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“Triangular Solid with Circular Inserts (Variation E),” 1989-2007, at the Whitney Museum
Here’s a good art-world quiz question, one that could stump many an astute insider: What do Sol LeWitt, Sonic Youth, Dean Martin, Mel Brooks, Merle Haggard, Hudson River School painting and midcentury New Jersey tract housing have in common?
The answer, Dan Graham — a Zelig of so many creative circles over the past four decades it is dizzying to keep track — sat recently sipping an iced tea and eavesdropping on conversations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of his work opened Thursday, finally adding him to the ranks of conceptual art’s thorny 1960s pioneers to receive a full-blown American career survey. (The show, organized with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, began there and travels to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis after it closes in New York on Oct. 11.)
Among his conceptual peers, those who set out to wrest art from the realm of objects and move it more fully into one of ideas, Mr. Graham, 67, is someone whose work does not come easily to mind even for an informed artgoing public. In part this is because his restless intellect has never allowed him to settle into anything resembling a signature style or to be easily categorized. (Most attempts at categorization are parried by Mr. Graham himself with a professorial annoyance and fencer’s agility, and he dislikes being called a conceptual artist and says he is not a professional one in any sense, calling art his “passionate hobby.”)
If the world had nothing else for which to thank him, it might be enough that during a brief stint as a dealer he gave LeWitt his first solo gallery show, along with presenting early work by Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Or for the part Mr. Graham played later in the formation of Sonic Youth — he helped Kim Gordon, one of the group’s founders, land her first New York apartment in his Lower East Side building and cast her in an all-girl “band” for a 1980s performance piece, jump-starting her music career. When Mr. Graham, rumpled and white-bearded with a kind of Mr. Natural aura, shows up at cutting-edge rock concerts these days, well-read 20-somethings tend to mill around him admiringly.
But it is the way his artistic DNA has seeped into the work of younger artists over such a prolonged period that underscores his importance. Chrissie Iles, a curator at the Whitney who organized the show with Bennett Simpson, a curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, said that prominent artists as well distributed over the years as Tony Oursler (video artist, born 1957), Rirkrit Tiravanija (known for the shows in which he cooks for gallery visitors, born 1961) and Wade Guyton (who “paints” with printers, born 1972) all showed strong traces of Mr. Graham’s influence. Their work looks and feels almost nothing like his, or like one another’s, a remarkable testament to the way Mr. Graham’s fascination with perception and with the conventions of art and mass-produced culture have become part of the contemporary art landscape.
Because so much of his work — from early pop-culture writing to performances with video cameras to his well known mirrored pavilions — is about what Mr. Simpson called “the way one experiences the space of the self,” it has also seemed more prescient as each new iteration of the Web alters the calculus of media, society and individuality.
“The pieces make sense, in a way, even more than they did 10 years ago,” Ms. Iles said, “when they had a completely different kind of reading because we hadn’t gotten to this stage yet, the stage of Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.”
Randy Kennedy
New York Times
Today, the Parthenon temple that watches over Athens is a pure, white building, dazzlingly bright on sunny days against the deep blue sky. But it wouldn’t have looked anything like this in ancient Greek times. Researchers at the British Museum announce today that they have detected tiny traces of blue paint on the building’s sculptures – suggesting that the temple’s statues and friezes would have been not stark white, but a riot of colour.
I’ve just written a short story on the work for New Scientist, which you can read here. Although only a few hints of a pigment called Egyptian blue have been detected so far, experts think that the original paint job would have included red as well, with the original marble showing through white in places, and highlights of gold in others (see [pic above] for one interpretation of what this might have looked like). Although we have the benefit of seeing the sculptures on display at eye level, for the ancient Greeks they were fixed around the top of the temple – 40 feet high. “Colouring would have hugely enhanced the visibility,” says senior curator Ian Jenkins, who is responsible for the Parthenon sculptures held at the British museum.
