects, an impressive group show curated by Chris Lew. Using photography, sculpture, video, and installation, the artists (Josh Kline, Margaret Lee, Trisha Baga, Helen Martin, and Lucas Blalock) all have, in one way or another, a meticulous relationship with the ordinary.  

Lucas Blalock, Building Materials, 2011

Margaret Lee, Cucumber (phone), 2012

New Pictures of Common Objects is open for one more week (!) until Sunday, January 27. Don’t miss it.

On view a few blocks away at the SculptureCenter, is Double Life curated by Kristin Chappa and presented through the Center’s In Practice program. Artists included in this year’s In Practice exhibition are Korakrit Arunanondchai, David Berezin, Paul Branca, Lea Cetera, Rachel Foullon, Molly Lowe, Shana Lutker, S. A. C. (Student Art Collective) with Justin Lieberman, Julia Sherman, and Bryan Zanisnik. The diverse group of artists, most of which work in multiple media (sculpture, video, performance, photography, painting, installation, etc.) made smart use of the cave-like architecture in the downstairs basement galleries.

Highlights from my all-too-brief trip through Double Life include Molly Lowe’s FORMED, an odd and humorous video that is somewhat akin to a David Lynch film colliding with a contemporary Dr. Caligari, and Julia Sherman’s video and photography installation Lucy Becomes A Sculptress. Sherman wonderfully and wittily recreates clay sculptures made in an I Love Lucy episode (same title as her piece) in which a pregnant Lucy endearingly tries her hand at ceramics in hopes of providing her future child with a cultured life. 

Molly Lowe, FORMED (still), 2012, HD video

Julia Sherman, Homage To Lucy's First (and Last) Abstract Work, 2012, C-Print, 16" x 20"

Lucy Becomes A Sculptress (still), 1953.

Double Life runs through March 24, 2013.

Fine Specimens

Art enthusiasts regularly seek out art museums when traveling.  For the rest of the world, the word "museum" has a broader meaning, which includes military and maritime collections, waxworks, natural history, historic houses, various technologies, and, of course, medicine and science.  Medical museuns can be of special interests to fans of fine art because the objects  they display often relate to long-time interests of artists, such as human anatomy.  They also tend to recall a time when artworks and medical items were intermingled, as in the cabinets of curiosities of old.  There are some fascinating medical collections around the world, including La Specula in Florence, the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, the  Museum of the History of Medicine in Paris, and the Semelweis Museum in Budapest.  If you are attracted to any of these, you might want to make a stop in Leiden to see the Boerhaave Museum.

Officially a museum of both science and medicine, the Boerhaave collections includes interesting and important artifacts pertaining to chemistry and astronomy.  But, for me, the medical collection was  most exciting.  Consider the macabre items collected by the Albinus brothers in the 18th century, which includes unusual skulls, a child's arm in formaldehyde, fish skins, a fetal elephant displayed next to a human fetus for size comparison.

Of equal interest are the medical models of Louis Auzoux, and 19th century anatomist who innovated techniques for making extremely fine medical models out of papier-mâché.  This was an advance over wax models, which were fragile and more expensive to produce.  The paper models include insects, snails, and humans, including an exquisite sequence showing fetal development, and models depicting the reproductive systems of both men and women.

The museum is named for Herman Boerhaave, a contemporary of Spinoza, who is regarded as the father of the modern academic hospital, and his students included Linneaus and Voltaire.  Appropriately, there it contains a surgical theater, which is occasionally put to use for animal dissections, open to the public--a kind of performance art.  The museum also hosts innovative exhibitions, which integrate medical artifacts and art.  On my recent video, there was an outstanding show on body image that documented obsessions with weight, both past and present.  The show includes works by Vanessa Beecroft, who does group photos of naked models who have lost their individual identity, Ivonne Thein, who alters photographs to make models look shockingly anorexic, and Kurt Stalhaert, who transforms children into muscular monstrosities.  The inclusion of contemporary art was welcome, but hardly necessary, for making the Boerhaave a worthwhile stop.

Pink Caviar

The Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen is hosting an exhibition of acquisitions from the last three years, and they have certainly been busy buying.  It spans everything from collage to large sculptures, paintings, and installations.  Germans are heavily represented here, with works by Struth, Tilmans, Polke, and Kiefer among others, but the range is more global.  There is a spectacular cloud of humming microphones by Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta and a room of lights and mirrors by Kusama.  Another highlight is a room lined with photos by Hans-Peter Feldman depicting people ranging in age from 1 to 100.  A small sampling is shown below.

Intense Proximity

The Palais de Tokyo is hosting a compelling exhibition that combines art from several decades with ethnographic materials that deal with the body, most typically, as it is perceived by others.  Field notes by Claude Levi-Strauss and African masks photographed by Walker Evans intermingle with paintings by Chris Ofili and video work by Adrian Piper.

Of special note is the representation of artists from Poland, spanning four decades.  Videos from Teresa Tyszkiewicz and doctored photographs by Ewa Partum are on view, as is a crowd pleasing video by Aneta Grzeszykowska, which depicts the artist undressed and dismembered, as her various body parts explore each other and try to reconnect.  The opening delivers a powerful blow as the still-intact artist lights a fuse that connects to a bomb in her mouth.  Like the other Polish artists on display, this work is strongly feminist in orientation, but also works as a piece of neo-surrealism, and evokes the cinematic experiments of Georges Méliès (see his Un Homme de Têtes below).  The Palais show reminds us that Poland has long been and continues to be a major center for art.

Morton Bartlett

The Morton Bartlett exhibit at the Hamburger Banhof Museum was everything I hoped it would be and more.  I first stumbled upon his work years ago in Chelsea. It was love at first sight. Bartlett's exquisitely hand crafted dolls, prepubescent girls and boys in finely tailored outfits he made for them, were staged in delightfully uncomfortable poses. Uncomfortable because you get the feeling the dolls aren't wearing underwear, or if they are, you can't help but suspect you are supposed to look up their skirts.

The eeriness continues. Bartlett poses and photographs them. I don't mean to tarnish them with my pervy interpretation,  because I really do think his work is fantastic. But there is an undercurrent of sexual tension which cannot be ignored. One could equally think that he was a loner trying to create an imaginary family. (In fact, the first catalog published by Marrion Harris in North Adams, Massachusetts was titled, 'Family Found".) Either way, it is impossible not to wonder.