Ota Benga

In the Houston Chronicle, a piece on the black art collective, Otabenga Jones.

Briefly

“skip skitter start trip vault bounce - and other attempts at flight”
At the Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Through Dec. 23

Earthbound might be the worst description of Jacob Hashimoto: his installations share not only a spacious grandeur, but also a celestial lightness. “skip skitter start trip vault bounce—and other attempts at flight,” currently on view at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and tailor-made for the site, inhabits and explores its space from an elegant, distinctly Eastern angle. From the ceiling dangles the fluttering centerpiece, an ethereal flock of white “kites” painstakingly fashioned from silk and bamboo, hovering over gallerygoers like a lustrous cloud. Equally striking work adorns the walls: papery rainbow mosaics that unite origami and quilt-making in a hushed tribute to Hashimoto’s dual heritage.

“On the Scene”
At the Art Institute of Chicago
Through Jan. 28

The Art Institute’s new “On the Scene” gathers the work of three local photographers—Jessica Rowe, Jason Salavon and Brian Ulrich—into their own solo shows. In an eerie excavation of red-state memories, interiors become family scrapbooks in Rowe's work, while clothes become ciphers that simultaneously cloak and illuminate their owner’s lives. Ulrich searches the same corners of the country. His photographs reprove the Republican equation of patriotism with consumerism, slyly documenting the self-annihilating monotony and gluttony behind the ritual of shopping. Probing the borders of the medium itself, Salavon’s “photographs” take wildly diverse forms: from concentric, rust-hued circles to snaking blocks of color. These geometries are startingly precise. Yielded by intricate mathematical averaging—quite literally abstracting beauty from mountains of everyday ephemera—these computer-aided objets d'art mold the ordinary into the transcendent.

Nomadic mutiny

In the early twentieth century, many artists crossed the Atlantic in search of new homes. American artists felt their minds were shackled in a puritan backwater, believing the Old World remained the bastion of cultural innovation and refinement. European artists found their trumpeted traditions to be suffocating, that their appetites for truly modern art could only be nourished in the New World. And so the so-called Lost Generation colonized the Parisian neighborhoods of Montmartre and Montparnasse, while a countertide of avant-garde fixtures fled the City of Light for New York. It was in the refuge of Manhattan that a handful of continental émigrés, godfathers of surrealism like Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara, set up a stateside branch of Dada.

Francis Picabia was among these expatriates. He began important work in New York, but nurtured his Dadaist experiments abroad. Where his fellow travelers behaved more like doctrinaires, straying little from their manifestos, Picabia was a freethinker. The intellectual anarchy that sets apart Picabia’s sensibility could not accommodate Dada’s limits. Limits smacked of authority, of artificiality. But the soul of his esthetic was movement, restless imaginative travel; independence came as a windfall. “If you want to have clean ideas,” he once said, “change them as often as your shirt.” And change them he did: he dragged on an art-school flirtation with Impressionism, later liaisons with Fauvism and Cubism and even Orphism, and a famously, slightly longer affair with Dada. Of course, he moved on from there.

This portrait of Picabia, as a stylistic Bedouin, emerges from the new exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago, “Francis Picabia: A Selection of Works on Paper, 1903-1951.” At 87 works, the scale of the exhibition itself reflects the breadth of Picabia’s peripatetic style. It is clear that where today’s postmodernists labor in vain to evade categories, Picabia effortlessly succeeded. Still, some critics often try to lump him in with the other Dadaists, viewing him narrowly as an enemy of the bourgeois, bent on upsetting the delicate complacencies of the Parisian middle class. But Picabia’s rebellion was promiscuous. In and outside of art, he had many partners and left nearly all of them in his wake—even Dada. He wrote its obituary in 1921. Three years later, not before adopting the style himself, he denounced surrealism.

Fortunately, the Arts Club exhibition conveys Picabia’s nomadic mutiny. From its high vantage point, one can almost trace the tortuous arc of his rejections, zigzagging through modernism’s history. An early self-portrait begins the exhibit. Its spartan pencil lines are unremarkable in nearly every way. But darkness collects in his hair, his tie, and—most forcefully—in his eyes. The drawing’s power centers on his eyes, which belie his young, humbly rendered face, expressing through a squinted glare and tense brow an incipient seriousness, a skepticism, even a hostility, that would steer his art.

A decade later, he had left Impressionism for the fragmented planes of Cubism. By this time, as he began to use watercolor, warm golds and browns trickled into his work, in blends of figuration and abstraction. Not long afterward came Picabia’s Dada phase. To its credit, the exhibition offers little evidence of his famous “mechanomorphs”—more or less, sexualized images of machines. The same goes for his scrawled phrases. Despite his worth to the movement, this phase could be considered his creative nadir. Its adolescent impulses to shock the middle class, disguised as a salvo at the zeitgeist, are as vulgar as they are inert.

