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Picasso in Rehab

Image credit copyright P.A.R Photo by Marc Domage
Image credit: © P.A.R. Photo by Marc Domage

Picasso may be one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, but the jury is still out on the value of his late works. ‘Mosqueteros,’ an exhibition of nearly one hundred paintings and etchings at Chelsea’s Gagosian Gallery is the first major U.S. effort since a 1984 Guggenheim show to change the prevailing perception that the late master had lost his touch by the time of his death at age 91 in 1973.

In a great blast of energy, Picasso spent the final years of his life creating hundreds of paintings after canonical works by Velasquez, Goya, Delacroix and other old masters. Adapting images of soldiers, prostitutes and performers to his trademark, fragmented and twisted style, Picasso seemed to be grappling with his own position in art history. At the same time, the works’ title, ‘Mosqueteros,’ or musketeers, referred to the non-paying rabble at the theater and hinted at the artist’s status as an onlooker as contemporary art rejected abstraction.

Response to the Guggenheim show was underwhelming. New York Times critic Michael Brenson praised Picasso’s energy more than the work itself, while the less gracious Robert Hughes opined that the work showed only fragments of Picasso’s talent.

So why try to change the record now? John Richardson, curator of this show and Picasso’s biographer, says he’s ‘avenging’ Picasso of the poor response to his work; more interesting to a contemporary art audience, he also explains that he intends the artist to, “…look like a brand new painter.”

Portraits like Buste (1970), a character whose feline face is created with pools of dark paint punctuated by a phallic or key-like orange monocle, immediately make the case for Picasso as a forerunner (albeit distant and far more dignified) to young, expressionist-inspired artists like Jonathan Meese and Andre Butzer. Though the character’s terrible, black-eyed gaze ties him to Picasso’s other harrowing portraits, Picasso eschews the sketchy outlines he uses in many of the show’s other works, and composes using blocks of color in a style that enhances the mystery of his shadowy personality.

In 1984, Hughes noted the speed with which Picasso painted, and condemned the artist for making his painting process more important than the final product. Nowadays, that’s accepted practice in any media, from Josh Smith’s paintings, to Fia Backstrom’s performance/installation work to Walead Beshty’s photography and sculpture.

Picasso’s late paintings aren’t likely to be direct precedent for any of these artists. But given the popularity of mining 20th century avant-garde art history (think camera-less photography, constructivism, 60s and 70s performance), it’s fascinating to see evidence of the reverse process – a canonical artist who seems to have deliberately pointed several ways forward. As evidence that he was a wellspring of ideas until the end, this exhibition will doubtless have the legacy-effecting impact it deserves.

Hottest Show: Barnaby Furnace

After an August lull, the art world has suddenly come to life with hundreds of new exhibitions opening within the first three weeks of September. With so much competition, it’s hard to single out a solitary, ‘best’ show, although a few stand out primarily because of their spectacular new surroundings. Powerhouse dealer Marianne Boesky’s new building on 24th Street houses Barnaby Furnace’s enormous paintings depicting the parting of the Red Sea, while solo shows by John McCracken, Jockum Nordstrom, and Yutaka Sone inaugurate David Zwirner’s new empire of art galleries (three in a row) on 19th Street. (Barnaby Furnace’s show runs Sept 16 – October 21. John McCracken’s and Jockum Nordstrom’s shows are open Sept 8 – October 14th and Yutaka Sone’s is open Sept 21 – Oct 28.)

Read more on the following gallery websites:
Marrianne Boesky Gallery
David Zwirner

‘Extreme Makeovers’ Work by Wangechi Mutu

For ‘Art on Paper’ Magazine

Wangechi Mutu, 'The Rare Horn- Hair Thought', 2004. Ink, Acrylic, Collage on Mylar
Wangechi Mutu, 'The Rare Horn- Hair Thought', 2004. Ink, Acrylic, Collage on Mylar

Wangechi Mutu creates collages of fantastical creatures, beautiful but damaged.

