Book Review: Julian Bell, "Mirror Of The World."

By Carl Belz

Julian Bell, Mirror Of The World: A New History Of Art, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007. First paperback edition 2010, 496 pp. with 372 illustrations, $34.95

You likely took an art history survey course at some point in your educational travels, and if you’re a Baby Boomer or younger, H. W. Janson’s History Of Art was probably your assigned text. Its authoritative voice and generous visual presentation understandably made it the text of choice here in the US for decades following its publication in 1963. Likely, too, your copy accompanied you to each of your post-college addresses and still occupies a sentimental place in your library today, for such was the lasting impression it regularly had on its readers. Still, I’m here to recommend you add to that library Julian Bell’s recent Mirror Of The World as an important and seriously engaging contribution to a newer art history, to art history as it is practiced now—now being signified by its global scope and contextual methodology—and is here further distinguished in being practiced by a writer who’s also a practicing artist. 

Crafting a manageable survey of art’s ever-expanding global history, a survey that’s neither too heavy to lift nor too dense to absorb, is a daunting assignment. Bell tackles his history chronologically and structures it thematically into 12 chapters, each of which comprises four to six sub-themes. Chapters average 30 to 50 pages, sub-themes average six to ten, and each regularly transports us to separate but synchronous global venues. Thus, by way of example, Chapter 5, Doorways and Windows, includes Banquets and bare trees, China, 970s-1370s; Earth colours, Germany, Italy, 1240-1350; Texts and textures Iran, Italy, France, Spain, Russia, 1330-1420; Opening the windows Northern Europe, Italy, 1390-1460; and Private passions Flanders, Italy, France, Iran, Indonesia, 1440-1520. The modular organization enables, even invites us to open the book at random and begin reading for sheer pleasure, while extended captions on many of the illustrations serve as self-contained thumbnail summaries of their adjacent texts, not unlike the wall labels we see in museums. 

Bell’s felicitous and accommodating prose, in tandem with his structural concision, facilitates our global odyssey and brings within reach the art and artists and cultures otherwise distanced from us by vast stretches of time and space. In turn, their otherness begins to yield, they become knowable, and the ever-expanding world they and we occupy becomes smaller, more humanly scaled, more familiar—as Bell periodically, and gently, reminds us. Here, for instance, he summons Ni Zan in China, 1372, working against the grain of acceptable Ming dynasty taste:

The parallels with what happened to later avant-gardes are intriguing, and any modern painter might sympathize with the bon mots attributed to Ni Zan: Skeptical viewer: ‘Bamboo? That doesn’t look anything like it!’ Ni Zan: Ah yes. That total lack of resemblance is quite hard to achieve. Not everyone can manage it.’        

In a brief preface, Bell offers the following explanation for the title of his text:

I see art history as a frame within which world history, in all its breadth, is  continually reflected back at us—rather than as a window which opens onto some independent aesthetic realm. I shall assume that the records of artistic change somehow relate to records of social, technological, political and religious change, however inverted or reconfigured these reflections prove.

Bell’s history, in other words, reflects the new art history in foregrounding the contexts in which artworks are made more than the formal properties they display. He is nonetheless fully aware that each approach is hollow when pursued to excess or in isolation, tending in either case only to diminish art and artist alike, and his text accordingly breathes everywhere with meaningful form/content unions. As in this description of Rogier van der Weyden’s mid-15^th century Portrait of a Lady (National Gallery, Washington DC), which

 … probably shows the illegitimate daughter of his master, the Duke of Burgundy. Van der Weyden was van Eyck’s successor as court artist, and by the 1450s, when this was painted, he too was an international celebrity. His art likewise explored the deeper tonal range and subtler modeling made available by oils. But he made his painting proclaim its own artifice: this formal arrangement of a few bold shapes within a rectangle…asks us to consider what a remarkable object a work of art can be. For this composition is also a feeling about a girl, about her pale sensual bloom, her pride and her pathos.

Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460 ( Andrew W. Mellon Collection, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC., #1937.1.44).

Or this account of Goya’s activity in the decades immediately following the French Revolution:

Of this cataclysmically violent period, Goya would strangely become the leading recording instrument. The illness of 1793 that left him unable to hear seems to have knocked through floors in his imagination. Its lumber of fantasies, fears, cracks and sneers shifted and gathered in weight. While he maintained his post as leading court portraitist, he now pitched into the kind of eccentric printmaking formerly practiced by Italians like Tiepolo and Piranesi. His set of Caprichos, ‘caprices’, from 1799 gave the genre a new pungency and grotesque force, prodding not simply at stock butts of derision like the priesthood, but at human propensities in general.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes (Spanish, 1746-1828), The sleep of reason produces monsters (Caprichos 43, Delteil 80, Harris 78). Original etching and aquatint, c. 1798. 

