February 25 to May 22, 2017
2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, barnesfoundation.org

“The Person of the Crowd” is a large survey of 53 artists that has numerous successes and failures, leaning towards success. It is inherently unwieldy, stretching across five or six decades surveying installation, video, performance and conceptual works centered on the theme of the social and political context of modern urban life, crowds, political life, private lives in public, and communities. The exhibit includes work by seminal artists in these various fields as well as recent developments. Many of the works are shown dovetailed and overlapping each other in one large gallery, in a way that is for the most part a curatorial success, pulling into interactions with each other video works and conceptual sculptures sometimes shown dryly and remotely detached in the white and black boxes of other museums and galleries.

Several parts of the exhibit take place around the streets of Philadelphia including posters and billboards by Jenny Holzer and the Guerilla Girls, as well as performances by Wilmer Wilson, Ayana Evans, and a re-enactment of Tania Bruguera’s Diplacement of 1998, an important work of recent political art resulting in Brugeura’s arrest and detention in Cuba. The pieces in the gallery stretch from Robert Rauschenberg, Guy Debord, and Vito Acconci, to more recent artists such as Zhang Huan, Virgil Marti, and Papo Colo. If the viewer is familiar with art history, works such as Carolee Schneemann’s Beatle Box, c. 1960s, and David Hammons Untitled (Speakers), 1986, provide a whiff of context to the more recent works. One of the failures of the show is that even with the judicious and informative labeling, some of this historical context is hard to grasp. On the other hand, a success of the show is that even slight pieces—slight in relation to the other later accomplishments of these two artists—are brought back to life by seeing them next to other likeminded works. A kind of visual and historical rewinding takes place in this exhibit which is hard at times to follow, but yields a more vivid experience of most of the individual works. Again this is not without some failures, but the successes often outweigh them.

Along with the art of this period, “Person of the Crowd” weaves together two additional contexts in its consideration of contemporary flânerie: the history of the Barnes Foundation itself and the narrative provided by Walter Benjamin and others in regard to 19th century Parisian idlers, voyeurs, and observers in the crowd. The Barnes Foundation is a non-museum intended to be a visual demonstration of a self-proclaimed “objective” method of understanding art through plastic values that was developed by Albert Barnes and the longtime director, Violette de Mazia, and illustrated by many of the best works money could buy in the first half of the 20th Century, hung floor to ceiling and wall to wall. “Person of the Crowd” curiously displays works similarly, except the interactions of visual qualities reach across diverse mediums and speak more directly to social and political worlds.

Thom Collins, executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation, and curator of the exhibition, focuses in his wall text on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd;” the poet, Charles Baudelaire; and the idea of someone who has the leisure time to wander through crowds in the city, such as the flâneur, or dandy, all of which figure prominently in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.”

The main collection of the Barnes Foundation carefully compares visual qualities of works in its “wall pictures” which for some are curatorially heavy-handed. Similar relationships occur in this exhibit. It is questionable if Jean Shin’s found pieces of blue painted plywood construction site fencing from her 2016 “Surface Tension” series are seen best here running through the middle of the show rather than closer to the wall, as she has shown them before. Here Shin’s series seems to be a room divider and backdrop for other works, even as they regain some original context as found fencing.

“Person of the Crowd” provides the rare pleasures of seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s 1961 Second Time Painting (1961), next to Brett Day Windham’s Rosary (2008-13), both of which examine the mystery of quotidian objects. Pope L.’s The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2003) contrasts vividly and starkly with Kimsooja’s Beggar Woman – Cairo (2001). The efforts of performance and the engagement of the spectator are questioned by both. In a corresponding way, the narrative territories of many of these works, if read from the right angle, pleasurably enrich each other’s various transitional states of social identity, as in the works of Jefferson Pinder, Papo Colo, Sanford Biggers, Kendell Geers, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. Likewise the rooms of the Barnes Foundation makes use of strategic comparisons that inverts relationships between performance pieces, say African masks, and narrative art, such as Picasso’s and Matisse’s paintings. Benjamin in Part II of his essay contrasts a hero or political figure that stands in the crowd with the heroism of the crowd. Pinder’s Marathon (2001) and Biggers’ Duchamp in the Congo (1997) leans more to what separates members from the crowd, but not without redefining a moving center of the crowd.

Beyond the obvious social and political engagement that links the works of “Person of the Crowd” are their narrative complexities, narrative twists and turns, made evident in conjunction with formal, visual, and political weights. (This is in fact true of the Barnes Foundation’s collection as a whole, but is rarely acknowledged by either its admirers or its detractors.) And part of this narrative complexity that cannot be overlooked is the diversity of voices and cultural outlooks present in this exhibit. (Ditto.) While including a nod to 19th century Paris, other connections and conversations are brought into a state of motion and play, maybe frenetic but not chaotic, which renders the works and their themes animated and in a state of transition.

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Titled “Neither Coming Nor Going,” Zhang Huan’s exhibition of an ashen sculpture of Buddha accompanied by collaged monoprints on paper suggests some form of stasis, an exegesis on silence, where everything remains still. The large Buddha is molded in ceremonial ash collected from temples in China. The thickly molded surface of the sculpture is embedded with small porcelain relics, copper dishes (used for offerings), simulated skulls, and joss sticks, normally burned on the occasion of certain Buddhist rituals.

