Art for Breakfast: An Independent Writing Project by Margaret Rew

Art for Breakfast

An Independent Writing Project, 2012-2013 Margaret Rew

A project to trace the lines art makes on me with words. One piece of art almost every day.

Conceived, written and edited by Margaret Rew between October 2012 and March 2013.

HESSE

Marlene Dumas, Jule-die Vrau

Cadmium beauty. There is something luscious about red. This one in particular. It is so pure and vibrant that the addition would only diffuse its impact. Dumas slathers her composition in it. That bright cadmium jumps forward so aggressively that it is hard to convince yourself that this is not the painting’s best feature. Is this supposed to be the background? It is monotoned and boring and it does not deserve the spotlight but it hogs it from the woman’s eyes and lips, which draw our eyes but fall flat, holes in the beautiful fabric of red. Jule-die Vrau, 1985 Marlene Dumas

I am interested in this void in spite of myself. For me, the piece becomes about that emptiness. The tragedy of beauty haunts this painted ghost.

I saw this painting for the first time at the ICA Boston 1980s exhibition, This Will Have Been. I walked in the room and I recognized it immediately, as a Marlene Dumas, though I only know her work because of its records at auction. Right away it jumps to you with its beautiful parts. All the things that a painting is supposed to be beautiful for. That luscious red, the transparent eyes, delicate lips. But in the second second you feel this emptiness, the painting exposes itself as less than all of those bits put together. There is an eerie lack of substance in that bold visage. Stand in front of it and push through the red and the image drops away. The painting becomes about this airy place behind the cadmium sheer. The girl is in your face and up close against the canvas but she is a ghost and you don’t know her.

This is the horror of a face deprived of skin and muscle, of shadow and space. It is the spook of disembodied features, sunken beneath a pool of lustful red. Her hair could not shake out, move aside – it is plastered stiff in its place by that heavy cadmium.

March 8, 2012

HESSE

Dawoud Bey, Mgbechi Looking at me, it is obvious that I am a young African-American woman. Some may see pride behind the firm position of my lips, others may see that I am a person who is always looking, looking deep into another’s face, another’s actions, always analyzing, thinking, interpreting. Some may even say I’m twelve, fourteen. But nothing, nothing in the world would make me happier than to have someone say to me, at first glance, “You must be from Nigeria, an Igbo gal, an Ngwa gal.” I would wish that a person could tell that from the very first glance, could see in my initial “nice to meet you” smile that in my heart of hearts, in my wildest Mgbechi, 2005 Chromogenic print, 50 x 40 inches Dawoud Bey

fancies, I am a dancer. This is my identity, it is who I am, what I wish to be, what I love to do. And so, when I become the neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, novelist of my dreams, I know I will always see the things deep inside me that make every success shine brighter, I will see the fountain of beauty that streams behind my every smile, my source of strength, my motivation, my happiness. I thank my parents, my family, my true homeland, for shaping who I am today; I love to dance, I am an Ngwa gal, I am Mgbechi. - Mgbechi, 2005

See into her soul. The grey light of the classroom bounces off of the desk and softens on the peak of her cheek. It dances across the bridge of her nose and brow, but it does not sink in. Her face retreats to the warm shadows, sinking into the deep hues between her elbows. She speaks to us as if we are listening. She looks at us with trust, melting into our arms and hearts. Her striped blue sleeves cradle her head, elbow coming forward, taking over the pale beige desk. This classroom is her context, she is comfortable here but it does not define her.

taking several weeks to get to know the students and then to have them write a bit of their story and to take their picture. It is tempting to draw a correlation to Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits or Sally Mann’s “At Twelve” series. Bey isn’t looking to expose raw weakness and vulnerability. Instead he seems obsessed with capturing the inner adult, strong and articulate. He doesn’t cast a tint of teenager over the image, but rather allows Mgbechi to inhabit her zone and, by way of comfort, show us her strength. A portrait is a picture of the human subject. To take that picture is an exchange of trust and authorship. A glimpse into the raw core of a forming identity. Bey talks about searching for psychological nuance, communicating a deeper understanding of self through the picture. But this is a collaboration – a person never presents all of themselves to a camera by accident. Those candid shots are stolen. Instead Bey picks up these most vulnerable and natural gestures over time, watching carefully from a distance. Then, he guides her back to those gestures and she settles into herself, trusting him. She knows that he is listening, and she gives him the picture. Bey shares authorship with the students, he allows them to step in and have a voice within the portrait. You have something to say, he tells them. And they do. They have big ideas and universal fears ready to pour out on paper. They let us into these inner bits and you are taken aback. You are privileged to read them. The portrait might have just been another stock photograph of a black girl in a classroom. But instead it is Mgbechi and she is an Ngwa gal. Her head is slumped on the table behind protective arms but her eyes are wide and they see right through us into her future.

Are you surprised by her high school words? She is elegant and strong. In this place, at least, in front of this camera, she owns her space and her words. Here, she controls her image. Photographers have long been drawn to photographing adolescents, teetering on swollen knees. In this “Class Pictures” series, contemporary photographer Dawoud Bey has completed a series of artists residencies at high schools across the country, 7

March 7, 2013

HESSE

Fred Sandback, Untitled (Sculptural Study for Room with Three Entrances)

The lines are made of yarn, carefully and precisely establishing invisible walls. The planes cut through our space. They prepare an odd, triangular room for us. Navigate me, they say. Come, question me. Respect my negative space, even as you violate it. It is clean and pristine in this new world, and space is precise and discrete. Invisible geometries surround us, beckoning from another world. Yarn travels quickly from ceiling to floor, then takes off like a shot along the warm grey gallery stone.

Untitled (Sculptural Study for Room with Three Entrances), 1981/2011 black acrylic yarn, dimensions variable Fred Sandback

I stood next to a Sandback sculpture during the Dance/ Draw exhibit at the ICA Boston last year. I remember it vividly. I was there to protect it physically (and conceptually, in my mind). It was a bit different from the ones above, made of three primary colored strands of yarn that framed this big space, an entire wall. Together they are a painting rather than a sculpture. Red and yellow play against the light of the museum wall, tripping up and down the thin yarn-wire. And slam – the yellow disappears into the floor. The red hits the floor and turns, abruptly, to the left. It is unbelievably bright and straight against Diller and Scofidio’s warm grey floor. It is a drawing, this perfect line. Suddenly, it drops back into the floor without drama, simply ending. A pause and then the weight is picked up after a dash of empty grey by a vertical blue line taking off to the ceiling again. Straight up, a shot recorded and manifested in a tense blue line. I cannot for the life of me find an image of this particular piece from my memory, so your imaginations will have to do.

not in that sense. He draws as an architect draws. And this is not because his lines are straight (an architect’s lines are often not straight almost until they are walls). He draws to define space, to affect your world and to heighten your sense of your environment. He uses line to create new spaces. For me, Sandback’s work is about this other side of drawing. Lines with purpose and without sentiment. They will enter your world in a slippery way – they are just bits of yarn, after all. But then they stand bold, tall and defiant against the empty white room – a statement of presence and absence, imagination and possibility.

As an art form, drawing sometimes seems to be painting’s silly little sister. It is often a preparation for a larger piece. It is observation, it is experimentation, it is the direct imprint of the hand. There is an informality to it. Sandback draws, but 9

February 21, 2013

HESSE

Jean-Léon Gérome, L’Eminence Grise

The colors are very warm. Sweet, rich. A red velvet cake of brushstrokes. Deep, sumptuous browns glaze the stairs, carrying lines of ochre rhythmically up the walls. Luscious ochres and indulgent detail draw you from across the room.

L’Eminence Grise, 1875 oil on canvas, 27 x 39 inches Jean-Léon Gérome

stunning fabrics and clever narrative. Gérome is a master, but as I stepped towards this painting its shiny exterior did not let me in, and I am reminded of why the world turned next to the flawed but human hand of Van Gogh.

Diagonals come together across the canvas, leading to our Capuchin monk. The simple and sweeping composition flows from the drama of the robes. The space between the monk and his admirers is filled with the tension. It is the tension of contrast between opulence and simplicity, heightening the narrative of L’Eminence Grise. The label informs us that this is a portrait of the main advisor to the extremely powerful Cardinal Richelieu, the Clerk du Trembly. As the story goes, this man was called the “Eminence Grise,” or the Grey Cardinal. This phrase lives on today to describe “the power behind the throne.” Each of these gilded spectators lives in fear of the immense power wielded by the monk. It follows every convention of drama to deliver the message. Gérome was one of the last great academic painters to reign at the Salon before the abrupt shift towards Impressionism at the end of the 19th century. He achieved something close to perfection as his paintings brought a pompously casual air to the drama of history. Symmetry governs composition, color, and action, whipping up drama to a perfect crescendo at the center of the frame. The narrative is neatly packaged; a shakespearean exposition, climax, and denouement. But there is something insipid in this perfection. It glosses over that bit of truth that is the humanity of Sargent, Picasso or Pollock. The gloss is attractive at first, but then you cannot move past the sugary sweet exterior. It stops you at the surface with

February 20, 2013

HESSE

Paul Cezanne, Large Bathers

This painting is huge. Standing in front of it your vision is a field of blue. The sky expands. Deep breath. The trees engulf you, embrace you. Your sight goes to the horizon, that perfect straight line. The unfinished-ness is an important part of its power. It dances around utopia, not daring to crystalize ideal beauty to a face with a name. Instead the power comes through the soft light and the sweet provence air. Large Bathers, 1900-1906 oil on canvas, 82 7/8 x 98 3/4 inches Paul Cezanne

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something beautiful about vagueness. Calvino says that this is because something vague is universal. But it also protects the innocence of the concept itself. As if avoiding clarity preserves the mass of the thing. Tip-toeing around it means not trying to stand next to it and measure up against it. Not trying to reign it in, to his own scale â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but to leave it be, big and beautiful on the horizon. This is the last painting that Cezanne ever made. He worked on it for the last 6 years of his life, and it remains unfinished. The figures are unresolved. Their shoulders dance between postures, as if the painter were about to trip into cubism, if only he could live a little longer. Heads are missing, arms cartoonish. But the bits that are there are gestures of soft perfection.