As these passages suggest, Bell’s historical voice is the voice of an artist acutely mindful of art’s makers and the challenges and rewards of their job of work, a voice clearly personal, blending passion and humility, a voice guided by a steady moral compass. Yet, a voice that at times is also troubled on behalf of the artist and art. Here he reflects on Giotto’s early 14^th century frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, in particular the scenes where Joachim is cast from the temple, his sacrifice rejected because he and his wife Anna are childless, so he returns to the hills in shame to tend again his flocks among the shepherds there. Joachim and Anna become the parents of the Virgin Mary, everything works out, but Bell responds

And yet I must admit that there are no pictures in this book that bring me so close to tears. I blame Giotto’s unerring instinct for social cruelty (those muttering shepherds) and his heart-gripping sentimental stagecraft (Joachim’s worried dog). But at the same time, insofar as ‘Western painting’ has been my own business, I suppose I read these primal moments in the tradition prophetically. There stands the temple—the great structure that the medieval world was about, if it was about anything. And painting starts where it ends—in the void, outside. It stalks the land, it broods, it dreams of the land, but it has no fixture in the land, just as it has no fixture in the temple. It is bound nowhere; it is mere mind-stuff, mere images.

Giotto di Bondone, The Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, c. 1303 - 1306, fresco, The Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

We can appreciate the concern. Postmodern culture has seemingly turned culture upside down, announcing the death of the author and conferring upon readers the status of writers, exposing the myth of originality by celebrating ironic appropriation, and finessing meaning with the claim that it resides only in the eye of the beholder. All of this, moreover, in the name of freedom! Well and good, but who will tell the artist? Who will wrest the quill from the writer ‘s hand? Who the printmaker’s stylus? Who the painter’s brush? And who will break the news that the artist’s labors yield no meaning? Who possesses the audacity to carry out that assignment? Who the arrogance?  

Julian Bell frets that art is bound nowhere. It’s not Giotto he’s talking about, it’s art now and modern art generally, for that’s the condition of its being: It knows no bounds imposed by church or state or any institution; at the same time, neither does it enjoy a home, an anchor—a fixture in Bell’s words—it’s altogether free. But freedom comes at a cost. As free as art in our modern era may be, it is nonetheless bound, bound to its past—bound to and by its very own urge to sustain that past’s level of achievement while at the same time challenging it—and bound, above all, by the cost of its freedom, which is the responsibility that attends its practice. And the result? Mere images, Bell tells us. Yet, his very own words effectively assuage his very human doubt in demonstrating the boundless meanings those images convey and the abundant pleasures they yield. His voice, very much an artist’s voice, adds an invaluable dimension to this new history of art.

Carl Belz is Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University. 

The Other Side of Modern Sculpture

By Charles Kessler

I've been thinking more about my post on how the backs of sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum, backs that were never intended to be seen, are nevertheless beautifully finished. It's occurred to me that traditional sculptures were usually commissioned by rich and powerful people. They were not only sacred objects, but they were also luxury objects, and anything that looked cheap or unfinished would be unseemly.

Modern and contemporary artists, on the other hand, make their art on spec and pay for it themselves. They don’t think of their work as luxury objects commissioned by rich and powerful patrons (even if it is), and they rarely believe their work is sacred. This might explain why the backs of most of their sculptures, if not completely neglected, are treated in a more purely functional manner.

Here, chronologically, are some sculptures currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art that make the point. Significantly, the MoMA website, unlike the Met site, doesn’t have many photos of the backs of sculptures (the backs are just not important), so unfortunately you’ll have to make due with my poor iPhone photos. 

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Widow, 1920, miniature French window, painted wood frame, and panes of glass covered with black leather, 30 1/2 x 17 5/8"  on wood sill 3/4 x 21 x 4". Katherine S. Dreier Bequest. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp (MoMA, 151.1953).

And this video of a Duchamp sculpture in action:

Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), 1925. Painted papier-mâché demisphere fitted on velvet-covered disk, copper collar with plexiglass dome, motor, pulley, and metal stand, 58 1/2 x 25 1/4 x 24" . Gift of Mrs. William Sisler and Edward James Fund. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp (MoMA, 391.1970.a-c).

Alberto Giacometti, The Palace at 4 A.M., 1932, wood, glass, wire and string, 25 x 28 x 15 ¾ (MoMA #90.1936)

Cady Noland, Tanya as Bandit, 1989, silkscreen ink on aluminum and bandana, 72 x 48 x ⅜ inches (MoMA, #1155.2007).

