ITALICS at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Now through February 14, 2010

Maurizio Cattelan, All

Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 is on view now through February 14, 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. This exhibition is reaping with revolution and rarity, ushering in art from Italy that has never or rarely been viewed by a North American audience. In the exhibition catalog, Italics curator, Francesco Bonami writes, “This country blessed with so many exceptional talents has trapped them in an invisible box” (28). Many of these talents are revealed in the exhibit, and this is what makes Italics stirring even as an idea, even before entering the MCA’s exhibition.

Upon entering the exhibit, the first visual encounter is the epitome of violent revolution with Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, All from 2008. Unlike much of his other sculptural work, this one is somber and sobering, not satirical. It is a meditation on mass murder as well as a meditation on creation itself. There is this mortal / immortal quality in this piece laced with an intensity his other pieces do not possess. It is as if this is the truth, the piece with most meaning to Cattelan and to its timeless context. Mass murder has been around for eons and marble is the perfect medium to portray the immortality of this mortal narrative, acting also as an allusion to Italy’s art tradition.

Walking through the galleries, I felt a very real feeling that this was the “moment” that so many Italian contemporary artists had been waiting for, and really had to wait for thanks to political turbulence in Italy. Returning again to Bonami’s catalog essay about Italics: “Just like large sections of Italian society, Italian art was for some time ‘hi-jacked’ by a political fundamentalism that choked even the strongest and most lively international instincts” (26).

Carol Roma’s 1970 sculpture, Presagi di Birnam conveys a heavy, choking sensibility in her minimal-but-not piece of a hundred or so deflated bicycle inner tubes that hang limp over a harsh and sturdy iron trestle. This piece conjures up a reeling array of emotions and associations: I feel a deep terror in seeing a violation, the dead inner tubing as little bodies slung over something cold and rigid; I feel a sadness seeing it after learning of the possible autobiographical allusions to her father’s suicide after his bicycle business failed; and finally, I feel a general emptiness, just like the inner tubes, now limp memories of a vehicular excitement with a past of enthralling numerous bicyclists on sunny days on Italian streets.

The documentary photographs of Letizia Battaglia  show the sinister realities of Palermo in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Her photographs focus on the Mafia in Palermo, but also on the people of Palermo who suffer from poverty and the daily reality of bloodshed in their neighborhoods. Unlike the somber sculptures of Cattelan and Roma, these photographs have surpassed somber and advanced into the starkness of death. These are not representations of murder as Cattelan conveys in All, or the metaphorical expression of death as in Roma’s Presagi di Birnam. Battaglia’s works are absolute reality, and have an interesting home in the gallery hanging nearby Simone Berti’s Senza titolo, a photograph of a well-dressed Italian family in a grassy area posed within a contraption. This contraption at first reminded me of a jungle gym from a park or playground and then I was reminded of tool or a hinderance for mobility. Berti’s photo discusses play and familial love, so its proximity to Battaglia’s disturbing “crime scene” photographs further illustrate the complexity of Italy and this exhibition.

The claustrophobic and erotically-charged snapshots of Carlo Mollino have a careful beauty in the risque and classical poses of the women and in the photos’ unavoidable feel of the private meeting the public. His Untitled photos from 1968-1973 appear to be snapshots, photos that do not have the grandeur that classic art photographs would possess, but instead have this beautiful but seedy color and dreamy quality only able to be captured this authentically on a portable, mass-marketed pocket camera. This only adds to the layers of intrusion these photos exude, a private eye moment with a peep show element in tow.

Pietro Roccasalva’s painting, Skeleton Key III from 2007 has a motion that brings Francis Bacon’s oils of heads to mind, namely the one that appears to be the head of a bishop. Roccasalva works with intersections, literally playing with and blurring lines between genres of art, as well as human history. The subject in the portrait is difficult to identify with the Baconian focal point of motion in the piece, a fleshy additive in the face that seems to be playing with motion and its intersection with the subject. In this work, I see revision, a desire to start again and the result is the ultimate intersection of Classical portraiture and Modern Expressionism.

