July 10 to August 17, 2018
510 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, pacegallery.com

Fred Wilson’s “Afro Kismet” is seeing its third iteration. Made for the 2017 Istanbul Biennial, it was also presented earlier this year by Pace in London. The installation follows the now familiar strategy Wilson pioneered in his breakthrough 1992 project, “Mining the Museum,” in which he reconfigured the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to focus on its exclusions and thereby illuminate the history of slavery in the United States. “Afro Kismet” expands on this idea, turning attention toward Venice and the Ottoman Empire to consider the African diaspora on a global scale.  

Wilson employs an extensive range of materials and strategies to explore this ambitious theme, exploiting his signature technique of blending the historical and the contemporary to its fullest extent. There are both appropriated historic tribal artifacts, such as a Yoruba Gelede mask, and objects that the artist has created, such as painted museum reproductions or works on raw canvas. Stand-outs – in terms of drama and scale – include a pair of large, opulent Ottoman-style black chandeliers hanging overhead. These not only add needed light to the space, but also, with their hefty chains, a sense of grounding. Black is deployed so forcefully throughout the show that it has the weight of a material in its own right. Historical prints – framed or encased with a sprinkling of cowrie shells – have been altered, as the black figures are spotlit through the near-erasure of white people under opaque vellum. Blackness is both textual reference and color choice in two tile walls emblazoned in Arabic letters with the phrases “Black is Beautiful” and “Mother Africa,” respectively. The African tribal pieces, in scattered vitrines,  are paired with quotes, in black vinyl, either from James Baldwin (who himself lived in Istanbul for a time) or from Othello, Shakespeare’s racially charged play partially set in Venice.

Wilson’s more delicate touches carry their own kind of unique power. Trade Winds (2017), a tabletop plastic globe, poetically and powerfully illustrates the worldwide movement of abducted Africans through criss-crossing black brushstrokes. The vaguest outlines of nations and continents remain visible through some of the thinner strokes, inviting viewers to step closer and see the path of the natural phenomenon of wind turned unnatural through the trading of flesh. Works from Wilson’s “drips” series frame the center of the gallery. These are arrangements on the wall of individual blown-glass elements that the artist has described as reminiscent of oil, ink, or tears. Regardless of what they bring to mind, these glossy black clusters add an elegant, crafted touch to the referential, appropriated objects in “Afro Kismet,” and attune the space to specific emotions. The cascading arrangement of frozen-in-time shapes imbues us with a heavy sense of loss, sadness, and disintegration.

Adjacent to “Afro Kismet” is a gallery of related recent glass works. In contrast to the abundance  of found and created objects next door, the more abstract glass works form a streamlined presentation of three “drips,” three “mirrors,” and Wilson’s most recent chandelier. This latter, A Moth of Peace (2018), hung at eye level in the center of the room, serves as a foil to the other chandeliers. It has a Venetian look, more organic than the Ottoman-inspired geometry of the other two, and is made of white and clear glass that extends upward, antigravitational in its vine-like progression. Wilson’s belief in “beauty in service to meaning and beauty as a seductive material that draws you in” feels particularly vindicated in this captivating work. Upon close inspection, one finds that it is not pure white, but that in fact there are a few small details of the design where a white piece has been replaced with a black one. These black bits prompt the eye to consider the rest of the room. The large, layered mirrors, each titled for moments in Othello, feature an intensely black high-gloss surface. Their dark mirroring allows visitors to see themselves in the work, particularly due to the light provided by the chandelier, which is itself always visible in the reflection as a looming white mass behind the viewer. The considerations of blackness that Wilson explores in “Afro Kismet” are thus distilled in this side of the gallery: whiteness is at the center of the room, and even when one turns away it is always looming close behind. The shadows of imperialism and colonialism remain, and, as “Afro Kismet” explores, they linger not only over the United States, but also above other historically slave-holding areas.

Wilson is not the only artist who uses black as both a subject and a material. His Where’s-Waldo-esque engravings bring to mind Kara Walker’s silhouette cutouts, while Rashid Johnson’s frequent use of black soap resonates with Wilson’s flags of African nations, reduced to black acrylic on raw canvas and hung across the highest point of the gallery walls, reducing people and nations to a few lines rendered in a single color. Kerry James Marshall’s mastery of black acrylic paint has cemented his signature style in his portraits, infusing them with individual personality and collective pride. Wilson’s pure black Murano glass, used in both the “drips” series and mirror works, achieves a similar effect. Such connections place this exhibition in a larger context of ongoing conversations of representation and identity politics.

The hopeful antidote to this legacy seems to come from the joy in Wilson’s pair of tiled walls (Mother Africa, 2017, and Black is Beautiful, 2017). After all, the installation is called “Afro Kismet,” which this viewer read as a redemptive view rather than accusatory history lesson. Like the “drips,” which tie together the two parts of the Pace show in their materiality, these walls can literally be seen in both parts of the gallery – monumentally in “Afro Kismet,” and framed within the doorway from the glass room. At nine feet tall and nineteen feet across, these gorgeously painted walls are more than just a backdrop for selfies (a popular phenomenon on this reviewer’s visit). Wilson adopts a rallying cry from the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States, and brings it face-to-face with a phrase symbolic of the history of displacement and reality of the vastness of the African diaspora. The traditional Turkish floral design of the tiles’ background offsets the almost-neon quality of the huge blue text. The deep purple, blue, and black tones of the walls, illuminated under the chandelier Eclipse (2017), diffuse a rich glow through the space.

Standing between these elegant walls, I felt embraced in the energy of the pattern and the light, causing peripheral thoughts to be subsumed by a profound sense of coming together. This might seem ironic, staged between two walls. Yet still, this space became an open channel for reconciliation, bridging the gap between “selfie” and “other.”

