As a lover of painting, I was rooting for the curator Laura Hoptman‘s survey of current art in that venerable genre—The Forever Now, which opened yesterday (to Apr. 5) at the Museum of Modern Art. Sadly, this show didn’t do much to help the cause.
I had high hopes that this 17-artist exhibition of works featuring pigment that is applied by hand, not digitally (sometimes on canvas, sometimes on another surface) would counter the end-of-painting talk by major curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist who (according to the recent New Yorker profile by D.T. Max) now believes that “it’s difficult to do meaningful work in that medium.”
Maybe my letdown from this show came from the nostaglia and jaded attitude of a “seasoned” critic. But as Hoptman herself has acknowledged, many of these works invite comparison to well-known artists of the past. For her, that’s a good thing—a manifestation of “atemporality,” her jargon-y catchword (coined in 2003 by science-fiction writer William Gibson, of all people) for the current artistic moment.
Here’s how she explains it:
“Atemporality,” or timelessness,… is manifested in painting through the reanimating of historical styles or by recreating a contemporary version of them, sampling motifs from across the timeline of 20th-century art in a single painting or across an oeuvre, or by radically paring down an artistic language to its most basic, archetypal form.
In his one of his own tweets, Gibson proclaimed that “less creative people believe in ‘originality’ and ‘innovation,’ two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.” In another tweet, Gibson declared that the “now-bound” is “actually, for me, a non-starter.”
So much for The Shock of the New.
It goes without saying that many artists, throughout history, have looked to their antecedents, either to riff off them in fresh ways or to rebel against them. But striking, innovative departures in subject matter, techniques and art forms rightly define the contemporary artists to whom we pay the most attention.
In MoMA’s “atemporal” array, the now-then pairings that immediately sprang to my mind in considering Hoptman’s picks didn’t work to their advantage. That said, almost none of the artist-forebears cited in the catalogue essay (which I perused afterwards) were the ones who occurred to me as I gazed at the very recent works now on display.
I saw Helen Frankenthaler in the stained-and-poured look of this Bakersfield, CA, urban landscape, updated with a touch of neon:
The work below evoked, to me, Adolph Gottlieb (a Gottlieb in MoMA’s collection).
Hoptman also acknowledged the influence of Abstract Expressionism on several works in the show, but her names weren’t my names.
I can’t help seeing something of the Newark Museum’s 1920-22 Joseph Stella, “The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge),” in this engaging, eye-candy trio, two of which (or maybe three) are owned by megabucks collectors:
That said, there were two artists who arrested me and jolted me out of the invidious-comparison groove. The Oscar Murillos on the wall struck my “seen-that” sensibility as punk Hans Hofmanns. But this one—a paintings spill (inspired by Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘ candy spills or his newspaper stacks?)—made me do a double-take and, ultimately, some soul-searching:
The way these canvases were installed (or dropped) at the press preview—so close to the corner that you almost had to step on them (although I daintily avoided doing so) to see the works on the wall—struck me as curatorial malpractice, until I read the label:
Viewers are invited to unfold and examine these paintings, which are indistinguishable from the ones on the wall in terms of quality [really?] and were produced at the same time. By allowing the works to be touched by all, Murillo challenges—not without humor—the fact that contemporary paintings by some artists have become so valuable and so sought after that they cannot be touched or even closely examined by the average viewer.
The kicker is that after reading the label, I still couldn’t bring myself to handle the carelessly tossed canvases, even though I wanted to (and even though I’ve often stepped on Carl Andre metal floor plates). This told me something about my own inhibitions, as well as those of my fellow critics at the preview, none of whom (as far as I saw) violated usual museum/gallery protocol. Perhaps they had no desire to do so.
All of which is to say that Murillo’s non-participatory/participatory piece unsettled me, heightened my perception of exalted art’s lowly materiality and made me viscerally feel the neurotic aspect of the relationship among art, artist and viewer.
Below is another work that freed me of cynical comparisons and engaged me on its own terms. (My woefully inadequate photo includes a yellowish tinge that is nowhere present in the actual painting, but the photo I could have downloaded from MoMA gave it a crispness that sabotaged the scumbled smokiness of the actual piece.)
For several commentators, this evoked the “automatic writing” of Twombly, which never occurred to me. I was too wowed by how Mehretu has abandoned her brightly colored swirls and splotches over an architectural infrastructure (collectors’ catnip) to explore something darker, less fathomable and, to me, mesmerizing in its brooding energy and complexity. I did think for a moment of Pollock (because of the composition’s all-over look), but Mehretu’s personal language is staccato, frenzied mark-making, not rhythmic loops and skeins. If anything, it reminded me of the madly inspired look of original Beethoven manuscripts.
One other thing I liked about “The Forever Now” is that MoMA is now crediting on its introductory wall text the curators who organize its shows—something I’ve been advocating for a long time. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing this; I just started noticing it.
If MoMA really wants to get gutsy, it should do a “Forever Tomorrow” show: Who among today’s myriad artists is likely to stand the test of time and why? The museum’s choices would undoubtedly rile just about everyone. But what an intense conversation would be inspired by such recklessness!
Calling Kathy Halbreich.
All of the above photos: by Lee Rosenbaum.