Scholars have long known that the Greeks painted their marble buildings and statues, but they’re particularly excited about this work because despite two hundred years of searching it hasn’t been seen before on the Parthenon’s sculptures (there used to be some visible traces on the mouldings just Reconstruction of sculptures on the Parthenon’s west pediment, showing some imagined colours underneath the roof, but not on the sculptures themselves). In the end, post-doc Giovanni Verri used a clever imaging technique called photo-induced luminescence to pick up microscopic specks of pigment. When red light is shone onto the molecules of Egyptian blue, they absorb it and emit infrared light. Seen through a camera sensitive to infrared, any parts of the marble that were once blue appear to glow.
So far Verri has found the blue in a few different places – for example on the belt of the messenger goddess Iris from the temple’s west pediment (see the pic below from the British Museum – there’s a normal photo on the left, and an infra-red image showing Iris’s glowing belt on the right). Depicted as she descends to earth, she’s famous for her life-like flapping tunic. Verri also detected blue stripes on a cloak draped over the knees of the goddess Dione, from the east pediment. It’s amazing to think that when in full colour, the Parthenon’s sculptures showed details down to the weave pattern of a figure’s clothing.
One thing that interests me, though, is why the public perception of Greek temples and sculptures is of simple white buildings, when there’s so much evidence that they were actually brightly coloured. I asked Jenkins about this and he described it as “a conspiracy of collective amnesia”.
“We don’t want to know it,” he says. “We want to believe that ancient sculpture was white and pure.” He believes that instead of paying attention to how the Greeks really lived, we’re judging them according to our own aesthetic standards – for example the idea that it would be abhorrent to cover up beautifully-carved quality marble with coloured paint. He thinks the delusion stems from the Renaissance – when artists producing sculptures inspired by those of ancient Greece left them white to dissociate them from the previous Gothic style.
Jo Marchant
Decoding the Heavens
(AFP/File/Daniel Mihailescu)
Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.
Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.
The team — which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso — was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other.
For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.
The researchers then displayed the pictures on a screen to the birds and gave food rewards to those that picked at the “good” paintings while denying rewards to those pigeons that displayed poor artistic taste.
The researchers used a variety of images, including pastels and watercolours, still lives and landscapes, which were judged on their artistic merit, including how clear and discernible the images were.
Through the month-long experiment, the pigeons learnt to peck only at “good” paintings said Professor Shigeru Watanabe of Keio’s Faculty of Letters and Graduate School of Human Resources.
Crucially, they responded appropriately even to paintings they had not seen before, said Watanabe.
Keio University in a report clarified that the research “did not deal with advanced artistic judgments.”
“But it did indicate that pigeons are able to learn to distinguish ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ paintings the way an ordinary human being can,” it said.
The findings of the government-funded study by the university’s Centre of Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility are due to be published in the journal Animal Cognition.
Characters in a Kentucky cave that may be the earliest examples of the script (Fred Coy and Andras Nagy)
The illiterate Cherokee known as Sequoyah watched in awe as white settlers made marks on paper, convinced that these “talking leaves” were the source of white power and success. This inspired the consuming ambition of his life: to create a Cherokee written language.
Born around 1770 near present-day Knoxville, Tenn., he was given the name George Gist (or Guess) by his father, an English fur trader, and his mother, a daughter of a prominent Cherokee family. But it was as Sequoyah that around 1809 he started devising a writing system for the spoken Cherokee language.
Ten years later, despite the ridicule of friends who thought him crazed, he completed the script, in which each of the 85 characters represented a distinct sound in the spoken tongue, and combinations of these syllables spelled words. Within a few years, most Cherokees had adopted this syllabary, and Sequoyah became a folk hero as the inventor of the first Native American script in North America.
It may be, as is often noted, that his achievement is the only known instance of an individual’s single-handedly creating an entirely new system of writing.
