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All that Glitters - El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum

2/12/2013

2 Comments

 
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In the Event of a Thread 2012 (photo MGM)
What is happening to Contemporary Art? Lately it seems to have staked a claim for joy, pleasure, beauty and lasting meaning. Ann Hamilton’s In the Event of A Thread, which took over the Park Avenue Amory in New York for a too brief month last December, was a gleeful romp of swings and children and billowing curtains. Shouts and laughter, the ringing music of freedom and serendipity, filled the cavernous space as muttering, Beckett-gray characters sat fixated on monotonous tasks at tables piled with caged pigeons. In the Event of A Thread made a clear, significant point without having to belabor it. My spirits still lift every time I think of it.

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Gravity and Grace 2010 (see credit**)
And now, El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum. Wow. Beauty. Joy. Splendor. Delight. Wonder. Awe. If you don’t immediately feel these things when you see his work, go back and start over. El Anatsui is the great African artist whose rich textured draperies crafted of crushed bits of metal detritus have taken the world by storm; Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works is his first sole exhibition at a New York museum. It’s there until April 4th - don’t miss it*. Much of the work in the show is recent and stems from an accidental discovery of a discarded bag of worthless bottle caps. The day he stumbled on that banal cache El Anatsui discovered gold - literally - though not the gold you may think I mean.

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El Anatsui (image by Nash Baker)
El Anatsui, born in Ghana and raised with a Western-style education at a Christian school, has long been a professor of fine art at the University of Nigeria. As a full time resident of Africa, he is a rare ambassador of forms and ideas, inhabiting a strong, proud culture with deep traditions while also viewing it with the intellectual and historical perspective of a Westernized outsider. In videos that help narrate the exhibit, he speaks of how he was introduced to his own culture and how he works to communicate profound truths of African history.

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Yida (Comb) 1994/2010 (photo MGM)
A theme of the show is ‘Non-Fixed Forms,' a key concept for El Anatsui. The best demonstration of what he means by the term comes from the earliest work on display. Several small-scale sculptures, planks of wood with burnt and punctured patterns, are deceptively simple but communicate layers of ideas. The worked surfaces of the wood, an iconic material of art from West Africa, relate to scarring patterns that appear on human skin and in traditional African sculpture; the planks therefore represent Africa itself - continent, people, and culture. These forms can be endlessly interchanged on aesthetic whim but they also carry a punch; in the shifting of divided forms El Anatsui consciously harks back to the Berlin Conference of 1884 when European powers sat around a table portioning out the African continent.

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Amemo 2010 (see credit**)
It is, of course, the celebrated draperies that are the stars of the show. When El Anatsui hung one of these gargantuan wonders on the façade of a Venetian palace at the 2007 Biennale, jaws dropped and the world snapped to attention. Painstakingly crafted of those crushed castoffs - from liquor bottles, thus the debris of Colonialism (liquor was introduced into Africa to further exert European control over a degraded continent) - and twisted into blocks of color and pattern with bits of copper wire, each one looms up before you with an astonishing unearthly power and presence. 

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Earth's Skin 2009 (see credit**)
In Brooklyn two of them face each other across the broad central gallery: Gravity and Grace (2010) on one side, Earth’s Skin (2009) on the other. Here is the gold I mentioned - the metallic surfaces gleam and shimmer and tantalize with the subtle brilliance of purest gold and precious stones, throwing off regal and celestial associations. Present is the once powerful, gold-wealthy Ghana and great kings wrapped in swaths of colorful, highly valued Kente cloth. Another glance brings aerial maps with rivers, villages, roads and trails - a physical, historical and fantastical journey that may speak first of Africa, but just as truly propels the viewer around and through a mesmerizing universe.

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Detail (photo MGM)
Folds in these tapestries create further landscapes of light and shadow. Let them entice you closer until you are nose to nose with the fabric; the closer you get the more you understand of meaning and process.  Colors and brand names on the bottle caps are still clearly visible - staring ordinary in the face, you note each twist of copper wire and wonder at the alchemy by which El Anatsui transforms the worthless into the magical.

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Red Block 2010 - Akron hanging (see credit**)
It was fascinating to be told by Kevin Dumouchelle, the curator of the exhibit, that El Anatsui ships these great works flat with no instructions. How they are hung, how many folds and how exactly they fall - all this is left to those who hang them. In Akron, Ohio, where the show originated, Gravity and Grace was upside down to how it is seen in Brooklyn. Two beautiful drapery pieces in the final room, Red Block and Black Block (both 2010) are especially striking in the Brooklyn presentation.

