May 21 – September 12, 2021
1099 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

I had heard of the “bloody Sundays,” as the salons hosted by Louise Bourgeois at her Chelsea townhouse were termed for the intimidating quality of her critiques on art brought by visitors. The phone number was listed and I called to ask permission to attend. “Yes, three o’clock” she herself answered and slammed down the receiver. A full house assembled in her parlor, admitted by an assistant who was also filming the proceedings. We sat on a faded banquet and on an odd collection of chairs against the walls in an L-shape. There was  a small table in the middle offering a box of supermarket chocolates, a bottle of whiskey that no one touched, and some plastic cups.

The room looked unpainted down the decades, the back garden a dense thicket of green, and a large inspiration board was heavily layered with all manner of invitations and images. When Louise slowly entered from the kitchen through French doors with the aid of a walker, her damp, short hair combed back, wearing a white long-sleeved Helmut Lang T-shirt, the room fell silent. She sat at another small table with some fresh watercolors in a white plastic cupped container off to the side, suggesting she had been working there recently. Visitors gradually came forward with an example of their art and sat at the small table facing her and so went the afternoon. Steeled a bit, I got up and placed a smallish bronze figure on the table between us. Her sole remark was “Impressive” and I felt lucky it had escaped her wrath.

Hurtle forward to the Jewish Museum 2021. Freud’s Daughter is the first exhibition in the United States to focus on the Bourgeois’ psychoanalytic writing, shown with a selection of her art from all its epochs curated, and artfully installed, by Philip Larratt-Smith, her literary archivist for eight years. An example of his installation prowess is the small utility closet that he recommissioned for three early wood Personages, (1946-1954) now cast in bronze which nestled within light grey walls reminiscent of the kind of enclosed spaces favored by the artist.

In 1952, at age forty, during an intensifying psychological crisis, Bourgeois began psychoanalysis with Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, seeing him four to five times a week until 1967 and then off and on until his death in 1985. For eleven of those years she had no solo exhibitions, and from 1955 to 1960 she seems to have made no art at all. During this time she read extensively from psychoanalytic literature, transcribed dreams, scrutinized her psychic life with its inner truths, kept journals, and notated ideas for art.

Her sample jottings on loose sheets displayed here include the following: “3:15 am. olives, radishes with salt and butter. I would like to eat some anchovies for something salty.” “he talks like a bottle of glue. she talks with a hatchet,” “when i do not ‘attack’ i do not feel myself alive,” “futility of effort, failure, loss.” A diary page notes, “All day sitting in a chair/I could not lift a feather/nor make a phone call/depression……”  These personal writings show the viewer that her sculpture emerges from an inner, psychological life instead of from a one-dimensional intellectual approach.  It a challenge to current norms that such intimate materials, revealing her naked distress and violence, are presented to a male-dominated public sphere where armor is the rule and the vulnerable is attacked or ignored. In this way we can see that her art takes a stand for another perspective and values. 

Freudian theory framed the challenging events of Bourgeois’s life, its hidden emotions and anguish. Although many aspects of Freud’s theories have been contested, there’s general agreement that he brought into prominence the idea of the unconscious, a focus of great consequence for culture and the individual. Freud’s contemporary Erich Fromm, though a psychoanalyst himself, has said that most people resist the idea of unknown parts of themselves and moreover, if everyone knew what they could know about themselves, it would shake society to its foundations. Freud’s empirical recovery of his patients’ repressed wishes, fantasies, emotions and instincts was thus very radical, embraced by cultural avant-gardes but off-putting to a world intent on bending humans to the machine and consumption.

For Freud, self-knowledge meant becoming conscious of what is unconscious, a difficult process that is both emotional and intellectual. This lifetime process pays off by releasing energy from the efforts of repression, energy available to be awake and free. His most controversial and misunderstood idea, the Oedipus Complex, involves psychic work with a prime symbol of authority and fertility, the phallus. Some have extended its Freudian meaning to point out that his correlative theory of penis envy symbolizes female social envy of the freedom, power, and prestige of men under patriarchy at the cost of the subordination of women. “Part of the argument of this show,” according to Larratt-Smith, “is that Louise’s work and Louise’s writings, represent a contribution, and in some sense a corrective, to classical Freudian psychoanalysis.”

Bourgeois’ art neither illustrates theory nor manifests neurosis, as Freud might believe. Instead one could say, alchemy points toward a process in which the autobiographical and unconscious is rendered into artistic form. The process, occasionally described by contemporary artists, is a kind of trance while working in the studio, that allows the unconscious to flow outward to confront the materials, while bringing into play techniques and decisions exercised by aesthetic power. In both cases the ego is subordinate to other energies. T.W. Adorno argued that real art entails risk-taking, genuine experimentation, bringing to life fresh perceptions, new feelings and alternative values, in a struggle for individuation–all qualities that Louise Bourgeois exemplifies.

The artist often remarked that her childhood never lost its magic, mystery, and drama. The materials of memory and the unconscious ignited the physicality of her sculpture that could include a gamut of found and appropriated objects and materials. Her techniques, including sewing, carving marble and wood, and modeling clay and plaster, arose from uncovering expressive possibilities of these materials. “I transform nasty work into good work. I transform hate into love.”

