Subtle Subversions and Luscious Loops
Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism at the Georgia Museum of Art explores the legacy of magic realism in the United States
Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism at the Georgia Museum of Art explores the legacy of magic realism in the United States
2020.we
They’ll be talking and writing about 2020 from now until the end of language.the year of the virus.the year
quarantined. The year Nature answered back. The year of George Floyd.the year of found and raised voices.the year of crossroads. Strictly as a word, however, 2020—in my estimation—won’t refer to perfect eyesight anymore. In the future, someone you know will ask you how your day is going, or how the interview went, and you’ll reply, “2020.”Your answer won’t have anything to do with eyesight, much less perfection. 2020 will mean “off, strange, strenuous, unhinged, beyond your control.”you will have survived the day, gotten through the interview, but you will have the scars to show for it. Mark my words—you heard it here first—in a few years, the O.E.D word of the year will be “2020.”
All of which is to say that the new exhibition, Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism, at the Georgia Museum of Art, suits our peculiar 2020 lives and times.
In the superb essay that accompanies the exhibition, curator Dr. Jeffrey Richmondmoll describes Extra Ordinary as an examination of “the formation and legacy of a magic realist tradition in the United States, from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s.this catalog, like the exhibition it accompanies, surveys a range of US artists who embraced realism, representation and classical artistic techniques in the face of the rising tide of abstraction at midcentury.through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity, and an uncanny assemblage of ordinary things, their works not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life.”
Magic realism, a term coined in the
1940s to describe new currents in Latin American fiction and a disparate group of artists—many of whom made their livings in illustration—who occupy a spectrum between surrealism and pure abstraction. While in pure abstraction the mark, materials and form displace representation, surrealism, and in Richmond-moll’s terms “embraces the irrational and insists that one’s psychological state is at odds with one’s surroundings.”the art of magic realism often embeds socio-political concerns: war, class, race, gender and environmental depredation, from a point of view that oscillates between observed reality and imagination, placing both in an unstable relationship that the viewer apprehends with a mixture of attraction and anxiety.“in magic realism, by contrast,” as Richmondmoll states,“the psychological and the actual are inextricably intertwined.”
What is interesting is that the period of Extra Ordinary, from the mid-1930s to the 1970s, while it is characterized by world war, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, the rise of racial tensions, and the emergence of women as a political force, it is not generally seen as a period that would give rise to magic realism.after all, democracy triumphed over fascism, the threat of mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War cold and, despite the attendant strife, people of color and women made great strides in our Great Society.
The works in Extra Ordinary make it clear that our notion of history fails to attend to the shortcomings in our so-called progress and to layers of deeper anxieties.
Self, as in the self-painted into the picture, projected into the picture—almost never, however, in terms that recall the traditional selfportrait—looms large in magic realism, though what these selves reveal only contributes to the unease of the overall work, offering neither a stable point of view, nor an islet of certitude.there’s kinship to Frida Kahlo in many, if not most, of the artists in Extra Ordinary. Richmond-moll divides the works in the exhibition into three categories, stating,“the works gathered here suggest that American realists mobilized the magical in order to
speak to everyday human existence through three modes: prophecy, performance, and parable.”the fluidity of these categories is what makes them appealing and useful; their application to the artworks says as much about the sayer as it does about the artwork itself. More than mere fortune-telling, prophecy in its truest sense must show the future, almost as if making it manifest.two paintings in the exhibition, Ivan Albright’s The Mirror— Self-portrait in Georgia, 1971 and Helen Lundeberg’s Selma, 1957 toy with time and hint at futures.albright, who had been a wound-painter in World War I— before color film—repudiated beauty in his easel paintings, depicting his subjects not as they were, but as they would be, battle scarred and broken, wearing their sins on their skins, yet vital and very much alive for all that.albright turns his aesthetic on himself, like Rembrandt in his later years, finding himself gray, lined and baggy, and as twisted as the trees in the dense forest behind him.the work is a memento mori of sorts as the artist looks back at us, and at his past, and says,“this is how you, too, will end up.” Lundeberg’s Selma seems painted from the point of view of an old woman holding a bouquet up to a portrait—of herself, perhaps, as a young woman—while at right, flowers from the same bouquet wilt on the sill of a window looking out onto a dark, abstract sea. All things pass in their time, and time, like the sea, is vast and indifferent.
