Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Visiting the Museum of Modern Art at Sunrise

Articles

Visiting the Museum of Modern Art at Sunrise

For those who wake up hungry for art, the Museum of Modern Art is opening its doors at 7:30am every Wednesday in October.

Elyssa Goodman20 hours ago

Meditation cushions in the Museum of Modern Art's lobby for Quiet Mornings (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) — Meditation cushions in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby for Quiet Mornings (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

At 7:15am on a Wednesday morning, it occurs to me I’ve never seen the gates open at the Museum of Modern Art before. I am here, with a very obliging friend, for Quiet Mornings, the museum’s program to open its fourth and fifth floors at 7:30am for reduced admission every Wednesday in October (a partnership with culture website Flavorpill). There is an optional meditation session from 8:30am to 9am, and then the museum closes until its regular opening time of 10:30am.

Yayoi Kusama's "Accumulation No. 1" (1962) during Quiet Mornings — Yayoi Kusama’s “Accumulation No. 1” (1962) during Quiet Mornings

The smattering of people outside the building is comprised of more city dwellers than tourists; perhaps these locals are seeking a break from their usual pre-work routine of coffee and a bagel. Inside, a wealth of cushions and folding stools are set up on the floor of the lobby for the meditation later. I remember going to MoMA a few years ago in hopes of seeing an exhibition and having to wade through floods of aimless visitors to reach it; this is not the case today. My friend and I slowly make our way through the fourth floor galleries showcasing work from the 1960s. It amuses me to enter the first room on this Quiet Morning and be greeted with the periodic shrieks of John Whitney’s 1961 video of revolving, brightly colored shapes, “Catalog,” but otherwise MoMA is very quiet. I admire sculptures like Yayoi Kusama’s “Accumulation No. 1” (1962) and Claes Oldenburg’s “Floor Cone” of the same year. Their curving shapes are comforting as the clock approaches 8am.

Julian Stanczak, "The Duel" (1963) — Julian Stanczak, “The Duel” (1963)

My friend and I come upon Julian Stanczak’s 1963 painting “The Duel,” an Op art composition in black and white with lines popping simultaneously toward and away from the eye. “I can’t take this picture this early in the morning,” my friend says, walking away. While I feel energized by this particular work, I begin to echo his sentiment as I approach Paul Thek’s “Hippopotamus Poison” (1965), a wax sculpture meant to evoke rotting meat, and a video of Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 performance piece “Meat Joy,” in which a series of mostly nude couples writhe together, slapping each other with various meats and dead fish. Yes, it is much too early for this, I think.

A view from the fourth floor of the meditation assembling below, in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art

I am reinvigorated as I enter the 1967 gallery, where Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” plays in the background. It’s not too early for Grace Slick, I think as I peruse the museum’s wall of neon-colored concert posters from the era. It’s only when I enter the adjacent gallery filled with 1960s furniture that I realize the sun has begun to shine outside. Since many of the galleries are shielded from exterior light, this Quiet Morning at times doesn’t feel like morning at all, doesn’t feel too different from visiting the museum at any other time of day — save for the unrelenting caffeine deprivation addling my brain and eyelids.

Meditation in progress in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art

At 8:30am we make our way downstairs to the cushions and stools now filled with people. The lobby is brimming with sunlight and a guided meditation, led by expert Biet Simkin, begins. She purrs instructions and the entire crowd shuts its eyes. While I, neurotic writer that I am, am not often prone to a meaningful pause in mental activity, my blood begins to buzz, vibrating in response to the sinuousness of her voice. For once, I don’t think of anything except how much I love this feeling pulsing through my veins. When the meditation ends, Biet releases us into the October morning with wishes of positive energy and self-reflection.

My friend begins chatting to me as we leave MoMA, but for a while I can’t respond, and don’t want to. I just want to feel my blood and hear the honk of taxicabs, the roll of tires across pavement, the buzz of the New York morning.

Visitors make their way downstairs to the meditation as sunlight streams through the windows of the Museum of Modern Art.

The final Quiet Mornings event takes place Wednesday, October 26 at 7:30am at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan).

How Cold War Politics Sabotaged Norman Rockwell’s Art

Museums

How Cold War Politics Sabotaged Norman Rockwell’s Art

An exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum tracking the drop and resurgence in popularity of narrative art raises much bigger questions than it set out to address.