An archaeologist and explorer of caves has now found what he thinks are the earliest known examples of the Sequoyah syllabary. The characters are cut into the wall of a cave in southeastern Kentucky, a place sacred to the Cherokee as the traditional burial site of a revered chief. The archaeologist, Kenneth B. Tankersley of the University of Cincinnati, said in an interview recently that this was “one of the most fascinating and important finds in my career,” yielding likely insights into “the genius of Sequoyah.”
Roughly inscribed on the limestone wall, Dr. Tankersley said, were 15 identifiable characters from the syllabary. They are accompanied by a date, apparently carved by the same hand. Part of the date is hard to read, but it appears to be either 1818 or 1808, at least a year earlier than any previously known records of the script.
Dr. Tankersley discovered the cave writing in 2001 and in years of subsequent research established that Sequoyah often visited caves for inspiration while working on the syllabary and made several visits to the region, close to the Tennessee border in what is now Clay County. He had relatives there, the archaeologist said, and could have left the marks there himself.
Dr. Tankersley referred to the discovery in a paper on Cherokee rock art presented last year at a meeting of the Society of American Archaeology. Further details and interpretation were reported in an article in the current issue of Archaeology, the magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America.
If the date proves to be 1808, Dr. Tankersley said, Sequoyah was probably the only one then with knowledge of the writing and so must have carved the characters himself. If it was 1818, he said, it was possible that someone he taught had made the characters.
Specialists in Cherokee writing have yet to analyze the findings. William D. Welge, director of research at the Oklahoma Historical Society, who oversees an extensive archive of Cherokee records, said it “was reasonable to think that Sequoyah or one of his students carved these writing symbols.”
Any new findings about Sequoyah, Mr. Welge said, are important because his invention of Cherokee writing promoted rapid strides in education and the culture of one of the largest Native American populations. Some crucial early steps in his development of the script had been lost, the archivist said, because Sequoyah’s wife had destroyed examples of his early efforts, thinking this “the devil’s work.”
Dr. Tankersley was especially intrigued by some petroglyphs carved on the wall alongside the Cherokee characters. He said the glyphs appeared to include ancient Cherokee symbols as well as drawings representing bears, deer and birds.
Dr. Tankersley is a member of the Cherokee Nation who traces his ancestry to Red Bird, the murdered chief once buried in the cave. He said that he was investigating possible links between the traditional glyphs and a few of the symbols in Sequoyah’s script. If a link can be established, he added, the inscription may be “our Rosetta stone, enabling us to see where prehistory meets history.”
John Noble Wilford
New York Times
Thanassis Stavrakis/Associated Press
Not long before the new Acropolis Museum opened last weekend, the writer Christopher Hitchens hailed in this newspaper what he called the death of an argument.
Britain used to say that Athens had no adequate place to put the Elgin Marbles, the more than half of the Parthenon frieze, metopes and pediments that Lord Elgin spirited off when he was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire two centuries ago. Since 1816 they have been prizes of the British Museum. Meanwhile, Greeks had to make do with the leftovers, housed in a ramshackle museum built in 1874.
So the new museum that Bernard Tschumi, the Swiss-born architect, has devised near the base of the Acropolis is a $200 million, 226,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art rebuttal to Britain’s argument.
From certain angles it has all the charm and discretion of the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan. Neighbors have been complaining all the way to the bank, housing values having shot up because of it.
Inside, however, it is light and airy, and the collection is a miracle. Weathered originals from the Parthenon frieze, the ones Elgin left behind, are combined with plaster casts of what’s in London to fill the sun-drenched top floor of the museum, angled to mirror the Parthenon, which gleams through wraparound windows. The clash between originals and copies makes a not-subtle pitch for the return of the marbles. Greece’s culture minister, Antonis Samaras, on the occasion of the opening last week, said what Greek officials have been saying for decades: that the Parthenon sculptures, broken up, are like a family portrait with “loved ones missing.” Mr. Samaras’s boss, Greece’s president, Karolos Papoulias, spoke less metaphorically: “It’s time to heal the wounds of the monument with the return of the marbles which belong to it.”
