February 16 – March 24, 2012
533 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 714-9500

Yinka Shonibare MBE (this royal honorific, standing for Member of the Order of the British Empire, has become integral to his artistic moniker) is a master mixologist of historical allusions. His nuanced syntheses of significant moments in global and artistic histories reflect his own hybrid Nigerian/British identity. The Dutch wax fabrics that have become his artistic signature, for instance, have a complex pedigree. Inspired by Indonesian batiks, they were first produced by the Dutch, and yet, oddly, have come to symbolize African authenticity. Infusing Shonibare’s work with an implicit critique of empire, these textiles frequently find themselves fashioned into exquisite period costumes outfitting headless, toffee-toned mannequins mimicking classic scenes from art history.

And who is clad in Dutch wax for Shonibare’s latest exhibition? Lord Nelson and his estranged wife, Fanny. While they serve as types, the importance of their specificity is made clear by the titling of their costumes displayed in the central room of the gallery. On the surrounding walls hang photographs of ‘grand exits’ called Fake Death Pictures. Here, Shonibare complicates Nelson’s one-dimensional identity as a celebrated naval leader who famously sacrificed not only an arm and an eye for Empire but also his life: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” As carefully staged as the old European paintings upon which they’re based, these photos invite comparison with the original works of art, perceived historical fact, and Shonibare’s overall oeuvre, not to mention Cindy Sherman’s deconstructive role-play. But goofy, myth-busting theatricality of this order —the compositing of deaths (and lives) – can end up more convoluted cocktail than illuminating palimpsest.

Standing in for other white men whose deaths were immortalized in paint, a live actor plays Nelson. By making him flesh and blood rather than static statuary, Shonibare offers different perspectives on Nelson as both flawed individual and metaphor. Fittingly, other things shift in the photos, from Nelson’s bodily integrity to the races, genders, and ages of surrounding figures and the environment itself. For example, in the shot of a seemingly legless Nelson dying as Leonardo da Vinci, Shonibare makes the king black while the Borghese Gladiator in the background morphs into an angel’s wing. This sculpture was actually discovered after da Vinci’s death; its inclusion by the painter of Shonibare’s source image, François-Guillaume Ménageot, was an exercise of  artistic license. Visual and historical hiccups like these draw attention to the power of representations; they ask us to look twice.

Likewise, Shonibare’s video of an aria from La Traviata benefits from sustained viewing. Having accumulated diverse shot coverage, typical in moving image production, Shonibare made several versions rather than simply looping the same sequence. These subtle differences make the labyrinthine repetition seem all the more inescapable, a technique mirroring content. Fanny’s story of dutiful deprivation is intertwined with Violetta’s pre-death lament, Addio del Passato [“So closes my sad story”] from Verdi’s opera performed here by a black singer. Awaiting Nelson’s return from his perilous missions and even from his mistress, Lady Hamilton, Fanny had a penchant for socially prescribed sacrifice. This she shares with Violetta, who gave up her lover because her checkered past threatened the social status of his family. Violetta, however, more closely resembles Nelson’s mistress, both of whom improved their lot through sexual relations. Shonibare jump cuts in and around an aristocratic residence to give the sense that this mash-up of a woman is everywhere all at once, all fettered despair. Unfortunately, the gorgeous camerawork is intercut with computer-generated moves on the Fake Death Pictures and schmaltzy live action shots of Nelson, and so we say farewell to the elegant economy that might have been.

On the sidelines of so much anticlimax and overwhelming intertextuality, three fetishistic table-top objects steal the show. With its gears and pistons set off by a timer, the Anti-Hysteria Device is a locomotive-inspired sex machine with a Dutch wax upholstered dildo thrusting ever faster until an orgasmic whistle sounds. The frigidly restrictive Anti-Masturbation Device looks like the inverted spout of a teakettle while the Fetish Boots, with their high curving heels, are an incapacitating set of stilts. Crafted in a Victorian, industrial era style, these pieces get at power relations—sexual and otherwise—with a comic stealth absent from the rest of the exhibition. For while Shonibare successfully demonstrates that no historical moment or player is too grand or too insignificant to be examined afresh, the results serve best as an invitation for further inquiry; not the worst outcome, but not the most visually compelling either.