I often think of Cezanneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greatest contribution to art as his radical treatment of space and composition to delight the eye of the viewer. His work was formally radical and transformative. But, for me, this canvas marks a departure from that pursuit. It is a very introspective piece. In it Cezanne gropes for something deeper, more essential than space. It is almost spiritual in its tender confrontation, taking on ideal truths as the old artist prepared to leave the world himself.

February 7, 2013

HESSE

Rineke Djikstra, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Vulnerable, confronted with the camera. The girl knows this is her moment. This is her time to show the world what she is. But the moment comes and she doesn’t know what to tell us. There is a void where clothes and makeup part and only the raw bits are left behind. Dijkstra pushes the subject through the exterior shell into a kind of psychotic inner place, and then she records them there. She holds them captive, frozen in time.

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, 1992 Rineke Djikstra

I first saw Dijkstra’s work in the New York Times last year. It was a huge spread, with this photograph atop a review of her solo exhibition at the San Franscisco Museum of Art. The image stuck with me, at first because of the impressiveness of its size in the prestigious paper, and then because of the story behind it. Apparently this particular girl asked Dijkstra to take her picture. She arrived at the appointed time the next day sporting her best suit and caked with makeup. The overt narcissism of the narrative rubs up against the vacant vulnerability of the resulting image.

centuries, where such human contemplations belong. The girl holds herself to Venus’ imaginary standards while we revel in her awkward phase. Her bathing suit pulled up just over her hips; her knee just unbuckled. Her shoulder is lifted, as if her torso could be lengthened by will alone. Every muscle in her body seems to fight against the idea of a natural state. But somehow, in this sustained tension, she grasps at a bit of heartstring humanity and, through all of the discomfort, she glows.

Printed very large, life sized. This format is hip these days. Cool colors from an unnecessary outdoor flash will flatten smooth against a white gallery wall. This only makes the raw ambiguity in the girl’s expression more exposed. It peeks out around the corner of perfect composition and color, framed in its discomfort. Contemporary temperatures contrast with a classical composition – the figure almost exactly mirrors Botticelli’s iconic Venus. And just like that Venus, her skin glows and her feet seem to tip over the edge of unstable ground, though here that famous shell is flat against the sand. The balance between eras carries her message about youth, identity and beauty across 15

February 2, 2012

HESSE

Karl Baden, Brighton MA

Explore the space, let your eyes rove over the objects. Simple planes turn out to be drawers, the car floats over gas canisters – empty or full? This garage is full of characters – a John Chamberlain sculpture come alive. A photograph that fills the eye, defy expectations – your space is left confused, changed. This is your world, compressed and squirted back at you through a tube. Do you recognize it in its bright and shiny package? Brighton MA, 2012 archival inkjet print Karl Baden

You might not recognize Karl Baden in this bright and shiny package. This is a new aesthetic for the photographer, who has long made brainy and challenging work in black and white. That’s not to say that the content has moved away from wit and commentary – the facade has merely shifted. Full disclosure – I work at Howard Yezerski Gallery, where this photograph is currently on view in Baden’s solo exhibition Roadside Attraction. For a more formal description of the show, check out the press release – I wrote it. I have lived with this work and watched it grow and couldn’t let it come down off of the walls next week without giving this piece a second run through in writing. It’s too full – I want to catch the bits before they overflow out of the frame onto the floor and are gone forever.

The world beyond Baden’s car is thick and juicy. The energy comes from unlikely sources – the sharp edges of the corners of the drawers, the bold plastic of the trash can, the easy metallics of the car grill. These objects breathe, and at the same time seem that they will never again be able to move from their positions here, in this defining photograph. They have frozen in time. Space moves easily on our right, tracing the side of the old grey Ford. Our eyes follow the vintage curve of the drivers side doors – I wonder, would it open? An odd dotted line meanders from ceiling to floor, where it crumples to a scribble. A drawing has invaded our view. What Baden captures isn’t a moment or an event, as perhaps he intends. Instead, it is a vision. It’s a way of looking at the world upside down, then chewing it up and spitting it out; turning it inside out and putting a bright light on it – and then, finally, taking the picture.

The car becomes an anonymous frame. It is the conceptual vehicle for the series and does not have to be more. The picture steps beyond it. The grey interior invades and still we ignore it – we forget that it is a part of the image at all if we are not careful. This frame is not fair – it quietly crushes the composition with that seductive swoop of grey over the top corner of our view. Good thing there is a bright orange crutch to hold it from collapsing over the entire image – our glimpse feels stolen. 17

January 30, 2013

HESSE

David Park, Couple

“I can’t do people,” they say. The detail in a face is too much, the stakes of failure are too high. We rest incredible power in a facial expression – the tilt of an eyebrow and the height of a cheekbone. But faces are round and mushy things. They are built on soft shapes of muscle, not defined by lines but by shadows beneath a brow. Ears are not about that maze of folds, they are flashes of pink cartilage. Couple, 1959 oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 47 inches David Park

David Park was a founding member of the Bay Area Figurative Painters – a movement in California in the 1950s and 1960s to move away from the empirical proclamations of Abstract Expressionism towards a new kind of abstraction based on the figure. The movement is known for its loose embrace of color and form. They are what we call painter’s painters.

the character of a heavy lip. Park confronts us with the facial gesture of expression – he allows it abstraction and through that abstraction he thickens its power. Deep blue against heavy cream sets up the odd angles of a nose. Dirty whites streak down his face and sweat onto the bright red backdrop behind him, the bright light of sunset. The shadow beneath his face defines and cradles him, as all shadows set up the faces that carry them. That navy has particular strength against the reddish green and the dirty white, with such strength that he seems about to speak.

Park’s geometries are gestural. Blurry bodies and dark, raucous colors. His compositions are close, stuffed with paint but not with detail. The forms are not concrete – it feels like you could fall through them in a dream. And so you are left hanging onto the edge of the scene, hesitant to push through the surface of the thick paint. Park creates an incredible tension here – between figure and paint, color and form. Gesture is an interesting word here. It implies the impact of the hand of the artist, an affect imposed on the subjects. But these paintings seem to fill with the gesture of the expressions of the subjects themselves. Compare, for example, how the technique of John Singer Sargent communicates a beautiful face to us. Each is so perfect, you cannot help wonder if all the rich faces Sargent painted were not simply temporarily endowed with beauty by the tip of his Midas brush. Park, on the other hand, sacrifices features and likeness to the motion of a shoulder and 19

January 25, 2013

HESSE

Paul Cezanne, Study of Trees

What does a tree look like? A child defines it like a lollipop, a green mass perched on top of a sturdy trunk. As we grow older we acknowledge the sinewy link between that trunk and its branches that support the leaves. Overwhelmed by the intricate detail of those connections, I find that when I draw a tree I often forget the leaves completely. They seem to be a superfluous externality, to be added on later in watercolor. But this detail-oriented technique leaves out the tree’s most tree-like qualities – the cool depth of its undercarriage. You cannot see the play of light against each leaf against each other. You cannot see past the emerald of the surface to the jade of its bowels.

Study of Trees, 1904 oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches Paul Cezanne

I see two trees, with branches entangled. There is a sandy road between, just suggested by the curve of umber in sunlight. This background does not separate itself from the vibrating planes of the tree shadows. They bounce back and forth off of one another, jumping up the trunk as a squirrel would. The blues perch on the tips of the branches, bits of sky held up by invisible twigs.

Cézanne sees the tree as he sees everything else. As a series of planes of color, fitted together up against your eye. He gently outlines the pathways of the trunks in dotted lines, but you barely notice them. The subject of the study is that jade heart, which tucks itself up beneath glaring negative space. But the master painter’s casual strokes are angled to create space within the sparse color, and the bare canvas is framed to maybe become that emerald layer of sheen. This study discards that excess, and pares down to the character of those shadows beneath. Paul Cézanne took the ideas of light and observation of the impressionists and tilted them towards modernism. He built his paintings on light and color, but drove them home with twisted planes that turned his landscapes into playgrounds for the careful eye. He was a major influence on artists as diverse as Picasso, Mondrian, and Jasper Johns. This study was completed near the end of his life and just before the art world tumbled into Cubism in 1907. You can see the beginnings of Picasso’s avant garde treatment of space and figure between these branches.

January 22, 2013

HESSE

Christopher Wool, Untitled

A jumble of letters, oversized. OLLECT, COAT SAND – all at your eye level. Alright, so there are words there. You have to back away from the canvas and give it a moment. Start from the beginning – the upper left. You follow the words and you expect it to be easy but by the time you get to the grammar error on the third line you suspect yourself. You start again and you begin to say the words under your breath a little to keep track. You move through, systematically. You see that its a story and you await your witty conceptual prize at the finish.