Rob Colvin7 days ago

Left: Martha Holmes (1923–2006), “Jackson Pollock Works in His Long Island Studio” (1949), photograph for 'LIFE' magazine; right: Louie Lamone (1918–2007), reference photo for "The Connoisseur"; both on view in <em>Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World</em> (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic) — Left: Martha Holmes (1923–2006), “Jackson Pollock Works in His Long Island Studio” (1949), photograph for ‘LIFE’ magazine; right: Louie Lamone (1918–2007), reference photo for “The Connoisseur”; both on view in *Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World* at the Norman Rockwell Museum (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass. — Norman Rockwell kneels over a canvas slinging paint in every direction. Dressed in slacks and a button-up shirt, the artist famous for depicting Hometown, USA, is now trying his hand at Abstract Expressionism. He’s painting “The Connoisseur” (1961), a rebuttal to the newer American art he understood to be replacing his. “If I were young,” he admitted, “I would paint that way myself.” Willem de Kooning admired the illustrator’s dip into abstraction, once commenting: “Square inch by square inch, it’s better than a Jackson!” But it didn’t alter Rockwell’s course. “My ability evidently lies in telling stories,” he said, “and modern art doesn’t go in much for that sort of thing.”

Norman Rockwell, “The Connoisseur” (1961), Oil on canvas. Cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Private Collection. — Norman Rockwell, “The Connoisseur” (1961), oil on canvas, cover for *The Saturday Evening Post*, private collection

This statement is offered and taken at face value in Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World, the current exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum. “The Connoisseur” serves as both introduction and centerpiece for the show, which “examine[s] the forces that forged the mid-century dismissal of narrative and illustration, as well as the resurgence of realist painting during the latter half of the twentieth century.” Chief Curator Stephanie Haboush Plunkett brought together pieces by over 50 artists, nearly all male. Works by deceased artists — Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, etc. — are mostly on paper. An exception is also the best; Alice Neel’s canvas “John and Joey Priestly” (1968) hangs on its own wall at the end of the show, rightly, as a singular work.
The ambition of Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World is inversely related to its clarity. Why, for example, is Andrew Wyeth put in the “Pop and Photorealism” section? The success of his work predates these genres and Abstract Expressionism itself. Why does the show conclude with Neel’s “realist” piece, which is dated 20 years before a Robert Motherwell abstraction, “Nocturne 1” (1988), hanging in the first room? Curatorial confusion becomes the exhibition’s most compelling feature. But what did happen to Norman Rockwell’s influence as an illustrator of American life?

*Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World* installation view

The artist was correct that his abilities lie in telling stories; but he was mistaken that US modern art doesn’t “go in” for storytelling. Rockwell (1894–1978) moved to Vermont and started painting small-town American life in 1939, the year World War II broke. It was also the year Clement Greenberg (briefly mentioned in the show) published “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” an essay defining the role of “advanced” art in terms of economic class and politics. In it, he likened Rockwell and his Saturday Evening Post covers to Russian realist Ilya Repin as a maker of images easily consumed by “peasants” who haven’t the time nor capacity for “reflective” pleasures provided by Pablo Picasso, a less readable artist. In contrast to “kitsch,” Greenberg espoused a new art, with a new story, one above crass consumption and politics.
Rockwell’s narrative art of national pride and Middle American wholesomeness became likened — by intellectual progressives — to Russian realism and, by extension, the state-regulated production of propaganda. Greenberg’s new art stood in perfect contrast to images depicting loyal Soviet subjects; it was an art stripped of all imagery and social obligations. As Rockwell and his audiences saw their America in pictures such as “Freedom of Speech,” from 1943, the American avant-garde was attacking the possibility of “pictures” themselves.

Robert Motherwell, “Nocturne 1” (1988), Lithograph. Courtesy Jane Eckert Fine Art — Robert Motherwell, “Nocturne 1” (1988), lithograph, courtesy Jane Eckert Fine Art

In 1943, Mark Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb wrote in the New York Times of their intent to “insult” those attuned to “pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantle; pictures of the American scene; social pictures.” De Kooning was always more open-minded: “Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical.” Thus, personal expression free of outside conformities became a necessary condition for true art. Even dissent was vital. As Rockwell put it, “A fine arts painter has to satisfy only himself … the illustrator must satisfy his client as well as himself.” This form of freedom, to be an autonomous agent acting without restraints, was America’s new artistic character. Artwork of this sort became a protagonist in a larger story told by more powerful forces than Greenberg.

