A POETIC FEAR FACTOR
In a city where thousands of people are still displaced from water-damaged homes that have mutated from sanctuaries into scary places, “Terra Infirma” feels timely.
During a precipitous period of impasse over borders, migrations and politics, the art in Mona Hatoum’s big survey show also seems urgently relevant. All serendipity. The Menil Collection began planning the much-anticipated exhibition five years ago, and some of the works are decades old.
Curator Michelle White selected about 30 seminal sculptures and installations, as well as many smaller works and some meticulous recent drawings, to introduce new audiences to Hatoum, a global force from Lebanon who has not had a major U.S. exhibition in 20 years.
Testament to the artist’s significance, the show has been given a lot of real estate, spilling from the museum’s two large west galleries, down both ends of its long hallway, also infiltrating the Surrealist and African galleries with “interventions.” The Menil hasn’t devoted this much space to one artist since its Richard Serra drawing retrospective in 2012.
Hatoum, who is in her mid-60s, walked the galleries last week with a gentle demeanor that belied the provocative, ominous mood of her works. She thrives on this kind of paradox.
In the vein of the Surrealists, Conceptualists and Minimalists who long have inspired her, she has an uncanny knack for both scaring the bejeebers out of viewers and making them grin at the same time.
Take, for example, the famous “La grande broyeuse (Mouli-Julienne x 17),” based on an old-fashioned rotary food mill from her mother’s kitchen that Hatoum used to make potato chips when she was a child. Super-sized to 17 times the original dimensions, the sculpture resembles a giant scorpion. And the scale matters: It’s designed so that an adult could coil up in a fetal position inside the bowl before being sliced to pieces.
Hatoum also imbues more harmless domestic objects with dread: She fashions a bottomless crib from glass laboratory tubing. She presents sparkling, colorful crystal ornaments shaped like hand grenades.
Often her ideas are so preposterous they are playful: Is that a bed, a torture rack or just an oversize cheese grater?
They can also be deeply poetic. The 400 barbed-wire strands of “Impenetrable” — a response to Jesús Rafael Soto’s luminous and delightful rubber “Penetrables” (the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston owns a yellow one) — appear to dangle weightlessly from the ceiling, barely visible from a distance, hung in a meticulous grid whose openings seem to move as viewers walk around it. The barbed wire itself is loaded with contradictions, designed both to keep people out, and in.
Whether working alone in her studio or with fabricators, Hatoum is a master handler of materials. Everything she touches takes on metaphoric qualities: Sand. Knife-edged steel. Human-hair filaments. Hand-blown crystal. Paper. Black marbles. White porcelain. Even intangible things like stillness and movement, light and shadows and sound.
One might recoil at the idea of a wheelchair with knives for handles, but nothing has quite the “ick” factor as pieces Hatoum makes with human hair. It dangles from a bed frame and swoops across a pillow as a drawing material.
The sexually provocative bistro chair “Jardin Public” has a triangle of kinky red hair right where a woman’s, well, you know, would be if she sat there naked, before a bikini waxing. (And yes, one might pronounce the title with a long “u” — the language slippages are intentional.) This early-1990s piece sits against a wall in the Surrealist galleries, paired for the first time with the René Magritte painting that inspired it, “Le Viol (The Rape).”
White loves the complicated feelings the sculpture stirs about beauty, the female body and feminist art history. “The hair becomes very present and offensive and complicated in what it stands for,” she said.
White thinks the Magritte painting — in which a woman’s face is made of her body parts — has less shock value, although Magritte was asking some of the same questions: “Why is hair so beautiful when it’s on your head, but when you detach it from your body it becomes completely grotesque or disgusting?”
Hatoum can also make hair beautiful, though: She weaves and knots it like fine thread in works such as “Hair Mesh,” which hangs like a wispy textile.
With the seductively shiny “Turbulence (black),” a circular rug of black marbles, she conceives an infinite-looking hole into the earth that could literally slip up those who venture too near.
Specially constructed rooms entice visitors into other kinds of unstable environments. The rotating tin lamp “Misbah,” punched with images of soldiers and explosions instead of ornate arabesque patterns, immerses viewers in a disorienting space of light and shadows.
“Homebound” — a pièce de résistance in a show full of them — fills a large room with electrified metal furnishings, all connected with crocodile clips to lights that fade in and out, bound together by ribbons of copper wire. It looks — and sounds — live, with the disturbed crackling of the electricity amplified through hidden speakers.
That’s the most chaotic moment of a show that is otherwise minimal. The huge pieces need breathing room. Viewers need it, too, along with the orderly relief of Hatoum’s grid-based works. (Although the grids rendered in steel, suggesting containment, have an entirely different effect.)
No work in “Terra Infirma” better reflects Hatoum’s own path and psyche, however, than “+ and -”. A circular sandbox with a metal blade that rotates on a central axis, it’s like a Japanese raked garden on autopilot. The blade has teeth on one end and a smooth edge on the other, so its continuous movement creates concentric ridges and erases them.
Hatoum conceived the piece as a small kinetic prototype, “Self-Erasing Drawing,” in 1979, when she was still an undergraduate. She made a larger but temporary version for a festival in Japan in 1994, then 10 years later worked with a German craftsman to perfect the current version, which holds 2,400 pounds of sand.
It represents a cycle of opposites that need each other to exist, she said: positive and negative; making and unmaking, war and peace. The effect is tranquil. Calming. Balanced.
Hatoum, born in Beirut to Palestinian parents in 1952, has examined her own sense of uprootedness at least since college, when she left home for London and was forced into exile by Lebanon’s civil war.
During her first decade as a professional artist, she focused on performance and video work, partly because it felt revolutionary and it gave her — like other talented young women — a back door into the male-dominated art world.
“The work was almost like a protest,” she said. “Sometimes it took the form of a vigil. It seemed to work for the ideas I had at the time.”
Performance also was cheaper to make than sculpture but not as satisfying. Fifty or a hundred people might see a show that was over in a half-hour. Hatoum yearned to experiment with materials and create work that involved viewers at a more primal level.
The topsy-turvy ideas of Magritte and Marcel Duchamp suited her perfectly, and she found her stride applying them to her own feminist notions, from the unique perspective of a displaced Middle Eastern woman. These days, she’s nomadic because her career demands it.
A major European survey organized by Paris’ Centre Pompidou kept her busy for about two years as it traveled to the Tate Modern in London and Helsinki’s Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Just as all that ended, Hatoum spent two months as an artist in residence with Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts.
What she needed most last spring in Houston was quiet time, she said.
Living in the Menil bungalow known as the “Wee House” and expecting the Menil Drawing Institute to debut this month (that opening has been moved to early 2018), Hatoum produced a series of small drawings during her time there.
Some incorporate frottage —rubbings — from the tiles of the bungalow’s bathroom floor. The pattern also related to a piece she was making for Hiroshima, after winning the Hiroshima Prize for her contributions to global peace.
She also created a series of drawings with fine, mesh patterns burned into waxy parchment paper with a hot metal rod. “I thought I would get a brown line but got these very sensitive, beautiful, fuzzy white lines that reflect every movement of the hand,” she explained.
She revels in such tedious work because it’s meditative, she said. “I always need to have that kind of activity, making things myself, by hand, going on parallel to my other activities.”