FOR KEEPSAKE
Some call it hoarding but The New Museum calls it art, writes Holland Cotter
creepy spoken commentary to an old film tour of the personal art collection amassed by French surrealist Andre Breton. Beginning in 2005, Swiss photographer Mario Del Curto began to photograph the astonishing architectural structures by Canadian artist Richard Greaves on a patch of woodland in southern Quebec, each an immense assemblage of discarded matter held together by wire, and all now destroyed.
SHRINE TO MEMORIES
It’s also quite personal, as the most absorbing work in the show is. Some of it has a reliquary air. Howard Fried, a Californiabased conceptualist, exhibits the wardrobe of his mother, who died in 2002. The dark, fetid-looking assemblages of the reclusive Hannelore Baron (1926-87) were made in the security of her Riverdale, Bronx, home but are saturated with a sense of panicked fatalism instilled by the Holocaust, which she had narrowly escaped.
That event is the subject of the show’s single most piercing entry: Reproductions of pocket-size pencil drawings, probably dating from 1943, that are eyewitness depictions of the daily horrors of life inside Auschwitz, as recorded by an artist who signed the pictures MM. (The original sheets, found stuffed in a bottle, are in the collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.)
What emotions propelled that artist’s hand? Fury? Despair? A spirit-focusing, nerve-steadying desire to deliver truth to history? We can’t know. Spiritual love was the force behind the work of the Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), whose 16 paintings here are the largest number I’ve ever seen in New York, and are alone worth a visit. Her mind was on history, too. She asked that her paintings be hidden away for 20 years after her death, by which time, she hoped, a new age would have the eyes for them. It did.
But if she had not lived a middle-class life and been academically trained, would her paintings now be slotted as “outsider art” rather than classic early modern abstraction? As it is, the outsider label hovers uncertainly over the Berlin artist Vanda Vieira-Schmidt, who turns out streams of abstract drawings, sometimes hundreds a day (300,000 are stacked in a gallery here) in the belief that they prevent evil from destroying the world.
And the label falls squarely on the career of Arthur Bispo do Rosario (circa 1910-89), a Brazilian artist who, after reporting that he’d had a visit from Christ and some angels, was committed to an asylum where, using unravelled clothing and rubbish, he created tapestries, ark-like ships and a line of celestial formal wear, all on view in the museum’s lobby gallery.
TALISMANIC ART
Yet art isn’t outsider just because it looks that way. If that were true, the market would have long ago jumped on Shinro Ohtake, a highly regarded Tokyo noiserock musician, who has for decades been compiling cut-and-paste scrapbooks that suggest bulging, eruptive crosses between Rauschenberg “combines” and Warhol “time capsules.”
Yuji Agematsu, his contemporary, would be a big outsider name, too. A New York City resident since 1980, he sifts bits of organic matter from the streets — cigarette butts, chewed gum, pins — and encloses them in tiny cellophane wrappers. The results, which resemble mini-terrariums or museum vitrines, do the heroic job of preserving a culture’s base matter but are as portable and personal as talismans.
As to the view of art’s being essentially talismanic, there’s a museum-within-themuseum devoted to the idea here, in the form of an installation called Partners (the Teddy Bear Project) by German artist Ydessa Hendeles. Designed as an insanely neat, claustrophobically dense ethnological display on two levels, it holds some 3,000 framed photographs, many from early 20th century family albums, of people and teddy bears posed together, and a few vintage examples of the real
thing. NYT