Don’t bet the British will agree.
New York Times
Michael Kimmelman
Alvar Aalto
I beg you do not forget playfulness. – Alvar Aalto
An architectural pilgrimage is never just about seeking out masterworks. It’s about what happens along the way, and all the joyous whirling that goes on in the brain after you return home.
I had dreamed of travelling to Finland for many years, to see the mythical giants holding spherical lamps at the entrance to the Central Railway Station (1909), designed by the great Eliel Saarinen in Helsinki, and to experience the architectural humility and humanity of the legendary modernist Alvar Aalto, who turned 16-year-old Frank Gehry onto architecture when the Finn lectured at the University of Toronto in 1946. Gehry has since travelled to Finland seven times.
And so, as part of my journey, I walked through a forest along a meandering path to the experimental summer home created by Aalto and his second wife, architect Elissa Makiniemi, in 1953 on the island of Muuratsalo, about 270 kilometres north of Helsinki. I also ate homemade pea soup and a pancake – a traditional military meal – at the Helsinki University of Technology, recently renamed Aalto University, and met students from Alaska, New Zealand and England who have come to practise working with wood during an intense one-year graduate program.
The Finnish approach to architecture is a sobering yet exhilarating antidote to a world gone mad for excessive and absurdly expensive design. Aalto fit his buildings to the scale of the human body and the natural world around them. Budget-restricted architects trying to breathe inspired life into their work need only to study the great Finnish master. Instead of travertine, he created stairs of brick or wood. For the graceful, big curve of his Helsinki studio space, first completed in 1955, he used insulation paper because of its interesting ribbed pattern, then applied thin, vertical ribs of wood and painted it all white. Inexpensive, and stunning. The studio now houses the Alvar Aalto Foundation, which organizes the International Alvar Aalto Symposium that takes place in the city of Jyvaskyla every three years.
Aalto devoted much of his energy to capturing natural light, cutting rows of round skylights in lobbies or cafeterias. In universities and the compelling National Pensions Institute in downtown Helsinki, he used thick structural columns with vertical rows of curved ceramic piping. Aalto was playing, albeit seriously, all the time.
Harry and Maire Gullichsen were among the wealthiest people in Finland when they commissioned Aalto to design their Villa Mairea during the Depression, but there are rattan mats on the floors rather than Persian carpets. There are flagstones on the ground and columns resting on small boulders at the front entrance. I am amazed by balustrades and arbours made of spruce saplings. In a home filled with Picassos and Fernand Legers and Alexander Calders, there are bookcases on the study walls made of birch plywood – nothing fancy, just engaging and warm.
Aalto had an imperfect aesthetic. When other international modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius were creating highly modular, mathematical designs, Aalto expressed something of an absent-minded hand with irregularly placed columns in his buildings, creating architecture that gave voice to gentle curves and locally found materials such as granite and pine. He wrapped slender steel columns in rattan, the better to mimic the rough texture of pine bark. At every one of his front doors, he reached out to the hand of the visitor – his custom-designed handles were rendered as boomerangs or animal bones, easy to grasp, comforting to hold.
It’s rare to find an architect who can produce work that’s so magical and mysterious, and so alive. Before travelling to Finland, I imagined this might be the case with Aalto, but it was during a night when I slept at Aalto’s celebrated Saynatsalo Town Hall (1952) that I was truly convinced of the ethereal qualities of his architecture. My bedroom was part of a housing wing at the public building. Children could be heard playing down the hall, and a man with a crooked, weather-beaten face greeted me while carrying laundry back to his apartment.
My room was simple and spare, outfitted with furniture classics by Artek, a Finnish manufacturer of chairs, tables and fabrics founded by Aalto, his first wife Aino Marsio (also an architect) and their friend, the aforementioned Maire Gullichsen.
