For me, MoMA is the art museum. The Frick may have the near perfect historical collection. Certainly, the Met has everything, which is why I love getting lost there. And the Guggenheim and Whitney are always worth visiting, as, sometimes, is the New Museum. But MoMA is our place, it’s the museum that formed and forms the canon in modernism and whatever comes next. That’s why I trace my own Bildungsroman by remembering the changing arrangements of the permanent collection, and recalling conversations I had about them: I once met up with the late Linda Nochlin there, who told a funny story about Willem de Kooning’s female nudes. And I met T.J. Clark in the exhibition comparing the paintings Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne.  I suspect that I’m not the only person who responds to the museum like this, with ample happy personal memories.

Just as only someone you care deeply about inspires the most passionate complaints, so this museum inspires deeply personal critical responses. I am aware, then, that its relationship to Abstract Expressionism, now well represented in the permanent collection, was for a long time problematic. And I am old enough to remember when it looked like there would be endless Frank Stella retrospectives. But when I recall such great shows as “Inventing Abstraction, 1920-1925” (2013) or “Adrian Piper A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016” (2018), that turned my head around. Simularly, when I recollect the amazingly ambitious rehang just before the closing last year, the first draft of a revolutionary contemporary world art history, all my complaints fade away. The museum is often uncomfortably overcrowded. I can recall when you could be nearly alone with Guernica. But those present crowds are a measure of the success of we educators.

The problem right now facing MoMA is what Hegelian Marxists call a contradiction. Our leftist art world depends upon a support system provided by the super rich, many of them Republicans, who name galleries and donate masterpieces. In practice sometimes the art world closes its eyes, and takes the money but not the politics. So far as I know, no one is picketing the Frick, though how Henry Clay Frick earned his money is dismaying to the moralist. And we may regret some actions of the Rockefellers. It would be worthwhile, I think, to chart the sources of the wealth of all the MoMA trustees. But institutions often accept old money whilst having problems with the new money of a Leon Black or a Steve Cohen. The grandfather made the money, and so the children could become philanthropists: Henry James and Louis Auchincloss have told that story. If you care about posthumous opinion, a magnificent art collection looks better than a yacht or country estate. Nowadays, however, no doubt the grand collectors also have yachts and estates.

Like the duc de Saint Simon, who, as Marcel Proust explains, had a snobbish preference for the old nobility rather than those ennobled only under Louis XII, many think that old money is better than new wealth. And yet, people who call for reparations for slavery or for Native Americans, are not satisfied to be told that those moral miscarriages took place long ago. And a realist might argue that since we’re stuck with the rich, let’s at least get some benefit from their money by asking up their offers to support our museums. At any rate, in the present division of labor, the function of the trustees is to raise the money while scholars do the theorizing. (And the staff does the work.) This is  why neither Meyer Schapiro nor Clement Greenberg were trustees of MoMA.

How would this museum finance itself if it had to do without the uber rich? It would be admirable to display more female, Black , and Asian-American artists. But that’s already starting to happen, at least in part. Could MoMA be seriously downscaled, perhaps, like the New Museum when it was on Broadway before it constructed its expensive building on the Bowery? Once I asked a MidWestern museum director if he wanted to have free admissions.. A good idea he said, but here’s what I need, and he quoted the exact grant required. Change is requires a serious chunk of change.

Twenty years ago as a Getty Scholar, I started to write my book on the art museum, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006). Thanks to J. Paul Getty’s oil dealings in Saudi Arabia, whose fierce theology prohibits graven images, the last new grand museum devoted to the European figurative tradition can now sit high on a hill above Los Angeles. We could view the automobile traffic stretching out far beyond the airport as we worked. But even literally aloof scholars are unavoidably inside the system, which isn’t to say that we have to approve of its dealings, or that we should fail to protest. It’s easy to be critical about other people, but harder to be self-critical about your own role. That’s why I am genuinely unsure about how to judge the actions of my colleagues and friends who protest at MoMA. Spectacular injustices and inequalities make our art world possible. But I am deeply uncertain about what change is likely. In 1974 I read one of the great publications of that era, Clark’s Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His conclusion coveys a feeling for the leftist world of that era, to which I am still attached:

“Long live the Revolution!”
“Yes! In spite of everything!”

These are Courbet’s instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire’s to himself in 1865. They don’t seem to me to have dated.

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Looking at the magnificent Proscenium the other day at the Neuberger Museum made me think of a building, or perhaps more accurately, a monument that had been taken apart, its components lighted like all monuments are, especially monumental ruins. In fact, it looked like a Greek temple to me. Not just because Stephen was Greek but also because I have, as many of us have, our own romance with Greek temples, with ruins, with the thought that such remnants are what remains of once vital civilizations. I thought of this as a ruin—a rune?—of sorts, albeit a lively, brilliantly colored one that Stephen had evoked through a spare, signature lexicon of architectural elements, the basics from which structures could be constructed, destructed and constructed again as parables of eternal returns.

In its layout, I thought about how architectural his inclinations were, how sensitive he was to space, and how he constructed surfaces, but also rooms and chapels with light, with neon, with color, and with an array of simple but universal geometric shapes, inclining toward architecture because it is so tangible—and to light because it is not.

The joy of making is always evident in his work—and there is no mistaking the purity of that joy—which might in part consist of putting something out there that wasn’t there before, of drawing lines in space that transform into the dimensional, trailing a kind of aura.

