Posts Tagged ‘exhibition catalogue’
Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
To my readers: No more posts on LA exhibitions for a while (other than this one and the one to follow); I am now curled up next to a space heater in Chicago, while the rest of you complain about the amazingly hot weather in LA, boohoo.
Admittedly I coerced my best friend to come with me to see these shows (Opie next time) by selling them to him as the “gay shows at LACMA.” They’re not really “gay” shows, but both have material that might be characterized as homoerotic, and maybe that’s why LACMA curators felt they needed to include the following at the entrance of the Manly Pursuits:
Warning Adult Material. (No joke.)
This begs to question—where!? I don’t see any adult material, unless you mean those paintings and photographs that have naked nude male figures in them. Is this warning necessary? Is it there because they’re naked guys? I don’t see labels warning about the naked women elsewhere in the museum. Where’s the warning sign in the renaissance galleries for that painting of that slut Danae and the golden shower?
Moving on from that unnecessary warning, the always clever exhibition designers at LACMA have come up with inventive signage. In the entryway a large title banner is hung from a complex rigging of ropes and pulleys. The didactics in the exhibition are printed on thick canvas (this sailboat not the canvas you paint on), and hung from punctured grommet holes. Very wood shop and very manly I supposed.
The exhibition is organized into genres of sport: rowing, swimming, hunting and sailing, equestrian, boxing and cycling, and wrestling. This method is both user-friendly and functionally allowed for smaller and larger spaces. This is not a full-scale retrospective, but a focused exhibition on one genre of Eakins’s work; this does not mean this is a small show or that it is lacking in works.
The first room, on rowing, had a plentitude of works: completed paintings, preparatory works, and sketches. Eakins fascination (even obsession) with accurate perspective is evident in these works and the combination of works showcased the artist’s anal-retentive process.
The swimming room is the room that I guess warranted the warning label (maybe also the wrestling room). There is only one completed oil painting in the room, The Swimming Hole (1884-85), the only Eakins work on the subject matter. The canvas wall text informs that Eakins relied on photographs for this composition; this is obvious since the painting is accompanied in this room by so many photographs. The photos are of “real” (LACMA’s word choice not mine) naked men, instead of idealized nudes (is that why we need the label?). All of the photos are preciously small and require close proximity to view them properly. The photographs come from various places (oh hey a loan from the Getty!) and are labeled as modern inkjets from original glass negatives. I call them soft-core-porn (kidding, kinda).
The main attraction, on loan from the Amon Carter Museum, has chairs placed in front of it (chairs I’m pretty sure came from a conference room inside LACMA). The wall text also explains that Eakins himself is one of the men in the painting, making this a clusterfuck of viewer-viewed-exhibitionist-voyeur-spectator-participant relationships. I would like to point out that the finished oil painting has no visible penis in it, so what is the big deal?
I blew through the hunting and sailing room, and the equestrian room, in pursuit of more adult content slash gay porn (still kidding LACMA), which I found in the boxing and cycling room. This room had more naked photographic studies to satiate my desires (haha) and several large finished works in it including Saltut from the Addison Gallery of American Art (which has been linked to Gerome’s Police Verso which was just in LA), Between Rounds from Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the largest work, Taking the Count from Yale. Pat on the back for being responsible and looking at where all these loans came from. This room was set with a series of benches arranged as they might be for a spectator sport like boxing (oh yeah that’s the topic of this room).
On to the wrestling room: This room is organized around LACMA’s The Wrestlers, it is a new acquisition and the central reason why LACMA organized this show. More chairs from a LACMA conference room were set in this gallery to allow for longer views (also so viewers could get their rocks off) of the works, which include preparatory paintings (one owned by LACMA prior to the acquisition), and more steamy photographs. Damn LACMA I’m all hot and bothered now, all this adult content.
And after I’d already jizzed my pants LACMA really delivered with Tad Beck’s installation Palimpsest. In a separate room, several works from Beck’s Palimpsest series were displayed, acting in dialogue with Eakins’s work. The subject matter of the male nude (the adult content remember) is not the only similarity Beck explains in an Unframed post.
The last room of the exhibition is a reading room. A really sad little reading room, which had a book on Eakins’s Grafly Album (sexy stuff), some terribly cheap Xeroxed essays, but oh wait, two iPads to read the pseudo-exhibition catalogue on. This is a big show (in scale and importance), with lots of loans—I can’t believe there isn’t an accompanying exhibition catalogue (is one is in the works?), maybe the organizers didn’t have any funds left for publications. But they had funds for those iPads…
The unfortunate gift shop and Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape will have to wait for next time. But believe me the gift shop was UNFORTUNATE and less noteworthy the Opie show did have figures and landscapes (and more gay stuff).