Her studio was just as I expected: body parts littered everywhere, a tray full of lips on the table, a pair of sleek legs in strappy heels affixed to the wall. In the telling, Wangechi Mutu’s workspace at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she is a resident artist, sounds like a campy crime scene. In fact, it is a sort of laboratory in which she uses collage and drawing on paper and Mylar to inscribe real crime stories onto hybrid bodies. “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male,” says Mutu. “Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” This includes everything from the violence perpetrated against innocent civilians in war zones to the ‘modifications’ made in order to follow fashion.

Artists from Cindy Sherman to Orlan have explored the chameleon-like nature of female bodies for decades. So what makes Mutu’s work unique? Apart from being skilled in montage she coherently refers to race, politics, fashion, and African identity in portraits that pack an aesthetic punch. This cocktail of influences strongly recalls Weimar artist Hannah Hoch’s collages of African artifacts and European bodies in her portrait series, ‘From an Ethnographic Museum.’ But Hoch’s montages beg the question, like ethnography itself, of whether her then-colonial subjects themselves are represented as they think they are or in a manner that reflects Hoch’s view of them. Eighty years later, an artist who was raised in Kenya and has traveled and lived overseas ever since, gives an answer as complex as her experience.

After completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Mutu found herself in New York without the school’s resources and faced with a crisis of direction. With pen and paper as her chief art supplies, she created the ‘Pin Up Series’ (2001), which established her interest in adaptable female bodies. In two grids of twelve small images, topless women preen and posture for the viewer like calendar girls. “I wanted you to walk up to them assuming you were going to see these pretty, interestingly posed females,” explains Mutu. “It takes people some time to see that every single one of them has some trauma or alteration that is severe and aggressive.” The women, who strike come-hither poses, are amputees. The series was inspired by violence in Sierra Leone, where an illegal diamond trade fueled fighting that maimed many civilians – in effect, trading one person’s well-being for another’s beauty.

Ironically, the more severe the violence done to her subjects, the more attractive they become, until their flesh, mottled with colored blotches produced by trauma, is as decorative as it is damaged. In ‘Riding Death in My Sleep’ (2002) a bald woman with bloodshot, Asian eyes and huge red lips crouches in a field of mushrooms, her beautiful orange, red and black skin resembling that of a poisonous snake. Mutu graphs animal or mechanical body parts onto other characters, such as two figures in ‘Intertwined’ (2003), from the ‘Creatures’ series. The scantily clad women have the heads of hyenas, animals whose name is an extremely derogative slang term for women in the Swahili language. In other collages, the figures adopt mechanical prosthesis, with several motorbikes becoming a foot, for instance, or joining together to be worn in a shoulder pad arrangement.

For all their mutations and injuries, Mutu’s characters come across as empowered. Using the body language of fashion divas, they simultaneously play the roles of victim and aggressor, adapting to the harm inflicted on them by whatever means necessary. ‘Centipede’ – a series of site-specific wall drawings accompanied by racially-charged texts that appeared in several New York group shows last season – best conveys Mutu’s intentions for her audience. “The point is to get people to access their own position, to enjoy and work at understanding what role they have to play,” she says of her hybrid, exploding insects, which represent the destructive creature foretold by African soothsayers before the arrival of European colonial powers. We are attracted, repelled, and implicated all at once by Mutu’s solitary survivors who remind us that the past is both behind us and looming ahead.

Jason Rhoades, at David Zwirner

For ‘Tema Celeste’ magazine

Jason Rhoades, 'Meccatuna', 2003, Installation View
Jason Rhoades, 'Meccatuna', 2003, Installation View

Cod Canal. The Flounder. Fish Hole. Tuna Town. These phrases and hundreds more were spelled out in bright, neon lights high on the walls of David Zwirner’s gallery. At first, aided by an enormous, multicolored cube-shaped construction made entirely of lego, they created a festive atmosphere. The show seemed dazzlingly fun, at least until the artist’s symbolism was decoded. The seductively colorful lights in fact spelled out mostly derogatory slang terms for vagina, and were joined by less ambiguous words like “wound,” “monster” and “cum dumpster.” With a little explanation, the show flipped from impressive to oppressive.

The title, Meccatuna, summarized two competing trains of thought. First, Mecca—the home of the cube shaped Ka’ba considered by Muslims to be the center of the world—is represented in the show by the lego structure. Second, tuna—slang term for vagina—is symbolized by the neon words arranged on the walls and on metal shelving units, shiny metal disk sculptures, tires, and sculptures in the shape of a camel’s toe bone. Mecca and tuna are united in the narrative of a journey commissioned by Rhoades, who supposedly paid a man in Saudi Arabia to document the purchase of a box of Geisha brand tuna in Mecca.