His light was quotidian light and spiritual light. And it was historical light. It was the light of the present and future. It was both phenomenological and metaphoric. He treated it differently from other light artists of his generation and I believe he was the first to use neon extensively as an art material.

I remember the times he would show us his beautifully made models of chapels on display in his West Broadway studio—a project room, an installation in itself. He made over 30 of them but only one was realized as a completed structure—at least to date. That was the Chapel of the Heavenly Ladder, for the Venice Biennale in 1997, when he represented Greece. I remember how excited he was to show them to us (hard to think of that in the past tense), how wonderfully, infectiously excited he usually was to show us what he had recently made, what he had recently been thinking about, what he had recently discovered.

In Proscenium’s dynamism, as its forms and light pull you and your gaze around the vast Philip Johnson gallery of the Neuberger, it seems as if one component activates the next as a kind of relay—you can almost hear the sizzle at the points of transition—as a spark, a quickening, a kindling which made me think of human inventiveness, resilience, and aspirations.

Stephen knew something about old and new; it was part of his heritage, part of what he was, situated, like many of us who came here from older countries, between a more ancient heritage and one that was relatively new, and perhaps partially because of that, he was entirely at ease looking back while also looking ahead.

I have selected four architectural images more or less arbitrarily (the theater at Priene the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Bernini’s Colonnade in Rome, and Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican—one of the most utopian spaces in the history of western painting) as examples that relate in a general way to Stephen’s work, starting with the circle, the half-circle, the incomplete circle and the line that becomes the column, that becomes a square, a rectangle that becomes a temple, a theater, a church, a chapel, a room. There is also the kinship of their great serenity and their embodiment of an idealized space and place.

I think Stephen liked the notion of taking neon – that had associations with the garish, the carnival, the carnal, the commercial – and changing it into something elegant, serene, immaculate, at times even holy. It tickled his fancy, his sense of mischief, I would think, but also his sense of completeness to equate temples and theaters. The temple lends its architecture to the theater which began as a more sacred space for rituals and the enactment of mysteries, before becoming secularized as venues for entertainment. But both are portals, stages, he reminds us, the proscenium signaling a plunge into imaginative, intangible realms, separating it from the realities of the mundane.

He was always challenging conventional boundaries in art, in what an artist could make and how he could make it and with what. His impulse was multidisciplinary and synthesizing and he was prescient, in advance of the kinds of practices without borders that are so prevalent today. He strove to open his practice up, to keep it open, to always let more in, to let viewers in, to let the world in, to open up what was possible with the vocabulary that he had chosen, that was necessary for him.

It was curiosity that always led him on. Naomi Antonakos, his wife, says that Stephen never knew when he started where he would end up—he just wanted to see what might happen. And so he did.

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September 16, 2017 to January 15, 2018
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, metmuseum.org

On November 17, 1917, France lost Auguste Rodin, a titanic sculptor and by some lights France’s last. By 77, after youthful failures (thrice rejected by the École des Beaux Arts), recurrent bouts of self-doubt, misprizal, and neglect, miseries more than matched by dogged perseverance and unshakable dedication to an artistic quest that he abandoned only once to a brief stay in a monastery after his sister’s death, Auguste Rodin had achieved international distinction. His centenary is being celebrated this year in the form of major museum exhibits worldwide as well as by programs, books, articles, and a dedicated website in his honor, a movie. Among these, an exquisite display has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will remain a permanent installation there (the adjacent gallery with works on paper and Steichen’s photographs of the Balzac adhere to the exhibition dates). Comprised mainly of the Cantor Collection, the display greets visitors entering from the east end with two monumental figures turned away from them. To the right is Eve, banished and crushed with remorse. To the left is Adam, his head pendant, an image that will be tripled on the Gates of Hell. In the center of the space, mounted on a four foot high pedestal, sits The Thinker in a bronze casting of no more than two feet.   Three backs greet us: three works of art seen from behind, works by an artist who asks us not to stand still but to move, to change position, to keep looking, asking, and reflecting. This installation of Rodin’s work by the distinguished sculpture curator Denise Allen serves as a supreme aesthetic tribute to its restless master.

Dwelling all summer in Paris “with” the artist, so to speak, contemplating his Burghers in differing light and weather, poring over Ruth Butler’s riveting biographical pages among others, strolling the streets of the various arrondissements where he worked—at first in cold ateliers shivering while wrapping his clay to keep it moist and later surrounded by students, including Camille Claudel, acolytes, and skilled assistants—I introduced his sculptures to students abroad, both at the Musée Rodin and the centennial exhibition taking place at the Grand Palais, and dreamt about him by night. Increasingly, it became evident to me that Rodin was au fond a compulsive modeler, never a carver: it felt right to flee his famous marbles (the emblematic stone Kiss, Hand of God, Cathedral) for his bronzes, his waxes and terra cottas, his fragments, cropped bodies, accidents cast as such, plasters with their rods left in, and crude small works. In my quest for confirmation of this hunch—that Rodin’s genius is found in his fingers—I suddenly recalled Leo Steinberg.

