Modern Art - The Quiz

Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art ... like I asked.

In New York on a Monday afternoon, late in the month of June, I find myself spending a few hours at the Museum of Modern Art.  My visits to significant art museums have been relatively few – the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery in Washington, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, and of course the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston.  Probably one or two others that don’t presently come to mind.  None of them were devoted, as MoMA obviously is, to modern art. 

I walk in lugging a heavy bag of skepticism about modern art.  A bag I acquired about twenty years ago in a small gallery in Los Angeles.  It was owned by my wife’s mother’s cousin’s wife, Kiyo Higashi, who had started the gallery three or four years before, when the second of her two daughters was about to finish college and head for law school.  Kiyo needed something to do with her time; she had a passion for modern art; her husband had enough money to set her up in a gallery; and so, into the art business she went.

The gallery occupied what used to be a Spanish-style house, the first floor of which had been converted into three large rooms for Kiyo’s art shows, while the upstairs contained another show room, some storage space, and Kiyo’s office.  The gallery rooms downstairs had light hardwood floors, off-white walls, skylights, and track lighting.  That much was predictable.  But other design elements were not.  The interior doors all slanted down to one side.  The hallway that went from the front door toward the rear of the house similarly slanted down toward the left wall.  Kiyo told us this created “a feeling of being pulled along the corridor,” of “endless space reaching out ahead of us.”  The hallway was about twelve feet long, and rather than creating a feeling of endlessness, at least for me, it created a feeling that the left wall was about to fall down on my head. 

The gallery rooms had no corners.  Instead each wall curved to meet the next where the corner ordinarily would be.  This, Kiyo told us, prevented any shadows.

Kiyo, at least at the time, was devoted to minimalism.  Not merely in the artwork itself but in her display of it.  When we visited she had hung just a single painting in each of the three rooms.  “Anything more would be too distracting,” she said, with a little wave of her hands, as if she were shooing away any distracting thoughts that may have snuck in when she opened the door to greet us.

To my regret, I have forgotten the name of the artist whose work Kiyo was showing that day.  I remember it was a woman, and I remember distinctly her work.  Each painting consisted of four bars of solid color placed vertically on the canvas.  Each bar was about eight inches wide, the painting about forty inches high.  The first painting was something like this:  a black bar at the left, next to a red bar, next to a teal bar, next to a bright olive green bar. 

We spent a few minutes looking at it while Kiyo told us how difficult this kind of painting was.  “What she achieves with color,” Kiyo sighed, “is so difficult technically.  To get the colors just right, she sometimes applies as many as sixty coats of paint.  Other artists just love her work, and buy it for themselves.” 

Clearly this was meant to be high praise.  And clearly Kiyo had never done any painting herself.  Or, if she had, she clearly didn’t know she was talking to a housepainter’s son, who knows that after two or three coats of the same paint, when you have completely covered whatever was underneath when you started, you then have a surface that is the color of the paint you are using, and applying another fifty-seven coats will not achieve any greater intensity or depth of color.  Only a greater depth of paint.

When Kiyo decided that we had enough time to appreciate this technically difficult work, we walked successfully across the endless, pulling space of the falling-down hallway into the next room.  The picture in this room also had four bars of color.  Something like this:  a red bar next to a black bar next to a dark blue bar next to a forest green bar.  Kiyo became more animated in the presence of this painting.  She talked about the “completely different statement” it made from the first one.   She studied it quietly for a few minutes more, while my wife and I looked on politely and wondered what time we would get to go have lunch.

We went to the third room to see a final painting of four colored bars.  Here I finally had the nerve to ask what these works might sell for.  Kiyo said, matter of factly, about six thousand dollars apiece.

After viewing this artist’s three-painting show we headed upstairs to see Kiyo’s office and a large room in which works by a number of other artists were on display.  Kiyo pointed out a thin wooden bench, the top of which was in the shape of Manhattan, with a street map of Manhattan transferred onto the wood.  Instead of legs, the bench sat on what looked like a sturdy brand of chicken wire that ran around underneath the perimeter of the bench.  “You see,” said Kiyo, “this bench is tremendous.  The wire base signifies how imprisoned one always feels in New York.  It’s so perfect.”

On the wall above the bench was a painting in two pieces.  Each piece was painted a solid, off-white color.  The two pieces were hung on the wall so that if the space in between them were filled in, the whole would be a perfect square.  “This is tremendous use of negative space,” Kiyo said.  “Very, very exciting.”

Also in the room were three glass cubes sitting on top of white pedestals. Kiyo explained that these cubes represented the “very important early work” of an artist who had moved on to “much more challenging media.”   The largest of the three cubes, about nine inches in each dimension, cost sixty thousand dollars.   

I now see, many years later, that these must have been made by an artist named Larry Bell, one of the California minimalists whose work recently was curated in New York and reviewed in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl, who describes them thusly:  “Take Larry Bell’s glass boxes:  chrome-framed cubes, vacuum-coated with vaporized minerals (usually grayish but gold in one instance).  The transparent objects admit your gaze.  The space inside them is a continuation of the space you occupy, simply inflected with misty tones. … Mystery-free, they leave you nothing to be conscious of except yourself, affected by their presence. … They are as obvious as furniture and as dreamy as any mood you’re in.  Not only elegant, they precipitate a feeling of elegance:  ease, suavity, cool.  They look expensive, not just in their lapidary craft but by extension, assuming ambience of taste in key with themselves. …”

Yes, take Larry Bell’s glass boxes.  Please.

