May 16 to August 3, 2015
2025 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy (at North 20th Street)
Philadelphia, PA, 215 278 7200

The Barnes Foundation’s recent exhibit, “The Order of Things,” in their contemporary gallery, is at once dynamic and problematic. Intended to relate to Barnes’s enigmatic approach to exhibition design, fantasy and appropriation abound. Installations by three renowned artists — Mark Dion, Judy Pfaff and Fred Wilson — mine varying aspects of Barnes’s approach to installing artifacts and paintings. His system for exhibiting work was intended to be carried into in perpetuity and is mimicked in the work of the artists selected for this project.

Pfaff created a sprawling installation in the main space of the gallery. Center stage, this work honors Laura Barnes’s arboretum, which she cultivated alongside Albert Barnes and a cluster of specialists. The arboretum is an extensive garden of hundreds of rare trees and flora from around the world, still flourishing at the Foundation’s original museum in Lower Merion. Pfaff’s Scene I: The Garden, Enter Mrs. Barnes (2015) is a dazzling psychedelic display of photos of the arboretum and Henri Rousseau’s paintings gone awry. Perhaps an abject backdrop to Alice in Wonderland, the installation is replete with digital prints on plastic and vinyl, poured pigmented foam, natural wood and steel. Swirling renditions of a simulated pond’s edge and bank are constructed using wood and liquid foam. Repeated in several key locations within the installation, these frothy sea-green islands create a sense of boundaries and depth. Punctuating this expansive landscape are leafy steel structures, painted white.

Incongruent elements abound, with white steel chandeliers overhead and neon lights that are, disappointingly, never illuminated. An installation of plastic wallpaper with distorted floral patterns is strategically placed on the gallery’s southern wall. Plastic floor panels extend across the space and were based on Henri Rousseau’s paintings; they serve as a conceptual bridge between Pfaff’s installation and the collection. Other connections include an area over the eastern wall of the gallery that alludes to the framed lunettes of Henri Matisse’s The Dance (1910).

Laura Barnes was integrally involved in the development of the arboretum at the original Barnes Foundation. She cultivated an expansive array of flora from areas within the states and other countries. Laura Barnes selected blooming plants that were considered difficult to grow in the Pennsylvania’s blistery winters of Pennsylvania such as southern magnolias, etc. Her approach to constructing the Foundation’s gardens paralleled the landscapes found in the work of Calude Monet, Paul Cezanne and other landscape paintings in the collection. Pfaff’s title channels the contribution of Laura Barnes to the development of the Foundation’s botanical gardens.

Fred Wilson’s rooms, located to the right of the entrance, are conglomerates of staged tableaux, some more successful than others. At the entrance three scenes are created in a sparse, modernist fashion, using furniture borrowed from the Merion offices, desks chairs and even an early Dell computer. The interior rooms hold greater intrigue; these spaces represent a sculptural approach to furniture, art objects and glass works from the collection. While visitors walk through these spaces, African drums and chanting waft through the air. Wilson inserts the African presence through sound rather than including it materially in his installation. Perhaps using African art directly would have been too obvious a move for Wilson, based on his past installations at museums throughout America. The soundscape is a compilation tape. Wilson has chosen not to disclose its origin or name the people recorded. Nameless voices surround the viewer — the ubiquitous presence of Africa is in our midst.

In his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson uses the metaphor that if aliens descended on earth and sampled the music produced around the world, overridingly the music from Africa and the African Diaspora would be the most prevalent. Wilson has reconstructed this reality for us in Trace. However, it is interesting that he has chosen not to name the African cultural groups represented in his compilation tape. Is this again an example of a Western intervention that includes the artistry of Africa and deciding to render it anonymous?

Mark Dion’s installation is delightful, yet foreboding, in its inclusion of guns, knives and the like; however, would these be included in the collection of a naturalist? These emblems are contrasted with butterfly nets, fishnets, satchels and garden tools. Dion’s The Incomplete Naturalist is a tour de force in symmetry. According to the curator, Dion’s use of symmetry is mimetic of Barnes’s aesthetic. Like an archeologist, he puts everything in order and builds relationships to construct a narrative.