Jasper Johns, “Untitled (Flag and Vase)” (2000), Linoleum cut. Collection of Lynn Kearcher and Carl Chaiet — Jasper Johns, “Untitled (Flag and Vase)” (2000), linoleum cut, collection of Lynn Kearcher and Carl Chaiet

The CIA and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) were allies promoting Abstract Expressionism in Europe. As Eva Cockcroft argued in her Artforum article “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” (June 1974), the success of Abstract Expressionism was essential for Cold War propaganda. The aim was not only to make the US, and New York City in particular, the world’s leading cultural center (rather than Paris); it was to attract foreign intellectuals to “American” freedom, in contrast to the culture of a controlling communist bloc. Rockwell’s audience was populist and American. The audience for Abstract Expressionism, as co-opted for covert messaging, was a foreign elite tempted by communist philosophies.
Exhibition programming was the primary method of attack, exporting the art of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, et al. overseas. In 1954, for example, MoMA bought the US pavilion in Venice, determining through successive Venice Biennales what American art “is” to the world. (It was the first time in the Biennale’s history that a national pavilion was not run by a national government.) MoMA distances itself from allegations of conspiracy, but does not forcefully reject them either. Frances Stonor Saunders’s 1995 piece “Modern art was a CIA ‘weapon’” in the Independent recounts the story, focusing on the CIA and quoting former CIA operative Thomas Braden as boasting: “Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I’d love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!”

Bo Bartlett, “The Box” (2002), Oil on canvas. Collection of Andrew Nelson. — Bo Bartlett, “The Box” (2002), oil on canvas, collection of Andrew Nelson

Norman Rockwell in an Abstract World is a sampler of post-war US art, rather than an expositor. The “resurgence of realist painting” it posits is unconvincing when considering that representational art after Abstract Expressionism largely lacks explicit narrative, even in the work of Rockwell’s inheritors such as Bo Bartlett, who is self-consciously surreal. The work of illustrator Marshall Arisman, who dominates the exhibition’s last room with about 10 pieces, is “conceptual rather than narrative,” according to wall text. Finally, the decline of Rockwell’s popularity cannot be blamed solely on “his predilection for visual storytelling,” as the curator suggests. It was, instead, the content of his stories. Covers of The New Yorker have narrated life for over 90 years; but they depict the lives urban elites, the “connoisseurs” themselves. It was Rockwell’s people who got eclipsed.
The Norman Rockwell Museum’s exhibition is one to ponder. It is far more curious and provocative than it intended to be; or, as critic and “realist” painter Fairfield Porter wrote of MoMA’s exhibition New Images of Man in 1959, it “is forced, and therefore interesting.”

Robert Rauschenberg, “Soviet/American Array III” (1990), Intaglio. Collection of Universal Limited Art Editions — Robert Rauschenberg, “Soviet/American Array III” (1990), intaglio, collection of Universal Limited Art Editions. From the wall text: ” In 1989, Rauschenberg became the first American artist since World War II to be given a solo exhibition in the Soviet Union. ‘Soviet/American Array’ was a screenprint series created specifically for his Moscow installation. The following year, Russia invited him to exhibit in the Soviet pavilion at the Venice Biennial, making him the first artist to represent a country other than his own in that venue.”

Norman Rockwell, Study for Connoisseur, The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1962, Oil on canvas, Norman Rockwell Museum Collection. Wall text: “The borrowing of Jackson Pollock’s style acknowledges a world that Norman Rockwell would never enter. After completing Connoisseur, Rockwell submitted a section of one of his studies to an exhibition at the Cooperstown Art Association in New York, signing the canvas with an Italian signature. It took first prize for painting, and another section of the abstract study, signed under his middle name Percival, won honorable mention at an exhibition at the Berkshire Museum. “If I were young, I would paint that way myself,” Rockwell said of his experiment in a brief note inside The Saturday Evening Post. Upon seeing Rockwell’s Connoisseur at an exhibition at the Danenburg Gallery in New York, Willem de Kooning expressed his admiration for the work.” — Norman Rockwell, “Study for Connoisseur, The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1962,” oil on canvas, Norman Rockwell Museum Collection. From the wall text: “The borrowing of Jackson Pollock’s style acknowledges a world that Norman Rockwell would never enter. After completing ‘Connoisseur,’ Rockwell submitted a section of one of his studies to an exhibition at the Cooperstown Art Association in New York, signing the canvas with an Italian signature. It took first prize for painting, and another section of the abstract study, signed under his middle name Percival, won honorable mention at an exhibition at the Berkshire Museum.”