A Cell sculpture in the exhibition, Passage Dangereux (1997) is an approximately 28 foot long, theatrical cage, made from woven iron mesh with a locked doorway, that the viewer walks around and enters visually. It includes the materials metal, wood, tapestry, rubber, marble, steel, glass, bronze, bones, flax, and mirrors. The art work is populated with objects such as chairs hanging from the ceiling (a French custom in attics), the raw depiction of a sex act  in steel and bronze , a small bronze spider (symbol of her mother’s industry and protection), a tiny child’s school desk, a tapestry from the family workshop, a large wood electric chair, and others.

Experiencing this artwork is somewhat akin to being in the midst of a dream with its condensed vibrations, with objects that light up a larger realm than the individual. The artist stated that her cells represent “….different types of pain; the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual. Each cell  deals with the pleasure of the voyeur, the thrill of looking and being looked at.”

Arched Figure No. 3, (1997) is constructed with a thick slab of steel partly revealed, partly covered by a sewn volumetric female form in black fabric. Its backward arching figurative pose simultaneously connotes hysteria and sexual ecstasy.  Knife Figure, 2002 made from fabric, steel and wood forms an amputated coral-colored cloth figure with a large, sharp kitchen knife poised over it, threatening violence. Mother and Child, (2007) made from dark blue fabric and thread, constructs a rounded, voluptuous female torso with a tiny dark blue head tranquilly resting on its maternal middle. These sculptures reveal the body as a sensing, feeling entity whose knowledge and wisdom channel significant experience.

By the time of her death in 2010 at age ninety-eight many considered Bourgeois the foremost female artist of our time. She managed to give suffering a voice in complex yet accessible sculptures that summon the sting and bite, the vitality and shock of earlier modernists. Philip Larratt-Smith has noted how Bourgeois is a symbolist and storyteller. As she herself said, “The connections that I make in my work are connections that I cannot face. They are really unconscious connections. The artist has the privilege of being in touch with his or her unconscious, and this is really a gift. It is the definition of sanity. It is the definition of self-realization.” Empowered by Bourgeois’s writings and sculpture we can say more: that the unconscious provides a foothold from which to imply critique of the culture, asserting a tangible resistance to an administered society and its suppression of the individual, from the deepest registers of the psyche, a utopian anticipation of social freedom.

The post I Transform Hate into Love: Louise Bourgeois at the Jewish Museum appeared first on artcritical.

Born in France in 1946, Kirili  came of age amidst the beginnings of post-war French critical thought. The influence of Roland Barthes is particularly evident in the emphasis he has always placed in semiotics and their manifestation in the body. This had been his impetus to study Chinese calligraphy, Hebrew script and the iconography of global cultures. The embodiment of language as sensation and as a sensual experience is, according to Kirili, communicated through working with the hand. “It’s something I refuse to surrender, it’s in my DNA.”

I met with Kirilli in the Tribeca loft he has shared since 1980 with his wife, the artist Ariane Lopez-Huici. We are looking together at his new works on paper, massed on the wall flanking metal sculptures set against colored grounds. The organic lines in the paper pieces are open to multiple readings, as script, brushstroke or some other kind of signifier that references Kirili’s own sculptural forms. They exude confident improvisation. They also bring to mind the late cutouts by Matisse in the way color operates as light. Another ongoing new series functions equally on the wall or on the floor. These are elongated, vertical rectangles of several sheets of newspaper taped together and then intersected in the center by a thin, single “zip,” sliced, pinned, and draped from the center.  Placement, displacement, materiality and references to Barnett Newman reframe these ephemeral remnants from The New York Times. They are physically light, seemingly instantaneous and undulating with the slightest breeze.

ALAIN KIRILI
My life as an artist is an antidote to what I should have become. Kirili is a pseudonym. I left the conventional expectations of my family and chose to become an artist. The creative process for me has always been sacrosanct, I’ve devoted my life to it, and now it is how I stand up to the current negativity of my body. I have bone marrow cancer and am undergoing various treatments. I never know when one will succeed. I confront this negativity with the joy of creation, this is deeply ingrained in my identity. The illness is a new experience for me. Until now, my body has always been a great source of joy and inspiration.

MARY JONES
It’s no wonder that you’ve found a kindred spirit in the late work of Matisse, who having survived his successful surgery for cancer in 1941, felt he had been given a second life and consequently invented the cutouts.   

The new work is a good sign that I want to survive. So, I’m an heir of Matisse’s second life, because when I came out of the hospital I was starving to create, and to challenge any form of negativity. I’ve worked intensely to achieve a celebration of life in this new body of work.

We are now quite used to seeing a field or rectangle of painted color behind your large sculptural works. I’m reminded of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s theory about the “container and contained.” There’s an interplay between the painted space and the sculptural object. They seem at once to have emerged from that space but also to be extending from it or attached. At times the colored rectangle functions as a base or pedestal. The tension is closer here, as the contrast between materials has narrowed, the color relationships advance. Is this partly due to your renewed admiration for Matisse?