For this exhibition, the artist intended his Rulai (seated Buddha) to possess an interactive effect not only in terms of its silence, but through the olfactory impact of temple incense. This impact, however, was limited only to opening night. As the billowing clouds of incense emanating non-stop from the oversized head of Buddha, they filled the gallery space with a choking fragrance that drove many a visitor back outside the door into the frigid street. Upon realizing there was no ventilation by which to release the clogging smoke, the staff wisely decided to extinguish it, thus allowing visitors – in the final minutes of the reception – to breathe normally and view, if not smell, the work more accurately.

This innocuous happenstance aside, the exhibition is charged with innovative features that appear less conceptual than driven by the fertile imagination of the artist. In a catalog statement from the previous exhibition in 2008, the artist (who returned to Beijing two years earlier after residing in New York for eight years) explained: “I think the key to my success is to just do it without thinking too much. I don’t reason. I just do it.” To the Western mind, such a comment suggests the romantic notion of inspiration, but for a Chinese artist, born the year prior to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, it could be read two ways: as a release of energy in the Buddhist sense of emptying the mind, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a way of manifesting desire for survival against all odds. For those who lived through this period, young or old, the challenge to live a cultural life was constantly under siege and therefore impossible to realize in the full sense.

In the Rulai, it is within the gray ash that one senses the conflicting elements of life and death. The artist has removed the raised forearm on the right and several of the fingers in the hand to the left. This is a formal decision. The Rulai is not an historical relic but a recent construction, so it would seem superfluous not to have them attached. Having visited many temples and seen numerous statues of Buddha throughout Asia, including the monumental bronze in Kamakura (Japan) exactly twenty years ago, the feeling of repose and tranquility expressed within that work, in particular, is not precisely what I saw or felt in the ashen Buddha of Zhang Huan. Instead, what I get from the Rulai at Pace Wildenstein is an appearance that suggests a mediated form, a kind of religiosity, which exists vaguely in the present but without the tension of an actual history to contextualize it. Still, there is an urgency about this Buddha that is different than the rest.

Given the rapid entrepreneurial atmosphere in China, the desire to preserve the past – essentially, what was not deccimated during the Cultural Revolution – is less likely to suggest repose and tranquility than a fierce desire to retain some semblance of a spiritual core. This idea is further expressed in the 7th-century, Tang Dynasty prophecy book, the Tui Ben Tu, which the artist used in the elegant series of works on paper that surround the Rulai on the walls on the gallery. Many of these contain animals that symbolically portray spirits that presumably will guide the Chinese people to a sense of well being in contrast to the kind of devastation they experienced in the previous century.

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Richard Vine New China New Art Prestel: New York, 2008, 240 pages, ISBN 978 3 7913 3942 9
[Revised/Expanded edition, 2011, 256 pages, ISBN 978 3 7913 4550-5]

Richard Vine, editor of Asian art for Art in America, has taken a ten-year-long interest in Chinese art and parleyed it into an encyclopedic volume of considerable information and intelligence. Vine has been publishing reviews and articles on China since 1998, when he first became interested in the field. Not so long ago, all but a few people in the international artworld were lackluster in their appreciation for contemporary Chinese art; today, the market bubble, showering money on even the lesser wannabes in Mainland China’s art system, has made the artworld there the focal place for art in Asia. Vine has wisely restricted his attention to the better-known artists in the relatively short history, perhaps three decades, of new Chinese art. He is an excellent writer, finding the exact term in any description and staying away from the unhappy grandiosity and triumphalism that often accompany writing about China’s avant-garde.

New China New Art seems pitched at the relative newcomer to the Chinese art world, with an emphasis on the introduction of names and particular achievements. It does a good job of describing that rather disconnected gathering of artists, gallerists, curators, and critics that constitutes the Chinese art intelligentsia, the latter unfortunately undermined by the practice in China of galleries directly paying writers for articles on their artists. As Vine rightly points out, the artworld in Beijing and Shanghai and other cities is clearly hindered by a lack of infrastructure: well-developed spaces, sharp writing and publications, and an overall professionalism that seems to have gone by the wayside in the face of all the money raining down on the artistic districts of China’s urban centers.

Rather than explain this rather labyrinthine state of affairs, Vine concentrates on the art itself, offering a wonderfully accessible approach to individual  achievements, grouping artists according to seven categories: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Performance, Photography, Video, and The Scene Now. He forgets no one, accurately summarizing an artist’s contribution within the space of a paragraph or two. Established installation artists such as Xu Bing and Cai Guo Qiang are given their due, but Vine also covers talented photographers such as O Zhang and Chi Peng, whose work is just beginning to make its way into Western awareness. He sticks close to the facts rather than working up a general theory for the pluralism of Chinese art. In truth, it may well be impossible to elaborate an overview when so many different kinds of art compete with each other, and Vine’s broad scope leaves very little behind.

One of the best things about Vine’s book is the very succinct way in which he characterizes artists and their work. He is able to capture, for example, Zhang Huan’s nearly twenty-year career in a few paragraphs, deftly analyzing his “breakthough” 12 Square Meters (1994): “Zhang smeared his body with fish oil and honey, then sat motionless for an hour in a sweltering, stench-ridden communal outhouse of that size (129 square feet), before stalking mutely away, step by step, to immerse his entire body in the brackish water of a nearby pond.” But even when the author packs so much information into so few words, the effect of the writing is never heavy or turgid. Conceptual sculptor Ai Weiwei is treated with similar objectivity and brevity.  Even when Ai went so far as to deliberately drop a Han dynasty urn, Vine holds back from any judgemental attitude.  This book stand out in its independence and clarity.

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Ben Davis, Lance Esplund, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Tara Donovan at the Met, Anne Harris at Alexandre, Bharti Kher at Jack Shainman, David Reed at Max Protetch, and Zhang Huan at the Asia Society.

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