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Gli 2010 (photo MGM)
Other works are just as fascinating if not as spectacularly beautiful as the drapes. Several floor constructions, including Drainpipe and Peak (both 2010), are also shimmering gold, but instead of bottle caps they are made of tops from condensed milk cans, a ubiquitous African brand named Peak. A featured work, Gli, hangs in 5 panels in the 72-foot high rotunda at the entry to the show. Gli (Wall) is the first installation piece El Anatsui has made with the bottle cap medium -–the work has a tissue-like quality that plays with the meaning and idea of walls. You are in front, you are behind; as others move in the space they disappear and reappear.  Like much of Western contemporary art - The Ann Hamilton installation is a great example - the work comes to full life with the participation of ‘viewers’ - no longer bystanders but an essential part of the artist’s intention.

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Waste Paper Bags 2004-2010 (photo MGM)
There are other Western art connections in El Anatsui's work - his validity as a voice of Africa is a springboard into the full conversation of art and art history, not a geographical stricture. References to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art are easy to spot - the work Waste Paper Bags (2004-2010) owes a good deal to Claes Oldenberg, but because the giant bags are made of crushed printing plates telling of people's lives and deaths they are eloquent rather than merely playful; they charm even as they speak of suffering and poverty.

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Earth's Skin and Peak (photo MGM)
At 68, an age thought old in Western cultures, El Anatsui is a wise elder on fire with creativity and inspiration. Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is his sober, beautiful feast of pleasure and joy.


*If you are unable to make it to Brooklyn for the show, check to see if there is a work by El Anatsui at a museum in your area. The De Young Museum in San Francisco has a beauty - Hover II from 2004.

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/el-anatsui

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/el_anatsui/

http://www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/ann_hamilton

**Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of African and Pacific Art, Brooklyn Museum.



2 Comments

Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Met  - and El Anatsui in Chelsea 

1/1/2013

3 Comments

 
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Women in Blue Dress 1937
Matisse? Again? Maybe it’s just Philadelphia, but with the Barnes Collection and the recent ‘Visions of Arcadia’ at PMA it seems like we’ve been seeing an awful lot of Matisse lately. Not that I’m complaining. Matisse is the ‘art as comfortable as a good armchair’* guy, and true to his word, he made a great deal of beautiful eye candy (in the very best sense.) His colors alone are an endless pleasure. Who could ever get tired of his sweet spot blues, candy pinks and vivid greens?

December 31 was Matisse’s birthday, by the way, so Happy Birthday Henri, with great thanks.

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Palm Leaves 1912
Matisse: in Search of True Painting, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (through March 17, 2013) is well worth a Megabus journey. The exhibit, organized by the Met in conjunction with a Copenhagen museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris, features 49 works in pairs or series. The exhibit is thus a spectacular chance not only to see Matisse but to probe beyond the pleasing surface of this most popular artist to get at his process and his ideas about creating art.


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Still Life with Purro I 1904
A number of the works have a still-searching-for-direction quality about them, particularly a grouping of still lifes that begin the show. In fact, when Matisse painted them in 1899 - 1904, he was in his early 30’s with a wife and three children to support. He’d been painting seriously for some time but had little to show for it - no critical notice and no financial success.  These still lifes are worth a long look; they hold many of Matisse’s sources and influences as well as signposts indicating his road forward. Cezanne, Signac, Bonnard and Van Gogh are all more or less present in color usage, texture, and composition, but so are strong hints of Matisse’s own unmistakable brand of alchemy. Part of the fun of the exhibit is noticing how the influences flicker in and out and then fade to background as Matisse became more confident with and more acclaimed for his own vision.


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Acanthus 1912
Much of the direction of his art was surely set by his trips to Morocco. I always picture Matisse, a child of bleak, grey industrial northern France, getting off the boat in that bright southern port for the first time in 1912 and opening like a flower to the golden light and the warm sun. Two paintings from that first visit, Palm Leaves and Acanthus, give a stunning idea of how Matisse absorbed the experience of Morocco and turned it into brave modern art. Both works are full of energy, slashed and scrubbed with strong color in thin washes; they both push and pull between representation and abstraction and steam with the excitement of discovery. Acanthus, a marvel of mauves, bright acid greens, oranges and rich periwinkle blue, troubled Matisse at first. He carted it home to Paris and then back again to Morocco, planning to rework it but finally deciding it was all right as it was. By nature and habit Matisse was said to be much milder than his groundbreaking art, so perhaps he just needed time to catch up with himself.