Untitled, 1990 enamel on aluminum Christopher Wool

It’s a big lead up. You have to work for it. There is no BUT or HOWEVER to warn you that the story is about to go sour – you are unprotected. You are so sucked into the moment of figuring it out that when their world falls away, so does yours. It is a shock and it knocks the wind out of your expectations and it makes this dark grey vacuum where home used to be. And then the painting abandons you there. The letters push the viewer away like a forcefield, resting on the surface in their enamel. The aluminum insists that it is a text and that it would never even want to be a painting, but it’s lying. In fact, the thing that he is painting lives in your head and it is composed of darker stuff that has no color and no name. The work is that act that you performed, an act of figuring them out, even more than they are the crisp navy on white letters. Scramble the letters, obstruct the meaning, and the dark painting is gone.

a psychological hole possible in the horror of a blank piece of paper. The words are already lost on the canvas when you read them – deprived of their proper scale, they are consciously out of whack with your expectations. They make you work for it. The letters cling to each other and to the sides of the canvas like coffee grounds sticking to the sides of a filter as the water drains out from beneath them. I imagine water trickling between the words, running at the path of least resistance. It moves so slowly that it often finds itself running horizontally beneath the letters. In this way it is the challenging scale of the words that gives them physical presence. You want this physicality to fill the void that those words created, but they won’t. Wool makes a painting that withholds comfort in the interest of impact. It recreates a public instinct in the late ’80s that there was a hollowness that had been allowed to build up in popular culture. He reacts to his perception of gilded society by taking a crowbar to it. As with most operations involving crowbars, the result is heavy-handed but effective.

Wool consciously eliminates gesture in a way that becomes the gesture itself. The dark nature of the work is a black hole that sucks in affect and detail. They are the painted equivalent of musician John Cage’s notorious 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Both are consciously and darkly empty, a deeper kind of 23

January 16, 2013

HESSE

Bill Jenkins, Untitled

Untitled, 2012 Plastic tables, formica, metal funnel, plastic pot, 28 x 156 x 25″ Bill Jenkins

Perhaps I’m a sucker. Maybe I’m so used to seeing the colors in works of art that I am ready to leap headfirst into this one. But I see things in this piece. I love the evenness of the whites and the warmth of the greys. It seems to float on the uneven wood paneling at Anthony Greaney Gallery. It is very still, surrealist. The shadow under the square echoes in the warm grey of the rock and the soot of the tabletop. The physical that is still recognizable and even returnable to its original form but infused with the ethereal. The art that just barely and timidly crosses the threshold into art. The composition is the decision, as much as the choosing of the objects. But the finger marks – that remains a mystery. The fingerprint of the artist, maybe a mark of a past owner or a wayward gallery visitor. Does it matter? Yes, and it matters that we don’t know and have to decide for ourselves. This piece was shipped and assembled in the gallery, harkening back to Sol Lewitt, the founder of conceptual art. The thing about these instruction driven pieces is that conceptualism as an idea isn’t new anymore. And so, for me, the piece has to be more than just that idea; it has to use concept as the medium to speak to something deeper.

rough and heavy, topped with an absurd funnel hat. But the whole thing takes itself very seriously and I trust it. The greys are calming and centering. It is a Morandi. What about it? The colors, but more than that. It is the quiet and the humble objects. It is the transfiguration and elevation of the ordinary. It is the light as well – the objects seem to absorb the excessive light of the gallery and release it back to you at a slow and steady pace. They are immune to our world, somehow. But the whole thing is absurd. It is dirty patio furniture. So the whole time that you are looking at it and making these observations that are real and important, you are laughing at yourself a little bit. It teeters on the absurd, but it manages to stay there. Balanced on the brink of the ridiculous and the ephemeral, it transcends its materials and skewers its concept to the wall. It is unapologetically itself, and I am a sucker for it.

The work feels delicate, like an Eva Hesse. Of course, it isn’t. That rock is older than civilization and that plastic was poured to outlast us all. But there is something light and vulnerable about the aesthetic. Perhaps its the greys, or the patient composition. That contradiction adds a new layer. The tables pull up, heaving towards the ceiling away from the vacuum beneath them. The square is sturdy, centers the composition in a physical and constructed space. The rock is 25

January 11, 2012

HESSE

Lorna Simpson, Necklines

The words are physical, berating. Neck tie. Break neck. Break your neck. Neck Lace. She twists our syntax to violence. Each with a meaning on its own but then tied to the others in form. ‘neck’ – helvetica curves repeating like stripes. Reminding us of what they have in common.

Necklines, 1989 silver gelatin prints and engraved plexiglass plaques Lorna Simpson

her collar. The cruelty is dressed up in wit and alliteration. She is a poet with those words, hiding meaning beneath beauty.

A neck is vulnerable and yet we expose it everyday. It is the soft spot that we allow all the world to see. Our violent language abuses this gentle vulnerability that makes us human. Necktie, neck & neck. Physical, violent, repulsive – these are words that we never think twice about. Breakneck. I could be sick. Do we swim in the english language in violations of our vulnerability without noticing it? Does this pervasive barbarity extend past language into our social fabric? The photographs are large and hung low on the wall, so that you are face to face with the subtle variations in light on her neck. The geometry of her shirt holds the composition together, cradling your eye. But she leaves exposed the soft veins beneath her chin. Her neck is a no man’s land between the structures of her face and the starched cotton. A grey area. Lorna Simpson is a contemporary photographer known best for her black and white work combining text and image. She often uses these basic juxtapositions to call attention to our society’s inherently discriminatory structure. We ask again and again, does she manufacture this violence or merely expose it? Therein lies her subtlety.

The work is adept and provoking. I hear the words over and over in my head; she has caught me up in her spell. The words are hauntingly beautiful as they roll off of the tongue in your head, as is the soft lighting on her neck and the rhythmic scalloping of

January 8, 2013

HESSE

Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers)

Perfect lovers. Two clocks, in synch. Two schedules, two mechanical systems. Two heartbeats. They hang on the wall, high and off center. An afterthought. They go on, quietly and persistently. Imagine when they come off the wall and are transported to the next exhibition, or placed somewhere in storage. They keep ticking along, just out of synch with one another. I find myself hoping that they are allowed to stay together midst the bubblewrap. Surely, they must. Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991 clocks, paint on wall Felix Gonzales-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres brings us another painfully simple allegory of love and partnership. Gonzalez-Torres was a powerful gay artist active in the 80s and 90s until his untimely death from AIDs in 1996. His conceptual oeuvre accesses the humanity behind the AIDs epidemic. He often references his longtime partner, Ross Lawcock, who died of the disease soon after this piece was finished. These odes often utilize reproducibility and interaction with the viewer to communicate the depth of his love and loss. This particular piece was originally exactly synchronized but destined to fall out of exact alignment as time passed. They are just clocks. Why is the metaphor so effective that a kitchen wall clock could send such an emotional message? The hands of the clocks continue to click, together, just a bit off, one following another. They move forward, around. You watch them and you leave them, trusting that they will continue, quietly and peacefully onwards. Until the end of time, so to speak.

January 5, 2013

HESSE

Diane Arbus, Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade

Arbus’ photograph is unnerving.

But this game looks very real.

Dappled sunlight sets up the boy. Everything is almost perfect, just exactly not right. He makes a face that might not mean much. His suspender happens to slip off of his shoulder. His hand compulsively clenches. His knobby knees choose to stick straight, he stands so tall he is almost leaning towards us, ready to topple over.

Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade, 1962 silver gelatin print, 15 1/2 x 15 1/16 inches Diane Arbus

He fits in the frame like a grown up. His knees have grown first, skinny legs soon to follow. Though the title tells us its a toy, to have that boy in charge of a grenade would be a terrible thing. He does not know what he does, that deranged mind amidst dappled sunlight. We get the sense that he does not know of destruction and war, but he will. He is the world and the world is just a kid when it decides where the grenades should fall. But here we are, a young world – confident and deranged. The world is tense and straight and goofy, it does not know what it says. Diane Arbus was an important photographer working from the 1940s through her suicide in 1971. She is widely remembered as a ‘photographer of freaks,’ though she hated that term. Interested in the margins of society, her portraits centered on the outcasts – dwarfs, giants, transgender people, amongst others. She searched for evidence of the strangest side of human nature, though the pictures become a testament to the pervasive depth of the human soul.

He makes a funny face. He pulls his lips down to an extreme, playing with his face like play doh. His appearance, his actions are all in jest. There are no consequences. He has no mother to tell him his face will stick like that, that the grenade will tear limb from limb if he lets it. Playing as if life with no consequences.

January 2, 2013

HESSE

Trisha Brown, Untitled

The record of a movement. On what plane should dance exist? Is it three-dimensional, within space – or four-dimensional, over time? If so, how should we record it? What happens when we deny that third and fourth dimension and compress dance to a sheet of paper. Perhaps it is a photograph of a body mid-stride. Or, in the work of Trisha Brown, it is charcoal on paper. Here, the imprint is direct. Her toes brushed aside that charcoal, her sweat wrinkled that paper. A dance is recorded. And for what? Untitled, 2007 charcoal and pastel on paper, 55 1/2 x 64 inches Trisha Brown

your bones; it is leaping and landing and it is the movement and then it is gone. And when it is gone it is just the memory of the movement and the imprint of Brown’s sweaty toes.

The object is only what we see before us, and where we can take it from there. I loved working in this room during the Dance/ Draw show at the ICA – I would ask people to try to act out the moves that they saw the feet making on the paper. Everyone had a remarkably similar interpretation – that spin is harder than it looks. In acting it out, what more information have they taken from the piece? We absorb this dance in an abstract, two dimensional, directly imprinted form, but then it continues to change as you adopt it and your own body plays it out in your own space. It becomes yours. Dance means different things to you and to me. To me, dance is body and beat and rhythm. Motion and movement, passing one another, occasionally synchronizing and making sense. It is the old in the young and the young in the old. It is the gait we strut down the street, acquired imitating those fabulous strangers. Dance bubbles up out of a favorite song. It is soul and it is sadness and it is love and it is the moment. I don’t know what dance is to Trisha Brown. Most likely, it is much more to her than it is to me. But I know that to this drawing, this humble charcoaled paper, dance is passion and it is precision and it is sport. Dance is sweat and knowing in

December 12, 2012

HESSE

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio

Castelvecchio, Verona Italy Renovation by Carlo Scarpa

Castelvecchio. Old Castle in italian. The castle was originally built by a wealthy Veronese family in the 14th century, highly fortified to protect themselves from belligerent neighbors. Later, it served as a stronghold for the Venetian republic and was a site of several battles during Nepoleon’s reign. In 1925 a valuable art collection was brought in and, along with some fundamental changes to the buildings, it was turned into a public museum. In 1956 the museum was in dire need of renovation and the directors hoped to return the museum closer to its original state. They hired Carlo Scarpa, a revered Italian modernist architect. This latest renovation is the subject of today’s Art for Breakfast. Authenticity. In a restoration, what is authentic? To be honest about one’s intentions and one’s abilities – through materials as well as tactful but unobscured modern interventions where necessary. In order to access the tower, a stair needed to be added. But that stair could not pretend to be built in the 14th century – that would be dishonest. And so the stair must instead be a subtle but clear statement of the current time. Each of the stairs in the Castelvecchio in an experiment in materials to reconcile the clearly new with the ancient.

