On the third floor of LACMA's Ahmanson building is Francis Alÿs' installation of his collection of Saint Fabiola paintings. Saint Fabiola was a wealthy Roman matron who converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD and (among other things) established Rome's first hospital for the poor. She is not one of Christiandom's most notable saints; like most folk in early church history, scant historical records leave no details of what she atually looked like. Some fifteen hundred years later Jean-Jacques Henner painted a confabulated portrait of her, which caitalized on Nicholas Cardinal Wiseman's racy bestseller, Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs, a confabulation itself. The original painting was lost, but reproductions of the work propigated her profile like a meme.Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Detail of Installation
Due to an abusive first marriage and her work with the sick, Fabiola became the patron saint of both nurses and abused women. These small paintings where probably purchased or made for personal veneration, most likely by nurses or abused women seeking inner peace or strength. When Belgian artist Alÿs moved to Mexico some thirty years ago, he started collecting these canvases at flea markets. On display are close to three hundred of these canvases.Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Video of Installation
One of the ablilities of art is to help us see new things in the stuff that is always in front of our eyes. Through repetition we begin to see the variations in the artists' skills and abilities, features that change with the era, and variation in the wear and tear, from well preserved to fished out of the trash heap.
Associations can be made between Alÿs and Michael Asher, who had his own turn in LACMA's European painting and decorative art galleries. There is also a bit of David Wilson, whose encyclopedic museum (of Jurassic Technology) displays his own idiosycratic mashup of high, low, and faux.Francis Alÿs' Fabiola at LACMA: Context of Installation
On display through March 29, 2009.
Are you basing the Alÿs/Asher remark on their broader practices or specifically to their engagements within the Ahmanson building? The former is too reaching and the latter seems as much an association of closeness as their names seem to have within the alphabet.
ReplyDelete"who had his own turn in LACMA's European painting and decorative art galleries."--Following your style, this really begs for a hyperlink.
I was talking about this installation specifically, and Asher's practice in general.
ReplyDeleteInstitutional space is essential to Asher's practice, much in the same way photography is for Alan Sekula, paint is for Gerhard Richter, or the MJT is for David Wilson: these things are foundational, the position from which they take on their specific topics. For me, repetitive process seems to be essential for Alÿs' neo-conceptualist practice.
The Ahmanson's galleries, like Fox's studios in Rosarito, a found newspaper photograph, or Megaloponera foetens are merely assignments these artists take on to realize their core practice.
In walking through rooms of European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts to view Alÿs' Fabiola, I couldn't help but wonder what attracts artists to these spaces. Asher visited a similar room at the Art Institute of Chicago. One of the reasons I didn't link is that I was thinking about Asher's reinstallation for Made in California Now, and the AIC piece.
Folks as disparate as Joseph Kosuth and Julian Schnabel love to place their work in faded European villas and palazzos. Louise Lawler snaps pics of modernist art amid antique furnishings and decorative moldings. Many post conceptualists have hung their work salon style and have exhibited in homes-cum-galleries: essentially reproducing the mix of fine art and furniture found in places like the Barnes, the Frick, or Hearst Castle.
What's up with that? My sense is that contemporary artists are trying to capture some of the incongruity of early modernism--before the invention of the white cube. What do you speculate?
At this juncture of display and presentation the consideration has continued as it has for some time: the art should show in the space fitting for it. And I mean to use fitting in an odd way here, partially to establish a sentiment and taste of the artist's aesthetics and partially to establish an optimal perspective.
ReplyDeleteFor some time the predominant form has been an isometric view of the white cube, which in a way alienates the work from coexisting with the passing of life. The entire lineage of installation savvy practices either illuminate the cube-ness or attempt to hide it from view. Both strategies elevate the containment though, whether by spotlighting the limits of the room (Doug Wheeler) or building into it a more confined area (Christoph Büchel). I think also here about Le Corbusier need for a office/studio separated from preexisting confines and so held two personal working spaces, one, a white cube dropped in the countryside apart from any other structures, the other, a white cube built within his office in the building that held his firm.
Before this impression of the white cube as alienating space it provided what can best be described as a laboratory for artists. Recalling Buren's essays on the functions of studio and museum, the impact of this display space was not so much a divorce from the studio of the past, but a recognition that the white cube and studio as spaces had become formally synonymous.
