by Jerome du Bois
First were the people themselves, thousands of them streaming into the new expanded entrance and milling around the new four-story galleries. It was encouraging that so many people seemed to be interested in art; less encouraging was that most of them were dressed for volleyball, or watching television, or mowing the lawn. I wager that even when they have to pay the ten bucks, they'll still wear the flip-flops. No wonder we got so many dirty looks.
Second, and more abstractly, were all the names fastened to so many diverse surfaces. Not just Somebody's Outdoor Sculpture Garden, or Somebody's Atrium, or Somebody's Wing, but Somebody's Visitors Desk. As Catherine and I settled in for Dennita Sewell's stilted fashion talk in Somebody's Lecture Hall, we noticed that each seat in our row had a little plaque with the name of somebody in Jerry Colangelo's extended family embedded in the arm. Little jerryclones all in a row. Neither Catherine nor I checked out the restrooms during our visit, so I suppose we missed out on the Brady Roberts towel dispenser and the Jim Ballinger commode. . . . Such desperate vanity, as if everyone should try to be a brand.
Third were the objects in the outdoor sculpture garden. Right outside the old front entrance --I couldn't believe my eyes at first-- was Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman from 2002, his "tribute" to the horror of 9/11. I don't know if this was the actual one which got kicked out of its original venue because it made so many people mad, or if he had the gall to edition it, but I was astounded that somebody at the museum thought it was appropriate to purchase. I thought that damned insult to human dignity had been melted down already. "She isn't tumbling," Catherine notes. "Tumbling sounds like gymnastics. Those poor people had to choose which way to die."
Next on the path was one of Joel Shapiro's ridiculous stick pieces, looking like discarded support armature from a larger, better Mark di Suvero sculpture. Then came the two big Robert Arneson bronze heads, stuck in the ground at diagonals to one another. The titles had something to do with pain, but the heads were just like all the other vanitas pieces this guy churned out as the Dale Chihully of ceramic portraiture. Behind one of the heads was a big fat ugly bronze woman, created in 1935 by Gaston Lachaise, and finally cast in 1991. His Standing Woman, done over and over, finally got real fat. Fatter than Alice Roi, fatter than Candy Crowley. Fat and lumpy and, apparently, proud of it. It reminded me of a lot of the people (both male and female) milling around the museum, actually, though mercifully they had clothes on.
Across the way, near the administration building, we could see five or six headless bronze figures, just frontal shells of people, tilted forward in a row, running --I can't say "headlong," can I?-- running one behind the other. I think they were by that Polish sculptor Magdalena --what? Yadayadaetcetera?-- but we didn't get close enough to read the label. Why would we? To be inspired? Moved?
At the end of the Garden was a big bronze egg, tall as a man. I wonder if it was a goose egg.
Fourth were all the objects and paintings in the new gallery. There was not a single dignified, inspiring image of humanity on any of the levels. We got Eric Fischl's idiot boy with the oranges; vapid Philip Pearlstein flesh tones; some fool in a dinghy rowing through blue impasto; Peter Saul's dayglo parody of a Dutch master painting; Raymond Saunder's garage-sale wall garbage; a flatfooted Vernon Fisher blackboard; somebody's mirrored platform with mirrored objects on it, like a low perfume counter. Anish Kapoor's shiny black double-scoop ovoid seemed like pure pop wow but nothing else. It was not, to use Catherine's term, enlifting. I would rather have been looking at a jet engine.
But the absolute worst piece, and the one which ruined all my hope that anyone at that museum has any respect for people, was the realistic sculpture of the naked mole rat mounting a woman's face. It was called, we think, Embrace, but "That's no embrace," Catherine said. "It's rape." Presumably all the glitterati at the pre-opening gala saw the thing, and nobody --none of those names on the walls, or Jim Ballinger, or anybody else-- had a problem with a feces-eating animal having its sexual way with a human being. I wonder what Kathryn Blake, the museum's education curator, will tell the touring schoolchildren about that piece.
Perhaps we should be thankful they didn't have any Kara Walkers, or Paul McCarthys, or anything by the Chapman brothers. But give them time, because now they've got the money, the space, and no bottom.
[Preemptive note to any anonymous or pseudonymous emailers: by not signing your real names you reveal yourselves as cowards, and your words as weightless. So don't bother.]
Posted by Jerome at November 14, 2006 03:05 PM | TrackBack