The wealth of the space comes from the view to the grassy courtyard, imagined by Aalto as a public gathering plaza. I pushed the tall wood-framed windows open to let the sound of the fountain in the reflecting pool fill the room.
The town hall launched Aalto’s red brick portfolio of work. Inspired by Italian hill towns, he arranged the buildings around an artificially created hill. The volumes look like earthen red sculptures, with the council chambers presenting a sharply angled primitive mask within the complex. Within the mask, there is a pair of fantastic exposed ceiling trusses that Aalto called, appropriately, the butterflies. This was Aalto’s gift to a pulp-and-paper community of 3,000 people: timeless architecture.
Though the connection is rarely acknowledged, there’s much that is shared between Canadians and Finns. The omnipresence of granite in Finland mimics the humps of the Canadian shield. And there was an important migration of Finns to Canada after the two world wars.
One of Frank Gehry’s best friends in Timmins was a Finn, and Gehry has visited Finland not only for its architecture, he tells me, but also for the company of Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which performs at the Gehry-designed Walt Disney Hall. Last year, Gehry visited Finland to celebrate Salonen’s 50th birthday, and enjoyed a sauna at a shared artist’s compound designed in the early 1900s in the National Romantic style by Eliel Saarinen.
The place is a muscular work of wood and stone set on a lake outside of Helsinki – designed as a mythical work of art, with ancient Nordic motifs painted on the ceiling. This is where I first tasted reindeer carpaccio. At the edge of the lake is the sauna. This is where, after taking in the heat, Gehry rolled in the snow and was in the middle of making an angel, buck naked, when somebody took his picture. It hasn’t been circulated.
“Finland was a place that was kind of my own for a while,” Gehry says during a telephone conversation a couple days after my return from Finland. “Aalto taught me humanity, how to make tough architecture with humanity. And I still think that he’s the master of that – nobody has ever made it to that level. The closest building I’ve done as an homage to Aalto is the Princeton Science Library.”
The Finns I met failed to uphold the reputation that precedes them. I’d been warned of people who rarely laugh and are so utterly reserved as to look at their shoes while speaking to a visitor. What I encountered was old-world charm, hosts who would wait on the sidewalk in front of their offices or institutions to greet me before ushering me inside to talk over coffee and elaborate treats – a regular Finnish custom. The language is half spoken, half sung. One of my hosts, Vilhelmiina from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the agency responsible for organizing my trip, breathes out the language in a whisper. Because of this and her pale eyes and bleached white hair, I’m convinced that she has another life as an elf in Kalevala, the epic Finnish poem.
The whirlings carry on. I’m writing this while listening to the driving, wind-swept ballad of Jean Sibelius’s Karelia Suite . Thinking back to a few days ago, I can almost feel what it was like travelling by train to Finland’s western coast to see Villa Mairea, past granite outcrops and fields and forests. The landscape registered on my video camera as patches of black and endless streams of green. The images stayed this way for a long time under the midnight sun.
Lisa Rochon
The Globe and Mail
Benjamin Zephaniah did it stuck in a lift with a drag queen, Phillis Levin in a car on the side of a mountain, Patience Agbabi 20,000 feet above sea level in a spasm of guilt about her carbon footprint, and Kenneth Steven did it in his head during a sermon in church.
Poets don’t need a tranquil room of their own to write, the Ledbury Poetry festival has proved, by asking this year’s participants for the most unlikely physical location in which they have practised their art. On this sample they’re far more likely to be inspired by being in a car than at sitting at an orderly desk or wandering among the dancing daffodils.
The American poet Phillis Levin was halfway up Mount Aetna in Maryland in her Citroen, when she saw the words John F Kennedy spelled out in graffiti on the side of a mountain, and that was enough. She also found inspiration sitting between two women in a subway car, one flipping the pages of a tiny Bible while the other spun a miniature globe – and there was a grim lyricism in her other setting, waiting with a friend and her mother at a bus stop in Tokyo, listening to the death throes of a cricket that had fallen from a tree to their feet.