Scarpa’s additions guide you through the spaces, dictating your experience as a string of discoveries. A series of stones lay out a path on the floor through the painting galleries – every seventh stone is slightly mislaid and creaks when you step on it (this was brought to our attention by an enthusiastic museum guard – “Scarpa is telling you to be in the moment! Remember that you are here, and look down at these beautiful stones!”). Parts of the windows are blocked off to frame that perfect view of the bridge without the intrusion of the modern apartments across the river. Controlling man, Scarpa is.

The details are essential but intrusive to the subtle Renaissance works on hand. The pictures were framed without matting or spacers – wood that complemented the medieval structure does not sit beautifully against the ancient paints. The building was distracting. No longer details, they are the subject. I walked through the halls of paintings staring at the ceiling, figuring where Scarpa had replaced or slightly shifted the huge wooden supports. Or I was tracking the floor, trying to decipher the pattern that dictated where the rooms were rimmed. 40 years after Scarpa’s renovation to the museum was finished the building is a love story to material, history, and space. It is a beautiful museum, though art is not its priority. Michael Cadwell had it right – the devil is in Scarpa’s strange details. In the end, it is the playful whim that captures – a light-footed weave between Italian modernism and medieval fortitude.

December 4, 2012

HESSE

Cornelia Parker, Hanging Fire

A drawing, mid air. Magically floating just off the ground, with a shadow gracefully leading back up the wall. Stand for a minute, and the pins will wink at you, suggesting sparks from the fire that once turned this wood to rubble.

Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson), 1999 charcoal, wire, pins, nails, 140 x 84 x 220 cm Cornelia Parker

from the ashes, literally and figuratively. Maybe it embodies a new kind of ideology â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that of sustainability and renewal, in which the used and the discarded are not cast away but elevated.

The piece hogs attention. It sucks the life out of the room and then feeds it back slowly at a calmed, transfixing rate. Every person who walks in is in love with it right away. And then it moves a little, and their breath is caught in their throats. When they look at the wall text, they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe it has such depth! Can you tell where the wood came from? Is that the leg of a chair? Cornelia Parkerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hanging Fire (suspected arson) is constructed from the remnants of a woodworking shop that burned to the ground in an event of suspected arson that had not been determined before the pieces were taken. The evidence has been reanimated by the artist hanging from glass on threads of wire. Taken out of its context, it hangs in balance both literally and metaphorically, never having disclosed its secret. Detective work is still possible, despite its futility. There is a crocodile skin pattern on the charred surface of the wood, which forensic experts have pointed to as a sign that an accelerant was used. Is it rising or falling? It is both rising and falling, as only a fire can do. As the interior heats and pushes upwards into the air the wood around it crumbles and fills the void. A dynamic that continues up into the sky as sparks rise and ashes fall. The pieces themselves are not static, they slowly twist back and forth, occasionally pumping to the beat of the installation next door. A dancing calligraphy.

It is a resurrection of the materials, a visual resurrection. Rising

December 3, 2012

HESSE

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face)

Your gaze hits the side of my face. Your gaze hits. The words have physical force, boom. Impact. Watch us turn our collective cheek. We see your gaze, we accept it. We know it, we feel it – we objectify us, but we are stronger. You objectify us, but we don’t care.

are real and have real impacts on our world, but they often have no physical manifestation. Kruger empowers the gaze as she empowers the face it hits. She acknowledges that both are real and lets us decide which is stronger.

Black/ white. The profile of the statue is simplified in a strong shadow. The strength of the stature is condensed from its three dimensional form. A coy nod to the perceived simplicity of feminism. The words alternate – white/ black, black/ white. The letters pop forward from the image as their backgrounds blend into the shadows and the highlights of her neck.

Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of my Face), 1981 Barbara Kruger

The face in profile – it is perfect though it is not real. It is an image of perfection, it is an image of what a woman should be. It is a classical sculpture, abruptly made mechanical at the neck, anonymous. When you hit the side of her face you will hurt your hand on her cold, chiseled cheek. Yet her dark eyes are knowing. They know you are there and they have seen you before – they have seen a thousand yous and those eyes do not care. They move forward, tilting forward off the edge, determined. You have your gaze and she has hers. Hers is made of stone. Barbara Kruger is an awesome feminist artist working since the 1970s who combines text and image to create new content and question our perceptions of gender and identity. She chooses her words carefully and powerfully. The simple compositions refer to the reduced visual language of the media and advertising at the time. They contain an astounding depth in their simplicity. Who is you? You is you. I am you. We are you. We objectify all day long – ourselves, strangers, friends. The judgements we make

December 2, 2012

HESSE

Eva Hesse, Studioworks

The brown paper curls over itself - the crest of a wave. The corners guide up to the ceiling, slowly. The shadows lay flat beneath the silent, hovering cradle. The surface is imperfect, you can determine how the piece was made if you like. You can just barely see the ghost of the baloon before the structure popped and collapsed. The pieces above are studioworks found in Eva Hesseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studio after her death. They are three-dimensional sketches she used to play with new ideas and shapes. They are made of layers of paper and cheesecloth and thus are incredibly delicate - a theme for Hesse. The paper has changed color slightly - Hesse wanted her materials to react to their environments and to change with time.

Studioworks, 1969 cheesecloth, paper mache, adhesive, dimensions vary Eva Hesse

accident that suspends belief. Soft, floating, hovering, unassuming. Hate them, but they will not hate you back. They will pull you in if you let them. Soft whites, delicate human texture, marks of the accident of making. Imperfect but pure. They are untouchable, they are so delicate they cannot be harmed. They are radical, but so simple and so mortal. They are a contradiction. They are the human contradiction.

Eva Hesse was an incredibly influential post-minimalist artist from the 1960s. She had a tragically short career - ending from a brain tumor at the age of 34. Her work intentionally lacks signifiers for your brain to recognize and categorize. Hesse accessed new elemental shapes through a simplistic playing finding the essence and the humanity in new industrial materials like latex and fiberglass. The pieces have an aura. They are individual, unique, human. I stood in a room with these works for an hour and a half at a time every shift during her solo show at the ICA Boston last fall. At first I hated it - I found the work frustratingly inaccessible and silent, no one seemed to be able to engage. But then I caught myself staring at them. Their subtlety had crept up on me - I was beginning to memorize their sneaky forms. A paper mache bowl was a cloud one day and a cave the next. The forms were so simple, perhaps accidental, but it is this very suspect of

November 30, 2012

HESSE

Michelangelo, Unfinished Atlas Slave

Muscle, brawn emerges from the rock. It swells but never changes, a constant static outward force, twisting but never adjusting.

absorbing the figure. Our perception is captured and looking is not easy as it was with the David. Seeing is a struggle of epic but human proportions.

We calculate the missing parts spatially. We see no head, no hand, but breathing is labored beneath that marble as the hand pushes outwards, beckoning release. Leonardo da Vinci’s idea of the calculated anatomical figure is challenged – Michelangelo’s execution is rooted a deeper understanding of his subject. This understanding is super human. We cannot wrap our heads around his method even as it stares us in the face, and the artist stands as god-like as Michelangelo always imagined himself to be. Atlas Slave (Unfinished), 1525-1530 Marble, 9 feet Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo was a sculptor’s sculptor. His drawings and paintings are beautiful and important to Renaissance art history for many reasons, but his eyes and his hands were made to carve bodies out of stone. He famously described his practice of carving as freeing the figure from the marble. Whether or not the final “unfinished” state of Michelangelo’s pieces was intentional is up for debate. The series was begun as a part of the artist’s massive vision for the tomb of Pope Julius II in 1506. The project was unfortunately dramatically scaled down after the death of the pope in 1513, though Michelangelo worked on these figures through to 1530, and subsequently went untouched until Michelangelo’s death in 1564. The four unfinished slaves remain in Florence at the Accademia.

An abstraction that plays between the reality of the rock and the realism of the figure. Jumping back and forth, representation is suspended in tension between. We are simultaneously aware of the rock and the figure, the figure within the rock and the rock

November 25, 2012

HESSE

Bonnard, The Bathroom

These colors are insane. Bright, saturated, and crystal clear. The shadows are purple, rays of sunlight refract over the image in Indian Yellow, straight from the tube. The colors are scratched into the surface, standing next to their opposites as equals struggling for attention in a sea of cheer. The contrast is based in hue, not in value and the canvas confronts as one army of color.

The Bathroom, 1932 oil on canvas, 47 5/8 x 46 1/2 inches Pierre Bonnard

relationship with it is complex. Each element of the (almost) square composition is a piece of a complex system of balancing. The entire painting is pushed to the extreme – and to what end? An absolutely transfixing post-impressionist anomaly.