Yes, the fresh, direct perception of color and shape is very new in these works, and there is a specific link to Matisse, to his book “Jazz” and to the “Matisse Chapel,” the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France. Ariane and I have attended mass there several times and it has always been very stimulating for me. Of course, I’ve admired the colors of the stained glass, but also the very rich collection of chasubles that he created. The young priest Father Paul Anel even did a mass in honor of Ariane and me wearing a striking chasuble. With that in mind, I’ve been studying the symbolism of colors in religious art in the well-known book by René Gilles, “Le symbolisme dans l’art religieux” (1961). It is crucial to understand that color in a church always has a profound symbolic dimension. I’m choosing and mixing beautiful, resonant colors with specific, ascribed spiritual attributes. There’s a dialectic between the formality and symbolism of the color and the organic aspect of the line, a powerful tension that I like to explore.

The “zips” of your newspaper pieces have a similar armature to the paintings of Barnett Newman, who was a formative influence for you. How do you feel the sensual and the spiritual are resolved in his work? 

The paintings of Newman are fire. Barnett Newman gave us one of the most beautiful titles for a work of art in the in 20th century art. “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.”  It means “Man,” but also “the phallus.”  The spiritual world of Newman is really burning with passion. I think of him as a source of white fire. His first sculptures, “Here I” (1950) and “Here II” (1965) were so important for me. I found them extraordinary. They were not anthropomorphic or architectonic. The only thing left was a presence. The quest for presence is something that has been with me from the beginning and I was happy to discover that in Newman. I’ve also had the opportunity to speak with Tom Hess about him, and to discuss the Talmudic presence in Newman’s work. But I also have a great love and respect for de Kooning, in part because he made one of the most beautiful quotes imaginable, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”  De Kooning and Newman stand very close to my heart and carry me, and I’d like to add something that I find very impressive, and that I feel is also very lovely. Barnett Newman did a show of “The Stations of the Cross” at the Guggenheim in 1966, and around the same time John Coltrane released “A Love Supreme.”  I’ve always loved to look at “The Stations of the Cross” in the Guggenheim catalog, listening to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”

But there is another Abstract Expressionist artist who has been especially important to me, almost as if he was part of my family: David Smith. I admire his work and character for many reasons and one of them is that he was an artist born in Americawho confronted and forcefully challenged his Protestant heritage. He denounced it in many of his works, including a great one called “Puritan Landscape,” (1946).  He stood up to the Puritan traditions of this country and rose above the influences that could have destroyed or suppressed him. He protected himself by working with such dedication, making more than 500 pieces during his lifetime. I find this incredibly inspiring, and like David Smith I also take issue with all things Puritan!  This was an ongoing argument I had with Louise Bourgeois. We were friends and were very supportive of one another’s work. Although we had verticality and sexuality in common, we had completely opposite views about the Puritan attitudes in America. She loved it, and I hate it. I interviewed her for Arts Magazine [March 1989) and she told me, “Alain, you have too much empathy for the world. I love confrontation, I had a great crush on Alfred Barr, because he was a temple of Puritanism, absolutely inviolable, this challenge was part of the attraction.” So I said, “OK, Louise, I am not like you!”

You’ve studied Smith’s work extensively, visited and studied his library at Bolton Landing many times. You’ve also organized exhibitions and written about his work. But how do you see your essential differences?

A huge difference is that he is a master of the scrapyard. He had the ability to find old metal that he that he could transform through welding. There’s some blacksmithing and forging in his work, but mostly he could make and envision his work from this found raw material. Whereas in my work, I’m deeply concerned with the trace of the hand and blacksmithing. Let’s say, I’m much more of a blacksmith than David Smith. He was a welder. Today, people don’t know the beauty of blacksmithing. It is, for instance, crucial in African art and society. The blacksmith is highly respected. He is a central figure in the village, performing necessary tasks in both utilitarian and cultural ways. When I worked in Mali in 2003, I met a blacksmith among the Dogon and worked alongside him. We had a great experience together, built out of mutual respect.

Even your large metal sculptures have the directness of drawing. Your new pieces are created from drawing subtractively. Is this a new experience?

Actually, the process is almost like blacksmithing. The pleasure of blacksmithing is mysterious and sensual—to create a vibration on the surface of metal and then form a curve. It’s a way to introduce gracefulness, an expression of emotion through the marks of the hammer, or the power hammer. In my new work the signs and shapes are slightly trembling, like in blacksmithing, and like in life.

What’s trembling in blacksmithing?

The fact that you start with rigid line of metal and as you shape it, a trembling quality is created, one that takes away the rigidity.

Is there sound?  Is it percussive?

Oh, yes. You could almost shape it with the sound alone and with your eyes closed. If you beat the metal when it’s getting too cold, your ear is also getting too cold, and when it’s red hot, it’s a different sound. And that’s why a lot of music is born in blacksmithing, in the forge.  It’s very often the secret source of Flamenco.

In this new series, there’s certainly a rhythm you’ve created from piece to piece, and as a whole.

Each work can be by itself, but as an installation they become monumental through multiplicity. Monumentality has always been with me, and I’d like to show them in an environment that activates this potential fully. There’s also an “archeology” of my own work here. Recently, I did some corner pieces of an iron rod and a piece of newspaper on the floor that relate to clay pieces I did in the 1970. The recent sculpture utilizing newspaper on the floor and on the wall is revisiting some floor pieces in zinc from 1972. Wire and paper are traditionally used to give thickness to free standing sculpture before it disappears with the addition of clay or plaster.

Today for me, to show the use of paper and wire is a way to break the traditional hierarchy where only bronze is the final version of the sculpture. Now, paper and wire are revealed and are the final versions of my sculptures.