Alice Neel, “John and Joey Priestly” (1968), Oil on canvas, Courtesy Sheldon Museum of Art — Alice Neel, “John and Joey Priestly” (1968), oil on canvas, courtesy Sheldon Museum of Art

Rockwell and Realism in an Abstract World continues at the Norman Rockwell Museum (9 Route 183, Stockbridge, Massachusetts) through October 29.

The Posthumous Fame of the 19th Century’s Greatest Vegetable Photographer

Books

The Posthumous Fame of the 19th Century’s Greatest Vegetable Photographer

Charles Jones photographed hundreds of vegetables in the 19th century, but it was only in 1981 that his work was rediscovered by chance.

Allison Meier22 hours ago

The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones — Charles Jones, “Vegetables, Lettuce Giant Cos” (© 1998 and 2016 Sean Sexton)

Charles Jones was the greatest 19th-century photographer of vegetables no one had ever heard of, until a fateful day in 1981. While wandering London’s Bermondsey Market, collector Sean Sexton came across a trunk packed with gold-toned gelatin silver prints of cauliflower, peas, gourds, radishes, corn, celery, and cucumbers, all carefully posed against neutral backgrounds. Many were annotated with the initials “CJ.”

Cover of 'The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones' (courtesy Thames & Hudson) — Cover of ‘The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones’ (courtesy Thames & Hudson)

“Though they had been passed over and scorned by dealers and collectors earlier in the day, Sexton instantly saw an originality and quality in the works, acquiring the whole collection for a nominal sum,” writes curator Robert Flynn Johnson in an introduction to The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones, out this month from Thames & Hudson. The publication follows a 1998 monograph of Jones’s images, neatly ordering the photographs by vegetable, flower, or fruit (although the majority are of the vegetable kind).
Why and how Jones, a professional gardener, took these photographs, remains a mystery. Johnson relates the few facts that are known about his life: born in 1866 in Wolverhampton, he was the son of a butcher, became an estate gardener in the 1890s, and was called an “ingenious gardener” in a 1905 issue of The Gardener’s Chronicle. By the 1950s, he was still living a Victorian lifestyle with his wife in Lincolnshire, never getting electricity or running water. He finally died at the age of 92 on November 15, 1959. In his later years, according to one of his grandchildren, he was using glass-plate negatives as shelters for young plants in his garden.

None of these negatives survive. All that’s left of Jones’s intent is in the images, which were never exhibited in his lifetime. And they are remarkable, being ahead of their time in still life photography, and presenting a very modern view with the careful framing and studio portraits. However, they also reflect the interest in botanicals and systematic documentation of photography in the 19th and early 20th century, such as Anna Atkins’s seaweed cyanotypes, or Karl Blossfeldt’s flowers.
Restaurateur Alice Waters writes in her preface: “Of course the photographer would have had to be a gardener, or a cook — and a good one, with a keen, unjaded eye. Who else would have composed still lifes so alive they are hardly still at all?” An arrangement of sugar peas has two pods open to display their gleaming contents like pearls, the bountiful silhouettes of gourds are captured with their spiky leaves, and a close detail of a bundle of leeks emphasizes their architectural curves. Each demonstrates an intimate appreciation for the variety in even the most humble of vegetables.

Pages from 'The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones' (photo of the book for Hyperallergic) — Pages from ‘The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones’ (photo of the book for Hyperallergic)

Charles Jones, "Vegetables, Celery Standard Bearer" (© 1998 and 2016 Sean Sexton) — Charles Jones, “Vegetables, Celery Standard Bearer” (© 1998 and 2016 Sean Sexton)

The Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones by Sean Sexton and Robert Flynn Johnson is out this month from Thames & Hudson.