The great art historian’s stunning 1963 essay on Rodin (augmented in 1971 as the last chapter of Other Criteria) has never been surpassed on its subject. Steinberg’s insights richly reward re-reading in this commemorative year. They supply conceptual ties, moreover, between Rodin’s art and much sculptural work that followed in the twentieth century. Steinberg recounts his lifelong fascination with Rodin, starting when he was ten years old and saw the iconic marbles in sepia reproduction on the pages of Rilke’s 1903-07 meditations on the artist when serving as his secretary in Paris. Then as modern art flourished and Rodin’s oeuvre went into eclipse, Steinberg too suffered a predictable disenchantment with it. But subsequently, this being the core of his essay, he awakened to a new comprehension of Rodin: Rodin as, beyond all else, an incessant modeler (rather than a carver) whose “real self had gone underground.” It is Rodin’s full oeuvre that must be engaged, especially his multiple smaller works, which demand being brought into focus and examined with care. They are what matter most. Not the world-famous stone pieces and monuments, wrought by others albeit under Rodin’s aegis, for in them the exploratory touch goes missing—that burst of energy which makes and unmakes form in flurries of protean ambiguity—an ambiguity forever denied to the unforgiving mallet and chisel. To mount a case for Rodin, an artist often misunderstood, as a harbinger of modern art, one can do no better than take Steinberg for one’s guide. In what follows, I shall do just that. Steinberg’s eagle eye, his erudition, and his own direct studio experience equip him to reveal just how, in this case, modeling prefigures modernity.

It has long been recognized, ever since Rodin’s first rejection by the Salon in 1865 (for his mask of the Man with the Broken Nose), that he breaks ground with academic norms by erupting with those modeling hands of his right up to the final stages of his art. We intuit his fingers in each bump, groove, rough and savage texture, each harsh or delicate correction. Rodin’s refusal of closure compels us toward co-creation of our own as we look on. He plies his art moreover with an openness that extends to theme as well as form. Take the Burghers of Calais. Anathema at first to patrons because they saw it as diverging from prevailing academic norms for public monuments, Rodin meant it to incarnate the duality of ignominious defeat and raw courage in the face of enmity. While subsequent scholarship has altered the historical record (Jean-Marie Moeglin, a scholar at Paris XII, writing in The Guardian, 8/14/ 2002, argues that the events in Calais were neither as unusual, heroic, or sacrificial as was previously thought), Rodin’s masterpiece stands. Obsessively re-working it, figure by figure, its heads, arms, and hands, limb by limb, he strives to embody the fundament of human tragedy, the ground of this 14th-century legend of six brave men striding forth together from a besieged French town, ready to die to save their fellow citizens. From brute matter, he wrests a wrenching tribute that eclipses all narrative revision. Steinberg, writing on the magnificent figure of Jean d’Aire, one of the six, speaks of “how desperately these statues act out the drama of powerful bodies giving their whole strength to the labor of holding on.” And this, Steinberg adds, is what is necessary to be a man.

But holding on also matters in reverse for Rodin, who is equally obsessed with the “threat of imbalance which serves like a passport to the age of anxiety.” Think of the precariousness of Icarus, and recall the Prodigal Son whose outsized arms, raised wildly aloft, threaten to capsize him backwards. Bastien Lepage balances dangerously on his pedestal, palette in hand, and what about Falling Man on the Gates of Hell? Steinberg points to a “hovering” aspect inherent in so many of Rodin’s works, an unstable relation to any ground. Interpreting this with him as a symbol of the anxiety that will come tearing in with the advent of modernism, I wonder whether it might also serve as an analogue of the modeling process per se—which goes on and on, unlike carving, and never reaches the terra firma of certainty.

What about replication? Rodin reuses figures. And fragments. He reiterates them, adds to them, transports them from one site of aesthetic or semantic significance to another: Think of Paola and Francesca on the Gates of Hell and of Fugit Amor, or the Prodigal Son, who morph and reappear in the former work. Such re-visionings point backward in time perchance to the pounding hoof-beats of multiple horses profiled on the Parthenon frieze and simultaneously they prefigure incredible repetitions in modernity as detailed by Walter Benjamin in his classic 1935 essay—the work of art as infinitely replicable by mechanical and now digital technology. The repetition also figures an inner obsession, a mental perseveration. Steinberg points to Rodin’s “cross-breeding” of forms, his borrowing of figures and body parts and re-assigning them: how the exquisite Torse d’Adèle reappears both in Eternal Spring and on the Gates. No Rodin work is known, Steinberg avers, until it is beheld in all its adaptability, until the body is understood not as an integral whole but as imperfect, as fissured, cracked, distorted according to its momentary purpose: this, he implies in his reading of Rodin, is the human body’s greatest truth.   But something deeper than momentary impression matters here: an expression of force that dwells in the act and therein finds its authenticity. Think of the small bronze and terra cotta dancers in the Musée Rodin, those coils of clay simply bent and twisted into miracles of exertion and intense extension.

Steinberg speaks of Rodin’s art in terms of what he calls “pure sculptural energy.” In so doing, he cites the bronze Figure volante of 1890 as an example of directional motion foreshadowing the pure abstraction of Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space. Rodin’s art is an art that cannot be finished but only abandoned or reworked, he states, and he imagines a secret dream on Rodin’s part of keeping each work ongoing forever. Above all, Steinberg shows how energy, inert matter, and time make of the part a whole, “wholeness wholly immanent in the fragment.” This is modernity tout court and, with it, we can better parse the ways in which later artists have and will continue to draw upon Rodin.