Monumentality can be thought of as imposing, formal and static, yet your work consistently involves movement, especially with the new paper pieces.

I’m concerned with movement, not stasis. My free-standing sculptures are tactile, fully indicative of the human movements that made them. That’s the beauty of sculpture, a free-standing work of art and that you can touch, and that has brought you something new, and to experience it fully you are compelled to move around it. Sculpture invites you to circumvolution. You are not just in front of a work of art, you turn around it, you dance around it, you have a spiritual experience enacting this very profound, performed movement that human beings need. In every religion in the world, whether church, temple, or a sculpture like a stupa, this movement is practiced. There is a fundamental sense or drive for circumvolution.

And speaking of movements, you and Ariane have recently become US citizens. How’s that going for you?

I first arrived in 1965 and traveled back and forth several times. In France, after the second world war, the art community was destroyed. So, it was great for me to meet artists here that were close to my age, like Mel Bochner, Robert Morris, Marcia Hafif, and to go with Robert Ryman to hear jazz. There was nothing better for me than to meet living artists. I admire them, have great empathy for the difficulties they face, and for the determination of contemporary artists. Life is short, it’s urgent.

I’ve been so moved to see women emerge in the artworld, people I originally met in the 80s, like Elizabeth Murray, who was a close friend. To belong to a community is important, and to be part of an open world where women are recognized has been wonderful. The “Me Too” movement of today is something that gives me so much satisfaction, and something I never expected. It’s signaling the end of patriarchal power. It’s a revolution and it’s great. To be married to an accomplished woman artist and see that we both can achieve recognition has been very gratifying. As Simone de Beauvoir said, “In a couple there should be room for two.”

I’m not afraid of the feminine or the emotional in art, I welcome it.  I’m completely in love with Italian art and I’ve gone to Italy at least 20 times. It’s my first destination. It’s absolutely stunning what the church has allowed on its walls regarding ecstasy, it interests me very much. The lightness of being is a crucial aspect of sculpture. We speak about weight. When does a woman experience weightlessness?  When she has a climax with God!  That’s exactly what the St. Teresa of Bernini is saying!  There are Hindu temples in India where you see carvings of beautiful bodies undulating, and you begin to understand that when you bring together sexuality and spirituality, you are in masterpiece mode.

The post Lightness of Being: Alain Kirili discusses his new work with Mary Jones appeared first on artcritical.

Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

The post A Dispatch from “Manifesta 10” appeared first on artcritical.

Art has found its place in the sun.  This week sees the tenth edition of Art Basel Miami, previewing Wednesday,  with a host of other fairs and art events also taking over the Art Deco Miami Beach neighborhood, the Design District, Wynwood and Downtown Miami.  artcritical will be covering the fairs day by day with highlights and personal reports from our regular correspondents and guests.

Art Basel Miami is the US sister event of Art Basel, the Swiss fair that has taken place on the Rhine since 1970.  The Miami iteration, launched in 2002,  quickly eclipsed the preexisting Art Miami and usurped Chicago, the nation’s previous front running expo.  Some say it has even overtaken its Swiss parent in terms of size, if not earnings.

But Miami is not just for 1%’ers, as our title cheekily implies.  With 40,000 visitors expected through this coming weekend Miami can make credible boasts to be the art Olympics.  Besides Art Basel Miami and the persistent – actually reinvigorated – original Art Miami there are over a dozen satellite (or should that be parasite?) fairs, whether informal, pop up fairs in hotels along Collins Avenue or substantial rivals like NADA, the New Art Dealers Association event, striking out at the Deauville Beach Resort in North Beach, where Rachel Uffner’s stand includes the work of Sara Greenberger Rafferty, or Pulse, in the Ice Palace, where Morgan Lehman features Sharon Louden.  And there are specialist fairs devoted to Asian art, photography, and design.

For all the offshoots and tolerated rivals  (in fact they are encouraged, as Art Basel even lays on free buses) Art Basel does remain the main event.  Aisle upon aisle of blue chip historic shows  (L&M Arts, for instance, with Andy Warhol drawings of the 1950s and ‘60s or Robert Miller with Louise Bourgeois) are cheek by jowl with the latest novelties, or simply fine offerings by mid-career artists like Alexander Ross, on display at David Nolan New York or Nabil Nahas at Sperone Westwater.

For the second year a group of (mostly) New York galleries will present Seven, antidote to the booth after booth overload of the biggies, in which the eponymous seven integrate their artists in a unified display.  Douglas Florian, for instance, is represented at Seven by BravinLee programs.

And this year more than others there are signs of concerted efforts to integrate all this frenzied commercial activity with museum and non-profit cultural centers across the city, offering hopefully more focused and thoughtful displays.  The Bass Museum of Art, for instance, offers a solo exhibition of Austrian sculptor Erwin Wurm while the reviving Miami Art Museum is showcasing Faith Ringgold paintings of the 1960s.

And many local galleries enter the fray  with curated group exhibitions.  Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art at 158 NW 91st Street presents a ten-person international line up, curated  by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, and including New York artists Franklin Evans and artcritical contributing editor Greg Lindquist.  The show is titled “you are here forever…” But as artists, collectors, dealers and casual perusers of art fair craziness must all realize, we are actually here for a weekend.

