Museum Views

This is the Jasper Johns retrospective that everyone, no doubt Johns himself, has been waiting for—a survey that emphasizes not chronology or studio production or objects or subject matter, (although all these figure prominently) instead, focusing on iconography. When he emerged some 60 years ago Johns rocked the post-Abstract Expressionist art world by making works that did not simply portray things—instantly recognizable things—but works that became those things. Ever since, we have been puzzled and frustrated when his field of vision has opened up to incorporate such things (miraculously keeping their thingness intact) into an expansive but recondite, even hermetic, personal cosmology. Now, finally, that cosmology is presented motivically rather than just sequentially, and what emerges is the artist-as-poet-as-alchemist.

The retrospective divides Johns’ oeuvre according to various conceptual, perhaps philosophical, approaches. It begins with rooms filled with flag paintings, target paintings and number paintings, the segregation of motifs allowing us to comprehend both Johns’ obsessiveness and his seemingly endless capacity for variation; he seems to find infinite ways of faceting the image, or at least the context, of a simple thing like a numeral. The exhibition groups this multi-monomania under the broader rubric, Things The Mind Already Knows (a Johns quote), grounding us at an epistemological null point. Painting As Object is a yet simpler concept, but addresses a more complex aspect of art, the facture of normal painting and that of painting that insists on invading the realm of sculpture—a reflexive condition based in Johns’ exposure to the work of Marcel Duchamp. Words and Voices traces Johns’ relationship with language, from an early fascination with the word itself—an entity at once visual, lingual, and emotional—to a surrender to poetry by the early 1980s. The New York arts scene of his salad days had exposed Johns to America’s literary avant garde, but it was only decades later that he came comfortably to embrace the literary in his own activity, activity he’d maintained as purely pictorial.

If any one characteristic arcs through this survey, it is Johns’ increasing philosophical depth of field. His thing paintings are obdurate in their thingness, but his later work—which he makes sure has the same weighty material presence— displays more and more elaborate motivic, even symbolic, relationships. Time and Transience reveals his crosshatch paintings, with their nervous, fractured dance of colored and muted pinstripes, as a meditation on mortality, and the thingness of the works grouped under In the Studio engages them in a clever dialogue between the momentary—the paintbrushes crammed into a coffee can—and the monumental—the reproduction of those paintbrushes and can in bronze.

Among Johns’ thing references are quotations from art around the world; but his incorporation of Nepalese Buddhist imagery or the Isenheim Altarpiece are no mere admissions of art-historical self-consciousness. Rather, as Fragments and Faces documents, they are personal touchstones for the artist, affecting him subjectively. In Seasons and Cycles Johns puts those associations to even more ambitious thematic purpose, producing in the mid-1980s a Four Seasons sequence bristling with references to other art and artists (e.g. Picasso) and to more vernacular forms of visual experience. In the final thematic section,

Memory Tracings, the autobiographical current in Johns’ work comes to the fore in typically intricate but lucid conflations of private references. These are contrasted with a series of “catenary” paintings marked, even bracketed, by erratic curves determined by the looping of strings allowed to sag under their own weight—a reversion to thingness and painting-becoming-sculpture whose formal grace anchors Johns’ now fully self-reflexive art with the gravitas of nature.

A life lived, framed by the natural world: Johns’ may not be a tidy mind, but it is a methodical one. Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth determines that the artist’s method should be allowed not simply to speak for itself but to dictate our comprehension of his work. Without losing sight of his evolution as an artist, the survey concentrates on Johns’ persistent presence in contemporary art as a thinker and a verbalizer. If you enter the show regarding Johns as a thing-maker, you leave it thinking of him as a proposer of circumstances—looking, as it were, for rhymes among images and harmonies among textures.

You see the red couch from across the room, right away. Its curves and contours and large-bore tufting combine with saturated color and warm organic texture, and there’s nothing for you to do but to go have a seat. From your luxurious, insanely cozy and ultra-hip new perch, the rest of the installation unfolds in every direction—a small sea of utterly unique chairs, settees, credenzas, lighting rigs and sundry design confections arranged in a rhythmic pageant of masterful vignettes. Ten miniature pavilions each expressing in immersive sculptural haiku one of the main tenets in the exhibition’s modern French design doctrine. It’s a riff on both contemporary art fairs and design showrooms, done with theatrical flair and cozy sophistication.