The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick

Articles

The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick

In the 15th century, the image of the witch flying on a broomstick first appeared, its meaning laden with sexual and spiritual depravity.

Allison Meier16 hours ago

Witches illustrated in Martin Le France's 'Le Champion des Dames' (1451) (via Wikimedia) — Witches illustrated in Martin Le Franc’s ‘Le Champion des Dames’ (1451) (via Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF)/Wikimedia)

As Halloween approaches, it offers a chance to delve into the occult, phantasmagoric, otherworldly, and haunted aspects of our world. In a series of posts, we’re exploring art history that offers a portal into a darker side of culture.
The visual of the witch on a broomstick is so ubiquitous as to be benign. Before the Wicked Witch of the West or Harry Potter took flight on the spindly cleaning tool, the image first appeared in the 15th century. Two women in marginal illustrations of the 1451 edition of French poet Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames (The Defender of Ladies), a manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), are soaring, one on a stick, the other on a broom.
According to Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700: A Documentary History, edited by University of Pennsylvania history professors Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters, Le Champion des Dames has “the first such illustration in the pictorial history of witchcraft.” Le Franc’s long poem about virtuous women is interrupted by a discussion of witchcraft, and the covered heads of the two women marks them as Waldensians. This Christian movement emerged in the 12th-century. With its tenet that any member could be a priest, even a woman, and perform sacraments and preach, the bloody ire of the Catholic Church soon followed. That these heretics would also meddle with the supernatural was not a leap, but why the broomstick?

Francisco Goya,"Linda maestra!" (1797-98), etching, aquatint, and drypoint on laid paper (via Brooklyn Museum/Wikimedia) — Francisco Goya, “Linda maestra!” (1797-98), etching, aquatint, and drypoint on laid paper (via Brooklyn Museum/Wikimedia)

Dylan Thuras at Atlas Obscura wrote that the “broom was a symbol of female domesticity, yet the broom was also phallic, so riding on one was a symbol of female sexuality, thus femininity and domesticity gone wild.” The two women in Le Champion des Dames importantly don’t appear deformed or grotesque, they are ordinary; their corruption cannot be visually perceived. And pagan rituals before the 15th century had involved phallic forms, so the shape of the broomstick between a woman’s legs had both a sexual and spiritually deviant meaning to the Church.
Yet it was racier than that. Richard Cavendish’s 1970 An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural cites a man, Guillaume Edelin, who confessed to flying on a broom in 1453 as the first known reference to the act. Just a few years later, in 1456, emerged the mention of “flying ointment.” Either given by the devil or crafted by a witch, the potion allowed a human to take flight, likely for a trip to the Witches’ Sabbath.

Albert Joseph Penot, "Départ pour le Sabbat" (1910) (via Wikimedia) — Albert Joseph Penot, “Départ pour le Sabbat” (1910) (via Wikimedia)

You might be able to guess where this is going. Megan Garber at the Atlantic cites the 15th-century writing of Jordanes de Bergamo, who stated:

The vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.

Hallucinogens of the time, such as ergot fungus, couldn’t just be eaten. They could be applied to mucous membranes, such as on genitalia, or those “other hairy places,” as Bergamo coyly put it. Matt Soniak at Mental Floss quotes Antoine Rose, who in 1477, when accused of witchcraft in France, confessed that the Devil gave her flying potions. She would “smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs and say ‘Go, in the name of the Devil, go!’”
Since many witch “confessions” were obtained under torture, and the Catholic Church and others could be wildly reactionary to any deviance, all of this is hearsay. (And think of the splinters!) But the image of the witch on the broomstick combined anxieties on women’s sexuality, drug use, and religious freedom into one enduring myth.

Benedict Cumberbatch Passionately Reads Sol LeWitt’s Famous Letter to Eva Hesse

Articles

Benedict Cumberbatch Passionately Reads Sol LeWitt’s Famous Letter to Eva Hesse

Reading the letter on stage, the Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning actor Benedict Cumberbatch practically foams at the mouth.