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The impetus for the renovation project was to provide better circulation through the many modernist buildings dotting the campus—which had grown from 50,000 to 500,000 square feet of built space since the museum opened in 1965—and offer visitors a more logical route through its three major collection wings devoted to the archeology of the region, Jewish culture, and fine arts. In a way, the three artists turned that linear coherence upside down by pulling works from different time periods, geographies, and media and using them to support narratives formed from their own associations. This is underscored by having no labels in the galleries next to the art, leading viewers to approach the objects unfiltered and look at each room more as a whole (maps with captions are provided outside the exhibition, which are informative but encumbering). Yet the shows ultimately reinforce the interconnectedness of world cultures—one of the fundamental messages of the Israel Museum which houses everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to art of the present, in a city where the crossroads of history and cultures play such an immediate role in contemporary life. This message is embodied in the new monumental stainless steel sculpture by Anish Kapoor commissioned as part of the campus renewal for the highest point of the museum’s outdoor promenade. Shaped like an hourglass, the sculpture inverts the reflection of the Jerusalem skyline, which starts at the tapered center of the piece and levitates to the top as the viewer approaches. It’s a lovely metaphor for the sands of time not running out but continually filling to the brim.

Susan Hiller, a U.S.-born, London-based multidisciplinary artist, hewed closest to standard curatorial practice by drawing 34 works from one timeframe—modern and contemporary—but created a more dense and visceral installation than typically encountered at a museum. Depending on the day viewers come, they’re greeted by either a brilliant burst of 2000 red gerberas pressed behind three large panels of glass or else the flowers in some form of rot and stench in the piece “Preserve Beauty” (1991) by Anya Gallacio. It’s tapestry-like visual effect and themes of life and death, memory and loss, are echoed in Christian Boltanski’s “Reserve (Storeroom) (1989), a long wall hung ceiling-to-floor with limp used clothing. Two floor pieces carpeting large areas—Erez Israeli’s “Field of Flowers” (2005), a bed of artificial red blooms, and Dina Shenhav’s “City” (1997), a charred gray topographical model of architectural ruins—ripple associatively with the others around the ideas of beauty and decay.

Yinka Shonibare, who grew up in Nigeria and is now based in London, selected of more than 200 objects from across time and installed them in dynamic, geometric configurations on four square platforms organized around the elements of earth, wind, fire, and water. Each is punctuated with one of Shonibare’s trademark figures in Victorian-era clothes made from African fabrics that personify the four elements and were made especially for the show. On the “earth” platform, with Shonibare’s dandy that has a globe for a head and looks to be charging out into the world in animated stride, the artist has juxtaposed a contemporary Andres Serrano photograph of a black Christ with an assortment of prehistoric tools, an Egyptian funerary mask, a South African fertility doll, and a color image of an 18^th-century synagogue from Suriname among others, pressing viewers to consider elemental relationships and the cross-pollination between cultures.

While Shonibare’s platforms suggest the idea of a “cabinet of curiosities” using a very modernist-looking installation approach, Zvi Goldstein’s floor-to-ceiling installation of more than 400 objects on antiquated shelving overtly referenced those 16^th- and 17^th-century wonder cabinets of odd and precious items collected by noblemen that preceded the concept of a modern museum. A Romanian artist based in Jerusalem who combines objects with text, Goldstein here crowded commonplace objects he found in the museum’s offices and recesses—including old typewriters, eyeglass cases, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a urinal not by Duchamp—together with photos by Harold Edgerton, Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Le Corbusier, and Japanese screens in a visually dramatic, non-hierarchical presentation. He was inspired by a hallucination he had of being haunted by objects, which he alludes to in 62 poems he wrote about the experience that hang on the walls amidst the shelves of objects. Some poems and items on the shelves are so high up they are impossible to really see or read, akin to the way memories can be tantalizingly out of reach while others remain vivid. Of the three shows, Goldstein’s most successfully transcends the individual objects and becomes an artwork in its own right.

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