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The post Checkbooks on the Ready: Art Basel Miami 2011 appeared first on artcritical.

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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547 West 25th Street
New York City
212 242 7727

September 20 to November 3, 2007

In Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Triumph of Death” (circa 1562), hordes of skeletons swarm upon a town, pitilessly inflicting lessons about the transitoriness of life and its diversions. Popular depictions of death have evolved in the centuries since, but death’s grip on our imaginations has hardly lessened. In “I Am as You Will Be,” more than 30 artists, from James Ensor to Andy Warhol and Donald Baechler, arrange bones in almost every possible configuration and medium as they grapple with mortality and our perceptions of it. In this intriguing exhibition, which was curated in part by James Ensor scholar Xavier Tricot, the images of death range from the romantically morbid to the coolly cerebral.

The most intimate and earnest works tend to be the earliest. These includes three Ensor etchings, among them one from 1895 that describes several skeletons in ill-fitting clothes, all vainly trying to warm themselves about a stove; Even death, it seems, has not delivered them from human misery. Edvard Munch’s drypoint etching “Death and Love” (1894) portrays a young woman and a skeleton in a rapturous embrace, her full, naked body contrasting poignantly with the wizened bones.

Some contemporary artists revisit the impression of mortified flesh, and none more effectively than Louise Bourgeois, whose 1997 torso-like construction of fabric, bones, and wire arches painfully inside a glass case. The pathos of death, however, is downplayed or deflected in many other works. Picasso’s 1946 lithograph of a still life with skull, book, and pitcher turns the vanitas genre into an excuse for wonderfully vigorous spatial rhythms and velvety tones. Later pieces tend to analyze attitudes towards mortality instead of the formal components of its depiction; among these, Warhol’s mixed-media self-portrait from 1978 pictures the artist coyly balancing a skull on his head, while McDermott & McGough’s “Flames of Jealousy 1964” from 2007 consists of what appears to be a real skull resting on comic books.

Other works show an almost fetishistic enthusiasm for craftsmanship. Kris Martin’s “I Am Still Alive” (2006), a silvery, life-size skull, glistens like oversized jewelry. (The exhibition catalogue indicates that it was executed from scans of the artist’s own head.) Angelo Filomeno’s ten-foot-tall piece from 2007 is an ornamental tour de force that renders a dagger-wielding, fish-clutching skeleton on silk fabric with embroidery and tiny crystals.

Elsewhere, Marcel Broodthaers’ 1965 piece makes a complex and gritty political statement with simple means: a female thigh bone painted in the colors of the French flag. The gothic title of Jenny Holzer’s “Lustmord Table” (1994) adds a chilling dimension to her tidy arrangement of human bones. Damien Hirst’s “Male and Female Pharmacy Skeletons” (1998/2004) is exactly that: twin life-size skeletons hanging from stands. Hurst’s original contribution appears to be limited to small, cryptic diagrams painted on the skulls, in appropriately pink or blue colors.

Other notable works include Roland Flexner’s tiny graphite drawing from 1995, which poignantly catches the rounding gleam of a skull on a darkened shelf. Jan Fabre’s construction of a stuffed budgerigar, clamped in the jaws of a beetle-encrusted skull (2000), stands out for its exotic violence. The biggest surprise, however, may be three remarkably diverse pieces by Alice Neel. Her painting “Natura Morte” (1964-65) captures a lone skull warmed by sunlight on a kitchen or dining room table; It could be a casual portrait of a studio prop. Utterly different is the ink drawing from 1958, portraying the artist as a ghoulish, screaming skull with stringy hair and bleeding eye socket. Her third piece is one the most modest in the show, and yet one of its highlights. Her small watercolor “Requiem” (1928) depicts two shrouded skeletons reclining on a shore alongside a beached fish. The setting sun filters tangibly through the air, enclosing distant boats and land masses in its ebbing light. Dark glimmers of waves echo the skeletal forms, one of which props a bony head thoughtfully on an arm. What is he/she thinking? We haven’t a clue, but willingly or not, the phantom feels fully alive in Ms. Neel’s dynamic little scene.

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Until September 9

Like the artist it celebrates, “The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art” is bursting with energy and ideas. The show presents Chaim Soutine 1893-1943) as a father figure of different traditions, American Abstract Expressionism and British expressive realism among them.

Of 46 works on display, seventeen are by Chaim Soutine himself, including such show stoppers as “View of Cagnes” (1924-25), on loan from the Metropolitan Museum and “The Carcass of Beef” (c.1925), from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.  These hang cheek by jowl (an apt metaphor for an artist notoriously drawn to dead animals as his favored still-life motif) with a range of modern and contemporary artists, including luminaries of the New York School like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Joan Mitchell; School of London painters Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff; and individualists as diverse as Alice Neel and Joel Shapiro, Avigdor Arikha and Louise Bourgeois.

This line up is both a plea for Soutine’s contemporary relevance and a signal of his perennial outsider status.  The organizers of the show are Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, collaborators (with Klaus Perls) on the 1993 catalogue raisonée of the artist which—very rarely for a scholarly work of this kind—sold out its first hardback edition of 25,000, reflecting a deep interest particularly among painters.  Bizarrely, as the authors observe, the fascination with Soutine doesn’t inspire the Museum of Modern Art to hang any of the artist’s work in their permanent display.  On the contrary, MoMA recently deaccessioned an important later canvas, “Chartres Cathedral” (1934), to their shame.  There is a sense, however, that such official neglect bolsters Soutine’s standing as a supreme “painter’s painter”—a maverick who inspires artists whether by his drivenness and eccentricity or his deep rootedness in craft and tradition.

