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“Order and Disorder” is the title of a magnificent exhibit
at Boston’s
Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) featuring the peerless work of Goya. But it may as well have been a
general theme for much of what we saw both there and at the
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). I’ll return in a moment to Goya and the MFA.
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| Ito wa ito Naomi
Kobayashi |
From the perspective of hindsight, order seems to have ruled
the day, for the most part, in the ICA’s big show called Fiber: Sculpture
1960–present, the museum’s
first major exhibition of fiber art in 40 years. That’s because 50+ years on we
as audience have grown accustomed to fiber sculptures that don’t lay flat on
the wall and because fiber artists generally hew to rigorous craftsmanship even
when challenging prevailing norms. But, as this exhibit demonstrates, in 1960
that idea was a radical break from tradition. Before that time fiber art was
generally known as weaving or tapestry, not sculpture.
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| Élément spatial (Spatial Element) Elsi Giauque |
According to the show’s curators, “This
radical shift in fiber from wall hanging to sculpture was played out against a
backdrop of social and cultural tumult—the civil rights movement, the women’s
movement, and antiwar activism—at a time when artists were rejecting prevailing
orthodoxies.” Disorder indeed.
With over 40
artists from all around the globe, I was gratified to discover that Wisconsin
was represented by Sheboygan artist Jean Stamsta (who died in 2013). Her piece,
called “Orange Twist” (above), was lent by the Museum of Wisconsin Art, in West
Bend. The museum’s information calls her work “folksy,” whimsical and distinct
from other fiber sculptors.
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| Carpet Style
Tilework on Canvases |
Tensions between order and disorder lie
much closer to the surface, literally in some cases, in the work of Brazilian
artist Adriana Varejão. Considered one of Brazil’s foremost artists, much of
Varejão’s work deals with race, class and ethnicity.
Polvo
Portraits (three paintings) and Polvo Oil Colors deal directly with
ethnic identity. Polvo is a reference to skin color. The tubes of paint in the
vitrine are all shades of skin colors identified with names gleaned from
individual responses to census survey questions of ethnic background. Examples
include “Sapecada (flirting with freckles), Café com Leite (coffee
with milk) and Queimada de Sol (sun-kissed).”
This piece,
entitled Folds, is one of a series where the surface of the painting, rendered
to look like tile erupts with highly realistic, three-dimensional protrusions
of viscera. Again, order and disorder.
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| Solo Goya (Only Goya) |
I couldn’t possibly
do justice to the Museum of Fine Arts. Even a review of the Goya exhibit will
have to be far too brief, a tease really. Like many museums, the MFA has
adopted a lenient stance towards photography in most of its galleries. (We have
social media and the free publicity it makes possible to thank, I’m told.)
However, as expected, this doesn’t extend to special exhibits and works on
loan.
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| Time and the Old Woman |
Fortunately, much
of Goya’s vast oeuvre is readily available online. These few selections were
all in the exhibit, which did a good job illustrating its theme of “order and
disorder.” I feel fortunate to have visited the Prado and so I was prepared to
enjoy revisiting works with which I was familiar. There were plenty. But I was
also pleasantly surprised to see quite a few unfamiliar works, paintings and
prints.
The most unexpected
treat was the side-by-side comparisons of Goya’s studies (known as “cartoons”)
for tapestries and the tapestries themselves. The “cartoons” were polished
paintings that invariably made the tapestries look flat and ironically
cartoonish.
Order was
represented primarily by the many prints and paintings that Goya did of the
royal family and court, such as the famous, The Parasol.
I’ve always found
Goya’s many treatments of disorder far more compelling. It is hard to imagine
living through the experiences he depicts so graphically, particularly his
horrific Disasters of War series. Harder still to comprehend the
compulsion to not only observe the atrocities but to laboriously record them,
whether through drawings, paintings or the various printmaking media he
employed.
The exhibit opened
with selections from Los Caprichos, including his most famous from that satirical
series about human folly and foible, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
(top) and, tellingly, a self-portrait. Inadvertently no doubt, the exhibit also
closed with what I can’t help thinking Goya would have interpreted as a
contemporary example of Los Caprichos: As always in today’s
hyper-marketed world, we had to “exit through the giftshop.”
In a first-ever
comprehensive retrospective the MFA demonstrates that Jamie Wyeth’s
professional career followed a perhaps not so surprising trajectory from order
to disorder, in my opinion if not the curator’s. While the evidence for my
opinion seemed manifest in the works of art, I admit I am speculating about
what I interpreted as increasingly disorderly psychological states. Perhaps I
was simply over-sensitized by the Goya show. In any case, Jamie, third in a
distinguished line of artists, began as a chronicler of the hip and famous,
including J. F. Kennedy, Andy Warhol, and (here) Nureyev.
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| Gluttony |
While never
renouncing the realism that may have been genetically inherited, his late works
display a far looser, more painterly approach. His cycle of paintings depicting
the Seven Deadly Sins using seagulls as his allegorical subjects have
emotional power that transcends realism. It was a thought-provoking show.
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| There were Sunday Mornings |
It wasn’t a
complete surprise but it was certainly intriguing how seamlessly Shinique
Smith’s work translates considerations of order and disorder into her
distinctive contemporary style. I’ve enjoyed seeing the variety of her output
over time but many of the works in this show were newer or unfamiliar.
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| The Power to See |
The show, called BRIGHT MATTER,
“surveys 30 key works from the past decade while debuting more than a dozen new
pieces, including painting, sculpture, full-room installation, video, and
performance.”
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| Breath and Line |
Maybe this is a stretch, but I couldn’t
help thinking that if Goya were alive today his work might look something like
Smith’s.
Finally, a few random artworks that not
only caught my eye and interest, but also suggest a connection with the theme
of order and disorder. At least for me.
Pedro Reyes crafted a musical
instrument by soldering together steel parts of weapons confiscated and
destroyed by Mexican authorities.
Jeremy Deller created a spectacular
video installation for the 2013 Venice Biennale. It addresses British
society—its people, icons, folklore and history—conflates events from the past,
present and an imagined future. I wish I could share a link to the video but
the two that a Google search found had been removed from their respective sites
(one being Deller’s own website.)
Okay, I suppose if Goya were alive
today his work is far more likely to resemble something Anselm Kiefer would
make. As with Goya, disorder tends to win out in most of Kiefer’s work. This one,
called Rising, Rising, Falling Down,
is a curious mix, not only of characteristically unusual materials but of
disorderly content neatly framed in a glass case like one might see in a natural
history museum.
This is the second in a pair of reviews
from my recent trip to Massachusetts. To read the first, about MASS MoCA, clickhere.