The white cube prior to this, spanning back to its inception, was an environment that acted the most like a showroom of a high end automotive dealership (the grand pun of Chamberlain's oeuvre). Free of clutter and with enough space to stand comfortably back from the work and view it separately from all else. Whereas the space itself is elevated in the later on the work it the thing elevated here.
With situations prior to this e.g. the Salon, palaces, et al., the stipulations for the optimal presentation of the work was as something fully integrated into the decor and ambiance of the total room. I think these are pre-photographic times, before we perceived the picture frame as a cropping, and thus the wall on which the frame hung, and the room so on...
Kosuth and Schnabel I imagine are enticed by this gesamtkunstraum (my word: total-integrated-art-space) of old and claim this dislocated sense of nostalgia for it, even though they never experienced a contemporary conception of it. The romanticism in both their practices for this sort of integration is persistent. I relate Schnabel's work most easily to tapestry because of its scale and its materiality, e.g. velvet. But also because it reflects a quality in which the focal point is not the work itself, but its compliment to a preexisting space already with histories and objects within it.
The use of a salon-style hanging is intriguing because at its inception I think the usefulness of it was one related to moving (in a marketing sense) the art. The buyer cannot stand this "marvelous" work in front of him to be in a sea of so much "mediocrity" and so he resolves to purchase it in order to allow the piece a chance to breathe and leave the cluttered space. The salon-style now, in a commercial use may have similar intent, but I regard it as more of thing one sees at do-it-yourself shows. It embraces an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sort of mentality (Jason Rhoades) or everyone's-an-artist-and-everyone-can-show (common student curatorial behavior at Calarts). Alternative possibility utilizes both these in a way to integrate into a environment in which the work will integrate through familiarity (Washington in AIC and/or Fabiola in LACMA).
The home-cum-gallery space is one I do not have much experience or knowledge of, but imagine it might fall in lines with this nostalgia of Kosuth or Schanbel for adding to a more fully integrated environment, but on a smaller couch-size painting scale). Some realtors tour buyers through barren houses and some through furnished ones. Both scenarios allow the buyer to project their future use of the space, one like an artist entering the white cube for installation, the other like seeing the palace before seeing the pieces that make it a palace.
Thank God artists don't NEED the white cube anymore for display, but for the time being all will require it as that impractical environment intended to be a divorce from the world, but existing as a vapid version of a domesticated space.
I thought perhaps you were referring to the 24 Young Artists show when comparing the uses in Ahmanson.
"Whereas the space itself is elevated in the later on the work it the thing elevated here."
ReplyDeleteShould read:
Whereas the space itself is elevated later on, the work is the thing elevated here.
At the time of the 24 young artists show at LACMA I don't think there was the variation in gallery space that there is today, so the variability in Asher's choices were limited.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of an earlier time (the 1970's?) before museums started to paint their walls in dark colors. Today you get an odd mashup of old school moldings minus the ceiling. Unlike the gesamtkunstraum, museums' European art galleries call to mind another kind of studio--the movie soundstage.
I've never thought about Chamberlain's work quite that way before. Is that something you read or is it your own association? Down the street from me are a few of the old car dealerships from the 30's and 40's. Unlike the white cube, one wall is all glass in an attempt to create a nexus between the public transportation corridor and commercial space.
Some of that capitalism gets inverted in spaces like Asher's at the Chicago MCA and to a lesser degree by the Wrong Gallery.
I've only ever looked at Chamberlain; the association was my own, but it seems so obvious to me that it must have been observed in some early review.
ReplyDeleteI know of those type of older car dealerships. Bringing up a current example because it fits more or less, Dan Graham's use of mirror-glass is similar to that glass wall of those dealerships. The window wall frames the new models in the showroom for drivers passing on the roadway, while it provides the movie theater screen view of that roadway for the interested customer that has ventured inside the dealership.
A soundstage? And also, do you mean crown-moldings etc. when you say, 'an odd mashup of old school moldings minus the ceiling'? I always think of all the molding on the room acting in a symbiotic relationship to the molding of the picture frames in those galleries--Its intention is to elevate the work within its bounds.
I am now envisioning a European gallery whose crown-moldings et al. match the pictures'. Another involves those old works removed from their molding frames and their molding galleries and placed in a white cube. Of course with the works proper being absent the European gallery itself wouldn't go anywhere and so neither should the frames, rehung in place.
Just came across this evaluation of the white cube by Saltz:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz2-18-09.asp