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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March 7-11, 2012
7 West 34th Street at Fifth Avenue
New York City

At Blythe Projects’ Volta booth artist James Clar has a text piece in which the phrase “global English” is transliterated in six non-Latin scripts – Chinese, Russian, Hebrew etc.  It is a good place to start, conceptually, with this popular boutique fair in which style refuses to be pinned down to place.  This LA gallery’s neighbor, for instance, is Frankfurt’s Galerie Heike Strelow, which is showing the Turkish duo Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt, while Pristine Galerie of Monterrey, Mexico, has an Israeli, Oreet Ashery.  If you want to see a German you are best off at Vane, an English gallery based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with their presentation of Kerstin Dreschsel.  As for the joys of international English, someone someday is going to do something cruel with the name of one of those Turks.

“Must have’er” is the operative phrase, indeed, for Dreschel, the aforementioned German, who makes exquisitely sexy oil sketches based on photos she takes of lesbian sex parties in Berlin.  The painterly sense of participation works to cancel the potential voyeurism of these hard-core images, at least the artist’s.  More complex sexual politics underscores the transgendered theatricality of Zackary Drucker’s photographs and videos at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles’s booth where the most visually arresting works are actually the more understated images: the performer fur-hatted at a snowy football field is more poignant than herself nude and writhing on a dining table, for instance.  Carina Linge, at Jarmuschek + Partner, Berlin, keeps up the libidinal quotient in her reworkings of art historical images, although again, the most erotic is not necessarily the ones that are overtly sexual: a young woman fondling a skinned rabbit that channels Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine is actually her most startling piece.

Canadian galleries are a forceful presence this year.  O’Born Contemporary from Toronto has Alex Fischer whose digital manipulations are entirely made from portions of images sampled on the web, mostly from fine artists.  Janet Werner at Montreal’s Parisian Laundry has two large paintings, Currin-like in their satirical vacuity but out-Currining Currin in their sheer painterly relish.  The artist is to be included in MASS MoCA’s upcoming survey of sixty contemporary artists, Oh Canada, this May.

Sexiness, meanwhile, is not confined to nudes or skinned rabbits: it pops up in the elegantly crafted abstract sculptures of Rachel Beach, Canadian-born and presented by New York’s Blackston gallery, and the slick, glossy artchitecture and graphic design-based abstractions of David E. Peterson who is showing with Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami.  His series based on a clothing catalog feel like they could outfit the schematic beauties of Julian Opie – bringing us back to bodies, in other words.

Of course, what happens at fairs updates what’s going on elsewhere.  Andrew Masullo, at Steven Zevitas Gallery of Boston, signals the ascent of the funky abstractionist secured by his Whitney Biennial triumph – by virtue of default as he provides that dour display with rare instances of color and personal touch.  If you are unaware of the work of Mary Heilmann these are paintings that might feel fresh.  The fair also provides the first commercial outlet for Models for (the) People, an installation by Indonesian Dutch artist Tiong Ang first seen at the Shanghai Biennale in 2008, reassembled by Florence Lynch at <<Rewind<<.

A young artist by the name of Wilmer Wilson IV, who is still a senior at Howard University, stole the show, however, with a performance at Conner Contemporary Art of Washington DC.  Echoing – by bizarre coincidence – one of Zackary Drucker’s videos in which she is embalmed in gold tape, Wilson, a tall, lithe African-American youth, patiently mummified himself before his audience with gold stickers, each of which had apparently been authorized by a notary public in DC (past performances and their resulting photographs have used postage stamps and “I Voted” stickers.)  The ritual sends up notions of validation and self-worth and yet has an eerily calm and timeless dignity about it that belies its satirical intentions.

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