With great interest, I read the recent Smithsonian magazine article about Elizabeth Shapiro, a researcher of ancient DNA. Some speculate that Shapiro and her brood might bring extinct species back to life. In the article, Shapiro poses with a mummified bird—the dodo, a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius off the west coast of Africa until its extinction in the 17th Century. Today, the dodo has become a metaphor for extinction that rivals only the extinct giant moa of New Zealand in aviary fame. I always found the dodo a curious creature. Despite its morose association with death, artists’ renderings of the dodo always reminded me of a rejected Sesame Street character, with its bulbous, frowning beak and waddling cotton-swaddle body. Its odd name remains poetically chained to the fun-to-say expression, “Dead as a dodo.”
Charles Darwin is dead as a dodo too. The silver-bearded author of The Origin of Species, Darwin espoused an atheistic theory of extinction and evolution that at once canonized and vilified him for the ages. Yet Darwin was more than a beacon of controversy: he was also a family man, as illumined by a precocious doodle on the back of one of only twenty-eight surviving original folios of The Origin of Species. His young son Francis drew a picture with the aplomb of Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are. “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers” shows two soldiers facing each other. One dons a flamboyant turban and blooming pants and rides a plum; the other, dressed in British attire, rides a stately carrot. Despite his precocious talent, Francis didn’t grow up to become a professional artist. Instead, the fruit didn’t fall far from the tree. With his eminent father, Francis would co-author The Power of Movement in Plants. Maybe Francis kept in mind his childhood doodle, drawn on the back of a page filled with the inquisitive cursive of his father. Photo courtesy of Denis Finnin/American Museum of Natural History.
The limitations of the silhouette would seem to hamstring its communicative abilities as an artistic medium. There is only a shadowed outline. At best, you can identify what you see—a person’s profile or object’s shape—but there is no way to clearly convey expression or emotion with these cutouts. Instead, an artist can only convey physical action.
Kara Walker’s work pushes against all of these restrictions. Her show at the Whitney— Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love—reveals how subversive and disturbing a silhouette can be. Focused on the untold narratives of African Americans in the South, Walker’s work satirizes race, gender and sexuality.
Like an antique frieze, “Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart” stretches out for 50 feet, occupying the walls of an entire gallery. A viewer’s eyes first pass over the shapes, not really identifying the gruesome and disturbing actions taking place: a suited gentleman steals a kiss from a girl while nearby a young child displays a strangled goose for a woman lying supine at his feet. A male figure’s head and arms disappear underneath a woman’s skirt, her legs and arms violently splayed.
Scatological, fanciful yet violent and uncomfortably confessional, Walker’s work belies the banal medium she has chosen. By emphasizing the gap between what is seen and not seen, the horrors that her shadows hide take on the same all-too-real substance of nightmares.
Much as a whisper has more power and persuasion than a shout, so lies the appeal of Olafur Eliasson’s work. It makes you hush up, lean in and really look. It quiets and enlivens you simultaneously. It heightens your awareness both mentally and physically with a heady dose of artificial and organic stimuli. The primal becomes cerebral and vice versa.Next month the San Francisco Museum or Modern Art (SFMOMA) retrospective on the 15 years of Eliasson’s career will move on to its next venue, but it reiterates what we all know by now: here is one of the most moving and articulate artists of our day. An exceptional show, Take Your Time amasses an impressively wide range of Eliasson’s work—photography, prints, sculpture, environments as well as new site-specific works.
Elemental and sophisticated, Eliasson’s work manipulates water, light, temperature and visibility with saturated color filters and mirrored reflections and refractions. Multiple Grotto is a freestanding sculpture with a kaleidoscopic interior that allows every visitor who steps inside to become an active participant in the work, if only for a finite period of time. Beauty is a fragmented rainbow that appears and disappears depending on one’s location. Created by shining a prism into the mist that fills the entire room, it is a poignant reminder of how one step forward or one step back can so easily alter one’s perception.
Photo credit: Beauty, installation view at SFMOMA on the occasion of Take your time: Olafur Eliasson; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA; (c) 2007 Olafur Eliasson
Graziano Cecchini is an oddball to be sure. An anarchist prankster who picks off-the-wall justifications for his stunts, he has been quite active as of late.In October, Cecchini strolled up to Rome’s famed Trevi Fountain and dumped a vat of dye into the pool while onlookers snapped pictures of the water turning bright red. He left a calling card of sorts behind—a pamphlet attacking the excessive spending at the Rome Film Festival. A flimsy excuse, but no harm was done. The colored water didn’t stain any of the fountain’s surfaces and order, in the form of clear water, was soon restored.
Last Wednesday in Rome, Cecchini unveiled his encore. Arriving at the top of the Spanish Steps with huge bags in tow, he and his cohorts spilled half a million colored plastic balls down the steps. Cecchini mentioned that the event cost him $30,000 to coordinate, and that this act was also a protest. This time, of the treatment of the Karen people by militarist groups in Burma. Read more about it.
It isn’t clear if Cecchini’s justifications are blather or heartfelt, but in our artistic climate where predictability battles with myopia, at least he is an “artist” who leaves his mark.
Photo credit: The Trevi Fountain’s waters turn red. (Wikipedia)
By no means am I calling for blood sport, but a little spirited argument wouldn’t be remiss. A few days ago Tyler Green interviewed Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune. The Q&A was parceled out into three parts. I’m not referring to the aftermath of the third installation, when everyone reading had a “what the…” moment when the critic so apathetically bared what amounts to a serious professional conflict of interest.Instead, I direct your attention to the second act, where Viveros-Faune makes a good point about the lack of rigorous debate in art criticism. He seems to call it disagreement for disagreement’s sake, and I don’t think that’s exactly right, but the sentiment is that very few of the talking heads in art express different opinions anymore. The success of a show or exhibition is usually assured before the opening, and like sheep everyone nods their heads and tries to think of something thoughtful and sharp to say in order to reinforce this preordained ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’
Of course it is easier to be a yes man. Putting oneself out there with an opinion that goes against the moneyed crowd bolstering a show; the fame of an artist; or the experience and heft of big-time reviewers is intimidating. But there are few things more fluid and open to interpretation than the visual arts, so it is really just a matter of making your case and having a really good rebuttal on hand.
Photo credit: Minoan fresco showing two youths boxing (Wikipedia)
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