Gold and blood
Crystal Bridges’ 2020 exhibit navigates fractured American moment.
BENTONVILLE — Some people say art is like gold; it’s precious because it’s rare. Sometimes you see it glittering in a river or find nuggets loose on the ground, but more often it resides in hidden veins that are difficult to access and exhaustible. It is a store of value, a commodity dependent on its relative scarcity. And not all that glitters is gold — there are pyrite and chalcopyrite and mica when the light is right.
But art is more like blood.
It is as necessary as it is common. It is not difficult to find but can be painful to produce. It is regenerative. It courses through us all, although most of us are understandably reluctant to open our veins. Making it requires an act of courage, but it’s not precious because it’s rare. It’s precious because it is necessary.
A minor but inherent problem in Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s “State of the Art 2020,” the second in what is designed as a quinquennial (every fifth year) core sampling of the American art moment, is that the story of how the works were selected for inclusion tends to occlude the work itself.
Intrepid Crystal Bridges curators cover the country, dropping into artists’ workspaces and interviewing creators while inspecting (and inevitably judging) the work. It’s not hard to see a made-for-TV angle — artists tend to be colorful personalities in which audiences can invest (or not). The curators no doubt have strong and sometimes contrasting opinions about what belongs and what doesn’t. And can you imagine the drama in the season finale when a nation tunes in to find out who will and won’t make the cut?
This being Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, there are some who might expect just such reality-show vulgarity. But from the very beginning, Crystal Bridges has frustrated those who would like to ghettoize it as a nice, safe Southern/Midwestern depository of Rockwell and Remington and elevated kitsch.
In less than a decade, it has established itself as one of the world’s great museums while maintaining a remarkably user-friendly feel. Crystal Bridges is that rare paragon of excellence that manages not to intimidate those who would approach it.
While watching the excellent Craig and Brent Renaud documentary about the making of the first “State of the Art” exhibit (Sept. 13, 2014-Jan. 19, 2015), I was intrigued by the logistics of the year-long 100,000-mile expedition undertaken by co-curators Don Bacigalupi and Chad Alligood. I would have liked to have seen more of the curators in the film; their backstage banter might have made an interesting complement to the on-camera interviews with select artists.
Yet however intriguing the process may be — and the process of mounting an exhibit like this might be as interesting as the process of any individual artist — the process is not the thing, and shouldn’t
eclipse the thing.
So maybe we shouldn’t care so much about how the curatorial team of Lauren Haynes, Alejo Benedetti and Allison Glenn prospected for the pieces for the current show, or how they decided to integrate select pieces into the museum’s permanent collection while installing others a mile and a half away in the museum’s new Momentary space (the opening of which coincides with and therefore competes with “State of the Art”) and grouped the rest together in dedicated galleries.
What we ought to do is look at what they’ve brought us and think about what it might mean to us.
★★★
First impressions aren’t necessarily the best we can do for artists whose work has been recontextualized by curation. In acknowledgment of the interplay between history and architecture within a given piece, several of the artists selected for this exhibit contributed site-specific works.
It matters where a painting is hung, whether on the concrete-block wall of Momentary, an old Kraft cheese factory, or smuggled into Crystal Bridges’ Early American Art gallery to converse with such 18th-century wonders as Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington and Charles Bird King’s Wakechai (Crouching Eagle), Saukie Chief. No matter how intense your focus — the environment, the rhyming of lines and shapes — the way works can seem to investigate each other matters.
That’s the art of the curator and does not necessarily reveal itself with a quick walk down a hall. “State of the Art” is more than the sum of the individual pieces, but there’s a limit to our powers of description — to feel the show, you have to be there.
Still, we can talk about a few pieces that, more or less at random, catch a magpie eye out of the more than 100 works in the exhibition.
JooYoung Choi’s Time for You and Joy to Get Acquainted (2017) is a large (more than 9-foot-tall) fabric-covered sculpture that (judging from the response on my Facebook page after I posted a snapshot) is likely to be one of the most divisive works. (“That museum has too much money,” one commenter posted.)
It is a fantasy scene, and we might guess that the two main figures, one a felt astronaut — black with white spots on his (?) face and dressed in yellow flight suit with black spots and with a belt and some sort of boxy device strapped to his chest — the other a similar seemingly naked creature, black with white spots.
Somehow these two have landed on the back of a flower-bedecked brontosaurus with a vaguely anthropomorphized bunny (Rainbow Rabbit) and (perhaps) a frog (Putt-Putt) looking on, just encountering each other. The meeting (a reunion? a first date?) is indisputably a happy one, though we might perceive an undercurrent of menace.
Despite the similarity of the figures, they read as opposites. The yellow figure reads as male and alien. The black figure reads as female and vulnerable. Yellow dude is technologically advanced. The female might be nude, might be native, aboriginal. What culture describes the world as riding on the back of a dinosaur?
It’s not long before specters of racism and colonialism, of man’s fall from paradise, begin to creep in. Are those flowers near the base wilting? Maybe you don’t like the piece — maybe it looks like a scenario constructed from a child’s stuffed-animal collection. Maybe that’s the point.