The image is miraculously cohesive. Close observation shows us that this success is due to careful repeated use of the same colors throughout the composition. The hot pink on the woman’s pelvis is the same that traces the curtain behind her and the lowlights of the fabric form to the right. It is the same that lines the grout of the wall on both sides of the window and outlines one of the objects (perhaps a bowl?) on the table on the left. The same goes for yellow – try it for yourself. This is a painting that changes and changes as you notice its casual but obsessive detail. Space is secondary to composition and patterns flatten and organize. The pink form on the right toys with our minds – what could it be? It is fabric, a bed – a table? It twists beneath us and is held up only by the strength of the figure. A strong vertical – the legs of the figure ground the whole composition. The table on the left is recognizable because of its planes while the objects on its surface blend into the wall behind. As if the objects within the room are secondary to the communication of the whole. The piece is defiantly irrational. If the impressionists sought to find a scientific method to use color to incorporate light into their paintings, Bonnard is using color and distortion to portray something beyond reality. This painting is complex, and my

November 24, 2012

HESSE

Muqi, Six Persimmons

Six Persimmons, 13th c. blue-black ink on paper Muqi (Fa Chang)

Precise gestures offer a sense of familiarity – perhaps the shape is a common character in Chinese. The stems must be an abstraction of language. Does each stem mean a different word? Do they mean anything? How do we extract meaning from gestures like these? Why do I feel that there must be any meaning at all? What does it mean to reference language without fully engaging in a dialectic? What about this little sketch is making me ask so many questions?

simplicity.

Our eyes read the fruits as individuals. One is smooth and hard, another ripe and juicy. I project my own delusion of a perfect persimmon onto the ghost fruit on the left, rendered from a light sweep of water. The loose, unpolished qualities of the sketch are important. The artist’s hand is exposed, his space is implied but not specific. The relationship between the shapes and the background and the negative space between the fruits is ambiguous and allows us to establish our own relationship with the anonymous fruit. Muqi was a 13th century monk during the Song Dynasty who was known for his simple compositions and extraordinary gestural precision. Chinese historian Arthur Waley once described the piece as “passion… congealed into a stupendous calm.” It was apparently very popular with art history students in the mid-twentieth century who perceived it as a calm and cool opposite to the loud, pompous American work coming out of New York at the time. Professor Richard Barnhart from Yale has an interesting discussion of that phenomenon. I am astounded at my reaction to this little sketch. Its simple shapes and implications have absorbed me, and I am immersed in its scale-less, colorless world. I love its language and I envy its 47

November 30, 2012

HESSE

Julianne Swartz, Affirmation

Honest interaction. Interaction with the building, with the works, with our own emotions and expectations. Pleasant surprise. Conceptualism with a heart. Great art gets at a central truth, accesses our humanity in a way we could not have done ourselves.

Affirmation, 2006 Speakers, soundtracks, building, nine sites throughout DeCordova museum Julianne Swartz

Stick your head in that sculpture and it will reward you. Come out of the bathroom stall, expecting to leave and to begin your museum experience in the traditional gallery space. It will speak to you, tell you all the things that you want to hear. You are loved, you are wanted, you are everything I want you to be. I am proud of you. It will make you stand there by the bathroom sinks, waiting to hear more. You will walk back and forth from sink to sink to trigger more responses. Do we all need to hear those things? Swartz manages to disembody the vulnerability so that these sensitive feelings can be said without our repulsion from the raw exposure. The artist directs the installation and the intentions, but the speakers write the words, anonymously. The words are “authentic” in that way – not composed according to the needs and expectations of the artist. And so whether or not we need to hear them, they make us happy. They make us feel good. The piece accesses that little bit of exact truth, that unaffected expression of the human experience. I love it.

November 22, 2012

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Blue, Black Yellow and Red

I remember the first moment I saw this Mondrian. It was in the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, and it drew me across the room because I recognized it from slides in class. It was pathetically small compared to its ghost in Cabot auditorium. But it was magnetic.

Composition with Blue, Black Yellow and Red, 1922 oil on canvas, 39 x 34.7 cm Piet Mondrian

You cannot see in the slides (or here, for that matter) the delicate optimism in the brushstrokes. Each white square is a very slightly different white, pushing gently back at the others and at the stern black borders that define them. The borders are broken at several of the edges, but the sterile whites do not engage. Those moments are tense, awkward abuttals; a bird whose cage has been opened but does not know that it is possible to fly. This is not what I had learned in school. They teach that it is groundbreaking. Really? How could it be groundbreaking? How could it be special, it is only squares of white. It is only color. It is modernism. That the perfect could be achieved, that it was just beyond the tips of your fingers. In modernism artists, architects, and designers, worked to find the purest, truest forms of beauty. We have since decided that the utopian modernism could not work, that it was impossible. The chaos of postmodernism ensued. But Mondrianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painting continues to stand at that moment when it might all be possible, when black borders and primary colors might be the ticket to order. And so his whites are filled with possibility. They are soft, human experiments in visual perfection.

November 21, 2012

HESSE

Lucian Freud, Reflection

They say that every line on an aging face is a mark of a moment lived. Freud has lived. In this painting his face is constructed of bits of conjoining shadows, a mountain range of flesh. The highlights are merely flecks of paint but they come together to construct a face that sits heavily on its bones. The shadows are an olive green against the pale pink highlights. The beautiful play between warm and cool draws you in. The casual handling of an aficionado. Close up, these transitions are miraculous dashes and just-right dabs that illustrate the physical state of a face in a way detailed realism cannot. Reflection (Self Portrait), 1985 Lucian Freud

Look at his ears. One in shadow and one in light, one is not brighter than the other, it merely has more contrast. They are perfectly symmetrical â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the same. Light changes everything. Freudâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s famous face is deep in thought. The moments that he has lived led to this moment, but this moment is not easier than the last. The painter lays out the evidence of these moments and hours and years onto canvas. The look on his face says that he does not know what the marks mean any more than we do. And yet he is on the verge of knowing. The marks make him so real. His head comes forward off the canvas into our personal space as we invade the privacy of his. And yet we do not back away, we cannot.

November 19, 2012

HESSE

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea

Wind from the Sea, 1947 tempera on hardboard Andrew Wyeth

Wind. It cannot be photographed or painted, yet it is an essential part of a landscape. It slips by our cheeks and through our fingers, tiptoeing around our perceptions. How does one truly illustrate an open window without accommodating the rush of bright autumn air? Wyeth’s curtains are not solid – they are ghosts of the fabric that might be there. But the detail with which the painter traces the billows of invisible fabric conveys the wind. The fabric is an illustration of a feeling rather than an object. Andrew Wyeth is a classic American painter. Son of the legendary illustrator N.C. Wyeth and father of painter Jamie Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth is from a family of artists and painters. A recluse working often around his family homes in rural Pennsylvania and Maine, he is obsessed with our relationships with landscape. Andrew Wyeth is known for his capture of detail in rural landscapes, as well as his untraditional medium – egg tempera. Tempera was a popular paint in the early Renaissance, before the advent of modern oil paints. Wyeth liked the viscosity and matte texture of the tempera paints, which he credits for his execution of detail. It also accounts for the unusual earthy tones of his canvases, which seems to fit his admiration for the ethereal qualities of landscape.

Wyeth’s tight grasp on hyperrealism loosens as he vies to portray a zephyr. I like to see this looseness, it shows his humanity. There is something universal and human about the opening of a window. The inrush of new air into a room, the slight, welcome change in temperature. For me, this painting is all about that response to this painting. The painting would be boring without this accessing of an elusive but fundamental human experience, one whose awesomeness is often forgotten.

November 18, 2012

HESSE

Michelangelo, Battle of Cascina (lost)

Battle of Cascina (Copy of Michelangelo’s 1504 original), 1542 Bastiano da Sangallo

Study for Battle of Cascina, 1504 Michelangelo Buonarroti

Bastiano da Sangallo’s drawing is a copy of a long lost cartoon by Michelangelo illustrating a moment just before the Battle of Cascina in the fourteenth century. The cartoon is for a fresco that was intended for the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, though it was never finished. Sangallo’s copy and a few partial sketches by Michelangelo are the only records of what the massive project might have been. The Battle of Cascina is a moment from Leonardo Bruni’s description in his history of the Florentine people. The story describes a surprise attack that was mounted on the Florentine army while they rested and bathed in the Arno. The men valiantly jumped into their gear and repulsed the enemy. Michelangelo depicts the moment at which the men spring to action, in a vibrant state between repose and combat. The scene takes place on a riverbank but the landscape disappears behind the moving figures, each with a self-contained purpose. He takes care to harmonize their movements, creating a composition that is active and unified. Michelangelo’s figures are plastic and take up space, with tactile muscles and swinging limbs. Michelangelo loved the human body. He uses the opportunity of the athletic bathing scene to display the figures in a number of distinct poses; those variations move the eye around the composition. The figures were to be larger than life. The visual impact of such large, vibrant nudes would have been unprecedented. Each figure is entirely self-absorbed. The focuses the subject of the cartoon even more onto the bodies of the figures and each soldier’s personal, athletic struggle to transition into battle.

November 17, 2012

HESSE

Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting

The surface is very flat. It doesn’t have the overlapping flecks of paint of the Pollock that it imitates. The greens settle on the surface of the copper like no paint ever would – they pattern into smaller and smaller droplets – I say droplets not because the impressions are round, but because they are liquid-like. They settle like water on wax, organic yet systematic. You are drawn into the surface, the detail continues, the marks smaller and smaller. The flat surface changes in the light as the copper reflects and the green absorbs. That color combination is so appealing – it reminds us of those once shiny buildings and sculptures that have weathered over time, with little pockets of shiny copper hidden on a dark green roof.