Soutine satisfies either criteria, which in a way is his paradox.  He has been vaunted as a kind of painterly madman, a latter-day Van Gogh.  Phrases like “hallucination,” “drunkenness,” “Dionysian frenzy” litter the Soutine literature—one critic even spoke of his flinging down ready-made compositions and not particularly caring if they landed on the canvas—and yet in marked contradiction to this is hisfierce rigor, the hidden order that binds together his frenetic marks and energized compositions.

This duality comes across in the masterful and perplexing “Landscape with Figures” (c.1922), from Soutine’s watershed three year period in Ceret, when his work reached its most “abstract expressionist” intensity (he destroyed many of the fruits of this creative outpouring in disgust at its extremity.).  A seated group of women are on a village terrace overlooking a ravine.  There are violent flashes of color—red chairs, the orange tiles of the surrounding houses, the blue of distant hills, and the near black of the steep wall disappearing beneath the figures—which somehow survive a tendency towards chromatic mush.  Similarly, close scrutiny of what could come across as a formless, expressive swirl, reveals moments of careful observation.

The elongated features of a woman with her back to the viewer, the exaggerated hat and almost dislocated, distended arms, appear to be carved out of the negative space around them—an area of intense greens and yellows that pop forwards into the picture plane.  Chairs and benches are at once specific and perfunctory, concrete and shorthand, lumpen and animate.  The whole composition is caught up in a kind of frenzy, submitting to the force of a spiral that moves down along the wall, up through the tree, and down again into the ravine.  There a sense of things coming into focus and melting away.

Some of the artists placed alongside Soutine relate more to his primitivism than to his modernist sophistication.  Jean Dubuffet, for instance, is represented by “Pierre Philosophique (D’Epanouissement)” (1951) and “Paysage Fossile” (1952), whose grinding, dense, existentialist gloom speaks to the expressionist angst in Soutine.

Two sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, a suspended bronze titled “The Quartered One,” (1964-5), that resembles a leg of meat, and a wall piece, “Rabbit” (1970), relate to the totemic, almost ritualistic identification with slaughtered animals found in Soutine’s work. “There is something electric and violent and fragile that touches me deeply in all of Soutine’s works,” Ms. Bourgeois told the curators in 2005.  His carcass motif—inspired by Rembrandt’s “Slaughtered Ox” (1665)–is also picked up by Gandy Brodie in “Meditation on a Kosher Tag” (1963), while the depictions of inert fauna by such painters as Georg Baselitz, Alice Neel, and Susan Rothenberg, keep company with Soutine’s game and fowl.

The viscous veils of swirling reds and blues in Bill Jensen’s “The Five, The Seven VII (Ceret)” (2005) eerily relate to the Buffalo “Carcass of Beef” .  Jensen’s layering of translucent colors offers an abstract equivalent to Soutine’s ability to conjure hidden pockets of space while pushing his marks and colors outwards to heighten the visceral, intrusive presentness of the meat.  In the same room an untitled 2006 construction by Joel Shapiro, who owns a Soutine rabbit, takes on a carcass-like complexion: The wooden pieces hang together with awkward lifelessness; they are stained an almost sinister sanguine purple; and the bent out of shape wire (a device he started using after September 11, 2001) adds poignancy.

The heart of this show, however, is a presentation of Soutine as the father of two traditions—American abstract expressionism and British expressive realism.  The American involvement with Soutine has an historic marker: the 1950 Soutine retrospective at the MoMA, which the New York School artists took in with great admiration only seven years after the artist had died in Paris.

While Pollock is represented by a 1934 canvas whose robust, hefty awkwardness feels Soutine-like, it is his trademark “all over” drip paintings that relate to a defining quality in Soutine, identified by another Abstract Expressionist painter included here, Jack Tworkov: “the way his pictures move towards the edge of the canvas in centrifugal waves filling it to the brim.”  It is this sense of a swirling gestalt, a method in the madness of compulsively accumulated marks, which also justifies the inclusion of the poetically intense Milton Resnick.

De Kooning, on the other hand, relates directly to Soutine’s instinctive rapport with materials, the luscious, succulent, urgent, voluptuous presence of oily pigment that brings both their canvases so rudely to life.  While De Kooning’s “Untitled  XVI” (1976) hangs with the “Carcass of Beef” it has an unmistakably sexual presence in the way slippery pinks, whites and grays ooze into each other.  It is the kind of canvas that exemplifies De Kooning’s legendary remark that flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.

De Kooning is as much an avatar of British painters Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff as Soutine.  Auerbach’s gooey, glistening, sparkling impasto is impossible without the example of the American.  But these men, with Freud, are convincing in their role here as contemporary incarnations of the Soutine spirit.  A glaring omission in this show is the chef d’ecole of the School of London, Francis Bacon (in 2001 the same curators organized an exhibition in Germany that juxtaposed Bacon, Dubuffet, De Kooning and Pollock with Soutine) whose “Painting” (1946) directly quoted the Soutine/Rembrandt carcass.  Freud is represented by “The Painter’s Garden” (2003), a relatively rare outdoor subject that relates more to one of Soutine’s heroes, Courbet, than to Soutine.