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Books considered in this essay: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor (2006) and Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures by Eric R. Kandel (2016)

Nearly two years ago, my sister, at a relatively young age, suffered a rare form of stroke. I learned about the progress of her physical condition from the many medical professionals treating her. It was an artist, however, who suggested I read, My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, to help understand my sister’s own experience of her injury and healing. Taylor, a Harvard-trained brain scientist, was at the forefront of advances in the new science of mind at the time of her own stroke in 1996. She conducted her research into the micro-circuitry of the brain on actual human brain tissue through post-mortem investigations.

The cat scans taken periodically of my sister’s brain provide still snapshots of the impact of her injury and subsequent treatments. Taylor’s writing explains how the brain works in real time. The road map of the brain’s functions starts at the molecular level within a single living cell. The first form of information processing happened through instructions housed in the atoms and molecules of DNA and RNA. They are stored there for use by future generations. As Taylor observes, “[m]oments in time no longer came and went without a record and by interweaving a continuum of sequential moments into a common thread, the life of a cell evolved as a bridge across time.” These shared biological instructions are also a link between creatures alive in the same moment.

Taylor’s knowledge of brain functions is based on a fairly recent convergence of several scientific disciplines. The Nobel Prize winning scientist Eric R. Kandel, who is also a cultural historian, has written important books on the new science of mind, a field born of a merger of behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology and molecular biology. Addressing its multi-disciplinary origins in his most recent book, Reductionism in Art and Brain Science, he recounts how the collaborations in physics and chemistry in the 1930s led to the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, which paved the way for today’s molecular neurobiology. His goal for this book is to humanize his investigations of brain function by looking for commonality between this pursuit and the arts. My sister and I are both artists.

Just as it sounds, “reductionism” in scientific research reduces the scope of investigation to measurable, and thus knowable terms. For Kandel, reductionism as an investigatory method, “…doesn’t oversimplify a problem, [rather] it allows for a deep understanding of key components that can be extrapolated more broadly.” This book presents current scientific findings about the functions of the brain arrayed around the components of visual experience such as face recognition, color, texture and depth perception. More profoundly, He describes how what is now known about these functions is integrated with “abstract” processing involving emotion, memory and association.

Kandel credits Vienna in the 1850s with supporting the establishment of art history as a scientific discipline grounded in psychological principles. Its famous salons brought together scientists, such as Carl von Rokitansky and Sigmund Freud, and artists such as Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Alois Riegl, doyen of the Vienna School of Art History, emphasized a profound and pivotal concept in the relationship between the artist and the audience. According to Riegl: “Art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer.” His term for this phenomenon was the “beholder’s involvement.” His successors, Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, developed this idea further, settling on the term, “the beholder’s share.” Everything we see is an illusion enacted in the brain according to studies in the new science of mind. What an artist does in creating a work of art models her own physical and psychic reality and parallels what our brains do everyday. An artwork thus becomes a form of Rosetta stone between the brain of the artist and that of the viewer.

Thanks to our shared genetic structure, the intricate wiring of our cerebral cortices is nearly identical. “We are generally capable of thinking and feeling in comparable ways,” as Taylor puts it. In describing her stroke experience, she emphasizes the difference between the two sides of the outer brain. The right hemisphere is master of the present moment processing all incoming sensations and giving us our awareness of where we are in space. The left hemisphere strings these moments together, giving them a “voice over” of internal monologue. It also presents us with a sense of self and our relation to others including the dimensions of our body.

During Taylor’s stroke, as with my sister’s, internal bleeding interrupted the normal flow of neurons in her brain. Taylor temporarily lost her ability to move, speak, to decipher the spoken language of others, and make sense of visual images. She tells her story of that morning in a dual voice, as both scientist and subject. As she hemorrhaged she knew that is was the left side of her brain that was affected based on her gradual incapacitation.

Kandel’s scientific investigations are based on studies of the neurons in a lower life form, a large invertebrate sea snail called Aplysia. Although the neuron system in the snail’s brain is so much smaller than ours, it functions in the same way: Kandel has been able to draw conclusions about how short- and long-term memory are formed by studying specific responses in the snail. He has shown that repeated stimulation of physical reflexes initially increases the flow of serotonin between sensory and motor neurons. Further repetition eventually causes the actual growth of additional synapses between the neurons. Memory and learning thus have a concrete physical impact on the brain’s structure.

Over a lifetime our brains are literally shaped by its response to all of our experiences. “Since all of us are brought up in somewhat different environments, are exposed to different combinations of stimuli, learn different things, and are likely to exercise our motor and perceptual skills in different ways, the architecture of our brains will be modified in unique ways”, Kandel concludes. Changes to the brain are constant and ongoing throughout life. Having made a full recovery after eight years, Taylor also believes in the plasticity of her brain, in “its ability to repair, replace and retrain its neural circuitry.” This phenomenon also contributes to the nature of a “beholder’s share” in that, according to Kandel, it “accounts for the differences in how we respond to art.”