Oxidation Painting, 1978 Urine on metallic pigment in acrylic pigment on canvas, 70 x 52 inches Andy Warhol

This late series of Warhol’s is also known as the Piss Paintings – the materials here are copper acrylic paint and urine. Legend goes that Warhol would recruit heavy hitters like friend Victor Hugo to come over to his studio to pee on his copper canvases. Literally, that’s what it is. The urine reacts with the copper in the paint in unpredictable ways and then becomes a painting. Warhol would experiment with different participants and different eating habits, but that was the principle. The making is simple, but the idea is complicated. The disrespect hangs in the air. Especially after you have leaned closer to admire the details. But the painting is still beautiful – what does that mean? The work is more than just a ruse – there is something elemental about your relationship to the object and the simplicity of its making, it accesses an aesthetic and material side of Warhol though it is, as usual, masked in concept.

November 16, 2012

HESSE

Marsden Hartley, The Great Man

“Lincoln’s is the one great face for me and I never tire of looking at it, he was photoed so often… each time so different.” – Marsden Hartley

The Good Great Man, 1942 oil on masonite, 40 x 30 inches Marsden Hartley

I know that feeling. To know how the arch of an eyebrow fits the bridge of a nose on a familiar face. At first looking scientifically to remember what is there and then abstractly to remember the looking. But Hartley didn’t know Lincoln. He painted from a portrait by Mathew Brady, the successful 19th century celebrity photographer. So it wasn’t a face that he knew, it was an image. The image of a man. The idea of a hero. Abe Lincoln stood for ideas that you wanted to study, to know better than the back of your hand. To know them to remember them and then, abstractly, to inhabit them and to live them. And so Hartley’s Lincoln isn’t a portrait of a man – how could it be? It’s the portrait of a man who is an idea. The knowing gaze of a man who never knew you, but who meant everything to the course of the United States. This painting is one of a series of paintings towards the end of Hartley’s career documenting the faces of his heroes. The series centers on Hartley’s imagined relationship with these larger than life figures. Today, Lincoln is a very old hero. But what about our own relationships with the faces of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.? What meaning do we place in the arch of their eyebrows, the curve of a cheekbone? Can we read our future in the knowing eyes of a photograph? Can we tire of looking at those faces, those ideas of those heroes?

November 15, 2012

HESSE

Michael Toenges, 34-08-40-50

34-08-40-50, 2008 oil on canvas, 15 3/4 x 19 inches

Open up the crate and the first thing you notice is the smell. You’ve stepped into a studio soaked in oil paints. This stuff won’t dry for decades. What will happen when the paint dries and it doesn’t smell any more? That’s a thought for another day – I’m already distracted. The sculptural paint reaching upwards, creating real rather than painted shadows of one stroke hovering over another. Looking at the painting horizontally on a table – the painting seems to crawl towards the ceiling. Stalagmites. Three-dimensional and object-like, it defies our expectations of paint. Defies our expectations more than just within the viscous handling. The colors are varied and yet harmonic. Sometimes they combine to a soft grey, holding their unadulterated colors only at the edges of a swatch. But other times a bold hue is miraculously maintained – gliding over the thick layers beneath. The strokes are patterns, they are mountains. They are water sometimes. A force pushes it in one direction and then freezes in a crest. Backeddies of deep purple form along the edges of a stroke as currents within mix before our eyes and then are frozen.

November 14, 2012

HESSE

Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government on City Life

Effects of Good Government on City Life, 1433-1440 fresco Ambrogio Lorenzetti

A cropped print of this fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti hung over my desk in high school. A little motivation towards the utopian ethics of the Sienese renaissance. My parents were not very subtle about their expectations. But the piece isn’t intrusive or condescending. I liked looking at the rolling hills, and the delicately off-scale figures gliding through an earthy landscape. I would think about the lines of the buildings, how they cradled the dancers in the street. The colors seem to match the passive harmony of the nonsensical landscape.

and upholds our best qualities to make a more honest and functioning society. I think we could use a little more of that.

Maria Luisa Meoni wrote a book about the anthropological implications of Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government. She argues that the fresco embodies a different kind of utopia, a utopia that is concrete and attainable even as it is perfect. Meoni’s utopia is an “ethical-political ideal, destined to remain unrealized on the institutional level, but acting, however, as a stimulant within the sphere of politics, offering a hypothetical method.” The fresco sits in the Sala di Pace within the city’s Town Hall. Meoni argues that Lorenzetti creates a world where all of the best parts of Siena come together and form a recognizable and relatable ideal. The architecture resembles Siena, the people wear clothes that were popular in the region at the time, the farmers use methods that were essential to the economy. This is us, he says. This could be us all of the time, if you, the government, continue to uphold our moral standards. What a beautiful thought. I’ve always been annoyed with ideas of utopia. I love my imperfect world, and a blemish-less landscape doesn’t seem to be worth much thought. But to think of a political landscape where our government remembers 65

November 11, 2012

HESSE

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Inkwell

Today’s Art for Breakfast is a musing that I wrote a few years ago while sitting in the Harvard Art Museums preparing to write an essay for Eric Rosenberg’s Picasso to Pollock class. I love the frustration that comes through – I was almost angry with Picasso when I wrote it. It goes to show that writing and looking don’t come naturally or easily; that great paintings demand your time and your attention, and, maybe even more, your trust. Enjoy.

Still Life with Inkwell, 1911-12 Pablo Picasso

The paint doesn’t even reach the edge of the canvas. It crowds the center, an angry mob dressed in muted colors. The colors herd together, organizing themselves into lines and shapes. There are lots of lines. I don’t like looking at it. It’s hard to see. I don’t understand it. I cannot trust myself to leap into such a coalition of muted tones. I stare at it. Again, my eye is drawn to the center. There is a shape there, a short, obtuse rectangle. I want it to transform. I want it to become something more. I want to see the inkwell. I think I’ve found it, but who can be sure? Maybe the light shapes are paper, paper stacked on top of each other in a disarray of a writer’s frustration. There is a long, thin shape, angled across the paint. It is a pen. The shapes behind it are nothing. But they have depth. They cannot be nothing. My untrustworthy sight believes it sees a bottle. And a white box. But the box is never just a box. I decide it is a glass and leave it alone. The objects all recede into space. His crowded canvas is not a single plane. It has depth and dimension as the angles of the paint. Its loose construction makes looking an adventure, makes the act of seeing one of doubt and question. Picasso has pulled

into plain sight the elusive idea of our perception. He toys with our notion that everything must mean something. We see the name Picasso and we assume that there is something great, something hidden. It becomes a task. We challenge ourselves to be placed on the mental plane of the man the world has deemed a genius. And thus the act of looking becomes stressful. It is a race to the profound. But the race has an evasive finish. Forever immobile, the oil on canvas taunts us to depict its angled, murky colors. By doing this, is Picasso weeding out the elite? Or maybe he giggles at the thought of an art history student sitting below his picture, yearning to be chosen as one who can see the inkwell. This is abstraction. It is the transformation of reality, the creation of a riddle in oils. It is the arrogance of an artist.

November 10, 2012

HESSE

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty

Built up out of the Great Salt Lake in 1970 with rocks from the surrounding area, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty is now a part of the landscape. The rocks are arranged in the lake like a pier that lost its way, spinning inside itself instead of out to the ocean. The path leads nowhere. The rocks, while initially above water, have dropped below and risen above sea level for years at a time depending on environmental conditions. Spiral Jetty, 1970 Robert Smithson photo credit: George Steinmetz

I’ve never been to the Spiral Jetty. Neither have a lot of people. I’ve seen it many times on slides, on my computer screen, and occasionally in the newspaper. Yet the work is the quintessential experiment in location. It lies 250 miles outside Salt Lake City in Utah. Location is essential to its look – the scale of the mountains and the water line against the deep red of the water. It is also essential to its meaning – it is another landmark we have never seen nor will ever see, one of millions. Its remoteness makes the piece intangible, ephemeral, even as its materials are the most real material on earth – the earth itself.

November 9, 2012

HESSE

Jenny Saville, Reverse

Cool and warm, in and out of synch – with and without correspondence to a face. the cool lights make the skin look dead, and the warm red darks make it look like its bleeding, on its way to death. This contrast is disconcerting and erie. And yet the work is so raw and real. How is that? Is it proximity, understanding of subject? Honesty? How does one measure honesty?

Reverse, 2002-2003 oil on canvas, 84 x 96 inches Jenny Saville

That red is almost pure cadmium red, out of the tube. The flecks of white make them glossy, as if the face were slathered in juicy wet oil. Her colors are patchy and unforgiving, a heightened, saturated synopsis of a patch of flesh. The colors can’t possibly be true to her skin as we would see it, but instead they come through the flesh beneath. As if a traditional portrait has never seen the truth beneath the surface. Jenny Saville is a painter’s painter, as they call them. Her work is an investigation into the materiality of flesh through paint. Often the work is intrusive and provacative – almost repulsing. Dissections in reds and cool creme blues. Most of her paintings are extremely large – often more than 6 feet tall. This monumental scale allows Saville to produce much detail to ground her bold experimentations in color and texture. The paintings thus are statements – bold and unyielding. Statements via the grotesque towards a new dialect in painting in which the color conveys not light but the hot flesh beneath.

