Smithsonian.com

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.

I recently attended a lecture by Denyse Thomasos, a young and highly regarded painter based in New York City. The lecture reminded me how fine art greatly benefits from context. Too often we see the work of an artist out of context, scattered like puzzle pieces across vast distances. No wonder so many of us find contemporary art
mystifying.

Unlike novelists, most artists present their ideas to large audiences in excerpt. There’s simply not enough room on a gallery’s white walls. Often, gallery-goers remain in the dark regarding an artist’s studio practices. They can’t decipher a simplified yet precise visual language, honed through so many drawings and paintings, countless and unseen.

In her lecture, Thomasos masterfully explained how she developed her abstract paintings, cage-like grids in earth colors. Painted deftly on monumental canvases, her compositions suggest places of habitation.

While most abstract artists willfully cut tethers from the mundane world, Thomasos seeks to find home again through her art. Born in Trinidad to a family of African and Asian descent, Thomasos told a very moving story about her early childhood in the West Indies, how her father sought only the best for his children. An esteemed high school principal, he wanted his children educated within the British system. He found the right educational model in Canada, and he moved his family to Toronto.

Yet Thomasos’s father struggled to find his footing in cold Canadian terrain. Like many immigrants, he sacrificed the privileges of his more settled life in Trinidad for the lasting benefit of his children.

Though abstract, much of Thomasos’s art is deeply personal, honoring her father while at the same time attempting to define home in a culture of displacement. Deliberately, she wanders, taking pictures of buildings and homes in China, Vietnam, India and West Africa.

The cage-like forms that suggest buildings also suggest slavery and the middle passage; the roots of Thomasos’s art run deeper than one or two generations. She composes entire paintings out of lines, and she suggests that the slash of the line memorializes the labor of the sugar-cane cutter. Studio assistants mix her paint colors, and she asks them to mix the paint into the color of mud and dirt: the raw stuff of home on a canvas, hanging on a white wall.

(Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)

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.

One night about five years ago, I was out in Westwood, California, home to UCLA and its Armand Hammer museum, among other things. We were at a sanitized burger joint, one of those establishments that makes me start humming “Little Boxes” as soon as I step in. A girl I didn’t know well, not from L.A. but attending UCLA, told me she was disappointed with the city, my hometown, of which I’m admittedly protective.

“There’s no architecture here,” she said simply. “No architecture!” I sputtered. “No architecture!” I screeched, flouncing around in the garishly colored booth we were sitting in.

She’d hit a nerve.

The L.A. I knew and the L.A. she knew were clearly two different places. And though L.A. can be derided for many things, its architectural history is not one of them. Love them or hate them, the Taj Mahoney (Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral), the J. Paul Getty Museum and Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall are just the latest examples of what the city is willing to try, and L.A.’s architectural legacy is not linked to public buildings alone. Ironically, “Little Boxes” describes plenty of L.A. area neighborhoods perfectly, but there are some great residences in L.A. on the architectural and design forefronts.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, Sam Watters, at least, agrees with me. Though, according to the article, L.A. can be derided for the obliviousness it displays toward its architectural history. “ ‘That’s the thing about L.A., compared to the East Coast: We don’t just tear down our treasures. We toss out all written records about them as well,’ he says. ‘In the East, they kept bills for every seed, awning or doorknob ever purchased.’ ”

L.A. originals have been gutted or torn down for years, and Watters has attempted to stanch the bleeding by publishing the two-volume history, Houses of Los Angeles.

The Times describes Watters as chafing at the notion that “everything was just a copy of what had been built before somewhere else. ‘Untrue,’ says Watters.” I heard in his tone the echo of my indignant foot stamping from five years ago, and thanks to him, now I have the books to back it up.

It’s always a carnivalesque affair when a piece of art is slandered as pornography. Artists, critics, moralists—all have an opinion and are none too shy about sharing. But the reactions of the past week or so, after one of Nan Goldin’s photographs was seized from a British gallery where it was being shown, were noteworthy.

The usual heated indignation and strident protests about such effrontery were nowhere to be found. In fact, a couple commentators seemed to assert that the charges wouldn’t have been made in the first place if the artwork had been better.

I don’t claim any expertise about pornography. But I do know what art is, and Nan Goldin’s work more than qualifies.

Her snapshot aesthetic has invigorated documentary photography, and her use of slide projections as an art form is nothing short of groundbreaking. The inclusion of her work in innovative exhibitions like “SlideShow” at the Baltimore Museum of Art and “East Village USA” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art is proof. As a 20th-century artist, she stands shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Smithson, Basquiat, Haring and Koons.

Her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 1997 showed work devoted to subject matters—AIDS victims, the 1970s and 80s drug culture, transgender relationships, domestic abuse—that society wouldn’t even discuss, let alone see as art. Coupled with an incredible formal ability, it is really no surprise that Goldin was the 2007 recipient of the Hasselblad Award in photography.

Even a quick glance at Goldin’s accomplishments is enough to show how much she has done for photography as a genre. That’s why it is so disconcerting to see members of the art community casting aspersions at one of their own. Insinuating that an artist’s skill is a mitigating factor in the “what is art” controversy is imprudent, but forgetting that the power and purpose of artists is forever tied to free expression, not ability, borders on self-annihilation.