Kandel relates his and other brain experiments using reductionism specifically focused on visual perception to the advent of abstraction in modern art. As if modeling their choices on Kandel’s methods artists responding to the modern zeitgeist reduced or isolated the components of their expression to color, form, line and texture. Neurologists now believe that there are two fundamental modes of cognition . Bottom up processing, linked to survival, is hardwired from birth. It encompasses the sensory processing of faces and other identifiable objects. This mode allows us to recognize contours and intersections: it is the one that would be employed, for instance, when we look at figurative works of art. Alternatively, top-down processing which we use when looking at abstract art draws upon higher order thinking such as attention, expectations and learned visual associations. Compared to figurative art, abstract art makes more creative demands on the beholder’s share. Rather than rely on the visual processes universally inherent in the brain’s circuitry, abstract art—with its reductive focus on form, color, line and light—draws on a more active response involving the unique personal psychological context of each individual viewer.

As precursors to the abstract artists centered in New York City from the 1930s to the ‘60s, Kandel establishes an art historical narrative linking Turner, Monet, Kandinsky and Mondrian. Their work shares a common trajectory transitioning from figuration to abstraction. The earlier artists collectively worked to “escape the dreary task of mimesis” (Turner) and express the “sublime aspects of the human spirit and soul through abstraction” (Kandinsky.) Similarly, the later group of Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters could be represented by Barnett Newman’s claim, that “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of …[the] devices of Western Painting.” Kandel highlights the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Morris Louis and Newman as artists who used reductionism in the form of self-imposed formal and technical restrictions in their work. Kandel, a scientist coming from outside the arts, relies heavily on the received canon of modern art for his examples. There are many other artists – I would want to add Louise Bourgeois, Sonia Delaunay (Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, and Joan Mitchell, among others – whose work fits his bill.

Kandel selects the work of Alex Katz, Andy Warhol and Chuck Close to discuss how the lessons of abstraction and top-down thinking have, more recently, informed ways that figurative artists use representation in their work. Last year, the exhibition “Tight Rope Walk,” curated by Barry Schwabsky at London’s White Cube gallery presented modern and contemporary figurative work impacted by abstraction. In Schwabsky’s catalogue essay he concludes that “[t]he problem [of representation] …needs to be solved all over again every time…This is the great and difficult gift of abstraction to painting: that we can no longer assume that the how and they why of it are already given.” Again, casting a wider net than Kandel, Schwabsky presented work by over forty artists including Tracy Emin, Barkley L. Hendricks, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, and Henry Taylor.

Reductionism as an analytical tool can be a useful way to parse the impact on the creativity of both the artist and her viewer of evolving expressions in traditional and new media. Kandel leaves us with suggestions of what is to come in the study of brain science including further explorations of preconscious thinking in our brain’s default network which we call into play when looking at figurative art and ideas about the role of physiological distance in creating conditions that encourage less concrete, abstract cognitive processing in the Construal Level Theory. As a scientist Kandel has seen proof of the benefits of cross-disciplinary investigations. He hopes that “[a]rtists today can enhance traditional introspection with the knowledge of how some aspects of our mind works”. By challenging each other’s methods and claims, scientists and artists can move forward together.

When Taylor’s left cortex was incapacitated during her stroke, she experienced the freedom of living in the present moment available through her right cortex. She felt she was able to let go of negative judgments and long held feelings of anger and resentment. As she gradually rebuilt her abilities during her recovery, she has worked to stay in touch with this state of spiritual release, which she believes is available to all of us. Kandel’s premise that abstract art can also give us access to the spiritual realm resonates with me. Shortly before my sister’s stroke my painting transitioned to complete abstraction. In a short video of my sister taken before she went home from the hospital she is shown making an artwork as part of her physical therapy. While working, she observed, “Your attention is so devoted to what you’re doing and what you are constructing that everything else just fades away.”

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October 26, 2016 to January 15, 2017
235 Bowery, New York City, newmuseum.org

At the press preview for “Pixel Forest” at the New Museum, just days before the U.S. elections, Pipilotti Rist happened to mention that most of her staff is female. In view of who won, this has become especially meaningful.

In “Gravity and Grace”, Simone Weil writes: “The cause of war: there is in every man and in every group of men a feeling that they have a just and legitimate claim to be the masters of the universe – to posses it. But this possession is not rightly understood because they do not know that each one has access to it…through his own body.” In this show Rist offers a gateway to the intimacy of being in a body: the experience of “being inside” is prominent. What does it mean to be inside? How can it be described? And what does it reflect?

Starting from the museum’s second floor it is all about the senses: Administrating Eternity, 2011, is an installation containing thin transparent-white curtains that you can touch, while they hang from the ceiling and down to the floor. Oval-shaped nature films are projected freely in the space: a green field with sheep, as well as close-ups of flowers, trees and fruits. With soft, nurturing music in the background, there are six cone-shaped hubs that viewers can enter, watching video up-close and in solitude. The proximity is challenging, as you cannot escape the imagery. Six of Rist’s early works are presented this way, one in each hub. In one of them, When My Mother’s Brother Was Born It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossom in Front of the Brown Burnt Sill, 1992, a woman is giving birth. The footage includes the cutting with scissors of the mother’s vagina, as well as the newborn’s first appearance. Although framed by blissful snowy mountains and clear blue sky, this is not easy viewing. But it carries with it great strength and something so real it hurts, while it also generates wonder and joy.

Pixel Forest, 2016, one flight up, is a beautiful LED-lights-installation that spills out across much of that floor. The soft pastel illumination is something you can almost literally touch in an area where a large rug with pillows is set on the floor to allow viewers to lounge, be immersed in, and dive into music and nature in two large projections (Mercy Garden, 2014, and Worry Will Vanish Horizon, 2014). The videos consist of close-up footage of body parts gently and passionately touching flowers, plants, and water. The grand finale of the exhibition takes place on the fourth floor. Here it is as if the viewer is inside a pond looking up, seeing the water, plants, and sunlight from the inside out through two moss-holes in the ceiling above, while lying on a bed, intimately, with others you may or may not know.