Margherita Manzelli’s small paintings N from 2002, Q from 2005, and T and U from 2007 sit quietly on a wall in one of the galleries. Perhaps because Manzelli may be one of the only Italian artists who is known outside of Italy, her inclusion here is noiseless in its very white canvases with her trademark tiny ladies emerging from it as if from a curtain call. Standing out among them is U from 2007, where the figure is surrounded by a drawn floral pattern that does not desire to be wallpaper, but almost a bursting forth of the woman in the piece who is the focal point. It has a goddess quality, but the subject’s white dress that looks to be stamped with five globules of red, possibly blood, make this another sinister contradiction as a theme rife in contemporary Italian art.

Every exhibition has a “strange room,” a gallery of weirdly placed delights and in Italics this room was undoubtedly the space where one will find Roberto Cuoghi’s photos documenting the decomposition of human faces. These are immediately startling pieces but are gently so in their earthy sepia browns and grays. And these are not just random faces found in varying stages of decay, but they are men the artists knows personally, one being his wealthy collector, David Halevim. Cuoghi takes a cast of the face of his subjects, lets it “stew” in his garden for about six weeks before burying it, ultimately achieving a very real and deeply starling record of decomposition and death. Cuoghi, like so many of the artists in the exhibition, plays with mortality as he plays with contradiction.

Roberto Cuoghi, Senza titolo

The role of contradiction and intersection is constant in this exhibit as it is in Italy, its history seeming to take a strange turn in the 1960s and now, in 2009, Italy it is really just beginning to come out of its microcosmic hangover. From Cattelan portraying the constancy of mass murder in the immortal medium of marble, to Cuoghi’s immortalizing digital photographs documenting something as impermanent as decay, speak to the main theme of contradiction and its intersection, an overlapping, and its inherent revolution in Italy and its art from 1968-2008.

The Arte Provera movement is addressed in much of the exhibit since many of the artists were a part of this radical movement in Italy against what Bonami mentions in the catalog essay: “the political family, the religious family, the organized-crime family, the bourgeois family, the industrial-tycoon family, the terrorist family, and those of the ‘extra- parliamentary’ political movement” (26-7). This was a movement created by the artists of Italy for the artists of Italy, if you will, another “family.” Much like avant garde movements in the beginning of the Twentieth-century, this movement in the later 1960s has the rich history of renegade exhibitions, namely those by art critic Germano Celant, and in turn an exposure contemporary Italian artists simply could not experience. And by extension, here in Chicago in 2009, this exhibition is significant on an array of levels, layers of meaning and emotion that is evident in each artwork on view now in this exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Italics is undoubtedly an exhibition not only worth seeing, but an exhibition one must see. The sheer talent of the artists in the exhibit is a definite draw, along with the fact that these artists are barely shown in North America. But there is another reason why this exhibition in not to be missed and that reason is the opportunity to see an Italy that is rarely seen but is now visible in these very real artworks. It is an exhibition that does not leave the mind or the heart after exiting the museum, but it is one that will surely stay with you, inadvertently following you like a stranger who becomes a part of your daily habits. Something throughout your day will remind you of these artworks. Something will remind you of the turmoil and the ultimate declaration of freedom these artworks represent. Something will remind you of the power of numbers and passion, giving you something more to strive for while you move among your daily habits. And to quote Francesco Bonami again, “You could call Italics a kind of epiphany” (31). I would aptly agree.

Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008. Chicago, Illinois: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008.

Visit the MCA’s ITALICS:

http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=192

Buy the Catalog:

http://www.mcachicagostore.org/main/item_detail.php?pid=1184&cat=1

Eavesdropping in the Modern Wing of The Art Institute of Chicago

A bit over a week ago, I found myself in the same weird room of contemporary art in The Modern Wing. In this little gallery room is this Lisa Yuskavage painting, Angel; Margharita Manzelli’s Dopo la Fine; Peter Doig’s Gasthof zur Muldentalsperre; and finally the Lucian Freud Sunny Morning–Eight Legs. And since it is such a weird and wonderful room, it is ideal for eavesdropping. I did not spend over an hour in this room to eavesdrop, but was in there reviewing the Manzelli painting. The eavesdropping realization was just icing.