Carey Dunne5 days ago

Eva Hesse around 1963 (photo by Barbara Brown) — Eva Hesse around 1963 (image by Barbara Brown)

The cult of Sir Benedict Cumberbatch, some members of which identify as “Cumberbitches,” is drooling over the Sherlock actor’s very dramatic reading of a letter by artist Sol LeWitt to sculptor Eva Hesse. Written in 1965, the letter was LeWitt’s attempt to help Hesse, whom he’d befriended five years prior, banish her self-doubt.
The letter is full of good advice for anyone who’s ever felt creatively blocked. Parts of it sound like something written by Dr. Seuss as a coked-up motivational speaker; other parts recall Yoda’s Zen-inflected advice to a young Luke Skywalker: “Do. Or Not Do. There Is No Try.”:

Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just
DO

Reading the letter on stage at a London event called Letters Live, the Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning actor practically foams at the mouth. “Learn to say ‘Fuck You’ to the world once in a while,” he yells. “You have every right to.”
The minimalist LeWitt wrote the letter to Hesse while she was at a residency in Germany with her husband, whom she later divorced.

Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever — make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.
… stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant [sic] approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to
DO

The friendship and lines of artistic influence between these two famous minimalists were chronicled in Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, a recent exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art. It featured LeWitt’s original five-page handwritten missive, with the word “DO” illustrated in block letters decorated by sharp little arrows.

A page from Sol LeWitt's 1965 letter to Eva Hesse (click to enlarge) — A page from Sol LeWitt’s 1965 letter to Eva Hesse (click to enlarge) (image by Jillian Steinhauer for Hyperallergic)

The letter is well worth revisiting any time you find yourself “bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling,” etc., instead of just doing.

Mark Leckey, No Longer Art’s Wunderkind, Is Now Its Wizard

Art & Design

Mark Leckey, No Longer Art’s Wunderkind, Is Now Its Wizard

By ROBIN POGREBIN

OCT. 23, 2016

The British artist Mark Leckey inside his installation “GreenScreenRefrigerator,” in “Containers and Their Drivers,” an exhibition of his work at MoMA PS1 in Queens. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

LONDON — Arrange to visit the British artist Mark Leckey at his home on gritty Caledonian Road here and he confirms in an email: “I’ll put the kettle on.”

Climb the steps to his modest flat and you find him surrounded by crayon drawings and plastic sippy cups.

Has Mark Leckey been domesticated?

Can this guy making tea in the kitchen be the art provocateur made famous by his 1999 short film “Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore,” which traced British dance subcultures through sampled VHS footage? The quirky guy whose massive inflatable “Felix the Cat” sculpture captivated crowds at Frieze London last year?

True, his long hair, piratelike beard and single pearl-drop earring still evoke the bad-boy drifter he once was, growing up across the Mersey from Liverpool, intrigued by the Northern soul scene of the 1960s, which was made up of R&B and Motown, flare pants and dance marathons both languid and manic.

But Mr. Leckey has recently married (Lizzie Carey-Thomas, the head of programs at Serpentine Galleries); had a daughter, April (now 3½); and entered middle age (he’s 52 and that beard shows flecks of gray). All this makes him more conscious of paying the bills and no longer the wunderkind who eight years ago won the Turner Prize, for British artists under 50.

The Tate, which administers the award, said that Mr. Leckey’s exploration of sound, performance and sculpture “celebrates the imagination of the individual, and our potential to inhabit, reclaim or animate an idea, a space, or an object.” (He had already met Ms. Carey-Thomas, then the lead curator of the Turner Prize, and she recused herself.)

Now that he is, for better or worse, in the pantheon of prominent artists, Mr. Leckey has had license to — as he put it — “swagger around a bit” at the recent Frieze art fair. And the scope of that career is currently on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, in a survey that opened on Sunday.

An installation view of “UniAddDumThs” (2016). Credit Pablo Enriquez (photo); via the artist and MoMA PS1

“Art is changing — I don’t know if what I’m doing feels like it belongs to an older era, one older white man having a show,” Mr. Leckey said, standing by the sink throughout an interview. “The idea of celebrated artists is being rightly questioned. So to do a show like this, though it comes with all this excitement and energy, at the same time, it might already be — not archaic — but belong to the past.”

The show, “Mark Leckey: Containers and Their Drivers,” does deal in memory, most obviously in Mr. Leckey’s full-scale reproduction of a highway overpass that figured prominently as a hangout in his youth. The large-scale installation on the third floor, “Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD,” also refers to his former home on Windmill Street in London with videos, a model, wall paintings and an actual door from the apartment.