Gez Walsh – author of The Spot on my Bum, Horrible Poems for Horrible Children – says he once wrote on during “a motorway car crash”, and Phillip Wells could well have caused one, when he began to write “The Rock-Me Timing Bang” on the steering wheel of the car he was driving, while negotiating sleeping policemen around the edge of Hampstead Heath. “Thankfully the Bang did not refer to any imminent car smash, but usefully alerted me to Porlockesque waking policeman/imminent conviction issues, so I promptly stopped the car and finished writing the poem leaning against the steering wheel of my ageing black Golf.”
Kenneth Steven was inspired during a sermon, but had no pen or paper and therefore had to memorise his lines until he could scuttle off home, and Glyn Maxwell also composed in his head “as I wandered the hills around Lumb Bank in pouring rain, in desperate flight from Arvon students”.
Benjamin Zephaniah recalled being “stuck in a lift with a drag queen and a homophobic, claustrophobic weightlifter” – so the slight, dreadlocked poet, who once attempted to be gay on political grounds but concluded he liked women too much, used the only possible recourse and began to compose a poem.
The Ledbury festival has a record of bringing poets and public together in unlikely places including a midnight hillwalking poetry workshop. This year’s poets include the new laureate Carol Anne Duffy, Ruth Padel, fresh from her brief but contentious time as Oxford poetry professor, Ben Okri and Roger McGough, in venues including a 1950s diner offering take-away poems. It runs from July 3-12.
Maev Kennedy
Guardian
Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages at the Met includes this Crucifixion by Opicinus de Canistris from the mid-1300s (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City)
When you think of medieval art, drawing may not spring instantly to mind.
Medieval ivories and enamels? Definitely. Medieval sculpture, metalwork and stained glass? Sure.
Of course medieval artists — many of whom were anonymous monks working as scribes in scriptoria — drew. All those manuscript illuminations had to start somewhere. But did they actually make drawings that survived and were cherished as drawings, or that filled practical needs that only drawing can?
To most of us, European drawing before the Renaissance and its emphasis on individual genius and the artist’s hand is a dark, uncharted void. Which may explain why “Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art feels so startlingly full of light. You may even find yourself rubbing your eyes and blinking.
The 50 little-seen works on view span nearly five centuries and reveal medieval drawing to be vital, evolving, remarkably diverse and essential to the medium’s Renaissance blossoming. The medieval period is often compared with its successor and found lacking. And the superficial clumsiness in some of these works may initially ratchet up your awe for the Renaissance and for the radical changes wrought by its embrace of antiquity and its obsession with the human body and linear perspective.
But with a little time at this show the gap starts to shrink. The skills of medieval artists dovetailed with their otherworldly goals: the bodies that interested them most were heavenly. But, as this exhibition demonstrates, realism was not beyond their reach.
The material on hand ranges from accidental drawings — that is, unfinished illuminations that inspired a new emphasis on line — to exquisite efforts like a breathtaking ink rendering of a facade of Strasbourg Cathedral from around 1260. Many of them crossed the Atlantic Ocean for the first time to be here. Adding to their freshness, almost all come from university or monastic libraries rather than museums.
Organized by Melanie Holcomb, an associate curator, and Elizabeth Williams, a research assistant, both in the Met’s department of medieval art, the show comes with an excellent catalog that brings together a pithy introductory essay by Ms. Holcomb and lengthy entries by Ms. Williams and a dozen other curators and scholars. That number alone suggests both the broad scope of the works on view and the rarity of the occasion.
In the first gallery an assortment of illuminated manuscripts — psalters, gospels, epistles and a Bible or two — trace the liberation of drawing from its subservient role in richly colored illuminated texts. Hand-drawn line gradually assumes a life of its own, uncoiling from elaborate initials, existing on equal terms with color and abandoning carefully framed settings to exploit white parchment pages and the physical facts of the book as object.