November 8, 2012

HESSE

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus

Botticelli’s Venus lives in a beautiful world. Flowers toss through the air, the ocean laps softly beneath her feet. Venus just barely stands on her shell, which curves under her left foot as the right floats off in balance. She sways in an unsteady contraposto. Her neck curves again, chin settling so its soft curve echoes the rest of the body. The Birth of Venus, 1486 tempera on canvas, 67.9 x 109.6 inches Sandro Botticelli

Seduction, whim, lightness of being. There are bits of gold in her hair and in the trees, the glint moves around the canvas. Every part of the painting is beautiful, down to the moss beneath the angel’s feet. The land is an Eden, the trees perfectly straight and lush. The fabrics that do not cover Venus are luscious, jealous silks. The excess contrasts with the bareness of the pale skin. The body is not necessarily perfect – this Venus might not fair well as a model in today’s magazine’s. But anatomy takes a backseat to the glow of her porcelain skin and the sadness in her faraway eyes. And we are drawn in, in love. It’s intimidating to write about an icon. But why do these paintings become so recognizable, an emblem of beauty in the Renaissance? Botticelli made many other beautiful paintings, why is this the one to grace postcards and coffee cups? Some say that the Mona Lisa garnered its attention after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, but we’ll leave those debates to the experts. I love this painting because Botticelli’s Venus is beautiful, so beautifully human.

November 07, 2012

HESSE

Eero Saarenin, MIT Chapel

The arches trace a rock skipping along the moat, irregular and yet mathmatical. A series of archways, that look like they have adjusted to varying purposes through time â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as old and loved buildings often do. But the round exterior is unforgiving, unexpandable. It is a fortress. Irregular bricks are scattered across the austere facade, a faint play of shadow against uniformity. MIT Chapel, Cambridge MA Architect: Eero Saarinen

needs of MIT? This space is an intensely calculated thesis in the space of tranquility. It is an alignment of the geometric and the mathematic with a higher meaning of beauty in space.

All of the trees around the building are as if they once swayed but are now frozen, gently leaning. They yearn back towards the campus, lending grace to the unforgiving cylinder. The cylinder literally cannot be reached. Your entrance to the building is dictated by the form. You are led around the building by a moat reflecting autumn light back onto the bricks. You notice the complex shadows at the foot of each arch, and the curve of the moat wall as it traces the interior. Behind the sun soaked brick facade, in the shadow, is the entrance. A rhythm of verticals recedes back from the main structure along the facade, hopping lightly over the doorway and continuing. Walk inside and all is hushed. The space tenderly takes control, moving you forward into the center. The walls undulate, rippling out from the altar, which stands beneath a shaft of light back from center. Light reflects up the interior brick walls as well, from the surrounding moat through a thin break between the shells. Eero Saarinen was an important modernist architect from the middle of the twentieth century. His chapel is one of two buildings that make up his social core of the MIT campus, one secular and one spiritual. What makes a spiritual space? What makes it non-denominational? What makes it serve the specific

November 02, 2012

HESSE

Rhona Bitner, Grande Ballroom

Grande Ballroom, 2008 c-print, 40 x 40 inches Rhona Bitner

This picture can be distracting. Oohs and aahs about the holes in the ceiling where columns used to be and the splash of sunlight breaking out onto the dingy pastel paints. Its glamour is distracting. You might not realize that the reason Rhona Bitner took this picture was not for its tragedy, but for its soul. This 1928 ballroom was one of the epicenters of the Detroit rock music scene up until 1973. Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, and The Who all played here. The MC5, The Tymes, and The Stooges were all house bands. In 1968 in the days leading up to Halloween, it was the site of a reportedly epic three day concert/ riot by the MC5, where they recorded their classic album, Kick Out the Jams, which ranked #294 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Those walls were ripped apart by the blaring of speakers and the screaming of fans. They vibrated with the heavy, offensive beat as the crowd that far exceeded capacity felt their pulses race. That is the heart of the photograph. The people that lived and breathed and sweated that space are the heart of the photograph. Bitner wants to capture those storied walls in today’s moment – a space with a past and with a future.

Devastating. Destruction porn is a terrible side effect of our overstimulated, image driven culture. The more destruction the more we step back in awe. And eventually we numb to it, only impressed by the biggest and baddest destruction available. But when that happens, we miss the point. We miss the soul of the place. We forget the lemonade sales that it hosted or the late night bike rides home for curfew. These images don’t see the dinner table that had to be watered to keep from warping is now, ironically, soaking quietly in a soggy house. Rhona Bitner hates destruction porn. She hates it because it isn’t enough. I hate it, too. Now more than ever.

Rhona Bitner hates destruction porn.

I spent yesterday searching through the images of destruction on the New Jersey shore for any news about my family’s neighborhood. Image after image was horrible. A show in glittering lights and cliched phrases, framing devastation. Each worse than the last. And only every once in a while did I get a closer glimpse to the places I knew. But somehow those were 10,000,000 times more horrific. The anonymous streets could be flooded above the front door and I was too numbed to care. But the street where I learned to ride a bike, covered in sand?

October 31, 2012

HESSE

Jaume Plensa, The Alchemist

The Alchemist, 2010 Jaume Plensa

White, emotive, anonymous. Alchemy is the magical side of science. The art of transmuting metals. Plensa’s The Alchemist at the heart of MIT’s campus reminds us of the humanity of knowledge. Surrounding oneself in numbers until they become more than numbers – metaphors, surrogates of complex theories of the order of the universe. The symbols make up the structure of the form, they become the form. From a distance the piece is of a thinking man, seated – but up close they are an abstraction, a formal compilation of shapes. The knees of the figure are open, inviting us to explore the interior/ exterior space. A space defined but not enclosed. Standing inside, the numbers and symbols frame your view of the campus. The public is pulled into the mind of a scientist.

Plensa likes to see his sculptures from behind. He wants to know the way they see the world. They watch over the landscape even as they become part of it, reminding the campus of the dignity of their pursuit to contemplate the workings of the universe.

Jaume Plensa is a world renown contemporary sculptor from Barcelona. His most well known work deals in large scale public sculpture that brings elements of the interior self into the landscape. He has done a number of sculptures with the same form as the Alchemist, but typically they are made up of letters – an allusion to language and the universal abstraction of communication. This piece specifically addresses the communication of math – which at MIT is not only a science but an art. Photographing each other standing in its doorway, taking pictures to mark the moment. Do they perceive the sculpture as an icon of MIT, of elite learning and brainy-ness? Installed in 2010 as the most recent addition to the university’s incredible public art collection, it hasn’t been there for very long. Perhaps it speaks so naturally to the core of the MIT mentality that the public has adopted it as a portrait of the community. 79

October 29, 2012

HESSE

James Casebere, Flooded Hallway

Flooded Hallway, 1998-99 dye destruction print, 48 x 60 inches James Casebere

At first, I was struck by the geometry of the space in the picture. The bright spotlight holds the walls accountable for its mystery. Rectangles and triangles descend upon each other. A void forms between the two halves of spotlight, splitting the image in two. At the center the far wall is framed in the light through a doorway. The wall is pushed further into the background. A color photograph that is so almost black and white – a world that seems out of the movie Pleasantville. Or perhaps more accurately, Der Untergang. Erie.

supposed to be analytical beings, logical and omnipotent. But we live our lives in rooms. Space is charged with the intangibles of memory and impression. Casebere’s unusual methodology scrutinizes and isolates these ethereal qualities. Hitler worshiped the ideal. His reign exploited Greek and Roman art and architecture as evidence of the moral superiority of the Aryan race. This sinking bunker is pale and perfect, even in defeat. Haunting.

James Casebere is a photographer interested in the emotive and psychological qualities of architecture. The work deals in illusion – for each shot, Casebere constructs a miniature replica of a space that interests him and that model becomes the subject of his photograph. Often Casebere’s inspiration comes from the particular history of the space. Through lighting and faked floods, Casebere imbues spaces in the images with the rich psychological depth of the original. On a visit to Berlin in the mid-nineties, Casebere was struck by the excitement and energy in the city. Berlin was rebuilding, recovering. Though understanding this urge to renew, Casebere was haunted by the devastating history that was being glossed over. To express this complexity, Casabere took on a space literally beneath the city – the bunker in which Hitler hid out for his last few days. This was one of the first photographs in which Casebere used the effect of the water along the floor, which has become a signature theme in his current work. The intent is to heighten the emotion and psychology of the space. These qualities are not often associated so closely with architecture. Architects are

November 30, 2012

HESSE

Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios

Atrabiliarios, 1996 Wall installation with drywall, shoes, cow bladder, and surgical thread, 47 1/4 x 86 5/8 x 4 1/2 inches Doris Salcedo

What you see is cow bladder, stretched and sewn into drywall with surgical thread. Behind that, set back into the wall, you can just see delicate pairs of shoes – the shoes of women who have disappeared in Columbia. From far away the composition looks like photographs, carefully pinned. Walking closer, the details of the shoes do not become clearer, as they should, but instead start to blur, as if you were zooming in on an image far past its resolution. Instead, you see the sinewy surface of the cow bladder, and the careful stitching of the thread into drywall. The shoes are hidden, out of reach.

that talking has a tendency to numb the reality of the devastation occuring on the ground. Salcedo’s work operates outside the realm of talk. It peddles the charged silence that death deserves. This is the silence in which families were forced to grieve, fearing another attack on their family. There is something beautiful and tragic about shoes. Everyone wears shoes. These shoes are small, delicate – a dancer’s shoes. Yet the details are obscured, access definitively and forever denied. That frustration mimicks, for just a moment, the ache that comes with loss.

“When a person disappears, everything becomes impregnated with that person’s presence. Every single object as well as every space becomes a reminder of absence, as if absence were more important than presence.” – Doris Salcedo, ICA Boston Wall Text Doris Salcedo is an internationally renown contemporary artist from Bogota, Colombia. Since the eighties she has been making sculptures and installations addressing the political violence in her country. Often when Americans talk about political violence it is in numbers, regimes, or movements. Salcedo looks to show the depth within the universal and incredibly personal nature of loss and mourning through sculptures and installations. The artist often works with objects that once belonged to someone who disappeared, and affects them so that the object reflects its intangible history. Atrabilarios is a series that Salcedo created after a rise in abductions by a controlling government in the early nineties. This piece was incredibly moving. I spent a lot of time in college discussing political violence and its causes and implications. All

October 27, 2012

HESSE

Francesca Woodman, Untitled

A print sheet. Informal, in the rhetoric of photographers, a behind the scenes glance. Sharpie on the images. Is she editing or playing? She dives to the ground, over a line penned in after the fact. A line that didn’t exist when she dove over it. In most of the panels you cannot see her through the blur. She is a ghost. And her ghost defines the materiality of these virtual doors and windows. She gives substance to the imaginary spaces by leaping through them.