Perhaps his most interesting, and most influential, works on paper are his “transparencies.” In these works he suspends his own creations above ghosts of Romanesque frescoes, anticipating the appropriations of postmodern art. Coupled with the shifting scale of his figures, flora, and fauna, the technique of overlaying creates a protean, dreamlike illusion of depth.

The exhibit closes chronologically with Picabia’s Dada. So many years after abandoning the movement, the title alone draws a sort of momentum. It views a nude couple from behind. The woman’s arm is melodramatically outstretched, and the man wraps one arm around her shoulders, bringing the other to his face. Does she humiliate him? Is he crying? Laughing? Picabia’s shaky relationship to Dada is compressed into these gestures. Under a glaze of kitsch, the ambiguity of the two figures mirrors the final ambivalence he felt toward the movement. Whether the extravagant illogic of Dada finally amused him or embarrassed him, it is unclear. Like a withered lothario, meditating on his youthful romances, Picabia seems uncertain about his choices. Given the same opportunity to look backward, across his entire half-decade career, gallerygoers are invited to meditate on the same choices.

Develop Yrself

Polaroid-o-nize yr life.

The Evacuation Artist

At once photography's greatest asset & liability is the realism inherent to the medium's technical qualities: chemically aping the human eye's sensitivity to light. Thomas Demand, subject of a mid-career MoMA retrospective, fashions inexact paper sculptures from documentary photographs, linking him to Richter & Gursky. Stripping spaces of detail & affect, his work unmasks photography as a counterfeiter of reality. He is the Evacuation Artist, yelling Fire! in the media's crowded theaters, until they take on a pristine impersonality, a serene banality. His attack on photography's mimetic pretensions is the constant, stringing together his oeuvre.

The variable is the subject. Here Demand encases allusions within allusions, Chinese box-style, sliding the audience down slippery tunnels of reference. Consider the outwardly quotidian "Staircase":



attempting a facsimile of his high school stairway, Demand employs the Bauhaus style, invoking at once the Third Reich’s rejection of the art and architectural movement & the popular belief in postwar Germany that architecture could guarantee a democratic generation of moral integrity. Or Michael Kimmelman's note:

A patch of grass that he photographed turns out to be a laborious paper reproduction of a patch of grass, made blade by blade, which brings to mind a photograph by Mr. Gursky of a gray patch of carpet, itself devised as an ironic riff on Gerhard Richter's all-gray paintings, which harked yet further back to Jackson Pollock's drips.

Demand's rabbit-hole runs indefinitely deep.

He weds conceptualism to craftmanship brilliantly, neatly drawing insights into art & reality while skirting the murk of postmodern onanism.

Cultural Purgatory

Until recently, I had never really taken to Cy Twombly. A trip to MoMA over spring break spurred me to reconsider & now I'm fully under the spell. I'm trying to figure out why.



Codes are in our histories. One of my childhood fascinations was with cryptography, creating & breaking codes. Like my dad, Twombly had a short stint with Army intelligence, occasioning his famous self-appraisal: that he was 'too vague' to inflict the precise disorder of encryption. A convulsion of smears, scratches, & scribbles, his vagueness is at once pre-lingual & literate: pairing cave scrawl with Hellenistic namedropping. It is the vagueness of blurred borders, of ambiguity, of double lives. Perhaps I'm drawn to how Twombly inhabits a cultural purgatory, one foot in the lettered heavens & the other in the vulgar underworld. Sublimity tugs from both poles. His twin yearnings become nearly religious in their hope: for a dreamed paradise to be reified & a lost paradise to be recovered. He is too busy with the past & the future to confront the present.

Loneliness of the Lunatic

Can loneliness be commodified, fetishized? It's done every day, & too often it is the loneliness of the artist. Case in point: Henry Darger, the outsider artist par excellence. The fetishized commodity, here & everywhere, works from two cheapshot angles: sympathetically ("aww, what a sad man") & romantically (the loneliness of all great artists will be redeemed, in a sort of relentless art-historical Rapture, by posterity). Both of these angles point away from the art itself. The former relies on biography, the latter on myth (in a sense, biography writ large & abstracted).



Renowned art critic John Berger tired long ago of the romance with artistic loneliness. "He is lonely in the same way as a lunatic is lonely," Berger wrote of Picasso. "Because it seems to the lunatic that, since he never meets opposition, he can do anything." Picasso was less a man than a tempest, to whom loneliness was scarcely an obstacle. But Darger was no Picasso: his creative flights were so vagrant that they left the public grounded, scratching their heads, their esthetic vocabulary compressed into that single hollow phrase: "How ... interesting."