Junkyard and Deliverance

Last weekend I got to go to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington DC.  This is what I thought about it all:

James Hampton died in 1964. He was a janitor and an artist, and his major work, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly, is one of those astounding pieces of art that has to be seen to be felt and understood, although "felt" and "understood" are somehow interchangeable here when you witness the glory of Hampton's dedication, his secret devotion to what he believed, what he needed to do because of that belief probably just to get by day after day, night after night. Constructed from trash he would save from the dumpster (old light bulbs, pieces of foil, old furniture, wood scrap, and so on), The Throne has an interstellar heft to it, a set-design chic that somehow allows you to fall into its sumptuousness, to uncurl into that luxury culled from the trash-heap, and yet also the scene Hampton depicts is a sort of tone-poem to the way Hampton understood and felt passages from the Bible. It's art toying with functionality but the functionality serves some mysterious purpose beyond worship and therapy and even beyond creativity and intelligence. It's mystically significant, something that can't really be said about a lot of modern or contemporary art, and yet it also has a workmanlike quality to it too, a bold, no-nonsense theatricality that compels you into wanting to enter a dream-state that is both junkyard and deliverance. That mix of throwaway and grandeur, of loveliness and crap, is what makes Hampton's Throne not really the work of an outsider or an insider artist, but of an artist trying to decode what poetry and belief can mean once you transmorgrify daily life into spiritual significance. Hampton was a janitor/ecclesiast who found his way through life by absorbing its debris and re-interpreting it into bliss.

Duane Hanson (who sculpture is above) might be Hampton's opposite.  He takes the materials that creates debris (fiberglass, Bondo, resin, etc) and uses them to give us waxworks figures from daily life, often with a grotesque flourish.  His Woman Eating from 1971 is made from polyester resin, fiberglass, and polychromed in oil paint, decorated with clothes, table, chair and accessories from a thriftstore.  The overall effect is of cynicism burnished into voyeurism, a sort of blank stare that collapses on itself and parodies the way you see strangers not as forms of yourself, but as complete and total "other."  When I look at this woman I don't feel empathy or compassion or anything, just a dull vibration, a creepy little laugh going off like a smoke-bomb inside my head.  Maybe Hanson's intent was to be a 3-D practitioner of Diane Arbus's sense of alienation and connection to freaks, but this "tribute" here is more like a mock-up for a bad early 80s SNL skit, a character that isn't a character but a compilation of bad habits and bad genes.  There's nothing interesting here.  All that attention to detail that might sometimes have a sort of kinky aftertaste (Jeff Koons is all about that) here leaves no taste at all, just dead air, a corpse propped up and going through a scene in a really stupid movie. 

That same feeling of cynicism and horror is what Philip Guston's "abstract" painting (pictured below) investigates in a way that launches into nightmare and joy.  Guston's evil little nest here is a parody of Abstract Expressionism that somehow out-expresses the target of the joke.  There's a kindness built into his assault, a need to find grimy little angels, sort of like a Chagall painting that has turned melty after a house fire.  I kept staring and staring at this thing, and it was just a revelation, the webby tones and oddness, the smears and crooked little lines, those bleeding-newspaper and crumbling-brick colors, all of it cascading into nothingness and then back out toward image.  A masterpiece.   

And finally, Robert' Rauschenberg's "Reservoir," a piece I have always wanted to see in person.  It's one of those totem-poles inside my head; I've seen it in books and magazines, and I've always loved its simplicity and elegance, and yet also its brute stupidity.  That lame-brained greatness is given force and verve and significance here because of Rauschenberg's skill at editing and combining.  If Hampton is trying to create a palace, Rauschenberg is trying to make a celestial shotgun shack, and there's music and laughter spilling out of every little fucked-up room.  The clocks make a mockery of time, the paint a mockery of painting, and the wooden embellishments and dirty clothes stuccoed to the surface remind you of the day after a disaster, a grim sense of hope that no matter what has happened there's always proof of something after, clues to escaping tragedy by staring it right smackdab in the face. 

