Madison Square Park Conservancy

May 2 to September 8, 2013
23 Madison Avenue, between East 23rd Street and East 26th Street
New York City, 212-538-4071

Primary colors and monumental organic forms comprise Red, Yellow and Blue, Orly Genger’s installation in New York City’s Madison Square Park, on view until September 8.  Genger, a thirty-something New York-based artist, takes the daintily domestic art of crocheting to a powerfully dynamic level, using only her hands to construct loops of thick, rough lobster rope into gigantic strands.  Industrial rope of this quality became available for communities beyond fisherman several years ago when floating lines for lobsters had to be replaced by sinking rope to protect the rare right whale.  The Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation has since cleaned tons of rope, distributing it for various projects.

Genger revels in the physicality of her process, from crocheting to stacking, curving, and spray-painting her massive strands of 1.4 million feet of rope, which required 3500 gallons of paint. For this artist, the work is a “physical manifestation of time”—two years in this case.  Just as the artist engages with her material, she also wants the public to have a feeling for it. Obviously, the rope is quite durable as well as being waterproof, and Genger encourages visitors to interact with her installations by sitting on the lower sections, leaning against the fibrous walls, and gathering inside the curving forms. All the sections are quite stable, with the taller segments laid on steel supports. (However, the park does prohibit climbing on the art.)

A sweeping wall of blue rope creates the most formalized environment, encircling an expanse of the lawn except for a wide entrance welcoming visitors coming in from the west side.  When viewed from its exterior in midsummer, Blue most perfectly complements the park’s foliage, looming up behind floral bushes with blooms in purple and blue.  The enclosure assumes an importance and dignity, becoming a destination rather than a vista. Genger could have made a narrow entrance that would have seemed claustrophobic. Instead, her structure embraces those venturing inside.

In Red, toward the southern end of the park, the installation seems to contain and support several trees as it soars up majestically, far beyond human reach.  This structure has the closest relationship to natural objects.  The wall dips in one section to frame a tree’s spreading branches so that they can be viewed from the exterior, and it brushes up against the largest tree at that end of the lawn.  Red provides a sheltering environment, blocking the afternoon sun for those sitting against the inner wall.

Unlike the stately profiles of Blue and Red, in Yellow the undulating contours introduce a jaunty rhythm to the east side of the park, similar to the lift and drop of a roller coaster.  By far the brightest color of the three, yellow seems most appropriate for this installation as it romps around the lawn.  Because of its lower levels, Yellow appeals to children, who can easily sit on the rope, and to adults who can sit and lean back against the top.  This part of the installation best fulfills Genger’s interactive goal.

Although Genger explains her choice of primary colors as being familiar to everyone, one can’t help but think of De Stijl artists and the graphic clarity of red, yellow, and blue in Modernist painting and design.  Genger’s involvement with repurposed material resonates with the productions of environmental artists, such as Jeff Schmuki’s nylon tubes, and her landscape art—recently compared to the stark steel slabs of Richard Serra—embraces an aesthetic closer to works like the curvilinear installations of the Finnish artist and architect Marco Casagrande, notably his woven willow Sandworm on the Belgian coast. Orly Genger successfully mediates between painting and interactive sculpture, managing to wrestle Color Field extravagance into coherent, appealing constructions on a very human scale, in tune with both nature and art.

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elles@centrepompidou: Women Artists in the Collection of the Musée National d’Art Moderne

May 27, 2010 to February 21, 2011
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris, +33 (0)1 44 78 12 33

France has a long history of women artists and of organizations supporting their work.  Partly as a result of that tradition, the National Museum of Modern Art owns works by more than 800 mostly European women artists.  Approximately twenty-five percent of these are represented in elles@centrepompidou, an exhibition that runs through February of next year with occasional substitutions of additional works.  Occupying the extensive fourth floor of the Pompidou Center, elles is divided into nine categories: “Pioneering Women,” “Fire at Will,” “The Body Slogan,” “Eccentric Abstraction,” “A Room of One’s Own,” “Words at Work,” “Immaterials,” “elles@design,” and “Architecture and Feminism?”  This thematic approach enabled curator Camille Moreau to organize some 500 works in provocative groupings.  Her purpose was “to present the public with a hanging that appears to offer a good history of twentieth-century art.  The goal is to show that representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  But she goes on to say, “Proving it is another matter.”

