Two recent exhibits offered – beyond the delicious items on display – a demonstration of different approaches to the past.
While both created new contexts for the lost/forgotten/ignored to resonate, “Regeneration : Black Cinema 1898–1971” deployed scholarship to document, while “Cy Twombly : making past present” reveled in aestheticism for the fun of it.
The former said, “Here is the evidence. You cannot deny these realities,” while the later said, “This is what survives. Make of it what you will.”
You could make a list …
- A topic / An individual
- An essay / A retrospective
- Partisanship / Ambivalence
- Marginal / Central
- Moving / Static
- Celebratory / Elegiac
- Recovering personal stories / Editing personal stories
“Regeneration” was a delight. It emphasized Black agency and self-representation and self-creation. The heart of the exhibit was two rooms devoted to music – Black jazz artists and Black musicians in movie musicals. I thought I knew this stuff but left with a long “To see” list: “Carmen Jones” and the Sammy Davis Jr. “Porgy and Bess” and “I dood it” and much more.
One aspect that contributed to the pleasure was the installation. This is the Academy Museum’s second big special exhibit, and they have learned. They have found a better balance of objects, texts, and monitors and/or projectors.
Each room had sufficient quantity and variety of things to be intriguing. But never too much; you never felt overwhelmed. In the museum’s first installations you were often bombarded by movie clips. It was counterproductive. Here the effect was less noisy: often one main screen supplemented by discrete, smaller screens. Clips take up a lot of mental space, and here they were given room.
And I very much liked having actual works of art (by Greg Ligon, Kara Walker and others). It provided something direct and visceral in rooms full of representations.
Especially helpful was the associated installation of Isaac Julien’s “Baltimore” (2003) – a cheekily deep demonstration of seeing Black representations and deriving power from them. I’m glad we started our visit there.
The Twombly exhibition prompts its own list of contradictions:
- Chi-chi / Ugliness
- Preciousness / Irony
- Chaos / Arcadia
- Mindlessness / Erudition
- Forgetting / Remembering
- Epitaphs / Erasures
The subtitle of the Twombly exhibit was misleading. Is it possible to take seriously the notion that these scribbles and post-it memos are evidence of a significant engagement with the classical heritage? What have these to do with the study of the antique engaged in by Masaccio, Raphael, Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, Lawrence Alma-Tadema or even Picasso or De Chirico?
The exhibit made a fuss about CT’s residence in Italy and his life there. The romance of the American artist in Rome, like Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun”. Not that this doesn’t raise more questions than it answers. I suspect the whole story – if we ever get to learn it - is pure Henry James. An inverted “Portrait of a lady” overlaid with “The Aspern papers”?
Even so, the work is thrilling and exhilarating, and the exhibition unforgettable.
I’ve loved “Synopsis of a battle” since seeing it in an ad in “Artforum” in the ‘70s. Trying to make sense of the senseless. Diagrams of lines of force, not attempts to suggest that force. Traces, after-effects.
CT was not engaged in any sort of revival. He wasn’t even translating ancient motifs into a modern idiom. His classical words and allusions are all epitaphs. What’s left of Virgil? A name, for most people. And for the minority for whom Virgil is more than that, CT’s gesture provides a mournful monument.
It was the sculptures that really got me. Certainly the work of the 1990s what matters is the sculpture, not so much the paintings. Giacometti plus Oldenburg.
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