Someone Left the Cake out in the Rain

I'm always on the lookout for artists who are "big" but whose work is stupid and weird and lovely, intelligent without having to try too hard, but also completely comfortable with the boundlessness of not being smart.  I hit the jackpot with Joyce Pensato.  She's been around for over 30 years, but recently her work has been getting attention all over the place, chiefly for her show last year at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC titled "Batman Returns," pictured above. 

Her strategy and practice have a decidedly outsider-art smell and shimmer:  take what's out there and internalize it in an odd, festered, beautiful manner, then externalize what's been internalized obsessively through a variety of means.  Pensato does this by finding incredible shit at thrift-stores (toys, figurines, what have you), bringing the objects back to her studio, and then molesting them artistically.  The paintings are like Phillip Guston smashing into Franz Kline, all abstract-expressionist and dumb as hell, parodies and homilies simultaneously.  Someone left the cake out in the rain, so to speak.  The sumptuous apocalypse of her work is like a queen letting us in on the torture she provides to her subjects.  I love the crap in the center of the gallery too:  Mike Kelley (RIP) eat your heart out.  There's a feeling here of love lost and rediscovered somehow in the ashes after that trailer in Pink Flamingos goes up in flames.  It's poetic but also, as I said previously, completely and delightfully stupid.

Pensato has a big show opening at the Santa Monica Museum of Art soon.  I would love to go see it and get enraptured.  I think her work is another reason why we need to abandon the outsider/insider split for good.  I'm thinking of Judith Scott stealing people's car-keys and cocooning them as I look at Pensato's stuff, as well as Mose Tolliver and Thornton Dial paintings and assemblages.  I'm thinking of Robert Rauschenberg and Edward Keinholz as well.  The earned rawness of her style, the messiness taking over and persuading you it's all on purpose is a direct offshoot not just of expressionism and Pop, but outsider-art's propensity to aestheticize experience and biography while also burying the need to explain.  In other words, if you looked at Pensato's crazy-assed work you might think it's done by anybody with a need to explicate (without explaining anything) what's been bothering them for years and years.

 

Hot Mess

This is from a blog post Aaron Betsky, the Cincinnati Art Museum Director, wrote concerning "The Collections:  6,000 Years of Art," a big new exhibit at the CAM:

"The one issue that will not be addressed through these additions is whether these new displays treat the works of art with appropriate respect. The Schmidlapp Gallery turns each work into an icon, and in so doing removes it from the historical context in which most art museums (including this one) usually show such artifacts. In The Collections, the opposite happens: you have to look at what we think is an important work of art without many of the usual framing devices. For us, the questions both of these approaches, as well as some of the others we will be unveiling over the next year or two, raise get to the point of what an art museum does: at least in part, it makes the artifact into what we think of as a work of art through the way it displays that object or image. By varying how we do that, we want you to be aware of that process, and maybe even to be part of it."

Beautiful things to think about.

When you are in the thick of the exhibit, confronted with the "salon-style" onslaught of paintings and objects in "The Collections," meaning gets twisted out of itself until all you have left is stuff.  For the most part it is beautiful and interesting stuff, but stuff none-the-less.  Pictures and objects get summarily delegitimized through this process of egalitarian chic, and yet they also become somehow more sympathetic, more of this earth, to the point you start thinking about how much money these things cost, and why are/were these things worthy of museum-ness in the first place?  Just because they're here doesn't mean they mean anything.  That's kind of what this "hot mess" tactic of display shows us, and I'm happy about that.  The honesty Betsky is extolling is worth a little brain time.  It seems like he's deconstructing the institution he is in charge of.  Good for him.

Museums. churches, universities, and other institutions that are in charge of delivering meaning to us can often ossify into palaces ran by emperors with no clothes.  "The Collections" at its very core is allowing us to reconsider that hierarchy thoroughly and without a lot of drama.  The Schmidlapp Gallery becomes a cosmic, epistemological Salvation Army Store.  I felt both inundated with objects and somehow set free from their preconditioned purposes and attractions.  The one painting that makes its way out of the mess most distinctively (for me at least) is Phillip Guston's magnificent mean-spirited celebration of creepiness.  It has the vibrant stasis of a concussion taking place inside an overdecorated dream.