This combination of atmospheres creates a supporting space, as place where you are embraced and accepted. This womb-like interiority is quite the opposite of the outside perspective that is apparent today in the political realm. In a time when a president-elect seems driven to make judgments of people on the basis of their external features, encouraging atavistic male chauvinism, and public figures are striving to limit acceptance of women and sexual minorities, this show reclaims the body (female and male), its loving sexuality and its beauty in the most organic way. As the comedian Louis C.K. put it just before the November election on the Conan O’Brien show: “…to me it’s really exciting to have a first mother in the white house… because a mother she’s got it. She feeds you, and teaches you, protects you, she takes care of your shit.” Although Rist is not an American her show seems to offer a critical perspective on what we have missed by failing to choose a female president.

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Read Raphael Rubinstein’s important essay in full, exclusively at artcritical.com

The post The Obligation to Explain appeared first on artcritical.

In an important, personal essay on what it means to be Black in the American art world today – as an artist, a curator, an educator, a viewer of art – Lisa Corinne Davis challenges recent orthodoxies, calling for “a broadening of the visual dialog on race.” She questions whether it is “still necessary for black curators to primarily curate identity-based shows.” Earlier this fall, Davis answered her own question with “Representing Rainbows”, a diverse group exhibition she selected at the gallery that shows her work, Gerald Peters. (The Shinique Smith, pictured left, was included in that exhibition.) “Just as the aspirations of the civil rights movement were reflected in the attitudes of black art and the art institutions of its time, perhaps the political climate of today is pointing us in a different direction – one that begins to transcend identity, albeit with some difficulty.” Read the essay in full at artcritical.com

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I wanted out of my hometown of Baltimore, a city marked by racial unrest where, shortly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, there was looting, violence, and death. Despite its role at the forefront of the civil rights movement, Baltimore was burdened by a long history of segregation and racial polarity that still exists today. I wanted to get away and move to a place where racial tension could melt away. I wanted to do something where race was not an issue. I moved north to New York City where I studied and became a painter and a professor, beginning a life fully immersed in the liberal arena of fine art.

Recently, however, I am not sure that the place I sought actually exists. As I look around the art world, what I now see is a kind of racial tribalization that seems to trade on kinship-based organizations and reciprocal exchange. A social-club culture where exclusive membership comes with privileges: fashionable dinners, parties, entrée to certain galleries and collectors, etc. All are welcome at all events, but you must be enrolled as a member to benefit. In short, I see an art-world racial divide. I question the reasons for this divided structure and wonder if the art world now needs to rethink how black artists are included and promoted, allowing for a broadening of the visual dialog on race.

Back in the 1990’s, some New York curators began a movement to change the direction of museums by creating large exhibitions around ideas of racial and sexual identity. They fought for the right of minority groups to be seen and heard. They transformed the museum culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, effecting big changes in institutions that seriously needed to be changed. Their work provided an opportunity for artists of color to have exhibitions in museums and galleries and to be included in major collections. Even though power inequalities continued to exist for minority groups, some progress was made by this formation of a group identity. Here racial difference became a uniting force, instrumentalizing art for a larger social engagement.

Despite those curatorial efforts, today all is not equal, and a divide remains. But the original intent of those who initiated a self-generated identity can become restricting when imposed by others. And I have begun to wonder: Is it still necessary for black curators to primarily curate identity-based shows? Aren’t these shows only serving to highlight perceived cultural differences while firming up the separations between groups? Can identity only be affirmed by pooling together sameness in a themed exhibition?

Just as the aspirations of the civil rights movement were reflected in the attitudes of black art and the art institutions of its time, perhaps the political climate of today is pointing us in a different direction – one that begins to transcend identity, albeit with some difficulty. Take a look at the circuitous discussion around whether Barack Obama is black enough. There is endless talk about how others want to identify him and how he self-identifies. No choice he could make would go without criticism. No choice would be without exclusion or acceptance of aspects of black identity. Similar issues of identification surround Hillary Clinton with the question of how “female” falls in line(or not) with the idea of the “feminine”. You can’t trust her if her feminine wiles are present. She can’t protect us if her maternal side is visible. We can’t be politically seduced if she is not seductive. For both Obama and Clinton, their attempts at a fluid self-representation keep them more firmly identified as individuals than as “club members”, unable and/or unwilling to take advantage of any membership.

For me, racial fluidity began not by choice but with my birth, and my skin color – my very light skin color. It grew with the neighborhoods I lived in and the education I received. I was neither instructed in, nor possessed of, a strong cultural or ethnic identity. I believe in and have sought a world where identity is so malleable that it is essentially obsolete. My friends and many of my friends’ friends are broad and varied in race, geographic roots, sex, sexual identity and religion. We eat, dance, talk, laugh, cry, work and play together. We liberals and artists do not subscribe to essentialist thinking – except somehow when it comes to the art career. Rarely do I attend an art exhibition, lecture, dinner, or party that possesses the diversity of my life outside of the art arena. Instead, what I am seeing are professional camps: a black art world and a white one, each with its own team of curators, art historians and collectors. And I ask myself: why does this divide exist? If you have chosen, as I have, not to participate in highlighting racial differences, where do you position yourself?