Like Soutine, the English painters are romantics yearning to commune with the classical tradition.  Soutine was the victim of enormous prejudice even from critical supporters who mistook his expressive intensity for primitivism rooted in ignorance of painterly traditions.  He was seen as a wild primitive who painted from inner necessity, oblivious to conventions, whereas his style was in fact rooted in sophisticated observation of old masters, who he increasingly revered.  The School of London painters have a similar obsession with the past, which they believe can be reconciled with fresh, authentic, instinctive direct observation.  What is also telling is that just as the artist from the Lithuanian shtetl saw himself as keeper of the flame of French painting (working from Courbet and Chardin), the London painters (refugees from Nazi Germany, or in the case of Kossoff, the son of emigrants from Eastern Europe) as often work from Constable or Hogarth as from Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian or Poussin.

Kossoff is the English painter who comes across as the most Soutine-like.  He is represented by two of his finest works: “Here Comes the Diesel, Spring” and “Christchurch, Winter Evening” (both 1987).  Like Soutine, Kossoff (and Freud and Auerbach as well) prefer to have their subject present, although these Kossoffs are actually painted in the studio after copious drawings sur le motif.  Where Soutine would destroy many of his canvases, an equally doubt-driven Kossoff scrapes down numerous unsuccesful earlier attempts at achieving the desired image, some memory of which lingers under the final effort, the result of a single session.  His motifs, like Soutines, seem to wobble precariously in the expressive effort of landing in the picture.  And his buildings and trains, like Soutine’s French villages, anthropomorphize as if under the weight of their author’s ambition to instill into them a depth of feeling.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, July 6, 2006.

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Louise Bourgeois is 90 years old and still going strong. Critics have called her art the product of “inner necessity” and a “Sisyphean effort to work through psychic material that is not ordinarily worked through successfully in art.” She has explored the same themes in a number of different mediums and has stated that “If we are very, very compulsive, all we have at our disposal is to repeat, and that expresses the validity of what we have to say.” Statements like this encourage people to think that Bourgeois’s art is confessional, and she has been pigeonholed as an existentialist, someone who releases “anxiety into a form of perfection.” But these recent works suggest that there is a sheet of glass between her art and her private life. Her work is more than a form of therapy.

She has been labeled a Primitivist, a Surrealist, a Conceptual Artist, an Installation Artist, a Feminist Icon and a Minimalist. Through the years her techniques have included carving, welding, casting and assemblage. She has kept written, spoken/recorded and drawing diaries since the age of 12. The habit of recording her thoughts and feelings has had a bigger influence on her art than any childhood traumas. Lucy Lippard noted in her book From The Center, that Bourgeois is preoccupied with “dependence and independence, enclosure and exclusion, the aggressive and the vulnerable, order and disorder.” Her subject matter never strays far from the human anatomy. Although critics have used psychoanalytical methods to examine her work, her relationship with her parents has been overemphasized. .

All of the pieces on show at Cheim and Read were done in 2000-2001. C’est le Murmure de L’eau Qui Chante (It is the murmur of the water that sings), 2001, fills the entire gallery next to the front desk. This gallery has a very high ceiling. Diffused white light illuminates the shiny oval mirror towards the center of the room and two small but sturdy handmade wooden chairs spaced five or six feet apart a few feet in front of the mirror. Between the whiteness of the walls and the diffused white light, the room feels cold. In each corner of the room there is a small white speaker. The audio component of this artwork is intermittent. At times sound comes out of more than one speaker, but for the most part only one speaker is used at a time. We hear a female singing in French, and the voice is soft and child-like. I believe it is the artist singing. She occasionally claps her hands while she sings. These recordings sound like they were made with a small hand-held recorder. They may be snippets from the artist’s recorded diaries. When seated in one of the chairs you can, with the help of the mirror, see the person seated in the other chair. The mirror distorts the objects it reflects, so that things are much shorter and wider than they are in real life. The sing-song voice comes and goes. The fragments of singing pumped into the space vary in length but some are very brief and almost all of them are followed by a period of silence. There is also no clear pattern. You are not sure which speaker the sound will emerge from next. Therefore, your state of mind can be violated at any time. You are at the mercy of the creator. The voice also adds a layer of intimacy to the work that plays off of the antiseptic atmosphere. If both chairs are occupied a sense of discomfort sets in because both people are forced to examine the shifting blob seated in the opposite chair. When seated in a chair you can’t make out your own reflection in the mirror. We don’t feel introspective while seated in the midst of this installation. Bourgeois invites confrontation.