Performance in magic realism, as Extra Ordinary sees it, presents alternative worlds, notions of reality that subvert or complicate what we think we see and know.this concept is especially useful in considering questions of race, gender and sexuality where performance imagines better parallel worlds or exposes the dark and bleak in the world as it is. Eldzier Cortor’s intriguing Southern Landscape, 1941, for example, depicts a young black woman resting her elbow on what looks like a basket of her possessions, all that she could carry perhaps, as the flood in the background sweeps house after house downstream. She fingers the thin chain that holds the thin crucifix around her neck.the crucifix finds its echo in the cross in the graveyard and in the cruciform telephone poles, inundated and slack-wired. In the woman’s hand, wildflowers—one of which adorns her hat—droop as if she is about to drop them. She rests against a brick wall with spikes jutting from the top. Is this a place she has turned her back on or a place she could never enter? Her youth and vitality suggest a future for her that is at odds with the flooded, dead past behind her. She is her own Ark, in no need of Noah.
Hughie Lee-smith’s Contemplating My Future, 1954 reimagines Edward Hopper’s architectural works as a postindustrial, pre-apocalyptic wasteland, suggesting that the “north” of the black after World War II might not be to a promised land, while in Black Night, Russell’s Corners, 1943 it is precision, and the absence of humans, that makes George Copeland Ault’s barns into hushed, preternatural structures, beings almost, with a right wrongness—or a wrong rightness—of their own.
Lastly, as Richmond-moll says, the parable as a tool in magic realism allows artists to create riddles and enigmas, commenting on society obliquely to compel viewers to engage with their works and come to their own conclusions, forge their own truths. Here’s a question. Does the woman in the hat at right in Henry Koerner’s Tailor’s Dummies, 1948, approve or disapprove of the children at play in the snow? She looks on but betrays not emotion. How could she? She’s a painting on a brick wall?
And what of the children, using two discarded tailor’s dummies as sleds while they burn a third over a wire basket of wood as if burning it at the stake.the gruesomeness in innocence is mirrored in the mud that shows through the snow as the dummies oscillate in our minds between what they are and what their forms suggest: headless, armless, legless human bodies.the effect is troubling, and it is meant to be troubling. How do we like to imagine we’re raising our children? How are our children raising themselves in the world we make? Partaking, in my mind, of prophecy, performance and parable, A Night Garden, 1955, by Brian Connolly, is a dream that slides into myth, an alternate reality, and a quizzical parable.we see the artist in his studio, reflected in the mirrored orb at bottom center, at work to capture the scene that marks the rest of the painting, a scene of a garden of ripe fruits and flowers and three topiaries—one of a haloed gardener turning over the earth with a spade, and, at right, a couple gazing away, out past an avenue of trees that recedes into the distance. Espaliered pear trees entwine around an arbor and a pineapple sits atop a potted plant. Where is the orb? On a windowsill inside the studio? Or on a wall outside, flanked by stones at either side. None of this is possible, one you look at it, but the stars and the moonlight bathing the scene seem, not only to make it possible, but to have brought it to life. The gardener is about to push the spade into the soft earth with his foot and the couple are about to stroll off together.we’re in a green dream of a green world, in a lush, tended garden, an Eden of sorts, even as it is brought into being by the artist in a luscious loop of creation and perception.
Escape can mean escape from. Escape can also mean escape into. Could it be that if 2020 comes to mean “off, strange, something we survived,” then 2021 might come to mean something else, something better, a dream we’d like to dream again, or maybe even a dream we’d work to make come true? From a lexical standpoint, that would be extraordinary. Still, stranger things have happened, and no doubt will again.