Untitled, Providence RI, 1976 Francesca Woodman

Planes in space. The planes seem random, her body teeters exactly between on side and another, bisected. The planes are as random as the placement of a person in an empty room, which is never random. Then that person moves around the space. Start to move, and you start to push the boundaries. Spend time on the floor. See the corners. Live close to the wall, outside the center. The corners of our rooms so often are forgotten. Woodman makes us aware of these boundaries of rooms, and of our expected behavior. Do we ever really use the spaces that we occupy?

mostly with self portraits during the six years that she worked, often bending and breaking and juxtaposing our expectations of photography, exposing her own vulnerable nature. She speaks perfectly and exactly to the terror and impatience of adolescence. She is an art student whose short career has been the focus of several large retrospectives, and whose work has plucked at the hearts of millions. But I don’t need to validate her. The work speaks for itself. It speaks to me. I see her shapes and I feel the marks of her sharpie and I know her. I know her space and her shadow and her movement. She is the artist that lives inside me – surely she lives inside you, too. Jessica Brier, a young curatorial assistant who worked on her retrospective at SFMoMA, says that younger viewers seem to “intuitively understand the work.” Intuitively. Innately, unconsciously, viscerally.

I discovered Francesca Woodman this spring. I saw an image and read an article and, inspired, travelled to see her solo exhibition at the Guggenheim. The prints are all very small. You find yourself closing in on them for a glimpse of detail. Only a few were ever printed larger, those are caryatids, prints that could support the ceiling with folds of fabric. Woodman was a very promising artist who graduated from RISD with the prospect of a promising career but soon thereafter committed suicide at the age of 22. The medium of photography will never know what might have been. What it gained was a photographer of eternal youth. Woodman worked 85

October 26, 2012

HESSE

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral

The paint is a soft mix of whites, blues and pinks. It seems to shift before your eyes, the subtle difference in the hues playing a game. Monet relies on the solidity of the light on the surface of the cathedral, as if the existence of the church itself is defined by the sun. Claude Monet turned stone to light in his Rouen Cathedral, a series from 1892-94.

our navel, to allow our eyes to dance across the pink and blue shadows, taking it in not to think about it, but to feel it. “In front of the twenty views of the building by Monet, one notices that the art, in its persistence in expressing nature with increasing exactitude, teaches us to watch, to perceive, to feel.” – Clemenceau, a friend and contemporary of Monet

Monet was one of the first impressionists to reject realism in the late 19th century in favor of an aesthetic based around the beauty of light. They believed that shadows were made up of color, rather than added blacks. That the world was not made up of shades of a grayscale. They searched for light’s objective truth, but ultimately founded an incredibly emotive style. Rouen Cathedral, 1894 oil on canvas, 39 5/8 x 26 inches Claude Monet

Monet took to the gardens of Paris and its outskirts to record the impression of light upon the landscape, with much success. Having observed how the light changes as the sun moves throughout the day, he adopted what might be called an impressionist methodology. He began to paint several works at a time, switching canvases as the light moved and then returning the next day. He completed a series of Poplars and of Haystacks, and then moved onto the Rouen Cathedral. In the late winter of 1892 and 1893, he rented a room across the street from the cathedral as a makeshift studio, and began to paint. The room allowed him to paint every day, rain or shine. He painted the daily experience of beholding this monument walking out his door. Later, he brought the works back to his studio in Giverny to rework and finish them. Impressionism appeals not to reason but to the eyes. Monet has hit upon a truth in light that captures the feeling of beauty rather than its surface. And so we are drawn into the canvas from

October 25, 2012

HESSE

Fra Carnevale, Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple

Fra Carnevale’s canvas is an ode to the everyday life of a church at the beginning of the Renaissance. Clear details at the tops of the columns, receding into the background (linear perspective was an exciting recent discovery). The masses have weight and space. Each bit of stone exists to verify the existence of the whole. The forms are so clear that one doesn’t notice at first that the building doesn’t make much sense. Columns and arches stagger throughout, dividing the space. None of the windows align, none of the pediments stand at equal heights. There is an odd shadow across the top of the canvas that literally hops over two stone angels. The effect is a fantasy. A church so elaborate and ornate and exactly in perspective that it could only be the dream of an early Renaissance monk. Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, 1467 oil and tempera, 57 5/8 x 38 inches Fra Carnevale (Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini)

The figures add to this magical optimism. The forms are as clearly delineated as the columns, their robes falling logically on the floor. As confident as they are, however, they seem to be more personality than flesh and blood. Limbs string together with an air of performance. The church is a vibrant center of culture, with society flowing through one entrance and out onto the street. It is a public space, and used as such. We don’t think of churches this way anymore, but did they then? Or is this again a haven for Carnevale, a fantasy of what a church could or should be? The colors are essential. The columns look like they’ve been in a paintball fight. The people wander in crisp, bright clothes. There is a beautiful, electric life to this painting, as if it were infused with excitement about the future. Perhaps that is a clue to the true subject of the piece – enthusiasm about the life in store for the little girl in the foreground. Face in shadow, she is poised in her characteristic royal blue, absorbing the fantastical scene.

October 24, 2012

Jean Shin, Castles in the Air

Graceful, hanging from thin threads – stretched, dancing down a long journey into their destination in a cup of hot water. Are they there as tea bags, or are they merely drooping forms, particles of a cloud, floating? The thin thread is regular, like steady rain. Delicate patterns are knotted, keeping the tea bags in formation, dropping a beautiful raincloud below. The shadows are important, outlining the space of the cloud from below.

Castles in the Air, 2012 tea bags, string, acrylic mirror, aluminum frame Jean Shin and Brian Ripel

up in the first place.

Jean Shin and Brian Ripel make work adapting ordinary objects into sculptural installations that call attention to broader cultural meanings. The tea bags in the piece above were taken from a public tea party that the pair held on the roof of the deCordova museum several months before. This public participation infuses the anonymous sacks of tea with a history, a purpose. Now they may be waste, but they have lived! The piece settles into the air around it. All seems quiet, somber, calm. As an exploration into the concept of a “retreat,” the artists chose the tea bags as a physical manifestation of the American ideal rest and relaxation. The artists have developed their practice around our unusual relationship with their materials. This waste is gently and respectfully treated, as a painter would treat their oils. Shin and Ripel elevate materials that are often overlooked, but merely to the level of cultural meaning we had bestowed them with in the first place. In our culture we imbue objects with such meaning – a cup of tea is health, warmth, calm. The smells remind us of standing up after a full meal, pouring the cup of Constant Comment for your grandfather. But then the moment is gone and we forget these meanings. We use our objects and discard them without thinking about the values that led us to pick them

October 23, 2012

HESSE

Auguste Rodin, Psyche

The figure emerges from the rock, which is also cloth, and also liquid. The face is in perpetual profile against her own shadow, half hidden. The body is humble and perfect, a dancer hovering between bending and standing.

Psyche, 1899 marble, 29 x 27 x 15 inches Auguste Rodin

Trisha Brown, an important contemporary dancer and artist, once described the moment that someone told her to curve her back just to curve it, not to communicate emotion. She described the liberation when a dance no longer rested on the emotion of the movement but the movement itself. That moment was when dancing freed itself of the dancer’s liquid rock burden. Rodin’s dancer carries the weight with strength. No stiffness in her gait, there is only the perpetual engagement that is required to emerge from a rock. Something about Rodin’s work pompously accesses that exact point where emotion and romance are perfect and exactly true. The point that is only in our heads, that never really happens. If our lives were Disney movies we would have tragic moments like Rodin’s Psyche and glorious moments like his Eternal Springtime. The artist was also absurdly prolific. Over and over again he throws into the world a moment that seems to be perfect but that could never really be.

October 22, 2012

HESSE

JMW Turner, Slave Ship

The sea is on fire. Yellow, red, orange; color churns and spits. The sky spills into the ocean, the ship lifted and tossed. On the left, a storm builds, a fist ready to pound. Above the storm a dirty red smoke rises, as if the blue grey were not a storm but water on an angry furnace. And in the bottom right of the canvas, a shackled foot gracefully and terribly prepares to sink.

Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Over the Dead and Dying), 1840 oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 48 1/4 inches JMW Turner

sea, in a revolting way. It is hot and messy and unforgiving. The light doesn’t make sense, it seems to release the colors of heaven and hell rather than those of the sea. A triumph in matching the terror of a moment.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775-1851) originally intended this painting to be titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On.” It was painted in 1840 response to an incident in 1781 when an illness on the slave ship Zong caused the slavers to throw sick slaves overboard to their deaths, as their insurance covered the “losses at sea” and not losses from illness. The painting was sold to an abolitionist from Boston, where it has remained at the MFA Boston since 1899. The painting is brighter and lighter than I remembered it. The right half of the canvas is almost a buttercream yellow. That perverse color moves clockwise over the canvas, caressing the drowning foot, continuing to mirror the sunset and finally rushing upwards again to join in the typhoon. Is that putrid buttercream simply formal, so that the canvas comes together in a cohesive whole? To think that in depicting horror, such things could even matter. Murky brown and mud red, small upward strokes poke out of the gentle curve between breaking waves. The hands are very small, almost could be a texture in the stormy sea. But they have fingers.

This painting is scary. It is fairly small, but it hits you like a truck. It captures the violence of nature, both of humans and of the

November 30, 2012