A think tank of 40 design luminaries including makers, artists, critics, gallerists and photographers were tasked with identifying a central core of what became 40 “cult objects” and contextualizing them within the ten pillars they identified as essential values of “le French Design,” not all of which require translation: Art de Vivre, Creativity and Industry, Elegance and a Hint of Luxury, Sustainable

Innovation, Audacity, Savoir-Faire, Balance, Heritage, Cultural Openness and Panache. The exuberance of the overall exhibition design and poignant branding is itself an exercise in perfect fabulousness, telegraphing in its own aspects the tone of cheeky reverence that infuses the whole.

For this internationally touring exhibition, which will have been on the road from 2017 to 2020 in Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, the organizers commissioned creative polymath Jean-Charles de Castelbajac to devise an umbrella concept, including everything from key graphics to publications, merchandise and installation design. De Castelbajac calls what he did “an ephemeral palace,” not a bad way to describe the whole thing. A bit of Picasso’s delicately hefty Greco-Roman line-drawings, an iconic tricolor motif and the ebullience of Matisse’s cutouts and wall painting, all visually and emotionally tie the whole field of micro-pavilions together in something like a story, making the whole room feel like a life-size pop-up book.

You’ll want—and you’re allowed—to go ahead and sit in every chair like Goldilocks, starting with that seductive red couch in the Art de Vivre tent, Ploum (2011) by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Ligne Roset. Savoir-Faire has

the most surprising ottoman, the luscious “seating square” in milky coffee leather, Carre’ d’assise (2013) by Philippe Nigro for Hermès. As the Panache offerings beckon, the idea begins to settle in that, though these be functional objects, the sculptural, painterly and illustrative sensibility belongs in a fine art context. Panache’s red and white wrought iron chairs featuring wings and poetry, Anges (2008) by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac for Fermob; and the astonishing chaise d’arbre (tree sofa) Borghese (2012) by Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance for La Chance introduce wit and conceptual seduction into the discourse. Audacity hangs a photo by Denis Darzacq, of a young person floating in a supermarket aisle as if in a dream, behind the Ben Hur (2010) velvet chariot chair by Jean-Paul Gaultier for Roche Bobois, a modest but profound bit of adaptive reuse and post-industrial whimsy. In the Heritage tent, a regal dresser exudes the frolic and fancy of very old-school French design legends with Commode Louis XV 570 (1997) by Moissonnier. Sustainable Innovation breaks the mold with the fur-draped bicycle S+ARCKBIKE Snow (2012) by Philippe Starck for Moustache Bikes, speaking to the challenge of ameliorating resource pressures without ceding one inch of material luxury.

PASADENA MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA ART The Feminine Sublime (January 21–June 3, 2018) Words Molly Enholm

The Romantic notion of the sublime continues to haunt our consciousness, often accompanied by a healthy dose of critique. The concept, most famously articulated in the influential writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, posits, in a simplified version, that a form might either delight the eye (the beautiful) or overwhelm the viewer through scale, power and grandeur (the sublime). In The Feminine Sublime, currently on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, five Los Angeles-based painters further explore this legacy in response to contemporary conditions. That these artists happen to be female, dealing with notions typically ascribed to their male counterparts, offers another layer to excavate.

In a book with which the exhibition shares its name, literary critic Barbara Claire Freeman exposes the gendered oppositions providing the foundation of Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry. She writes, “The sublime amalgamates such conventionally masculine qualities as power, size, ambition, awe, and majesty; the beautiful collects the equally conventional feminine traits of softness, smallness,

weakness, docility, delicacy, and timidity.” Where Freeman primarily critiques literature, the current exhibition at PMCA, curated by artist and participant Constance Mallinson, offers a powerful challenge to Burke’s gendered investigation through the visual arts, in the form of landscape painting. While each artist offers an individual point of entry, collectively, Merion Estes, Yvette Gellis, Virginia Katz, Marie Thibeault and Mallinson effectively deconstruct Burke’s presuppositions.

Today, the sublime of the natural world is often countered by the sublime of the industrial. No longer a construct of the mind, as Kant might have it, a more physical intrusion is exemplified in the heaps of leftover candy-colored packaging and forgotten toys Mallinson strews among the fallen leaves of her autumnal landscape painted with painstaking precision. The panoramic view puts forth empirical evidence of contemporary consumption gone feral, as unyielding in its monstrous appetite as Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Children, while suggesting a conclusion similar to the great Titan’s fate. Across the gallery, a trio of abstractions by Thibeault also takes on the impact of unfettered consumerism. The imagery, conjuring notions of a horizon obscured through layers of brightly colored geometric forms and roughly hewn outlines, is based on the artist’s views of the Port of Long Beach with its seemingly endless parade of container ships coming to harbor.