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Young Sailor II 1906
Young Sailor II from 1906, a painting in the Met’s own collection, is shown side by side with an earlier version from the same year. I found this one pairing of the most striking moments in the exhibit. The Met version, well known and beloved, is a cartoon-like version of its partner, which is a more solidly drawn, better proportioned representation of a young boy in sailor’s clothing. When Matisse showed Young Sailor II to Leo Stein, he tried to pass it off as the work of the mailman in Collioure, the small town in southwest France where he painted it. Stein described the painting as a work of ‘extreme deformation.’ Again we see Matisse bent on pushing art in a new direction, taking chances and experimenting with form and color, but I was interested to see that in direct comparison with Young Sailor I, the Met version looked tepid and almost sentimental.

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Young Sailor I 1906
Young Sailor I is already edgy and modern - in its energy and courage and the play of color in the face, it reminded me of Femme au Chapeau, Matisse’s Fauve portrait of his wife from 1905, the painting that sent shock waves through American audiences when it was shown at the Armory show in 1913. Young Sailor I is in a private collection so is rarely seen - the pairing in this exhibit not only revealed Matisse’s process, but also raised interesting questions about the designation ‘masterpiece.’ Is a work crowned with honor and glory on its own merits, or may it be revered simply because it hangs in a storied, world-class museum? How does the taste of gallery dealers and museum curators and market availability factor into our understanding and acceptance of the ‘masterpiece’ label?  Whether or not Young Sailor II is considered a great masterpiece in Matisse’s overall body of work, the buzz of recognition connected to a known, rather than little seen, painting makes the question relevant.

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View of Notre Dame 1914 (MOMA)
In 1914, when World War I was about to devastate Europe, Matisse was in Paris, with a studio on the Quai St. Michel. Out the window he could see the towers of Notre Dame, and from this year came one of what is, for me, one of his supreme masterpieces. My heart did a little dance when I came around a corner and met it face to face. (The only masterpiece meter you need, really.) This is the stark, stripped down View of Notre Dame from the spring of 1914, owned by NY MOMA. The MOMA View of Notre Dame is a blue and black drawing on canvas, with a surface scrubbed and scratched and smudged and worked over until everything that remains seems both arbitrary and rock-solid essential. Disembodied towers float in a blue ether that is at once underwater and high in the sky. Only one little green splotch of a tree holds the great cathedral to earth.

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View of Notre Dame 1914 (Switzerland)
At the Met this work is mated with a second view from the same year, a literal sketchbook sort of drawing/painting that is light years away from the concept of the MOMA work. Over and over again I found this exhibit telling stories beyond the one it promised in the title. The story of Matisse and his process, valuable as that is, is just the beginning. Here is the ranging imagination of artists in general, those with the vision and curiosity to see and express the same idea or scene in infinite ways and forms. Matisse did numerous versions of Notre Dame, each with its own identity and particular magic.

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The Dream (1940) with photo of early stage
In the final galleries, several of Matisse’s paintings are documented with photographs showing working stages. (The Large Blue Dress, a 1937 work in the Met’s collection, is also accented with the skirt of the dress worn by model Lydia Delectorskaya.) The Dream (1940) is centered amid 14 black and white photographs that show how it progressed from a loose, sketchy, literal scene of woman and foliage to an abstract composition, a white oval against a rose background that retains hints, flattened and decorative, of the original subject. My own love of Matisse’s rich, luxurious drawings would have stopped the process at about stage 5 or 6 and left it in black and white, but the total picture, like this entire exhibit, is fascinating.
Matisse's famous quote:
*What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/Matisse
Slide show from the Met Exhibit
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/11/30/arts/design/20121130-MATISSE.html#1

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El Anatsui at Jack Shainman
Also in New York, but only until January 13, is a show of the work of El Anatsui, the great contemporary African artist, at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea. El Anatsui’s astonishing tapestries are painstakingly composed of flattened bottle caps and other bits of discarded metal held together with tiny twists of copper wire. Sprawled across walls, the works make deep, rich connections to ideas of African tribal grandeur, especially the legacy of the storied gold-rich African kings wrapped in luxurious cloaks of symbolic Kente cloth, and to the sad history of colonial exploitation by Europeans who cheapened and brutalized people, countries and traditions. The seductive beauty of El Anatsui’s textured, shimmering, swaths of metal cloth is the portal to worlds of meaning.
http://www.jackshainman.com/home.html

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