On View

One Work: Diane Simpson's "Two Point Enclosure"

in , , , ,

Diane Simpson, Two Point Enclosure (2020), installed in Point of View at JTT, New York (September 9 – November 13, 2021). Photo: Chris Murtha.

I recently wrote a “One Work” piece for Art in America on Diane Simpson’s old-but-new-again sculpture, Two Point Enclosure (2020). The work is one of three the artist produced for her current exhibition at JTT in New York, Point of View, from drawings made between 1980 and 1981, at the outset of her late-blooming career. Originally realized as part of a series of cardboard sculptures but never exhibited, Enclosure is here revived in a new material—the sturdier but equally utilitarian particle board.

Read it over at Art in America.

Point of View is on view at JTT through November 13, 2021.

Robert Rauschenberg: Night Shades and Phantoms

in , , , ,

Installation views of Phantoms (all 1991) in the Chapel, the artist’s former studio. Robert Rauschenberg, Night Shades and Phantoms, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, NY, March 14 – July 19, 2019. Photos: Chris Murtha.

Over the past year, I had the opportunity to research, plan, and develop an exhibition at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation with my Hunter College colleagues, Daniela Mayer, Lucy Riley, Joseph Shaikewitz, and Melissa Waldvogel, under the guidance of our distinguished professor, art historian and curator Emily Braun.

The exhibition, which opened on March 14 and will close on July 19, is the first to exclusively focus on Rauschenberg’s Night Shades and Phantoms, two distinct but related series of “metal paintings” from 1991. Produced on brushed and mirrored aluminum panels, these silkscreens are composed exclusively of the artist’s own photographs, which were captured on travels at home and abroad from 1979-1991. Rauschenberg’s photographs replaced those he previously appropriated from mass media print sources, shifting the frame of reference in his paintings from the public realm of current events and popular culture to one more defined by the artist’s personal experiences.

The Night Shades are distinguished by Rauschenberg’s application of Aluma Black, an oxidizing agent that immediately tarnished the aluminum surface, revealing and concealing the artist’s matter-of-fact images. In the spectral Phantoms, the faint screens compete with the transient reflections that enter the frame, which inherently include the viewer. Produced on the heels of three separate retrospective exhibitions, these ethereal works allude to Rauschenberg’s artistic past and, by conjuring the foggy realm of memory, address the difficulties of looking back.

My essay “Photosensitive Rauschenberg,” which examines the centrality of photography to these works and much of the artist’s creative output, will be included in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue.

Update: The Rauschenberg Foundation has made a digital version of the catalogue available here.

Installation view with Vanities (Night Shade), 1991. Robert Rauschenberg, Night Shades and Phantoms, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, NY, March 14 – July 19, 2019. Photo: Chris Murtha.

Morsel: Robert Breer's Floating Gumdrop

in , ,

Robert Breer's Osaka I (1970) in MoMA's Sculpture Garden, July 2018. Photo: Chris Murtha

The subtlety of Robert Breer’s whimsical Osaka I, which is currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, stands in contrast to most kinetic art. Powered by car batteries—a nice nod to the artist’s father who was an engineer for Chrysler—the sculpture moves at a rate of 2 ½ feet per minute. Slow enough to go unnoticed. That is until you walk away and return to find it several feet from where you swear it was just standing.

Having noticed that, you stop to look at the sculpture—one of what the artist called “floats” or “motorized mollusks.” Staring at it, your eyes start to blur and your head gets a little funny because it’s subtle enough to make you question your vision and memory. It’s like trying to see the moon move.

A woman sitting in a nearby chair starts to get uncomfortable when she realizes she is sitting way too close to the art. “Wait,” she thinks, “is this art? And did I approach it or did it approach me?” To be safe, she moves to another seat. Several eons later, the giant white gumdrop nudges the woman’s former chair and politely reverses course—looking for other visitors to unseat or unsettle, silently menacing the garden.

Robert Breer's "floats" amid Nakaya Fujiko's fog sculpture, Pepsi Pavilion, Expo '70, Osaka, Japan.

After establishing himself as a filmmaker specializing in experimental abstract animations, Robert Breer (1926-2011) started producing motorized sculptures in 1964. Osaka I was initially exhibited at Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan, as one of seven "floats" installed outside the Pepsi Pavilion, which was organized by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology). Later that year, it was exhibited in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden (from August 20, 1970 to April 11, 1971) and was acquired by the museum in 1971. It currently finds itself roaming the garden again as part of the Peter Fischli-curated “If Everything Is Sculpture Why Make Sculpture?”