“Pioneering Women” encompasses the late 19th to the mid-20th century period.  Often described as pre-feminist, these women nevertheless engaged the male-dominated art world with wit and determination.  Lack of representation of these artists in galleries and museum collections was one of the issues prompting demonstrations and other actions by feminists during the 1960s and 1970s.  Because of their longevity, several pioneering women were still working during those decades, notably Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay, Joan Mitchell, Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva, and Dorothea Tanning.  In general, however, they did not identity themselves as feminists or participate in exhibitions open only to women artists.

Confrontational and deconstructionist approaches produced the dynamic pieces in “Fire at Will,” which includes print and video documentation of performance art by Valerie Export (exposed crotch and machine gun), Sigalit Landau (barded-wire hula hoop), and Charlotte Moorman (cello and camouflage uniform), along with Wendy Jacob’s eerie installation of inflated, animated blankets.  In materials as well as subject matter, artists in this section attacked assumptions pertaining to art production. The violence of war, viewed as a male domain, prompted this theme. From Zineb Sedira’s nostalgic photograph of an Algerian ruin to Annette Messager’s skewered protest, these artists dealt with war-scarred landscapes and psyches.  The female body as both canvas and subject in “The Body Slogan” addresses concepts of gender and identity, creating the most unified section of the exhibition. Jana Sterbak’s flesh dress of thinly sliced raw beef (completely dried by the time I saw it in June of 2010) resonates with the bloody visions of a nude Ana Mendieta holding a flapping, decapitated chicken.  Marina Abramovic, Sonia Khurana, and Carolee Schneemann dance to their different drummers, while Tania Brugera, Louise Bourgeois, and Cindy Sherman consider the self-portrait as an exploratory genre.

“Eccentric Abstraction,” with its unmistakable reference to the 1966 New York gallery exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard using the same title, functions as the lynchpin of elles.  If we consider that the final two sections of the show focus more on design than art per se, then “Eccentric Abstraction” can be seen as positioned near the center of the exhibition.  Our opinion of everything that we see before these pieces and after them becomes enhanced or reduced by the “craft” materials and offbeat treatment of shape and space in this section.  Besides the classically deviant sculpture of Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse, works here emphasize the power of repetition, both inside and outside the grid.  The rhythm of marking, stacking, and stitching is claimed and perpetuated as essentially female within the context of this exhibition.

In “Immaterials,” eccentric abstraction morphs into post-minimalist dialectics, with light and white as recurring motifs. “A Room of One’s Own” strays from the rigorous curatorial focus in the rest of the show, with several works seemingly shoehorned into this category.  While Louise Nevelson’s sculptural installation, for example, may look like a wall unit for storage and display, its title Reflections of a Waterfall I suggests that the artist’s thoughts were elsewhere.  Although Mona Hatoum’s circular structure resembles a tiny room, the video seen on the floor invades and exposes the universal physicality of the human body.  The most ironic “room” is experienced in the 1975 video of Martha Rosler’s kitchen. “Words at Work,” while conflating text and visual narrative, nevertheless emphasizes the crucial component of language and storytelling within feminist art.  From the literal messages of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to Eleanor Antin’s liberated black boots, we are reminded not only that women have stories to tell, but also that women tell them best.

On seeing an exhibition of this magnitude focusing exclusively on women’s art, it is very hard to imagine how its curator could suggest that the “representation of women versus men is, ultimately, no longer important.”  Moreau’s show underscores the fact that museums have only just begun to demonstrate the advances in post-1960 women’s art, let alone to explore work  by early women modernists that explores their differences from male pioneers.

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