In an 11th-century French codex, the Maccabees pursue their retreating foe across the gutter of a two-page spread as over adjacent hills. Shields are painted orange and green; chain mail is indicated with tiny circles in ink on wash; otherwise line dominates, especially satisfying in its account of the lunging horses and contrasting body language of victors and vanquished.
Occasionally lines do all the work, as in a sinuous ink image from the late ninth century of St. Paul lecturing an agitated crowd of Jews and gentiles, rendered by a Swiss monk with a special talent for depicting hair. (Tonsures never looked so good, and Paul’s beard ends in curling droplets of ink.) The image is part of a copy of the Pauline Epistles lent by the Monastery of St. Gall, having been made on the premises.
Roberta Smith
New York Times
“How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies),” a 2006 work by Yinka Shonibare with mannequins, guns, Dutch wax-printed cotton textile,shoes, boots and plinth (Steve White/Museum Purchase, Wellesley College Friends of Art)
In his Victorian house in the East End here Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian conceptual artist, perched on an exercise ball at the wooden table in his book-crammed study, sipping peppermint tea and examining a shipment of faux oysters on the half shell.
A stationary hand cycle sat beside him, an electric wheelchair across from him. One of Bob and Roberta Smith’s slogan paintings, “Duchamp stinks like a homeless person,” hung above him, and a tuna on toast prepared by his housekeeper was sandwiched between a vase of yellow tulips and a stack of Dante volumes: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.”
It was a small tranquil moment in the midst of a whirlwind time for Mr. Shonibare, whose theatrically exuberant work, with its signature use of headless mannequins and African fabrics, will be featured in a major midcareer survey at the Brooklyn Museum starting Friday. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, large-scale installations, photographs and films.
Erudite and wide ranging, Mr. Shonibare, at 47, is a senior figure in the British art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. A disabled black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes — “That’s the point of my work really,” he said — Mr. Shonibare makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability, colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly.
“I don’t produce propaganda art,” he said. “I’m more interested in the poetic than the didactic.”
On that gray May day in the East End, Mr. Shonibare was trying to decompress after directing a weeklong photo shoot that involved 25 live snakes, 14 nude models, 6 pigs and 2 lamb’s heads. Inspired by Dante, Arthur Miller, Gustav Doré and the financial crisis, the shoot was a work in progress, “Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall,” which seeks to depict what happens after the death of the salesman. (Hint: It’s hellish.)
At the same time Mr. Shonibare was preparing for a trip to Jerusalem, where he is a guest curator at the Israel Museum. He was granting an hours-long interview, interrupted periodically by his plumber — “Do you happen to know where the stopcock is, mate?” — and he was evaluating the oysters for inclusion alongside a peacock with gilded beak in a 19th-century dinner party installation at the Newark Museum.
“I’m juggling a few things, yeah,” said Mr. Shonibare, who in contrast to his bold and lavish work, is disarmingly gentle and restrained in person.
Because of a condition that left him partially paralyzed, Mr. Shonibare’s head lists to the right, as if being tugged there by a few of his jaunty dreadlocks. This often makes it look as if he were cocking his head to see things more clearly. But that impression is misleading because, as Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, put it, his is the sure gaze of a “visionary” artist: “He’s able to juggle so many different ideas so brilliantly and to express them in such an immensely appealing and extraordinarily visual way.”
Deborah Sontag
New York Times
Flight into Egypt 1996 . Photograph: Private Collection/Tate
It is rare for any major museum to play daring with a wild card of a show, still less during times of recession, but so it is with Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern. Ten galleries have been devoted to this unfamiliar painter. For although Kirkeby (born in 1938) is a household name in Denmark, and the nation’s most acclaimed artist since Vilhelm Hammershøi and Asger Jorn, he can hardly be well known to many people over here, since he has never had a full-dress show in Britain before, despite a career lasting more than 40 years.