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1989, 69 ¼ x 58 x 13 inches, books bound in linen, wood bookcase, metal, plastic, electric light bulb and silkscreen ink on cloth (MoMA #524.1992.a-b).

Dieter Roth, Solo Scenes, 1997-98, 128 video monitors with DVDS on shelving units. Videos of the details of last year of the artist’s life done while recovering, and eventually dying from, alcoholism.

BTW, now is a good time to go to MoMA -- it's relatively uncrowded. If you go be sure to check this out:

Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P. I, 1977, pantyhose and sand, dimensions vary.

Giants Super Bowl Parade from the window of my doctor's office. FYI, I'm a Patriots fan.

Some Art News

By Charles Kessler

ArtInfo has an excellent interview with Renzo Piano on his addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Judge for yourselves how “chivalrous” the addition is.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with Renzo Piano’s addition.

Also from ArtInfo is news that the Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura will be directing a film about Pablo Picasso’s emotional upheaval while painting “Guernica” in 1937.

Wired Magazine reports on a fascinating (and very strange) group of artist/hackers who sneak into buildings, including the Pantheon, to secretly refurbish neglected treasures. Pretty incredible but supposedly true.

The Observer has an excellent article about perennially underrated artist/writer Walter Robinson. Be sure to read the comments.

ABC No Rio Cardboard Band performing at The Kitchen in 1983. Performers, from left to right: Bebe Smith, Kiki Smith, Ellen Cooper, Bobby G and Walter Robinson. (Photo by Christy Rupp, courtesy 98 Bowery.)

Other Art News:

NYU’s Creative Writing Program has a new, intimate brownstone for their extensive poetry and fiction readings — the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues. The readings are free and open to the public and well worth going to. Last night I saw Mark Strand, who's a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur award winner and a former U.S. Poet Laureate. He was charming, funny, clever and elegant — just like his poetry (or, as he called his new work, “prose fragments”). To quote him: “‘Fragments’ because they’re pieces of prose, and ‘pieces’ because they’re ‘fragments.”

The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House

And speaking of great literature, check out this funny, caustic letter from a former slave responding to an old master who wanted him to come back to work on his farm.

Mike Kelley, RIP

He was only 57.  The LA Times is saying it was an apparent suicide. Very sad.

Here's a great 1992 interview with him by John Miller in Bomb.

Subversive Art Subverted

By Charles Kessler

I wrote before about how the meaning of a work of art can be subverted by the way it’s presented. Well I recently encountered two museum shows that did that very thing.

Installation view, Sherrie Levine: Mayhem, Whitney Museum, November 10, 2011 – January 29, 2012. In the foreground is Bachelors: 1–6 (1991), six sculptures based on images taken from Marcel Duchamp’s painting The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.  (Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.)

In the early eighties, Sherrie Levine famously questioned the concept of originality in art (a very original idea at the time!). She notoriously plundered the work of such famous artists as Walker Evans, whose iconic black-and-white images of the Great Depression she copied and re-presented. Her work then was raw and anarchistic (and I mean that as praise), but in the Whitney retrospective that just ended, it was boring. That’s not entirely the Whitney’s fault. You can’t repeat that kind of art very often without it losing its edge, and her work had already lost its originality and thus lost its bite.

But in addition, the Whitney's fastidious installation made the work seem over-refined and even arty. And to make matters worse, guards actually prevented people from walking through the various installations (or "gangs" as she called them) even though there was plenty of room (see photo above). As a result, the fussy preciousness was magnified, and instead of being raw and transgressive as it once was, the work ended up seeming like slick Damien Hirst-type commodity art.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (free/still), 1992/1995/2007/2011, dimensions vary (MoMA #225.2011). (I doubt if the signs, especially the sanitary inspection grade sign, were in the original 303 gallery exhibition.)

The case of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work is not as extreme, but it’s sadder because the original motivation seemed so heartfelt. The first time the piece was presented (in 1992, at the 303 Gallery, then a funky second floor space in Soho), it was a delightful surprise. Tiravanija moved the gallery staff out of their office and into the exhibition space, and he converted the office and storage spaces into a kitchen where he prepared curry and rice to give away to people who came into the gallery.

Now MoMA has replicated the work and the surprise is gone. Not only have Tiravanija and others presented work like this many times (at the Zwirner gallery in 2007 for example), but the MoMA installation/performance is very didactic. There are explanatory wall labels, guards telling you where to go (and not go — for some reason we weren’t allowed in one of the spaces) and docents hanging out explaining things. And the artist doesn't even make and serve the curry and rice — it's done by MoMA restaurant staff. So rather than being a surprising and generous gesture, it’s become at best nostalgic, and at worst embarrassingly artificial and contrived.