The artist’s conceptual starting points are clear, but they initiate disturbing chains of association. His primary comparison is between the Muslim center of the world and the vagina as L’Origine du monde, as Courbet titled his famous painting. East also meets West in the donkey and camel, submissive beasts of burden and secondary actors in Rhoades’ tableau. Does this designation extend to women, whose vaginas are represented by the camel in this show? How are we to read a photograph on the gallery wall of the Ka’ba, surrounded by circumambulating worshippers? The relationship between animals, the faithful and women are too undefined; Rhoades may not have intended to directly insult women and Muslims, but his practice of encouraging ambiguous associations backfires in Meccatuna. Provocation for its own sake is like a drum roll followed by nothing—attention grabbing but ultimately disappointing.

Contemporary Asian Photography, at Japan Society

For ‘ART AsiaPacific’ Magazine

Too many cooks spoil the broth, but a superabundance of curators doesn’t have to be tasteless. At least that is the lesson taught by “The Year of New Work: Contemporary Asian Photography,” a four-part exhibition at New York’s Japan Society organized by photography curators Noriko Fuku, Alice Rose George and Christopher Phillips. Beginning in November 2002, the external curators presented quarterly, themed exhibitions of contemporary photography and video by Japanese, Chinese and Korean artists in the new ‘Lobby Gallery.’

Most artwork in the four exhibitions came from the collection of JGS, Inc. (standing for Joy of Giving Something) a non-profit arts organization eager to partner with institutions to show its extensive photography collection. Besides supplying the art, JGS, Inc. brought the curators, each of whom acts as a specialist consultant for different parts of the collection. George, an independent curator, photo editor and art advisor who has worked with JGS for eleven years succinctly said, “We’re interested in whatever talent that is coming that hasn’t been before.” A quest for the new took the organization as far as Asia, where it began collecting work by emerging artists in the mid 90s.

The collection now includes work by artists familiar and new to New York audiences, a mix which was reflected in the exhibitions. The first show, ‘Character and Choice’ featured photographs by Nikki S. Lee, Yasumasa Morimura and Tomoko Sawada and delved into the theme of physical transformation. Lee’s makeovers as a skateboarder, a Hip-Hop diva and a senior citizen and 400 surprisingly diverse self-portraits taken by Sawada in a photo booth captured the artists’ chameleon-like ability to alter their appearances. ‘Flesh and Flames,’ the second show in the series, opened in Spring ’03 with photos of dying flowers by Nobuyoshi Araki, close-up shots of the aging Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno by Miyako Ishiuchi, and images of Buddhist rituals in the Kumano Mountains by Risaku Suzuki.

If the first two exhibitions favored the human body and ritual, the final two shows focused on the collision of past, present and future. ‘Spatial Narratives,’ which opened in Summer ’03, featured a collaged scroll by Hong Hao, a scroll-like series of photos by Xing Danwen, photos by Tomoko Yoneda and Atta Kim and a video by the New York- based Korean artist Seoungho Cho. Cho’s work also appeared in the final installment, themed around the fast changing Asian cityscape. Photographers included Naoya Hatakeyama whose series ‘Slow Glass’ captures city lights at night though a car windshield and two Chinese artists: Beijing based Zhang Dali, who alters the appearance of buildings scheduled for demolition, and Weng Fen from Hainan Island in south China who takes high format photographs of the new cityscapes with children in the foreground.

The year-long exhibition is another demonstration of the increasing importance of Asian photography in New York. Though, the lobby venue seemed inappropriate for three curators with such international stature. (Despite the tranquil sounds of a waterfall and gorgeous black stone walls, it’s still a lobby.) But other shows are on the horizon in the city. Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) who is co-curating an exhibition of Chinese photography with Wu Hung at the ICP and Asia Society opening June 2004, points out, “Slowly, you’re starting to see mainstream galleries, and photography galleries starting to recognize that this is an untapped body of work of extremely high quality, which we can all learn something from.”