It might have been longer had Kirkeby not started out as an Arctic geologist, a fact that becomes more significant the deeper one looks into his work. And depth is always at issue. For the first thing to say is that Kirkeby is a paradoxical painter, a neo-expressionist whose enormous canvases of flaring colour and passionate gesture might appear to be purely abstract were it not that there is some kind of realist in him, too. Look into his surfaces and you see figures and forms tangled up in the paint.
Take the very funny picture that the curators have shrewdly chosen to open this show. It is called The World’s Northernmost House. But where is this fabled place? The canvas is a maze of ice-cracking lines, rickety black slate and rock, drips, damp outcrops of claggy brown and grey, rising up to a threatening green sky (or so one perceives it). Is there a hint of roof, doorstep or track? It’s not clear. There is no obvious vantage point – indeed, one could as easily be looking at a map as a landscape. But either way there is a powerful sense of absurdity: a room at the top of the freezing world.
What is discernible in Kirkeby’s art is often foolish or extreme: a medieval knight, a horse so strangely angled it could tip out of the picture, sinister huts and doorless dwellings. One painting is named after the ship Nansen was forced to abandon in his attempt to reach the North Pole and certainly there is some sense of deadlock and of splintering horizons, though these seem equally bound up with the action of painting itself. Forge ahead, keep going, don’t stop trying.
Now there is scarcely anything less enticing one could say about a painter’s work than that it is concerned with painting itself, and that is not the case with Per Kirkeby. It is obvious that the mind’s meanderings are as susceptible to expression for him as for any poet (and Kirkeby is also a poet), also that the infinite variety of the world inspires in him an infinite variety of representational methods.
He paints Pop on hard Masonite in the 60s. He glues on, tears off, splits the canvas into four screens in the 70s. By the 80s, images are overlaid and interleaved, paint is scraped and coagulated, thinned, dripped and squeezed in lush smears. He goes against the grain – huge stabbing strokes of black and white in Crystal, making a cataclysm out of delicate refraction – and he walks out into the landscape like some latter-day romantic. In several works, a calligraphy of lines spread across the canvas, rather like the branches of trees latticing a beautiful vista.
If Kirkeby is prolific and uncommonly various, he is also up to his eyes in art history, seeing the world, and his art, through that of others. You get a hint of what is to come in the second room where his commentaries on fellow painters fill a whole wall of bookshelves. I freely confess that I don’t know quite what Kirkeby is doing in paintings that reprise other artists – Monet’s poplars and water lilies, Soutine’s flayed carcasses – other than to isolate and celebrate their motifs, though the overwhelming sense is of exploration.
Kirkeby wants to paint a version of The Flight into Egypt for modern times and his imagination turns to the heat, the route, the ankle-turning rocks of the terrain; the painting navigates an immense range of hazardous lines and hot colours. He wanders into the woods and the resulting pictures suggest elusive spaces, alternately airy and densely gnarled, the shadows breached by flashes of exultant colour.
Kirkeby’s colour – radiant violet, cobalt, glowing ochre – is like a gift, a compensation for the complexity of his art. For he never offers any easy statements. None of his paintings is sewn up, resolved, and very often you feel more certain of the mood than the subject matter. His early work has been compared to that of contemporaries such as Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz, but in its primitive and irreducible pleasures seems more connected to Cy Twombly.
Though there are, of course, those who just find it annoyingly resistant and obscure; which is the occupational hazard of the abstract artist. With abstraction, there has to be some kind of affinity, some vocabulary or tone of voice that the audience may recognise as it recognises the content of figurative art. In which respect, the relative unfamiliarity of Kirkeby’s work is a boon.
For it allows one to see the paintings clearly, uninflected by the judgments of others, to meet them like relative strangers. And this show is the ideal encounter, for it has been very subtly arranged to display the fullness of their character. Rich, earthy, spearing, dynamic, fiercely inquiring, solemn, droll, sceptical and yet abundantly romantic: perhaps a portrait of the artist as much as his art.
Laura Cumming
Guardian