On the wall behind it is another piece by Choi, a large (80-by-60-inch) acrylic painting of a fictional comic book cover called Journey to the Cosmic Womb. More of her creatures appear here amid iconographic comic book figures (a robot Jesus? a geisha holding a giant key?). A cover legend reassures us: “Have faith for you have always been loved.” At the bottom, a subtitle informs us: “Hug Mountain, Pleasure Vision, and Queen Kiok in FREEDOM FOR FLOWERS!”
You’re either charmed or put off; either response is fair. In this small sample of Choi’s work you might perceive a sophisticated gloss on the obsessive art of outsiders like Henry Darger and Howard Finster, a preoccupation with comic books and other totems of childhood-like plush toys.
But unlike Darger, Choi obviously intends this work to be seen; unlike Finster, she operates at a playful remove from her obsession. These are artifacts from her created world, what she calls the Cosmic Womb, a kind of Adventure Time space that she populates with fantasy creatures that draw on her imagination and her autobiography.
Choi was born in South Korea and adopted by an
American family from New Hampshire when she was a year old. She reunited with her birth family while she was in graduate school.
★★★
While it might be difficult for a casual gallery stroller to pick out any overarching theme to this “State of the Art 2020,” the curators say that as they traveled the country talking with artists, they began to make connections and draw associations. They decided that what they were doing was finding artists and art that might help us navigate the current fractured American moment (all of the works were completed since 2016).
They settled on a series of sub-themes: world-building (the creation of spaces real and fictional); sense of place (ideas of home, family and immigration); mapping (relationships with landscape and power); and temporality (concepts of time).
Choi’s work overlaps these themes, as do most of the pieces in the exhibit. Larry Walker’s acrylic and mixed media diptych Tweet, Tweet … Look Who’s Here … or Aliens, Wall Spirits and Other Manifestations (2017) is an overt commentary on the current political situations, immigration and our culture of provocation and outrage, but like Diego Rodriguez-Warner’s The Fountain (2019) — a mural-like painting realized with spray and latex paint as well as acrylic which is on display in the Momentary — echoes Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece Guernica.
While Walker seems to allude to Guernica through his depiction of the current president, Rodriguez-Warner directly incorporates the styles of Picasso and Henri Matisse as well as 16th-century engravings of witch-burning into his piece, which could on cursory inspection be taken as a purely decorative element.
The same subtlety extends to Colorado artist Suchitra Mattai’s massive (15-by-40foot) Exodus (2019), an assemblage of vintage saris from members of an Indian family, woven together with rope.
In Mattai’s artist statement, she explains that the piece “connects diasporic communities of South Asians across the globe, giving voice to generations of women while also probing questions of displacement resulting from European colonization. Many South Asians left India in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work as indentured laborers around the world. Focusing on this period is both a means of tracing my family’s history in Guyana and fostering discussion around contemporary issues surrounding labor and gender.”
The drape and flow of the saris evoke medieval tapestry, and its situation in the relative emptiness of the Momentary also suggests a more utilitarian purpose, as a theatrical curtain or sound muffler — as a soft surface to receive reverberations.
There’s no shortage of arresting images. Frank A. Blazquez’s photographic portraits of New Mexico residents — like his The Gallego Twins from Belen, NM (2019) — contribute to a symphony of American faces in a hall-like gallery in the museum proper. Mari Hernandez specializes in uncanny photographic self-portraits that acknowledge their obvious debt to Cindy Sherman’s work while exploring ideas of dignity, identity and the ways we construct our stories. Her Colonizer (2017) is cheekily inserted among 200-year-old portraits of notable Americans in the permanent collection, and her Pitted Brother Against Brother (2019), a 55-by-26-inch triptych, portrays two brothers (each depicted twice) who presumably fought on opposite sides of Mexico’s Cristero War (or perhaps the Mexican Revolution).
In the Momentary, see Paul Stephen Benjamin’s multimedia video installation that combines clips of Jill Scott and Billie Holiday singing the 1939 anti-lynching ballad Strange Fruit or Joanna Keane Lopez’s site-specific installation A dance of us (un baile de nosotros) (2020).
There are other pleasures; Jena Thomas’ Beautifully Dirty (2018), a 46-by-48-inch oil painting, is one of the first pieces you might encounter strolling through the Momentary. Despite its relatively modest scale and approach, it shouldn’t be discounted.
Similarly, in the museum proper, Fayetteville artist Hannah McBroom has some stylistically interesting canvases, including Woodpile (2019), an oil painting that considers form and light as well as issues of gender identity.
Pittsburgh artist SuSu’s A Life in the Woods (2018) plays with the commercial representation of Bambi, a Disneyfied product that started life as an Austrian coming-of-age novel (the original English version of which was translated by Whittaker Chambers, the Communist spy who in 1948 testified about Soviet espionage and went on to become an iconic hero to American anti-communists) that was banned by the Nazis in 1936 because they viewed it as a political allegory commenting on the treatment of European Jews.
SuSu replicates Bambi, Warhol-style, into an extruded herd of deer moving through a photorealistic forest, creating an uneasy juxtaposition of the familiar and the menacing.
★★★ What the curators have done with “State of the Art” is admirable; it’s good to bring these voices into conversation, to find the harmonies and counterpoint they make, to pull them together near the middle of the country, away from the coasts and the bored and the blase.
So what do we make of this “State of the Art”? Let’s not make the mistake of calling this a survey. It’s a collection of a few exciting, largely agitated voices. It’s not a choir, but a dissonant sampling of the American cacophony. Which is as it should be.