So now, twenty years after seeing Bell’s boxes for myself, I wonder if MoMA will really be any different from Kiyo’s gallery, or just a bigger, grander, more famous collection of silliness.

It doesn’t start well.  The first gallery we enter is an enormous open space, in which a black electric fan hangs from a forty-foot wire, swinging around the room in various arcs.  We look at it for a few moments to see if it creates any impression other than that of a black fan swinging around a large room on a long wire, which it does not. 

In the next gallery we are confronted by the work of Sigalit Landau, a young artist who, the accompanying commentary tells us, “has produced several works that explore her native Israeli landscape in a performative way.”   The work we see today is Cycle Spun (2007), which comprises three separate video loops, running simultaneously on different walls of the same room.  “Functioning together as a trilogy and a triptych of moving images,” we read, “the videos each depict a performative act of spinning, or circular motion, against a landscape backdrop in Landau’s native Israel.”

The one that first grabs your attention is the wall-sized projection DeadSee, in which a cord connecting five hundred watermelons creates a spiral-shaped raft on the salt-saturated waters of the Dead Sea.  “Secured within this sculptural configuration, the [nude] artist floats with an arm outstretched toward a collection of ‘wounded’ fruits, their intensely red flesh revealed. The nautilus form gradually unfurls, leaving the surface of the water a nearly monochromatic azure and the artist’s body exposed.”

On the next wall is Barbed Hula, in which the artist stands naked on a beach, swinging her torso in the familiar way to keep a hula hoop swirling around her – except the hoop is made of barbed wire.  “In each cycle, the barbs graze the flesh, compromising the integrity of the body.  Enacted at sunrise on the Mediterranean coast, her methodical body movements resonate with the rhythm of the waves in a nearly ritualistic repetition.”  Just where the lines are between “repetition,” “ritualistic repetition” and “nearly ritualistic repetition” is not apparent to me.

The third video loop is Day Done, which “reinterprets an ancient Jewish custom in which an isolated area of a newly built house is intentionally left unpainted or unfinished to symbolize the remembrance of destruction. The video documents an inverse gesture—the painting of a circle around a window from inside the house, marking it first with a black stain and then, as night falls, tracing over it in white.”  

So there we have three major works of Sigrit Landau.

A small sign in the gallery notes that “[t]he Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is made possible in part by The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art and the JA Endowment Committee,” and that “[a]dditional funding for this exhibition is provided by artist.”  It is not surprising, but still saddening, to learn that Ms. Landau apparently had to pay MoMA to get her work shown here. 

MoMA of course has much to offer besides the swinging fan and the trilogy and triptych of Ms. Sigalau.  Some of it is even more ridiculous than these – such as an exhibit of ugly things that people have glued, screwed, or otherwise affixed onto books.   Some of it is quite famous, and yet entirely uninteresting – such as Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.   But then some of it is both famous and entirely more alive and beautiful first-hand than any photograph of it has ever been – all the Jackson Pollocks, for instance.  And some of the photography is entirely captivating – such as Bernd and Hilla Becher’s black and white photographs of mines and steel mills, and Diane Arbus’s photographs of the developmentally impaired at play.

And then, up in the galleries devoted to modern painting, we find a series of works that might well have inspired the artist featured twenty years ago, back at Auntie Kiyo’s gallery.  Here was Kazimir Malevich, who at least as far back as 1918 was making “suprematist” compositions of solid colors.  “Suprematism” referring to “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts.”  As, I guess, in this work White on White. 

And here were a number of pieces by Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, many from the 1950s, in which they created paintings of solid colors juxtaposed against each other.  Some – the Rothkos – with large blocks of contrasting colors and blurred edges; others – the Reinhardts – with smaller blocks of only slightly different colors in sharp squares.

Mark Rothko - Brown Blue

Mark Rothko - Untitled

So here’s the quiz.  Just two questions.

Question 1.  Consider this next piece.

Is it:

(a) a Rothko

(b) the artist from Kiyo’s gallery, ripping off Rothko

(c) a Malevich

(d) the work of another artist who followed Malevich and preceded Rothko

(e) none of the above

The answer, of course, is  … (e), none of the above.  It is a digital photo of one of the support columns on the commuter rail platform at Back Bay Station in Boston, where I stand to catch the Framingham-Worcester local at the end of a day.  A somewhat different shade of gray paint from the original has been used to cover up some graffiti.

Question 2.  Is it art?

I guess that’s for you to decide.  But here’s the card I wrote to hang next to this picture at my first show.

Voice of Authority (2008).  The work is at once an homage to the compositional elements of Rothko’s gray-on-gray Untitled, the paint roller technique depicted in Sigalit Landau’s Day Done, and the silenced voices of the graffiti artists whose original work was painted over by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. 

Actually, it is an homage to another artist whose identity I don’t know.  When I was in college, there occasionally were art installations on the stone plaza in front of McCabe Library.  One was an abtract modern sculpture, which consisted of several piles of twisted metal set a few feet apart from each other.  On the second day it was there, someone had removed one of the bike racks from the library entrance and leaned it against one of the piles.   

Now that, my friends, is art.