Robert Breer's Osaka I installed in MoMA's Sculpture Garden in 1970. Photo from MoMA's online archives.

Morsels are a series of brief texts—ruminations—on a single work of art.

What We Look For When We Look At Art: Rachel Harrison’s Perth Amboy

in , , ,

Installation view, Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy, The Museum of Modern Art, March 19 – September 5, 2016.

In Fall 2000, Rachel Harrison set out to document a modern-day pilgrimage to Perth Amboy, NJ. Residents there claimed to have seen an image of the Virgin Mary in their second-story window and people were flocking to this town on the outskirts of New York City to behold Her presence. Harrison’s resulting project, Perth Amboy, is currently being re-staged by MoMA fifteen years after its original presentation at Greene Naftali Gallery.

From early on, Harrison’s work has presciently combined sculpture and photography to explore our relationship to images more concretely. Here, she pairs her own photographs from Perth Amboy with a series of found-object sculptures. With this installation, Harrison questions how we view art and, more specifically, what we look for when we view art. In retrospect, it represents her archetypal project.

Harrison’s understated photographs forego documentation of the apparition and focus instead on the moment when visitors touch the window in hopes of gleaning any lingering presence. One photograph eerily captures the faint image of a person’s face, just visible through the glare of reflected sky and the accumulation of handprints. In effect, the handprints form a new image, one that recalls the smudges that initially conjured the Virgin Mary. With an emphasis on contact, Harrison’s photographs transport the image of this holy apparition back into the physical realm.

Installation view, Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy, The Museum of Modern Art, March 19 – September 5, 2016.

The rest of the installation, which fills the entire gallery, is set up as a cardboard maze that limits our mobility and seems to entrap us within the space. The cardboard panels are unaltered except for the folded scores that allow them to stand on their own, somewhat precariously. Situated (and sometimes hidden) among them are seven sculptural arrangements, exhibited on customized bases that include a mirrored pedestal and a Stor-All box. The gallery is so crowded with cardboard that it is difficult to look at more than one of these tableaux at once, and impossible to view them collectively.

Several pairings focus on the act of looking, with one object contemplating another. In one, a ceramic figurine of a Chinese scholar meditates on one of Harrison’s characteristically lumpy cement sculptures. In contrast, a family of porcelain Dalmatians gazes up at a crumpled chipboard envelope as if it were an important monument. Others focus more directly on photography: a Becky doll (Barbie’s disabled friend and coincidentally "the school photographer") views an unspectacular image of a green wall and a miniature bust of a Native American in headdress admires a framed snapshot of a sunset (a remnant from Harrison’s earlier project, Sunset Series*).

Rachel Harrison, detail of Untitled from Perth Amboy, 2001, wood, GatorBoard, cardboard, Becky Friend of Barbie doll, thumbtacks, and chromogenic print, 96 x 38 x 41 inches.

Each pair is a reiteration of the others, a repetition of the gaze (and the projections that accompany it) that is central to the artist’s project. By relating her own pieces to common objects, Harrison may be poking fun at her own work and contemporary art in general, but more likely she’s taking aim at the loaded nature of the gaze, the awkwardness of the exchange between a viewer and an object.

Here, the observed objects signify nothingness, or at least an absence of clear meaning or function: an empty envelope, an abstract sculpture, a generic sunset photograph, and a green screen, which represents digital invisibility. Harrison’s readymade figurines are searching for something in these objects that they may not find, and this, perhaps, is what they share with the people documented in the photographs that line the gallery walls. Still, the effort is admirable.

Harrison may have been drawn to the initial spectacle in Perth Amboy as a skeptic, but she clearly respected the power of the apparition. Unlike the sculptures, there is no mocking tone in her photographs of the faithful. After all, it was the power of an image envisaged from a few smudges on a windowpane that drew crowds of people to an unassuming two-story house in the suburbs. It’s a similar power that transfixes the figures in Perth Amboy and keeps us wandering this cardboard maze.

Installation view, Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy, The Museum of Modern Art, March 19 – September 5, 2016. (All photos: Chris Murtha)

Rachel Harrison: Perth Amboy
On view through September 5

The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
www.moma.org

*Harrison’s Sunset Series (2000) featured photographs that employed various analog distortions to create distinct images of the same sunset snapshot.