I have always been very fond of eavesdropping in museums. I spent endless hours in many museums doing just this while I sucked in the art around me. But this day, with my intent being very great on my review for my class of the Manzelli painting, pondering reviewing the Yuskavage painting pictured above, it was a wondrous eavesdropping day.

Yuskavage’s painting I have pictured here is titled, Angel. This is very tame for Yuskavage whose use of porno pastels further creeps out her luscious canvases of nude female figures in various narratives of dire straits of physical deformities. Abnormally large breasts and bulbous bellies that seem inhuman, so this one … tame in comparison.

Picture this: In comes a couple in their 60s perhaps, they walk into this odd room where the eye first spies Manzelli and Yuskavage. They stand before Angel in complete silence for almost 5 straight, uninterrupted minutes and then she says: “That’s no angel!” She seemed angry, irritated, quickly leaving it for the Manzelli, while her male companion, maybe her husband, continued to stare at Angel as if she were the most gorgeous and real woman he had ever seen. He was very taken by this woman on the wall in porno pastels, and I am thinking perhaps this is what upset the woman, most likely his wife (they acted married, long married).

Later I caught them near  Cindy Sherman’s Untitled #88, and this same woman was empathizing with the visibly melancholic woman on the wall while this same man gazed into Mike Kelley’s wonderful downpour waterfall of stuffed animals, Eviscerated Corpse. It was a fascinating afternoon in the museum with a very fascinating couple.

Now, I am interning in the Art Institute with Express Talk tours and look forward to this journey with my museum guests … their words, their faces, so significant. If the Curators of museums don’t already do this, I think they should spend loads of time eavesdropping on their museum’s guests. I can’t wait to open my ears to any and all of the observations of everyone in that space there for a common reason — to see art, even if their agendas are different.

Eavesdropping in a museum … I recommend it highly.

rediscovering sHApE with Xiong Yu at the Chicago Cultural Center

One of the main (of many) things that draws me to certain works of art — Shape. As someone who often experiences tricks of the eye, seeing the world around me as a series of shapes rather than things, I deeply appreciate another’s take on the shape of the world. And to say today that I merely appreciate Xiong Yu’s take on shape is an understatement; I not only appreciate it, I feel it wholly, it is a gutshot.

Through the end of August, the Chicago Cultural Center (across from Millennium Park) hosts the profoundly important exhibition, The Big World: Recent Art from China. In this deep and moving and shapely exhibit, one artist in particular took my heart and eyes: Xiong Yu.

The above painting, Riders in the Forest and the work below, Falconer, still reside in me … the shapes of me day today, a day later …

In Riders, the amazing complacency of the eyes and necks of both the riders and the horses lends an odd variety of summoned imagery to me: Aeon Flux of MTV animation infamy, as well as the strangely “proper” and profound bone-structure moments in one a favorite Western painting of mine, Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage(1434).

The muted use of color that is a punch in the orbitals even while it is muted. This is an immediate recognition to me, van Eyck and Yu, hitting me in the vertebrae and shooting me with the odd feelings that maybe I am crazy to put these works side by side. But then maybe I’m not crazy. Shape … the texture of the human machine manifested by artists like Yu, is the driving force of love, hate, peace, and discontent.

The technique in Yu’s paintings show the truth of the great human truths as much as the narrative therein does. Everything will be fixed in moments of time if we’re patient enough, everything being a reason. A reason for something steadfast and absurd, slow and steady winning an impossible race.

And, dear readers, if you get to the Cultural Center by the 30th, do also see the sculptures from modern China in Millennium Park.

I know I  must go to China to study and to feel the fingers of humanity on my impatient Euro-American skin, see the beauty in the rebirth from decay like a falconer summoning a lover in a mad hunt for the ultimate happiness in the shapes of humanity.

Modern Art will always Have my heart, but Hans wants me to hear him …

Just yesterday I wrote here about a painting I came across very much at random, a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger titled Lady with a Squirrel. Then, today, again semmeingly at random, a Holbein painting was the artwork on my daily calendar I change religiously. So for today, Friday, June 26th … Holbein is on my art calendar. I cannot help but believe there is something in this beyond the haphazard coincidence. So now, I am going to begin my research of this man … get a book to add to my collection, this book having the added appeal of having this odd little message perhaps.

