[Scroll down for Part One of Just 'Fro Stories, by Catherine King, about the SMoCA HairStories exhibition.]
by Jerome du Bois
Yesterday was a beautiful day, in Iraq and in Phoenix.
In Iraq, no explanations necessary, just congratulations.
In Phoenix, besides the glorious weather, American Beauty: Painting and Sculpture from The Detroit Institute of Arts 1770-1920, at the Phoenix Art Museum.
I know: this is the old stuff. Look at those dates! Oil and varnish! People wearing funny clothes! Frames so ornate they groan! But the lesson here is that most of it blows away most of the contemporary art several rooms away, in the traveling UBS collection. I strongly urge you to go look at them both. Not only is there a lot of major art to be seen, it's a great lesson in value and quality and talent, especially if you haven't seen any Damien Hirsts, Francesco Clementes, Gerhard Richters, Ed Ruschas or Julian Schnabels, for example, up close. [Speaking of close, the Chuck Close pastel, Mark, is an exception. So is the big Boetti ballpoint piece. And the haunted Keifer.]
John Singleton Copley versus David Salle? Versus Eric Fischl? Please. Go back to Cali, boys. Try to duplicate, or come close to, the red uniform of Colonel John Montresor, painted around 1771. Or the mesmerizing swirling in the silver hat held by Mrs. Clark Gayton. The Duchess-of-Alba attitude of William Merritt Chase's Portrait of a Lady in Black would bring Fischl, supposedly known for psychological tension, whimpering to his knees. (Same with the pallid tableaux of the neo-post-Freudian Gregory Crewdson.)
Compare Damien Hirst's dot painting (does the title, or date, matter? No? That oughta tell ya somethin'), or Richter's smearo abstraction (ditto), to John Haberle's 1890 life-size canvas, Grandma's Hearthstone. (I know, that title! -- but wait.) With the Hirst you get the familiar ocular ghosting that always happens with evenly-spaced dots, until you're . . . evenly spaced. Then you're done.
With the Richter, you can imagine his ironic, distanced infantilism as he subsumes his undeniable talent and "slides by on grease," as Robert Lowell said in another context.
But the Haberle, a life-sized trompe l'oeil of a big fireplace hearth, is filled with the meticulous details of everyday life, including some of the things that both Richter and Hirst have included in their work. Is it sentimental? Of course not. Richter and Hirst have slid by on grease their whole careers. I know next to nothing of Haberle's life, except that he was an excellent currency counterfeiter, so maybe he was an operator, too; but the painting is about complicated life, with some of its essential clutter, and with fire at its heart. The cane in the corner even looks weary of the weight of its owner.
(If that seems unfair comparison -- abstraction versus representation -- then compare those two with just the side of the barn in William Sydney Mount's modest-sized The Banjo Player.)
There was not much evidence of life's substance in the UBS collection. Giant photographs -- the Struths and Gurskys -- seem trapped by their size: that's all they're about. Tracey Emin's neon Trust Me? I think not. Susan Rothenberg's huge jittery neurotics? No. Bruce Nauman's deadass deadpan words, Read/Reap? Real Deep. Lorna Simpson's submental-puzzle photo-text piece? The longer you look at it, the dumber you feel -- about wasting your time.
You get the picture.
Posted by Jerome at December 14, 2003 05:15 AM | TrackBack