Overall, the Order of Things was a fascinating array of dissonant styles of installation art brought together. Therein lies its intrigue. Each artist serves as an individual conduit into the mind of Albert and Laura Barnes.

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On June 6, the three-day preview of dOCUMENTA (13) officially began with an afternoon press conference with artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and an evening reception at Kassel’s city hall.  The world’s largest contemporary art marathon, the event will run for 100 days total, through September 16. In contrast to its humble post-war beginnings, recent editions have transformed Documenta, which takes place every five years, into a multi-million-dollar affair that is expected to exceed a million visitors this year.

dOCUMENTA (13) has a wider grasp on the city than any of its predecessors. In addition to the usual installations in such local museums as the Fridericianum, Ottoneum, Orangerie, Documenta-Halle and Neue Galerie, artworks are also shown in scattered pavilions in the Karlsaue (the old royal city park), the old train station, a hospital and various commercial buildings. dOCUMENTA (13) also embraces off-off sites in Kabul. In Kassel, over twenty venues showcase more than 160 artists, many of whom specifically created works for the occasion. To view this grand art discourse also means to explore Kassel and its rich historic make-up.

Kassel is indeed a place proud of its cultural heritage. The Fridericianum is the first public museum on the continent, established in 1779, and the Brothers Grimm lived and collected most of their fairy tales here in the early 19th Century. But Kassel has also been the site of utter destruction. A center of Nazi Germany’s war production, the city was a prime target for Allied bombing attacks and in 1943 ninety percent of its 1000-year-old center was erased. The establishment of Documenta in 1955 by artist and educator Arnold Bode marked an attempt to re-introduce culture.

This history all makes Kassel a particularly suitable venue for presenting art that looks at both the past and the future. In fact, various editions of Documenta have focused on cycles of creation, destruction and renewal. dOCUMENTA (13) is no different in this respect. It is the dominant theme introduced by Christov-Bakargiev, former chief curator at P.S. 1 in New York and director at Castello di Rivoli in Turin.

Rather than providing a curatorial statement, Christov-Bakargiev offered a storytelling “Letter to a Friend.” Part-travel diary, part-press release, her letter ponders the general importance of questions over answers. Her exhibition is also a multi-faceted, at times fragmented, and yet astonishingly cohesive meditation on how human tragedies can inspire individual mythologies that can then offer a wide discussion forum. It is a curatorial outlook that pays homage to the beloved Documenta director of the past, Harald Szeemann, who spoke of “individual mythologies” as a motif for his Documenta 5 in 1972. To Christov-Bakargiev as to Szeeman before her, it is important to allow for loose ends to linger.

The essence of this concept is well illustrated at dOCUMENTA (13) by the work of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-43), examples of which are installed on the upper floor of the Fridericianum. While hiding from the Nazis and before being murdered in Auschwitz at age twenty-six and five months pregnant, Salomon created her epic “Life? or Theater?”, a body of work comprised of 769 gouaches. Layered with text and with musical and cinematic references, her drawings manifest as a personalized code. They meld political history with the artist’s personal memory and intimate thoughts. Though they express a sole individual’s tragic life, they have become a universally applicable song of suffering.

Christov-Bakargiev does not shy away from including many works that traditionally would have been dismissed as craft, such as ceramics and tapestries. The rotunda of the Fridericianum, which she has described as the “brain” of the exhibition and which for many visitors is the first space to visit, offers an eclectic and well-integrated mix. A group of still life paintings by Giorgio Morandi and sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, for example, are contextualized with objects damaged during the Lebanese Civil War and ceramics by Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isidrez, two ceramicists who live in a small village located in the countryside of Paraguay. One floor up, tapestries by Swedish artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) radically comment on the political climate and social conflicts of her time. Her works from the 1930s, which tell of the rise of fascism in Europe, are part historic document and part general warning of society’s apathy.

Ryggen’s work finds an interesting counterpart in a large tapestry by contemporary Polish artist Goshka Macuga. Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 1” is based on a digital collage in which groups of people find themselves snowed-in amidst the ruins of a grand building. A strong sense of alienation colors the overall mood. None of the people are looking at each other or at the two obvious disturbances: the destroyed building and a threatening, larger-than-life snake. Woven and rendered in black, white, and shades of gray, Macuga’s collaged scene seems to stand particularly still.  Disassociation has become timeless and is therebyeven more oppressing.

