The School For Critics: The Hirshhorn Museum
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these, and I do believe my first one was for the sculpture garden of this very museum. I’ve been by it often enough, I’ve sheltered in its courtyard both from heat and from rain, but I’d never actually been inside until my brother, on recounting his visit, said “They have dresses hanging on chunks of meat!”
“Well, that sounds like a suitable subject for my wit,” thought I, “I will have to go.”
Modern art is, I think, one of those things that, outside a certain circle, one is permitted to dislike without losing one’s pretensions to authority. Mocking either the impenetrability or the transparency of the artist’s point is, I think, my default reaction, and there are few things so enjoyable, in the ordinary way of things, as getting to have an opinion on something. Perhaps deceptively, modern art extends the privilege of having an opinion to everybody. No esoteric knowledge of a lost cultural context is required, no technical training demanded to appreciate the work that went into the physical creation of the object (”Hey! My five-year-old could do that!”). This is specious, of course, and the speciousness cuts both ways, but I am getting ahead of myself.
The Hirshhorn is an exceptionally welcoming building on the outside, a circle lofting itself lightly around a cool courtyard with a great pool and fountain playing in the center. On entering, however, the first thing and indeed only thing that one encounters is the gift shop, where one must pause whether to go up or down on the claustrophobic little escalators. No walk left, stand right here! You are a museum-goer now, not a commuter, and you had best learn to act like one!
I went down, where I found an exhibit called “Black Box” showing videos. The beautifully lit pomegranate exploding into splatter and seeds on being shot was a perfectly appropriate update to things like this, but “The Forest”, a slow pan through a dense green wood punctuated by the fall of trees, some with a huge crash like the roar of an express train, others silent, was very affecting even before reading the bit about this being the forest where the artist’s in laws had witnessed the execution of their fellow villagers.
I was already revising my opinion of my right to criticise, when I turned into the “Strange Bodies” exhibit, and it reasserted itself. Why should it not - the artists had gleefully taken it in hand to criticise the human form, and showed a rather disturbing obsession with dismemberment. The first thing that greeted me as I stepped in was this sprawling figure. “Oh, this must be by what’s-his-name!” said I. “Sounds like an author but isn’t - Francis Bacon? No, Freud, Freud, that’s it. Lucien Freud, painter of the naked.” For so indeed he is: of all those who take delight in unloveliness Freud has perhaps shown most clearly what it means to be naked, an exposed mass of flesh deprived of the clothes that made it possible to relate to you as another person, a body that is by its imperfection a besmirchment of the human form. Who told you you were naked? If it was Lucian Freud, I’d have snatched up some fig leaves as well. Still, it’s an important point, and well taken - at least he had something useful to say, unlike de Kooning, whose works are little better than a snarl of hate. Seeing “Pink Lady” across the room I thought it might be his, and was enormously relieved to discover it was by Niki de St. Phalle, thank goodness, because I don’t want there to be anything about de Kooning that I like.
The Strange Bodies room is dominated by Ron Mueck’s sulky giant. “Aww, I want to take him home!” cried one visitor, but to me he seemed about to rise from his corner and from the baleful glint in his eyeI didn’t think that it would be good for anyone in the room when he did so.
Upstairs, and upstairs again, onto the circuit of the first floor, which was primarily dedicated to an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois. She’s the one who did the spider outside the museum, a striking piece that one would expect to be horrifying but which is suprisingly comforting. Apparently, according to the text accompanying the exhibit, Bourgeois views the spider as a positive symbol, which makes sense. Still, there’s only so far an artist’s intent will carry a piece. Femme Couteau, for instance, seems neither aggressive nor defensive but dismembered, and as such might belong in the rag-and-bone shop of Strange Bodies downstairs. To be sure, sometimes the accompanying directives on how one is to view a piece can be helpful; I walked around “Cell: 12 Oval Mirrors” dutifully contemplating the difference between the distorted images of myself, and I came to some profound realization that I have already forgotten. But should art come with a user’s manual?
The poetry is better than the pictures in “He Vanished”, which is an evocative little piece of nonsense somewhat reminiscent of “The Great Panjandrum”.
Perhaps her sculptures would be more effective alone. The bones holding up the dresses, I’m afraid, seem to me only fodder for a future fad. Why aren’t cow bones more extensively used in home decorating, anyway? It’s not as if we don’t have an abundant supply of them. Ventouse is readily recognizable as a votive shrine, Cumul 1 is the best thing about her stone work, and the earnestness of her blending female with male genital shapes in her sculptures was somewhat undermined by the unfortunate resemblance of the third “Lair” to a pile of turds.
I was astounded, on making the round of the exhibition at last, to come upon a recent video of Louise Bourgeois herself. I don’t know what I’d expected - I think that she’d be be dead by now or something; clearly I hadn’t been paying attention to the dates on the sculptures - but I certainly hadn’t expected her to be an old woman of the brisk, earthy, and intelligent type that one cannot help but respect. Sitting and watching the video of Louise Bourgeois, thoughtful, humorous, vigorously physical, I was compelled by her person into respect for her art. I went back over the exhibit in my mind, obliging myself to take a second look at what I had dismissed as self-pitying or self-important, and new sides of the works began to emerge.
So what’s the moral* of all this? I think one should look critically at art, should allow and even encourage oneself to react emotionally as well as intellectually. Modern art encourages this, volubly, and indeed to the extent where it sometimes descends into navel-gazing.** Is there a difference between criticism and reaction? In practice, for the most part criticism is only an articulated reaction. But it is helpful, from time to time, to be brought up against the limits of your criticism, and humbled by revelation of your own ignorance, by the authority of those who worthily bear is, or by a beauty that brooks no articulation.
*What? This is a blog about morals, apparently.
**Just as poetry is not the only fit subject for poetry, so there is only so much art about art I can take.
I went to a Louise Bourgeois exhibit a few months ago with a friend of mine. Her work, to me, is disturbing but also often witty and although I wouldn’t want her giant spider-cage (http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-11/43306996.jpg) in my living room, I think she’s a fine artist. I found that taking several art history classes as an undergrad makes it easier for me to confront modern art with a bit more context and so a bit more understanding/appreciation. I think getting to know the artists also does this for me too.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:36 amI think it was really her humour that upended my initial perceptions of her work - not that the work, for the most part, is humorous at all. Maybe because so much of it very personal, knowing something more of the artist as a complete person worked back into into the art itself.
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July 14th, 2009 at 8:26 am