I think this message may have something to do with TRUTH.

Bizarre Visions of Squirrels in the Midnight : Father’s Day Reflections

Usually, I am attracted to Modern and contemporary art because it is a deep and wonderful anguishing to me and how I am feeling in my odd little modern world. But sometimes, very old art like this painting titled, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger (circa, 1526) and writings like Margarey Kempe’s Autobiography of the Madwoman of God will give me great meaning to my modern world. Since my dream last night, I am walking through a mundane Thursday afternoon  when suddenly so much again seems sad, heartbreaking even. Now is one of those days when the smallest thing can send me into tears, those large, gasping tears, tears  like toddlers have when their hearts break over something mundane, like an exploded balloon and a lost Barbie shoe.

Last night, I spoke to my parents on the phone, and my father told me he brought 2 dead squirrels from the road outside their house, buried them in the sideyard garden, made them headstones, naming one Step and the other Fetch, placing an American flag between them. To anyone who does not know my father, have a past with him, would find his behavior bizarre (and it does have its kooky quality for sure). But to me, I see the reasonable truth in this ritual, loving my father as much for his humor and sweetness as I do for his stupors of sadness.

He is the child of the sad Irish … photographs of he and his sisters from babies on up depict a sadness in their very rare, if ever, smiles. And they are not just bored, serious. They are sad knowing life is still waiting outside that camera shutter, Pennsylvania and Ohio starvation, darkness, furniture and carpeting covered in long draws of plastic always and forever. Their home constantly covered in plastic as if they had already left their living room, their living, but didn’t, just simply stuck in a room as complex as a turbine engine or Morning Glories.

And two squirrels dead in a street, still full of tap water and love from a yellow bowl. My father leaving water out for the squirrels in their yard, gallon by gallon, day by day. Patiently I have been waiting for a poem about my father to tap me in my dark and it did last night, tugging at me today. I know it is coming. It comes in small little nibbles. And I see and feel always a small house.

After the conversation with my father about the squirrels and about my mother’s anxiety about me moving to “the big city”, I shared some lovely hours with my love, Don and my great friend, Gina. And lying there last night with Don, medicine taking me gently away from the heat-steeped outside where sleep had been alluding, I slept in love another night in my life. And I was lying with a man who genuinely loved me back.

So why were there terrifying dreams when I wonder why I feel like a squirrel lying dead and decapitated in a street, driven around and laughed at by the engines of motorcycles? I was being drug into a house to help the faceless man (that usual man in my dreams I think — the bad man) embalm animals, me standing there vocalchordless, unable to help myself or anything or anyone else around me since I was being led around by the bad man’s thumb as if I were on a conceptual leash, a magnetic field of rebellion in the most intense manner possible in the modern world.

My modern world. And then today, this painting just comes to me in a book I arbitrarily open. She is scared, too. And just like me, I don’t know what really scares her.

So I start putting that black eyeliner around my eyes again looking for my inner Shirley. She has stopped talking to me. But I feel certain this painting is one that will get us talking again like two schoolgirls shoplifting in our little sockhops loving men who love us, arriving to save us.

the classy and somber side of IGGY POP …

Even as the over the top rocker of  The Stooges and the Bowie-collaborator Iggy break my heart with the raw power (pun intended) of his lyrics, Preliminairies shows yet another side of Iggy. A soft, somber, and wise Iggy, an inspired Iggy … as if this was all marinating in him for a long while only to emerge with a force like a Mac Truck at 200 mph. In an interview available for viewing on YouTube, Iggy talks about his need — a seemingly sudden need — to break away from the bozos of rock guitars.

Buy this record … see this absolutely necessary side of Iggy Pop …

truly fearless … Lisa Yuskavages

Naturally, the first thought is Hans Bellmer … with the bulbous forms made up primarily of rotund shapes. The bellies of Yuskavages’ subjects look like they will explode or deflate, like something under great pressure, like blown up balloons. They are almost too round to be pregnant bellies … but they look to be holding something … and this idea just gives the viewer still more to consider and discuss about her paintings.

Women in the art world seem to be very much reacting and commenting on the ingrained sexuality of American culture right now. Look at Hilary Harkness for one … her works repossessing male narratives with Barbie-esque buxom blondes.