My black artist friends describe their MFA programs as being largely white. Having graduated, they attribute their successes mostly to black art-professionals and, with a certain ironic glibness, to affirmative action. Recently, I heard one black MFA student question why another black student had not yet spoken to him about how to succeed in the art world. I suppose at the heart of this student’s question is an impulse toward solidarity in support of becoming a visible artist. The assumption that this exclusive conversation increases inclusion is incorrect; in fact it is simply the beginning of affirming inequalities by highlighting differences that later become systematically sustained. This is not a “post-racial” attitude, but simply the beginnings of drawing lines of difference.

The commodification of race begins in graduate school, where questions of identity and personal subjectivity live. Here students work towards communicating an intelligible identity while fine-tuning a sense of personal differences. All of this work about the self is fine and good, but only if these self-representations can be directed to a collective public and not simply to a pre-selected, curated audience. When the work leaves the private space of art making and moves towards the public space of exhibiting, these visual self-expressions become mutated and manhandled for use in the promotional side of the business of art. The result is a complacency around the original intent to promote and honor diversity. Here, the foundation of identity politics shifts from political change to a tool of separation. The initial radical intent is emptied out: the art’s effect is diffused.

Many African-American artists feel the obligation to represent Blackness. My position as an abstract painter allows me to manifest my own sense of self – my black self – as an expression of self-determination and freedom, while avoiding an oppositional stance. I do not believe this position is “post-racial” since I am not sure that that is possible. Yet the current system of how to include black artists in the mainstream seems to be stuck in tropes from the past. I do not want to negate discussions of race and racism in art, but I do want to open the conversation by detaching Blackness from a narrow racial term, allowing it to be more pliable. This will not cause current and historical racial differences to cease to exist, but it will enable artists who are not foregrounding Blackness in their work to become equally important members of the conversation. By rupturing accepted racial boundaries, subtlety and aesthetics will play a social role in the expansion of that conversation.

The art world needs to renew its ideas of racial inclusion. It needs to activate art spaces for a fuller discussion of racial issues, with more investment in complex representations and less reliance on didactic displays of racialized, reified art. It needs to value art that is driven through inspiration, not calculation, while incorporating the politics of identity with the versatility of creativity. It needs a way to avoid the lethargy of categorization, while allowing more fluidity in the physical spaces of the profession. It needs an eradication of the racial professional divide, by expanding the visual presence of race and avoiding a branded, static depiction. By moving away from essentialist exhibitions, perhaps there is a renewed opportunity for a transformation in perceiving, acknowledging, and representing the inherent complexity of race.

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When news first circulated that the Metropolitan Museum was to lease Marcel Breuer’s building from its original occupant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the word was that the Madison Avenue facility would be the Met’s new contemporary wing. We should be grateful, on the evidence of its opening exhibitions, that that does not appear to be the plan. Contemporary art needs to remain visible and vital at 1000 Fifth Avenue for the Met to thrive fully as a encyclopedic museum, for there is nothing like being able to see the work of a living artist within close proximity to achievements of distant eras, to be reminded of continuities and ruptures alike, of shifting aspirations and perennial concerns.

Breuer’s architecture is sold short, furthermore, if we think these sumptuously grave galleries are exclusively suited to modernist and contemporary art. As in the museums of Louis Kahn, the dark, rich timbres of exposed concrete and raw slate beautifully offset the textures of many kinds of art and artifact. Just as high modernism looks startling and fresh in classical settings, so too, anything from medieval armor to Mughal miniatures can take on unexpected resonances in stark modernist surroundings. A case in point: Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas. Although arguably a little cramped and deserving a wall of its own, the Venetian master’s late glory is the magisterial opening salvo of Met Breuer’s inaugural survey exhibition, “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible.” It is an incredible privilege to see this picture in New York City.

It feels unsporting to spoil the celebration with an inconvenient observation, but this painting is surely not unfinished. “Unfinished” (a title and concept that recall the New Museum’s 2007 re-launch exhibition, “Unmonumental”) is an audacious and enterprising way of connecting the satellite with the mother ship. Emphasizing art of the last 150 years while sustaining broader historical attention, the exhibition draws a thematic thread from old master tradition into contemporary sensibility. But by what specific criteria is The Flaying of Marsyas unfinished? It is a painting in the fast, loose, bravura old-age style of Titian, but if every aspect of a picture’s demeanor is meant and felt by its author (and the style of this painting is totally commensurate with contemporary works by Titian) why should its lively, self-consciously ambiguous painterliness be designated “unfinished”?

Maybe it would have been better to title the show “Unfinish” — in the present tense. This would suggest a proto-provisionalism in the colorito of Titian’s late touch and to justify the whole range of intentionality in the works this survey assembles. Provisionalism is, of course, a hot button contemporary label that makes the nonagenarian Renaissance master sound like a Bushwick hipster, but the term is no more anachronistic that the likes of “romantic” and “impressionistic” which would have been the natural ways to describe Titian’s late surfaces not so long ago. Of course, there are many works in this exhibition that were abandoned, or just meant as sketches, or in some fashion disrupted, and the process and pictorial thinking laid bare is indeed illuminating. But the key problem with “unfinish” as deployed here is that it privileges tightness, all-overness and gloss — literal “finish,” as in signed and sealed — as somehow yardsticks of artistic accomplishment, or the norm from which the plethora of artists in this show are deviating. But these are good problems for an exhibition to have because they have us pay attention to surface, think deeply about intentionality, and allow for disruption of canonical successions and period divisions.