Obese, Bulimic, Anorexic, 2001 is three separate sculptures. They are each made from washed out, pink pieces of terry cloth, which are sewn together and stuffed. The stitching is visible on these emblematic dolls. The expression on each doll’s face is one of disgust. Perhaps they are disgusted with themselves. These naked figures have no arms, nipples, hair, or toes. Each fuzzy figure is on display in a glass box with thick, worn wooden slats on the bottom of them. The figures are free standing. We can’t figure out how they are propped up. All three figures have large breasts. The dolls are not overtly feminine, but the breasts distinguish the gender. The first two figures, Obese and Bulimic, are reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf. The bulimic’s tongue is sticking out (A gesture perhaps borrowed from Mayan sculpture.) and her stomach is pouch-like, distended. She is looking down as if she is retching. As we move from left to right, from Obese to Anorexic the figures change shape, the bulging bellies found on the Obese and Bulimic dolls disappear. Bourgeois has stated that “To me, a sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture.” Contemplating eating disorders while staring at stuffed dolls is an odd experience. The blending of a child’s universe with the awful realities of distorted self image and self destruction is unsettling.

Rejection, 2001, is made of scraps of different colored terry cloth that have been sewn together by hand. The use of different pieces of fabric adds to the anguish of this soft bust. It has a certain Frankensteinian quality to it. It is a neck and head stuck on a wood block pedestal and enclosed behind a steel and glass display. The large head (73″ x 27″ x 27″) is tilted slightly upwards and the eyes stare into space. There is no hair or ears. You can barely make out a set of pupils, represented by different colored circles of fabric stuck in the middle of the eye-slits. There is something timeless about this monument to pain. Terry cloth reminds one of robes and towels, domestic objects that comfort one. This adds to the contradictory feelings generated by this piece, in that the softness of the materials undercuts the tortured facial expression.

The six pillow totems in this show, all of them untitled except for one, relate to Bourgeois’s early, primitive wood sculptures. These soft monoliths are fetishistic and delicately balanced. They are comprised of tiny round or rectangular fabric lozenges piled one on top of another or interlocking. The joyful colors of the fabrics remind me of Venice. The sculptures which are tapering are people-like or spine-like. Some of them have indentations in the center of them because the pillows are notched. We see, not for the first time in the artist’s oeuvre, the combining of abstract concepts of the male and female genitalia. These pillow sticks (each of them is over 6 feet high) lead a precarious existence. The first impulse one has when seeing a stack of pillows is to knock it over. They are strange alien sentinels. The only pillow totem that is not untitled, Do Not Abandon Me, 2001, made me feel a stab of pathos. This terry cloth and velour pillow structure, is colored shades of brown and tan. The words “Do Not Abandon Me” are stitched directly into the surface of one of the pillows. We are not sure if this quiet call for help has been made by the ominous pillow creature. I developed a certain camaraderie with these sculptures as I spent more time with them.

In the rear east gallery the most joyous artworks in the show, the paired dolls made in 2000 and 2001 (each pair is called Couple), can be found. Four terry cloth couples are suspended from the ceiling on thin metal wires, and slowly revolve in the air. The stitching holding the dolls together, welding their bodies together is visible. The stitching is a different color than the fabric used for the bodies. Each floating couple consists of a man and a woman. Their arms are locked around each other. The males have penises and balls that can only be seen if you look closely at the small spaces in between the entwined bodies and the females have large breasts. The nearly erect penises lightly touch the vaginas, but there is no penetration. The penis and breast shapes are not radically transformed or detached from the body. No longer do we see organic abstractions, made from cold bronze or marble, covered with labial folds and spiky, prick-like or breast-like protuberances. Bourgeois has chosen to leave the human figure more or less intact. Donald Kuspit stated that, “In Bourgeois’s sculpture the power of man and of woman integrates violently yet seamlessly.” This constellation of fuzzy couples pays tribute to the concept of mutual support. Instead of repressing human anatomy, abstracting the genitals, the artist creates a truly moving tribute to companionship.

Cell XXV (The View of the World of the Jealous Wife), 2001 is a blueprint for misery, but also something more complex. Legless, armless, and headless female torsos are imprisoned in a cylindrical cage. There are three of these dismembered female mannequins, adorned with pretty frocks. The one towards the center of the prison-like structure has two big white spheres underneath it. It is hard not to imagine that the spheres are balls and the limbless mannequin in a dress is a shaft or cock. Hanging a bit higher up in this suggestive birdcage is a fragment of a female mannequin, the shoulders, chest and breasts, also clothed in flowery fabric, and surrounded by translucent, plastic bell shaped beads hanging from thin wires. Each of the mannequin fragments are suspended from the top of the structure by metal rods with small blunt hooks at the ends. Unlike the other galleries in this exhibit, this one has mood lighting. The cage takes up most of the floor space in the room but the edges around it are dimly lit. Ominous shadows are cast on the walls. We wonder how these strange feminine presences relate to one another. Interpreting this piece as a form of autobiography, an abstract commentary on the affair the artist’s father had with the family nanny, is not fruitful. So what if these mannequins are intended to be the artist’s mother, the mistress, and the artist in her youth. This interpretation certainly doesn’t enhance our experience of the artwork. This piece is a dramatic presentation that communicates solely by signs, and at first the signs don’t add up to much. Initially I found the piece impenetrable. I had to work hard to see it as more than a monument to the tortured feelings of a jealous woman. The stillness of the objects in the cage and the increasing sense of uneasiness combined with a death-like calm, eventually won me over. There was just enough specificity to focus your attention on, to balance the frightening sense of emptiness the cell exudes. The longer you looked at it the more you felt as if you were inside the cage. The way the forms are arranged within the cage acts as a strange lure. The cell and its contents slowly expand. The viewer is absorbed by it.

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