– H.I.
Dennis Hopper: Double Standard
Museum of Contemporary Art
It’s been a long while since we (yes, the royal we) posted about a MOCA exhibition, which is sad since it was the museum that was closest to where I used to live in LA. A lot has happened since Collection: the First 30 Years opened not so long ago. MOCA is under new management, Jeffery Deitch from New York. Changes are afoot, and Deitch wasted no time organizing new exhibitions. The show is curated by (non-MOCA employee) Julian Schnabel, who like Hopper, is also a director slash artist. The show is, of course, Dennis Hopper: Double Standard. The show was being organized while the famous director/actor/artist? was still alive, but sadly Hopper passed before the show opened in the beginning of July. The show is presented at the Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo.
You enter the space down a flight of stairs and immediately see the ass of a large colorful sculpture of a man in a sombrero. This retrospective is not organized chronologically which I actually don’t mind in the slightest, the groupings are thematic or organized by medium. There is a combination of large-scale sculptures, photographs and other media in the first room—an introduction to all the kinds of media that Hopper dabbled in. As previously mentioned, the first thing you see is the ass of Salsa Man (2000) a massive pop sculpture of a mustachioed man holding a tray. You have to walk around the man to see him frontally which is the kind of curation that demands movement.
This movement gets visitors to the wall text, which is actually chalk full of information, but is still all the info provided for the whole show. Some things at MOCA will never change. Other than thanking the sponsors (duh the Broad Foundation, which doesn’t own any Hopper works), the intro walltext also gives a concise rundown on the works in the show. It explains Hopper’s interest in AbEx, how all but one of his AbEx paintings were destroyed in a fire, which begs to question: Where is this one painting MOCA? It also explains the gap in Hopper’s artistic production from the end of the 60s until ’81.
Salsa Man is paired with a sculpture on the same scale Mobile Man (2000), both face out away from the rest of the exhibition towards the large garage doors of the gallery space. This seemed odd to me, until I looked at photos from the opening reception where the garage door was open and people entered the exhibition that way. This enforces speculations about the purpose(s) of this show, is it really to promote this artist?—Or to be attendance booster? And what kinds of people (Hollywood types) is Deitch trying to get involved with MOCA? Regardless the garage space in interesting considering its similarity to Hopper’s mixed-use home/workshop space out in Venice.
The second room is dominated by Bomb Drop (1967/68/2000); I have no idea what the slash in the date is for (maybe it is a recreated piece) thanks for the explanation MOCA. The piece is very reminiscent of that Oldenberg Swiss Army Knife Boat (that wonderful prop). This is pretty much characteristic of Hopper’s work, it was obviously inspired by other artists, many of whom he was besties with. This room seems to be devoted to Hopper’s dabbling (yes I’m going to use this word multiple times) with Pop Art. A Coca Cola Sign (1962) hangs in this gallery. It is labeled as a “found object,” which begs to question the authorship of the piece, did Hopper even consider this one of his works, or was it something he had in his house that he hung on one of his walls?
The next two rooms, and my favorites, were all about photographs. The curators used the whole length of the walls and hung works on high and on low (much more stimulating than hanging them all in a row at the standard level). The photographs were clustered into themes: Pop Images, Civil Rights, Spain and Bullfighting (very Manet), Celebrity Friends, Artist Friends…Instead of having labels on the wall visitors were provided with laminated cards attached to a ring (kinda cheap) with all the info listed there. It was a fun game (for a while) to focus on one photo and attempting to find its label on the laminated sheets.
The most telling clumping of photos was the ones of Hopper’s celebrity artist friends. Present were: Larry Bell, Bill Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Allan Kaprow, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Claes Oldenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol. (Notice a lot of big LA names—who’s looking forward to PST?—I am!) This wall of famous artist friends is very telling about the kinds of people Hopper surrounded himself with, and makes a lot of sense when examining his artistic practices.
Following the two photography rooms, was a room with three humungous paintings. All of them were blown up versions of photographs from the previous room. The title work Double Standard (2009) was accompanied by Biker Couple (2000) from a ’61 photograph, and Rope (2003). I wonder if Double Standard was commissioned specifically for this show, it’s unclear how these works were executed, and whether Hopper actually painted them himself, or if they were just printed on huge canvases. No collection or other notation is mentioned on the labels for these works.
At the back of the gallery is a dark theater with seating where there is a selection of movie clips called “Excerpts on Freedom” edited by Julian Schnabel. It features clips from movies Hopper either acted in or directed: Easy Rider, The American Dreamer, Out of the Blue, Apocalypse Now, Giant, The American Friend, True Romance (damn that’s a lot of imdb links). This theater acts as a kind of footnote: oh yeah and Hopper was an actor and director. But wait, that’s what he is actually most known for, you’re trying to convince me he was an artist remember MOCA.