Even more encouraging and heartening is the choice of artist for the first solo presentation at Met Breuer. Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) was a minimalist of exquisite poise, rigor and resoluteness. This comprehensive retrospective focuses on her graphic works and monochrome paintings. The quiet austerity of her vision is the perfect complement to Breuer’s dignified architectural understatement. But more significant is the defiance of marketing expectation on the part of the Met’s curators in choosing a relatively unknown artist from outside the international mainstream and contemporary fashion: “difficult” art in “slow” mediums. It signals, let’s hope, that Met Breuer is to be placed at the service of the best that museum scholarship can come up with, defeating any sense that modern and contemporary equals flashy and populist.

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I was only four and yet I had a job already. I’m walking, hand in hand with my mother, down crowded, chaotic New York streets and my job is to provide protection whenever we pass a group of men. Even though we were a mother-daughter duo, they’d be watching her like a hawk. I never forgot the helplessness I felt at that moment, because I knew that the men’s gazes demoralized my mother, yet what could I do?

This distinct memory came to mind the other day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A show of portraits of grand ladies like Marie Antoinette and Russia’s Princess Alexandra Golitsyna created during the late 1700s showed off the artist’s meticulous skill and way with vibrant pigments. The artist who painted these portraits of such esteemed individuals was a woman: Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who was active as a portrait painter from teenage years until her death. Vigée Le Brun spent her early years in a convent, moving to the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris when her widowed mother remarried a wealthy jeweler. Thereafter she grew up in an influential circle of court artisans. She was accepted to the Royal Academy and was then allowed to show her work in their Salon. Nevertheless, Vigée Le Brun was a fish out of water, since the academy was completely dominated by men. I can only begin to imagine the ridicule and disdain that her fellow male artists showed her, just for being a woman and endeavoring to fulfill her passion. In 1776 she married painter and art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, whose great-great uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.

As I strolled around the Met, looking at her paintings, I felt a strong sense of pride, respect, and indeed gratification towards Vigée Le Brun for helping to pave the way for female artists and women in general, just through her unconventional success. The painting that had the most drastic impact on me was one of a famous subject in a non-traditional dress: La Reine en gaulle (1783) whose subject is Marie Antoinette. In this painting the doomed queen, unadorned by royal jewels, wears a loose fitting muslin dress with a simple sash around the waist. She delicately holds a rose and wears a straw hat. This painting caused quite a stir when it was first shown, what with the Queen of France in such a relaxed and un-royal pose: It was a major faux pas. Yet to me, even though the painting does not show her in the typical grand style that was the custom with the royalty during that time, I believe that Marie Antoinette exudes a sense of regality—even though, at first glance, one would not recognize the subject as a royal or a wealthy individual, since it has all the bearings of a commoner. When I first laid eyes on this painting, despite the casual aspect of it, I knew that the subject of the painting was someone of great importance, simply through her stature and poise. Even in a simple smock, Marie Antoinette exudes elegance and that is what I find most striking. Marie Antoinette had a reputation for disregarding tradition and etiquette at Versailles, one that this painting confirms. It shows her “wild” side, the individual she might have become if she wasn’t a royal. That’s what attracts me to this painting, the unconventional female artist and her equally unconventional royal subject.

Due to public uproar that greeted this risqué painting, Vigée Le Brun was forced to execute another, this time with Marie Antoinette adorned in a lavish headdress and a heavy corseted blue satin gown. Ironically, the new painting mimicked the old, with the same body position, and Marie Antoinette once again posed holding a rose—a rose that by any other name would smell as sweet. All that differs is the style of dress. The curators have placed these paintings side by side, inviting comparison. I almost feel as if Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun planned it so, as if to say “take a hike” to their harshest critics.

Max Weber once wrote, “Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance.” I believe that this applies to Marie Antoinette and Vigée Le Brun. In a time where women had little or no power, art was the outlet in which these women interpreted themselves. That is why I find this work so powerful. Most art is meant to please, but La Reine en Gaulle was meant to provoke.

Since the dawn of time, society has regarded women as incapable, unequal, and subordinate to their male counterparts. The same can be said for the art world. According to a famous poster by the Guerrilla Girls from the 1980s, less than 4% of the artists in the modern section of the Met are women, but 76% of the nudes are female. This is only one statistic that shows how the art world is a man’s game. My mother, who I mentioned earlier, the artist Brenda Zlamany, has always been an inspiration to me, a single parent trying to create art in a field where the odds are set against her. She is a portraitist and has used me as the subject of countless paintings, which might be why I took such a liking to Vigée Le Brun who also created many a painting with her daughter as muse. Both artists show the stages of growth of their daughter, from infant, to tween, to teenager. Vigée Le Brun is not as well known as Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste- Dominique Ingres, but women who are equal to men in every way are often left in the shadows. Even now in the “modern” era, women can still make less money than men for the same job and are often excluded from opportunities, just because of their gender. I hope to use Vigée Le Brun as an example and express my feelings about gender equality through art and the power of words. Art and words can change the world. Maybe I’m an optimist for saying that, but I really believe it.

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