“It’s the projection of someone’s interior,” said Peter Eleey, associate director of exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, who organized the show with Stuart Comer, MoMA’s chief media and performance art curator. “They’re all things Mark has encountered. They’re not made up. In some cases, they’re found objects.”

But while the exhibition, which runs through March 5, examines his work since the 1990s, Mr. Leckey is not only looking backward. Recent pieces include the talking “GreenScreenRefrigerator” (2010-16), a suite of Samsung products anchored by a sleek black refrigerator that is accompanied by a performance and film which, according to the wall text, “probes the inner life of the home appliance.”

Mr. Eleey describes Mr. Leckey as sitting “on the cusp of the transition from analog to digital, which allows us to look at the effect of technology in a way that’s grounded in a deeper time.

“He’s someone who feels very corrupted by advertising and television and popular culture,” Mr. Eleey added, “who goes back to these things that have held some outsized power for him.”

Mr. Comer said that aspects of the show have a “dark humor,” while other moments “feel quite sinister, foreboding.” He described the highway overpass, for example, as “a ruin.”

Mark Leckey, background, inside the unfinished installation “Dream English Kid 1964-1999 AD.” Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

“It’s not a symbol of an optimistic future,” Mr. Comer said. “It’s more like a dead end.”

Mr. Leckey lit the overpass with motorway sodium street lamps to create a sickly, yellow glow. “When I was younger, I would take magic mushrooms,” he said. “Everything would go orange.

“I want people, when they come into the space, to feel both polluted and that they’ve moved into this altered state,” he continued, “a state that’s akin to what music does, where you get lost.”

Mr. Leckey grew up in Ellesmere Port in North West England, an industrial town of carmakers and oil refineries. “It’s what they call an overspill area,” he said. “When I left school, the North started its slow decline.”

Both his parents worked in the department store Littlewoods — his father in sales, his mother as a secretary. Mr. Leckey grew up getting into trouble, leaving school at 15.

But young Mark could draw. He favored huge battle scenes — “the epic ones, very detailed,” he said, describing them as “autistic in that kind of very repetitive, obsessive detailing.”

His mother’s second husband encouraged him to go to art school, Mr. Leckey recalled, “‘instead of heading where you’ve been heading.’”

An installation view of “Felix the Cat” (2013). Credit Pablo Enriquez (photo); via the artist and MoMA PS1

But art school emphasized critical theory, which Mr. Leckey found frustrating. “I still think it was an experiment that went badly wrong,” he said, “being asked to understand Derrida, just because you can draw. And bad art arises from it.”

He finished with a poor grade and wandered London before spending four years in the United States with no green card — in San Francisco, where he worked as a cook and did some web design; in Las Vegas, where he worked on websites for big casinos; and in New York with the art dealer Gavin Brown.

“You had this man who seemed to embody possibilities in art,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s less of an artist than a curious member of our species.”

When Emma Dexter, then director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, was planning a show about music videos, Mr. Brown suggested she speak with Mr. Leckey, whose proposal became the “Fiorucci” film, featuring images of British nightclubs from the 1970s to the ’90s.

“It took me three years to make and I really didn’t realize it was anything until the night of the opening,” Mr. Leckey recalled. “People liked it.”

The success came with expectations, raised even further by the Turner Prize; this year he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize, which went to Anicka Yi. But Mr. Leckey said that he wasn’t complaining. “After ‘Fiorucci,’ I was in the art world proper,” he said. “I have to make things and not disappoint people. It’s not a bad pressure.”

Those who have followed Mr. Leckey over the years say his work has deepened. “As he’s grown into middle age, perhaps he’s become more of a wizard than a warrior,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s trying to understand some profound things, which in another time could have been described as magic — the internet and how it is a reflection of our imagination.”

While Mr. Leckey is often referred to as a video artist, his work defies easy categorization, as the MoMA PS1 show attests. Over here is a sculptural Minotaur head; there, videos of his mock-pedagogical speeches; elsewhere, a shiny chrome snare drum.

Even Mr. Leckey declined to say how he would describe himself. “I don’t like to,” he said. “I’ve tried my best to not be known.”

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Tuesday, October 25, 2016