The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has had an eyeful over the last seven years. Originally it housed the whirring generators of a power station. Now its vastness—five stories tall and more than 3,000 square meters (you do the math) of floor space—has been repurposed as a commission-specific exhibition space.
This month the eighth commission from Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo was unveiled. Shibboleth is a sinuous concrete chasm that the artist has artificially created along the entire expanse of the hall’s floor. From Hebrew, a “shibboleth” is a linguistic indicator that attests to one’s social status or class. Historically these markers have been used to exclude and often denigrate groups of people. Salcedo has made a literal manifestation of these figurative splits. She stresses that the work is meant to resonate with the bitter results of much of Western colonialism as well as societal fractures such as immigration and racism that still exist today.
Salcedo’s offering is in keeping with the sharp, forward-thinking installations that her predecessors in the Turbine Hall have established. Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment (2005) saw the arena filled with white polyethylene boxes (like granules of sugar) that were stacked in piles of different shapes and sizes. Louise Bourgeois was the first artist in the hall, in 2000, and she built towering platforms that visitors could mount and then sit in the chairs provided. Carsten Höller made huge corkscrew slides for Test Site in 2006.
I’m partial to Ólafur Elíasson’s work from 2003, perhaps because days are getting shorter. The Weather Project created a sunny yet shadowy environment with hundreds of lamps that emitted pure yellow light. The hall’s ceiling held a huge mirror, and many visitors lay down on the floor and just lounged in the hazy light, waving hello to their reflections.
Many critics decried the rise of the multiple or editioned artwork in the 1960s as a sign that the purity of art was lost. Harold Rosenberg was no fan. Clement Greenberg, preoccupied with the notion of art for art’s sake, was most vehement in his denunciation, applying the German word kitsch to what he saw as art tainted by consumerism.
He was an egotistical grouch, but who can blame him? The man saw the birth and culmination of America’s most eminent art movement—abstract expressionism—and guided (some would say a little too forcefully) the career of Jackson Pollock.
But he couldn’t hold back the wave of artists who turned the slur of kitsch into a badge of honor. For Joseph Beuys, making works—or “vehicles” of communication, as he called them—that had numerous manifestations was one of the most powerful acts he could engage in as an artist. Andy Warhol took a more overtly opportunistic view of serial art, but elevated the status of multiplicities with his silk screens. Claes Oldenburg is another artist who has usurped the nature of the “fabricated object” and reappropriated it as art. His most recent offering was a cardboard pretzel that came in six varieties.
And now the banner of the multiple has been taken up by another wave of artists. Kiki Smith has made porcelain sculptures that would make a nice conversation piece when displayed at home on a bookcase or coffee table. Cindy Sherman created a Madame de Pompadour-themed tea service in 1990. Just last year Zaha Hadid made a sculpture in multiple to accompany a Guggenheim design show. Jeff Koons shrunk his well-known balloon-dog sculpture way down and offered it up as a kitschy collectible. Jenny Holzer inked golf balls with poetically obscure slogans.
It’s only a matter of time before Damien Hirst jumps on the bandwagon and turns his Natural History series into bookends.
The memorial is a linchpin in the study of art history and architecture. For every battle or miracle, martyr or hero, tragedy or victory, a commemorative monument of some kind exists to mark the event or principle.
Merely taking account of one kind of memorial—the obelisk—allowed Glenn Weiss of Aesthetic Grounds to come up with almost a dozen examples of such monoliths off the top of his head, and those comprised only a small percentage of the ones out there in the wide world. Think of your last trip to Rome. There’s an obelisk in every piazza of city. It is no wonder even locals get lost with such a multitude of similar landmarks.
In contrast, some of the paintings and sculptures pegged to 9/11 have been surprisingly varied in form, subject, and treatment. As a rule, I find this theme somewhat macabre and murky in and of itself. But in spite of that I kept loose tabs on what was being shown (Aesthetic Grounds is a good place to start if you are interested in finding what kind of 9/11 artwork is out there) and found a couple of works that might have enough substance to truly reckon with the facets of this tragedy.
Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman is one that sunk its teeth into my psyche. Robert Gober’s installation at Matthew Marks in Chelsea was both anguished and disturbing.
Memorializing is arguable one of the strongest of human impulses. But the commonality of this impulse sometimes leads to art that is formulaic rather than expressive. Memorial as art should be held to the same rigors and high expectations as any other work. Those events and individuals we remember demand it.
The Getty Center unveiled the complete Fran and Ray Stark sculpture collection a few weeks ago in Los Angeles. The deal was inked in 2005, with several of the 28 works appearing around the Brentwood campus over the last year, serving as sneak peaks of the feature presentation to come. The late Ray Stark was the legendary movie producer behind such hits as Funny Girl.
The collection brings the Getty’s sculpture holdings firmly into the 20th century, with works by many of the well known: Maillol, Kelly, Noguchi, Lichtenstein, Moore, Giacometti and Calder. The new pieces give context to Martin Puryear’s That Profile, a modern work standing lone sentinel in the upper tram plaza for the last eight years. Now, by the time you reach the Puryear, you will have seen works by Frink and Moore in the lower Sculpture Garden, and will be on your way past the Maillol–beautifully placed on the grand staircase–as you start your visit. Other works appear on the Sculpture Terrace, and yet more have been incorporated into the Getty’s outdoor sculpture campaign, Irwin’s Central Garden. (more…)
“I don’t understand why they have to touch it.” This passing comment was directed toward a young girl who brushed her hand against the rust-red, corroded surface of Richard Serra’s Intersection II, on display in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I overheard it as I was circumambulating the behemoth object (more than 12 feet tall and weighing many, many tons) and, museum rule-breaking aside, I couldn’t disagree more.
More tactile than aesthetic, the primary appeal of sculpture is that it is exists three-dimensionally, sharing space with us. All its qualities—texture, weight, shape—announce that it is physically present. This arouses the senses in ways that paintings and other two-dimensional art cannot readily duplicate. The impulse to touch is an inescapable side effect of sculpture. Moreover, the most successful sculpture demands such a response. Serra’s work certainly does. (more…)
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