Macuga’s tapestry sits well with Geoffrey Farmer’s monumental sculpture “Leaves of Grass”, which consists of thousands of cutout photographs from Life Magazine, images that span Life’s five decades (1935-1985), providing snapshots of what defined many Americans’ view of the world during that time. Displayed like finger puppets on thin wooden sticks and arranged in close proximity like a lush, overflowing bouquet, these political and pop-cultural images take on a sense of playfulness that liberates them from their traditional context and translates as a re-organization/re-thinking of history.

Two of the least predictable installations can be found in the Orangerie, Kassel’s Museum for Astronomy and Science. A main room features the technical engineer Konrad Zuse, who in 1936 constructed a “mechanical brain” in his parents’ apartment. His discoveries led to the invention of the computer, but he also created fine but hardly original paintings that evoke the architectural abstractions of Lyonel Feininger, an artist he admired. Simultaneously displayed, Zuse’s watercolors, paintings and machines pose the question that it might in fact be the imagination that is art rather than particular objects. Zuse’s true creativity unfolded when rethinking arithmetical concepts and in regards to his machines which is what really makes him an artist.

Nearby, an exhibition of sound machines, notebooks, records, and video clips of performances by Erkki Kurenniemi ponders this conundrum further. The Finnish mathematician, nuclear physicist and expert in digital technology was also a pioneer of electronic music. The installation centers on his Electronic Music Studio, which he had established in the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961-62. It served as an experimental laboratory of sorts, in which electronic sounds formulated a new language. Neither Zuse nor Kurenniemi would have viewed themselves as artists in the traditional sense. However, they both were innovators who opened paths on which many have traveled since. If the ability to open doors and point towards undiscovered territory is at art’s core how can we draw the line in Zuse’s and Kurenniemi’s case?

Much of dOCUMENTA (13) navigates in similar vein between past and present innovations, attempts at re-invention, and above all questioning our possibly antiquated understanding of art and artists.

One treasure is to be found at the core of Mark Dion’s project at the Ottoneum, Kassel’s Natural History Museum. Dion has build an elegant structure that houses the Schildbach Xylotheque, a wood library that is part of the museum’s permanent collection. It was crafted by Carl Schildbach between 1771 and 1779 and consists of 530 books made from and describing 441 local trees. These books, which are actually boxes, are made from the trees they specify. Their spines are shaped through pieces of bark while inside each box are three-dimensional representations of the tree’s life cycle composed of dried plant parts and wax replicas. Again, Schildbach would not have viewed his work as art but science. However, Dion’s structure has turned the library into the wunderkabinett that it is

Christov-Bakargiev has stated that dOCUMENTA (13) is not about destruction but healing. It is an exhibition that implies that art can be the medicine that can change us by altering our perception of the world. Because of its sheer size and international reach, dOCUMENTA (13) might be misunderstood as an assessment of current tendencies, styles and aesthetics. The works assembled certainly reflect many of the international political and social conflicts that have shaped recent consciousness, but this is only one aspect. In many ways, dOCUMENTA (13) is a love letter to the artistic mind, the inspired soul and the undefeated spirit.

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Toys’R’U.S. (When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth)
Skarstedt Fine Art
1018 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021
November 19 – December 21, 2005

“The Curiosity Shop” is a small, well constructed house cum store structure with a front porch and windows in the front door (there is no back door), and on the front and side of it. The artist, who made a brief appearance in the gallery with an attractive couple while I was there, was glowing as he told them that the house was constructed by a friend in a backyard in Rhode Island, that it is rainproof, and that it has been bought and will be kept outdoors by the new owner. After lingering for a few moments on the front porch they disappeared into a private backroom. Their muffled laughter resonated throughout the gallery during my visit.