Another wing of the exhibition features additional large scale photorealistic paintings. Henry Geldzahler (2009) form the Met, and Lichtenstein (2000) no collection mentioned hang with Warhol with Flower (2004) from a ’63 photograph in the other room.
The exhibition as a whole was much better than expected, I thought that the curators might attempt to deemphasize Hopper’s influences (his artist friends) and promote Hopper as more original then he really was. The show is very honest; the writing is on the wall: in the form of Hopper’s portraits of his famous artist friends.
And now for your delight I present a complete waste of money spent shooting and editing a girl flipping through the Hopper exhibition catalogue. Really? Really! Is this necessary for any reason MOCA?
Thumbing Through Hopper from MOCA on Vimeo.
– H.I.
Oh and in case you missed it, MOCA has a blog. Who knew. The curiously titled The Curve looks like it is fairly old, but didn’t go public until fairly recently. And look they do posts just of installation shots (I’m sure a lot of work went into crafting this post). Now you don’t even need to go see the exhibition.
Collection: The First 30 Years – Part 2 (Geffen Contemporary)
Museum of Contemporary Art
After seeing the first part of Collection [link to part one post] at MOCA’s Grand Avenue location I was surprised to see that the seemingly meticulous chronological organization used there, had been abandoned at the Geffen Contemporary portion of the exhibition. At Grand Ave. a single narrative was created with a series of rooms leading one to another. The architectural space at the Geffen does not have a series of rooms, and instead has an open floorplan of a warehouse, which does not lend itself to a singular viewing path. The experience at the Geffen is less rigid but also has little direction.
Because of the lack of a set path, I was free to choose my own, and the first thing I was drawn to was Chris Burden’s Big Wheel. It’s a large moving object and set right next to the admission counter, so it’s hard not to be drawn to it. From there I followed a rampway up, passed an awkwardly placed Richard Hawkin’s painting Disembodied Zombie Skeet Pink, and continued on.
The special installations, like Ruscha’s Chocolate Room at Grand Ave, continued in the second part at the Geffen. Paul McCarthy’s installation of tarnished Christmas trees festooned in dust-covered flowers and ornaments, along with worktables and photographs of creepy, pervy Santa’s made up the piece Tokyo Santa, Santa’s Trees.
The usage of artists quotes for artworks was carried out again at the Geffen, MOCA’s best attempt at education. In an additional attempt at education several benches were placed in the galleries with exhibition catalogues. I wonder how many people actually read a single essay out of the catalogue. The cover of the exhibition is Baldessari’s work This Is Not To Be Looked At, which is featured at the end of the of the Grand Ave portion of the exhibition.
Large sculptures were placed with enough space for a viewer to completely circumnavigate them. This was necessary for examining the details of complex works like Thomas Hirschhorn’s Non-Lieux and David Altmejd’s The Egg. The exception was with the installation of Yutaka Sone’s Hong Kong Island, which was surrounded widely with by black tape and kept the viewer too far to really appreciate the tiny details of the piece.
Underneath the platform of the previous galleries one could find creepy little tunnels leading to the video works. Spelunking into the caves created a sensation of tension that overwhelmed the works; I was more freaked out than really concentrating on the works themselves.
In one room issues of scale were played with. The attempt to balance large works within the same space, and not have them compete with one another, was successful. Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum II, Berlin seemed large until viewed next to Thomas Demand’s Space Simulator, and that even seemed small with Fred Tomaselli’s Hang Over down the hall. And then the leviathan Khedoori Untitled (Seats) was right next door.
Certain artists were featured in multiple places in the Geffen. Baldessari was hung at the very back and also at the very front. A series of Opie photographs was hung far from another self portrait. Why do this? The artworks from the same artists did not necessarily speak more to the works they did hang by, and would have been more informative of the artists careers to compare earlier and later works.
Finally, after all of my meanderings, at the end of the exhibition, I came to the introductory wall text. The bland and uninformative sentences were accompanied by Bruce Nauman’s colorful work Welcome. The work’s title was appropriate for this placement, but that was about all that was appropriate about it. Now I understood the content warning label at the entry of the exhibition. I also realized at this point that I had traversed through the show in the wrong direction.
I had made it through the show with little direction, which seemed to sum it up. At the Grand Avenue portion of Collection, it seemed MOCA was presenting a cannon of contemporary art, explicitly creating a narrative. Where as at the Geffen Contemporary Grand portion, MOCA allowed a visitor to create one’s own narratives.
– H.I.