Of course, as Duchamp knew well, the experience of all art changes depending on the context, but some art suffers more than others (e.g. Fluxus Art). I can’t imagine a way to fix things; it’s just basic to the nature of museums.

The Other Side

By Charles Kessler

I've been paying attention to the backs of sculptures since my “Day at the Met” post last month. I’m especially fascinated with the backs that are beautifully finished even though the work was intended to be seen from the front, or primarily from the front — work made for niches, alcoves, or shelves, or made to be placed against a wall.

I suspect what might be going on is the artist was dealing with objects believed to be magical or holy or have some other power beyond ordinary objects. As a result, special care must be taken in the making (and possession) of them. Of course all art is experienced as different from ordinary objects, even Duchamp's Readymades. But this work was believed to be so important, so special that even the back had to be given proper respect. They may be simpler and more abstract than the fronts, but they are often more powerful because of it.

Here are my favorites, in chronological order, taken from the Met’s excellent website. Accession numbers are included in the captions to make it easy to find more information about the work. Just type the number into the Met's search window.

Enjoy!

Baby figure, 12th - 9th century B.C., Mexico, Olmec, ceramic, cinnabar, red ocher, 13 ⅜ x 12 ½ x 5 ¾ inches (1979.206.1134).

Ritual figure, Late Period or early Ptolemaic, 380 - 246 B.C., Egypt, wood, 8 ¼ inches high (2003.154).

Dionysos leaning on a female figure, Roman, 27 B.C. - A.D. 68, marble, 82 ¾ inches high (1990.247).

Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion, Seated in Royal Ease, Angkor period, Cambodia or Thailand, 10th - 11th century, bronze with silver inlay (1992.336).

Virgin and Child in Majestry, Reliquary, c.1150-1200, walnut with paint, gesso and linen,  31 5/16 x 12 ½ x 11 ½ inches (16.32.194).

Saint Margaret of Antioch, c.1475, alabaster, 15 ⅜ x 9 ⅝ x 6 9/16 inches (2000,641).

Prestige Stool, Female Caryatid, Buli Master, ca. 1810-1870, wood and metal studs, 24 inches high (1979.290).

Chelsea Gallery Roundup

By Charles Kessler

Doug Wheeler, "Infinity Environment," SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 (2012), David Zwirner Gallery

I was in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies so I saw a lot of "Light and Space" art. I didn't like it then and I still don't. I think it's easy and cheap (Robert Irwin's floating disk paintings —  soooo miraculous and Zen. Awesome, man!), but I didn't expect to find Doug Wheeler's "Infinity Environment" at David Zwirner (through February 25th) ridiculous and pretentious in addition to cheap.

First you have to wait your turn in an outer room, then you're required to take off your shoes and put white booties on your feet as if you're going into some kind of holy clean room.

Waiting area for Dour Wheeler's "Infinity Environment." The two people on the left requested anonymity.

Then someone instructs you on what you can and cannot do, where you're allowed to stand and what's the best way to experience the work. All this for the psychedelic experience of seeing nothing but white space (and maybe some floaters depending on your age). Oh please.

There were a lot of good things happening in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies -- Ron Davis, John McLaughlin, Charles Garabedian, Frank Gehry, Abstract Expressionist Ceramics, performance art -- just to name some. It's a shame that "Light and Space" art and the "Cool School" are getting the most attention now.

But Chelsea has a lot of work I love, and -- I never thought I'd say this -- most of it is video art. Although it's become a joke that now every exhibition of painting or sculpture has to have a video component, the video is usually pretty lame and the sculpture and paintings are really the main thing.

John Miller, "Suburban Past Time," installation view, 20112.

These exhibitions are the opposite; the real interest of these artists seems to be the videos and their other work seems secondary or peripheral:

John Miller's installations at Metro Pictures (through March 10th) are simple, strange and beautiful, but his videos (made in collaboration with Takuji Kogo) are more powerful. The text for the soundtrack was taken from personal ads, animated and set to manipulated voice recordings, which might not seem like much, but the result is poetic and deeply moving.

Paul Kasmin, in an additional new space around the corner on 27th Street, presents James Nares "Pendulum" films from 1976 (through February 11th) along with photographs and related work from the films. The films, shots of various objects swinging on a wire hung from a footbridge over a gritty Manhattan street, are claustrophobic and disorienting, and beautiful and haunting; the related work is just related work -- not much without the films.