The sign hanging in the front porch has three words on it in descending order: ANTIQUES, CURIOSITIES and COLLECTIBLES. The lighting in the completely sealed off shop is dim and self-consciously atmospheric. The shop is chock full of objects, many of which we can’t make out. The objects are definitely arranged or ordered in loose categories; ceramic animals, flowers, humanoid statuettes and figurines, various types of birds and stuffed animals, books, hats, models or kitschy sculptures of cars/vehicles, different types of lanterns, piles of cigar boxes, rows of tools, stacked cans of paints and varnishes, bottles, stacked and almost completely obscured paintings against the back wall, a pedestal with an assortment of small busts arranged on it, time keeping devices such as clocks and egg timers, and much more.

What are we to make of this busy assortment of stuff? Dion does not try completely to avoid verisimilitude. Anyone familiar with the experience of visiting a rural antique shop will see connections between the real and this natural wood interior. Keys hang near the shop-owners desk like they would in a real shop. There is a desk and chair for the make believe owner to sit at. There is a magnifying light on the desk for the proprietor to examine goods with. The simple interior and exterior design of the shop is meant to suggest a real place. At least this is a model of the real upon which Dion attempts to superimpose metaphysical dimensions.

We learn about the metaphysical dimensions of The Curiosity Shop, those relating to “a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses,” in the accompanying gallery. In it there are a number of competent but uninspired drawings, leftovers from past installations that are meant to satisfy those seeking to own a Dion, and a few Dadaist sculptures. In one drawing titled The Curiosity Shop there is a book shelf divided into two rows, and the sections in each row are labeled in descending order. The left column reads, Vision, Hearing, Touch, Taste, Smell, and Allegory of Vision, and the right column reads, Air, Earth, Water, Fire, The Underworld, and Realms of the Cosmos.

Dion attempts to connect elements of the real, a highly subjective use of classification “systems” (I use the term loosely because intuition is involved. Intuition plays an important part in the composing process and the selection process that brings these objects together.), and a powerful critique of and haunting display of our complete immersion in the unreal. Dion’s installations are simulating devices, in that they are created in order to examine aspects of human behavior which can never be subject to direct experimentation. Subtle traces of the artist’s conceptual framework are present, but they do not completely dispel the imitative representation on display. We are supposed to look at the groupings of things and wonder if they symbolize some concept or idea and why groupings are juxtaposed.

After looking at the drawing I returned to the shop and got up close to the small windows on the side of the structure and tried to find the shelf in the drawing I looked at. More or less in front of me there was a bookshelf that did not look exactly like the one in the drawing with respect to its size and shape and the number of shelves. On each shelf in one of the two rows of shelves there was a plaster cast of a body part: Mouth/Chin, Ear, Fingers or Hand, Eye, Nose. Surrounding the casts, some of them obscured by a swathe of colored fabric, were objects that relate to a specific sense, magnifying devices, textured bric-a-bracs, and things that produce sounds. We are forced to strain our eyes and imagination when peering into the murky depths of the shop and one wonders what the act of looking for that special something in a real junk shop means. The atmospheric lighting resembles after hours lighting in a real junk shop. Are we searching for a lost life of the senses when we purchase things we don’t really need to improve our quality of life? Is consumer fetishism a poor substitute for bodily satisfactions? When we shop for curios or buy works of art do we really seek out a lost past or a banished metaphysical worldview?

Most shoppers who frequent antique shops think there is some ideal moment in the past when objects were purer because they were handmade not mass produced, and the fact that all tactile sensations are thwarted by the sealed off shop and we must rely on our gaze to examine the objects within the shop, we slowly come to realize that language constitutes reality and we can never have true consummation with things without the mediation of words. This installation proves the Heisenbergian concept that “the very act of observing alters the object being observed.” The antique shop acts as a supplement for a lack of full presence (we can’t touch anything in the shop). We search for something amidst the semi-orderly displays of the antique shop, perhaps for a romanticized past, but we are left with supplements of this past. This installation is an autopsy of nostalgia. Dion re-presents the experience shared by buyer and seller, when they have what Carl Freedman describes as “no relation to…things but that of possession.”