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October 10, 2015 to January 10, 2016
1219 SW Park Avenue (at SW Madison Street)
Portland, OR, 503 226 2811

“Cézanne’s was not a canvas, it was a landscape.”
-Frantz Jourdain

I recently went to the Portland Art Museum to look at “Seeing Nature,” a survey of “landscape masterworks” from the Paul Allen Family Collection. Passing through the Paradise: Fallen Fruit imbroglio at Portland Art Museum’s entrance makes this exhibition an even more pleasurable destination. The former’s tormented, though enjoyable, curatorial bent is a commentary on modern culture and our inheritance of its public spaces, through various paintings and sculptures of PAM’s permanent collection spanning several eras, abutted sans-info or contextual sequencing. Less the mélange than a remix, though extremely understated, sculptures are clustered on a plinth at center gallery, while paintings hang in crushes along the walls. A good thing about this concept is that it takes canonized works and forces the viewer to answer for themselves the question, “Why is this major?” It’s a contemporary idea not short on tradition. That it’s jumbled up isn’t a reproach, it’s the point of the piece — to raise questions by making a work of art out of past works. But “Seeing Nature”’s M.O. is something much simpler though still nuanced, and visiting both exhibitions makes for two different museum experiences. One way of presenting a collection isn’t more valuable than the other, but what happened during my visit made certain institutional implements seem worthy of their subsisting charms.

The Paul Allen Family collection, some of whose 39 works are seen here in public for the first time, is composed of quite a few French Impressionist works and an impressive, wide array of other works from the last 500 years. The exhibition’s supreme appeal seems to be its intention to give the sensory experience of landscape. However old-hat this may seem to be, it works. The show’s sequencing is uncomplicated, with ample wall space between works, allowing space for longer looking. Three large galleries hold the paintings with central seating in each for tired feet, long visits, Instagramming, etc., and the the walls are affixed with artworks in unexpected and titillating curations.

The first room features the glorified French works including five by Monet, as well as Paul Signac’s Morning Calm, Concarneau, Opus 219 (Larghetto) (1891) with a musical connection in Pointillist fragmentation, like musical notes coming together to form a number. Signac’s fragments, like other of the experimentally adventuresome paintings in this show, fully allow the viewer to put the optical illusion of sailboats off the coast of Brittany together retinally and with their imagination. Seeing Gustav Klimt’s experimental 1903 oil painting of a birch forest at Attersee, Birch Forest, I can’t help but laugh, picturing Klimt painting among the birches, holding up his opera glasses to distort and augment the sights. The close-up view of birches juxtaposed with spacial illusion of the rest of the forest is dizzying and totally pleasurable.

Still, the same question can be asked: Why are these paintings famous and why should I care? My favorite of the show, Henri Le Sidaner’s Serenade at Venice (1907), immediately sent me into a state of reverie and welled my eyes, which also happened when I saw Degas’ Café Singer (1879) in Chicago. What causes such a reaction? Light (paint) forming the impression of life (the singer’s red lips, the sun, or in Le Sidaner’s case, low nocturnal flameglow). Le Sidaner, “delicious rhapsodist of night,” replicates the feeling of gloaming at night by way of painted paper lanterns, the luxury of sightseeing, and music made possible by subtle chiaroscuro (without Baroque melodrama) in his 1905 painting of gondoliers on a Venetian lagoon.

One of the other two rooms is full of Modernist favorites like O’Keefe, Ruscha, Richter, Hockney, Magritte, and Ernst, many of which are stretches when it comes to landscape, raising the question: what is a landscape? Take for instance Ed Ruscha’s Premium Oil (1965), a painting that brings the landscape to its viewer in its absence. What Ruscha presents here is a large silhouetted building, with the landscape a mere suggestion left to the viewer’s imagination. One would be remiss to not mention David Hockney’s massive panoramic stunner in oil, The Grand Canyon (1998), a veritable contemporary Fauve take on the natural monument. It’s by turns flat, illusionistic, cartoony, and naturalistic.

The third room features the older of the paintings, with artworks that document a return to classical themes, myths, and architecture. Jan Brueghel the Younger’s 1625 series, “The Five Senses,” involves the landscape combined with portraiture and still life, while Venice occupies the canvases of Turner, Canaletto, Manet, and Moran.

Returning to the first room to leave, I happened on Joan Kirsch, an art historian and docent giving a public tour. Knowing her wide frame of reference and clear, entertaining eloquence, I couldn’t miss the chance to listen in. Joan’s one of a kind who’s been around a while. She once told me that she used to rollerskate to the Met and then roll around the galleries looking at all the art. She and her group were at Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (1888-90). I learned things that contextualized an already thrilling painting in ways that maybe wouldn’t happen without the mediated viewing of the guided tour. In Cézanne, this kind of viewing is absolutely helpful.

Knowing that Cézanne has probably influenced every painter since his death doesn’t lessen his works’ challenging aspects. In this and the hundreds of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings Cézanne made, the natural landscape looks unnatural, larger than life, not at all like it does in situ. Cézanne’s structured, strange brush strokes (owing their slant to his left-handedness) reflect the painter’s emotional baggage, to paraphrase Joan. He painted his interpretation — what he wanted you to see, not what’s necessarily there. All this led to a conversation about why so much of the work in this exhibition was satisfying, and why we call this kind of work “great.” Cézanne (one of the first experimental painters of the Modern era), like so many of the artists in this exhibition, only wanted to give you part of the picture and so he left the rest for the viewer to discern or keep wondering about. “When you’re in a forest,” Joan explained, “you don’t even need to see the whole tiger. If you see his tail, you run.”

“Seeing Nature” will also travel to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and will conclude at the Seattle Art Museum in 2017.

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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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