The sublime is never static, but remains in a state of eternal evolution. Estes, known for exquisitely layering collage and paint on found printed fabrics, conjures destructive forces in Burchfield’s Plea as a wildfire destroys what appears to have once been an imaginative landscape of the earlier American visionary artist. Estes counters this image of elemental force with her second work, depicting melting ice caps rendered beneath a foreboding blood-red sky—a cautionary tale with global impact. Gellis also negotiates this territory, rejecting the associations of a pristine wilderness in her contemporary abstractions. The single painting on view is actually a fusion of two works, the first made in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which she later sliced and mounted onto a second canvas. The fractured amalgamation of the two works echoes the discord within both the ecological and the political landscape, suggesting that the sublime is not limited to the natural world.

Against these variegated paintings Katz’s nearly monochromatic works offer a meditative counterpoint. A large-scale triptych, Land–Into the Abyss, evokes views of preserved cross sections, macroscopic slides, of the oceanic abyssal zone as aquamarines morph into deep azurite blues, occasionally interrupted with mineral hues of copper and ochre. Nearby, the sole sculptural work in the exhibition lacks the luscious hues found in the Abyss, purposely removed by the artist to invoke a

sense of loss. Wavelike forms constructed of warm gray slabs of pigment populated with semiprecious stones conjure notions of the recent landscapes and the avalanche of debris left in their wake. If the Kantian secret to conquering the sublime is through conceptualizing the source of our dread, these semiprecious stones offer glimmers of hope, symbolizing the strength and fortitude nestled deep within the feminine sublime.

MUSEUM OF ART & HISTORY (MOAH) CEDAR, LANCASTER Monica Wyatt: Continuum (January 20-March 3, 2018) Words Megan Abrahams

Monica Wyatt’s mesmerizing solo exhibition Continuum, takes the viewer for a ride through a theme park of the imagination. Born of a synthesis of art and science—both artistic invention and intervention—formerly quotidian objects morph into dreamlike assemblage constructions. Objects once forgotten, abandoned, discarded or overlooked are first re-envisioned, then reincarnated into prominent new roles as the components of whimsical creations held together with the glue of magic.

Zip ties, glass marbles, wire, mattress springs, dominoes, hairnets and (shades of Noah Purifoy) sardine tins; these are just a few of the items Wyatt has salvaged from a treasure trove of once-disparate things whose orbits might never have intersected in their original, strictly utilitarian roles. Re-deployed by the artist, once-incongruous objects find new meaning, fitting together like puzzle pieces into an unexpected formal harmony, such as an array of electrical capacitors that assume the guise of lichen-like plant forms. Wyatt composes these new configurations with an eloquent and seamless craft that might cajole the viewer into believing they could have evolved that way organically.

The artist’s debut solo exhibition, her first collaboration with curator jill moniz, occupies three distinct spaces. In the entryway, a sampling of assemblage works is mounted on the walls, an overture to the larger body of work. Adjacent in the right hand gallery is an intriguing mini-survey of Wyatt’s assemblage work from 1999 to the present. Among these are a few pieces contained within rectangular framing devices such as wooden boxes. Leveraging this construct, the artist has deliberately focused her vision, confining the compositions so each element thoughtfully interacts with its counterparts as well as with the self-imposed parameters of the box or frame.

Inside the third gallery space, the notion of borders or frames is utterly abandoned. Concealed behind curtained doorways leading to the room on the left, strategically-aimed soft lighting filters down on an amorphous cloud-like constellation of cascading, enrobed, acrylic orbs suspended from the ceiling. The space, which the artist described as “womb-like,” feels like a secluded and remote enclosure far removed from the outside world. When Shadows Chase the Light, the artist’s most recent assemblage, defies the confines of a box– although in a way, the room itself could be construed as a giant box. In her appropriation of this space, Wyatt makes it thoroughly her own, inviting the viewer to enter and experience the installation almost as a participant. Floating on the perimeters of the room are complementary works including, Continuum 1, 2 and 3, richly burnished wood and rock structures that infuse the atmosphere with the essence of an enchanted forest.

The prevailing palette is quiet, reflecting colors seen in nature: gray tones, sepias, umbers, white, black and ivory, such as might be found on the landscape of a driftwood strewn beach on an overcast day. Rust—the color as well as the actual oxidized substance—appears prominently as the powdery patina acquired on old metal. Left intact, the rust seems a memento of mysterious past narratives, which the artist has made a point to respect and preserve. Its presence adds layers of nuance and meaning—a symbolic continuum of references—that deepen the resonance of Wyatt’s work.

By: Peter Frank