Mark Dion’s second installment in his “Toys ‘R’ U.S.” series, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, on display at Skarstedt Fine Art until December 21, is a blunt and horrifying exploration of our deep attachment to simulations and the way simulations do not replace real things or concepts but are the sole substance of our knowledge of the past and often the present. The collection and display of simulations of dinosaurs or perverted and completely transformed dinosaur-ness in this tableau of a child’s bedroom exudes obsessive energy. There is a desk and chair, a dresser with its drawers open and a television on top of it playing trailers for movies that feature dinosaur special effects (“The Lost World,” “One Million Years, B.C.,” ”The Land Unknown,” “Dinosaurus,” and some installment of the Godzilla saga), a bed, and a night table with a lamp covered with dinosaur decals. Socks, pajamas, underwear, shirts, ties, and shoelaces emblazoned with things we call dinosaurs hang out of the drawers. There are so many dinosaur related products in this installation that I can’t mention all of them, but they can be divided into categories: books, food, dishware and utensils, bathroom items including an antibiotic ointment with a dinosaur on the packaging, clothing, toys, action figures, games, bedding, graphic material such as wallpaper, posters, stamps, decals and stickers, illustrations, and pages from a coloring book. Dion includes a partially filled in page from a child’s coloring book in this installation so that gallerygoers intermittently feel or think they are in an actual bedroom. Of course Dion doesn’t attempt to make the verisimilitude of the installation seamless. The white cube is always present but this obscene amassing of consumer crap would leave less of an impression if everything was behind a glass display. These “dinosaurs” have little to do with real dinosaurs, and Dion emphasizes the fact that our understanding of the world is a product of capitalism. Recognizability trumps knowledge. Therefore, the solace we received throughout our childhood from imaginary forms that signify dinosaurs was preparation for a life of impossible longings and willful ignorance. Signifiers are not what they signify and the signified is always absent.

Dion tells us that a museum’s mission to popularize the sciences is just as insidious as any other deformation of the real perpetrated by Hollywood or Chef Boyardee. Dion once complained about the inaccuracy of many of the brilliant dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. This wasn’t just nitpicking. Science related products such as “Eyewitness Books: Dinosaurs.” or a poster for a new dinosaur exhibit at the Nat. Hist. Museum blend in with the dinosaur fruit snacks, dinosaur keychains, dinosaur calendar, dinosaur underwear and socks, dinosaur pins (“Party ‘til You’re Extinct”), dinosaur gummi candy, dinosaur straws, dinosaur gumball dispenser, dinosaur trading cards, dinosaur baseball caps, dinosaur pillows, dinosaur shaped pasta, et alia.

It is hard not to take Jean Baudrillard’s ideas seriously when standing amidst all of these signifiers. This installation makes us think about the concept of dinosaur. The sparse knowledge most people have about them and the distorted images the word dinosaur conjures up, do not relate to the real but owe their entire existence to consumer processes, the making of useless goods, the generating of desire for these goods, and the marketing of them. The overload accompanying this installation is an integral part of its message. It is easy to imagine installations similar to this one focusing on dogs, or people, or heart shapes, or anything we have completely transformed into banal and ubiquitous symbols. This installation examines cultural processes that distort, repackage and recontextualize the real. The installation shows us a world of consumer friendly signifiers that the individual is immersed in before she/he has a chance to experience the real or at least a coherent pictorial and textual account of the real. How many people really take the time to learn about real dinosaurs and is it even possible to do so?

On a more optimistic note, Dion also points out the malleability of our signifiers or symbols. The general concept of dinosaur is associated with comfort and nourishment (cookies, fudge, bubblegum and bedsheets), playfulness and camaraderie (Barney the purple dinosaur makes a few appearances and plastic and stuffed dinosaurs abound), hygiene and health (adhesive bandages and toothbrushes), fearful amoral monsters (Godzilla and Jurassic Park). Dion shows us how comfortable we have become with this commodity filled hyperreality. These dinosaur signifiers change through time and become more sophisticated formally and on a psychic level. Advances in filmmaking and manufacturing processes allow companies and directors to add detail of form and sophisticated movements to their dinosaurs. They can make them scarier and ickier for adult audiences. For toddlers and preschoolers the dinosaur signifier is scrubbed of all things messy and biological and made soft edged and cute. The unreal, whether it contains viscous and fanged monsters or cuddly and bright colored squeeze toys, has pervaded our lives, our habits and routines, our leisure time and hobbies, our imaginations. We are so accustomed to these distortions that the real has gone missing, and we like it that way.

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