What bothers me as both a woman (a “buxom” one at that) and as a great and passionate appreciator of art is that the word “pornography” is being thrown around like a bouncy ball and therefore the works of Yuskavages and Harkness are often labeled thus. Wrongly labeled in my opinion. I think what makes this work the most shocking is that it is being created by women.

Just look at this video from James Kalm. Notice the reactions from the men. I feel they are not only utterly clueless about women, but absolutely clueless about women commenting on stark sexuality. Vaginas still scare and amaze men … my point proven by Kalm’s constant attention to it in the video.

What makes Yuskavages in particular so very fearless is her blurring of techniques and imagery.  I see nods to Hans Bellmer, Margaret Keene, even and most oddly, Precious Moments knick knacks. The bulbous forms and exceedingly exuberant innocence in the faces and settings of her subjects make me wonder how her mind kept it all together while guiding her very talented brush strokes.

The women in these paintings are human. This is what the men in the above video have forgotten. Their expressions and circumstances are human and in this these paintings excel. The nudity gives this humanity texture, shape, furthering the emotion very much present here.

This is an artist that must and will be followed by me for a long time.

secrets in drafty rooms: my reactions to the Edvard Munch Exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago

I went to the exhibit with my love, Don anxious to see Munch’s Madonna and then I fell in love also with this one, The Kiss (1892). The complete sense of devouring and secrets is not only sexy and subversive to me, but also anxious and sad. Such an amalgam of emotions from this work makes it great … like many of Munch’s work actually. A man near us said of The Kiss: “I bet they’re lovers, married to other people.” The reaction to this comment — and to the painting — by his female companion seemed to be one of mild disgust, shock. The engendered reaction to Munch in general intrigues me and I felt fortunate to be at this exhibit. This moment of eavesdropping (something I love to do in art museums in particular) was significant in even my reaction  to the piece. I think this woman saw more violence and the man saw more lust in this work. Of course, I will never know this, but there was an interesting reaction in their words and their look. It was an exceedingly intriguing moment.

And the work itself creates a nervous little room in this: Is the woman in a lovely lust pulling him closer to her in The Kiss? Is she trying to push him away? Looking at this work, I think one could go either way. But for me, especially looking at all of the versions of this work, it holds passion over violence; love over malice. And of course any reader of French philosopher, Georges Bataille will the direct connection between violence and sexuality.

I believe Munch’s intention in depicting women are often spawned from the femme fatale ideal … even The Kiss could be seen as a great moment of female power, the power of seduction that is primal and needful for their male counterparts. Look at Ashes, Sin, and The Vampire. These paintings are an expression of the depth and power of the female psyche over the male.

Munch’s 1894 painting (above), The Vampire has the fascinating dichotomy of coddling and devouring. The woman looks to both be comforting and destroying the man in the same moment. The result is a brooding work that, in its light (the woman’s skin), challenges the viewer to change perceptions.

Please check out this wonderful and important exhibit of the work of Edvard Munch at The Art Institute of Chicago. I welcome greatly comments here about your thoughts about the exhibit.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index

Ooh La La … Valentine’s Day with Edvard Munch

My sweet Don is taking me to Chicago on Saturday … for dinner at the Chicago Chop House, a lovely stay at the Allerton and of course a transformative blast at the opening of the Edvard Munch exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago.

http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/exhibitions/Munch/index

I am such a lucky girl.

Pictured above is Munch’s Madonna definitely one of my favorite paintings of all time …

This exhibit will also help me to get a handle of my current critical project on the work of Egon Schiele … the palpable eroticism in Munch and Schiele exist in the same little room of my heart, just beneath of the pillow of my breast and there it beats … and there it shall stay.

My reactions to the exhibit will be posted here … I know now I wouldn’t be able to resist.

Happy Love EVERYDAY!

National Poetry Month 2009 Poster Unveiled

… from the poem that gave me a moment with T.S. Eliot, a pre-Pound Eliot — when he was still an innocent, emotional man unafraid of expressing emotion. Ahh, Prufrock …

Great poster this year. The artist is the award-winning graphic designer and illustrator Paul Sahre.