Monica Cook at the always cutting-edge Postmasters gallery (through February 11th), is an interesting case similar to Allison Schulnik except not quite as extreme. The sculptures on display were used to make the animations and they struck me as heavy-handed and so disgusting they border on silly. But they work great in the animations. What is it about video that allows us to accept more pathos and melodrama than we'll tolerate in painting or sculpture?

Monica Cook, installation view, Postmasters, detail view of the character Oriana.

I was disappointed in Shirin Neshat's video at Gladstone Gallery (through February 11th). It doesn't have the stark dramatic impact of her past work; but it's a lot better than the photos on view which seem very cranked out.

One pet peeve regarding presentation of video: why the f*** can't galleries provide a proper viewing experience. Presenting video in a room without seats and expecting people to stand for twenty minutes or more is just rude and inconsiderate. Even worse, as was the case with John Miller’s videos at Metro Pictures, is showing them in a room where people have to pass in front of the video. Kudos to Postmasters and Gladstone for providing a proper theater.

Okay, since I'm all worked up, here's my rant on Damien Hirst's "Spot Paintings." I like Hirst’s work, I really do. I like its ambitiousness, boldness, humor and inventiveness. But this is cynically corporate work that at best is mildly interesting for the variety he can achieve with such limited means. Moreover, I suspect his hype has finally caught up with him -- these shows have been poorly attended (I asked several of the guards, and they all agreed). I experienced it myself because Gagosian has a ridiculous rule about only allowing photographs that include people, and I had to wait a long time to find these two women.

But there's a lot of other abstract painting and relief worth checking out: Bill Jensen at Cheim and Read;  Richard Kalina at Lennon, Weinberg (especially his water colors); Martha Clippinger at Elizabeth Harris; and at the Howard Scott Gallery, David Goerk who, just when I thought minimal abstraction was finished, managed to do something interesting with it.

David Goerk, 6.13.2009, 2009, 15.2 x 15.2 x 5.1 cm, encaustic on wood.

Art News

By Charles Kessler

David Hockney, Woldgate Woods, 21, 23 & 29, November 2006, Oil on 6 canvases, about 72 x 144 inches (Courtesy of the Artist. © David Hockney. Photo credit - Richard Schmidt).

From Jonathan Jones at the Guardian on the popularity of David Hockney’s exhibition at the Royal Academy: “From Hockney to Downton Abbey: have our cultural tastes gone conservative?”

Via Hyperallergic: The Guggenheim has made 65 of its past exhibition catalogs available free online.

From the Los Angeles Times, an interview with Matthew Marks on the occasion of the opening of a  gallery in L.A.:  “Matthew Marks on lure -- and challenges -- of showing art in L.A.”

Agnes Gund, the classy art patron and former president of the Museum of Modern Art, writes about some potentially hopeful trends for artists: Three movements in particular may provide some relief to our sprawled and underserved population of artists: 1) The growth of local or hometown opportunities for artists; 2) The rise of unexpected exhibition places; and 3) Artist-to-artist initiatives.

And finally, there's this depressing article on our visual environment by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times: There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. …  One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” 

Kimmelman goes on to describe ways architects and city planners are beginning to deal with this blight.

A Parking Lot in Disney World,  Orlando Florida

Panel on the Bushwick Art Scene

Standing room only.

By Charles Kessler

Last night The Bogart Salon, one of seven (!) galleries now at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick, held a packed panel discussion on the "Nature and Future of the Bushwick Art Scene." It was expertly moderated by Hrag Vartanian, the founder and editor of Hyperallergic, and the panelists were Deborah Brown, director of the Storefront Bushwick Gallery; Burr Dodd of Brooklyn Fire Proof; writer-journalist for WNYC and Artnews, Carolina A. Miranda; and Marco Antonini, director of NURTUREart. You can find a pretty good summary at #bushwickarts (how can Paddy Johnson tweet so fast?).

One thing that surprised me was the carping about building codes. In the first place, compared to Jersey City they have it great, but more important, the reason why Bushwick is still relatively cheap is a lot of the activities (concerts, parties, live-work spaces, etc.) are not officially sanctioned.  Everyone knows (or should know) that fire codes are important, but sometimes minor violations for what seem like trivial violations (Burr Dodd complained about being busted for fruit flies in his restaurant) can be frustrating. But they should keep in mind that when something is officially approved it becomes a lot more expensive.

Peter Hopkins, director of The Bogart Salon, took a great deal of care with the seating at the event, even going so far as putting names on the seats. He said he wanted to get people together whom he felt should know each other. I thought that was a terrific idea and typical of the way networking (in a good way) is encouraged in Bushwick and the way people are so helpful there.