What happens when high-tech collides with high culture? In the retrospective exhibit “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” at the Guggenheim, what happens is an explosion of light and electrons, lasers and sound, transforming the usual museum experience of hushed reverence into something more akin to the disco distractions of “Saturday Night Fever.” The man responsible for juicing up the venerable institution on Fifth Avenue is a 68-year-old Korean-born New Yorker, Nam June Paik, pioneer of video and electronic art, avant-garde collaborationist, mad musician, television wizard.
Many regard Paik as the creator of the video art genre. He earned this distinction when he acquired, in 1965, one of the first portable video cameras to be made available to the public (by Sony), recording his first video, “Button Happening,” the same day and displaying it at the Cafi au Go Go that evening. Organized by John Hanhardt, senior curator of film and media arts (who also curated Paik’s 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum), with Jon Ippolito, assistant curator, “The Worlds of Nam June Paik” follows the vector of Paik’s experiments in performance art, television projects and sculptural video installations to his multichannel video environments and “post-video” laser projects.
Occupying the enormous column of space in the Guggenheim’s rotunda is the exhibition’s centerpiece, “Modulations in Sync,” a four-part installation newly commissioned by the museum and completed by Paik and Norman Ballard, an expert in laser technology. One part, called “Sweet and Sublime,” hovers miraculously at the top of the rotunda, where parti-colored lasers spiral on a scrim set in the dome’s oculus. “Jacob’s Ladder,” a seven-story waterfall with green lasers zigzagging through it at oblique angles, spills down from one side of the dome. Then, on the rotunda floor, 100 video monitors, with screens facing up, flash seemingly random images: Lou Reed singing, Merce Cunningham dancing, a computer-generated face, a marathon runner, birds flying across a computer-generated moon. These images are simultaneously projected onto six large screens set vertically into the spaces between the spiral ramp across from the laser waterfall. With the 100 video monitors, Paik has created an astonishing high-tech update of trompe l’oeil: What seems to be an inchoate jumble of rapid-fire images on the ground floor resolves, when viewed from high at the top of the museum’s ramp spiral, into a beautifully patterned TV painting.
The museum’s central areas — the rotunda and ramp galleries — are lighted only by the glow of cathode-ray tubes and beams from laser projections. Music from “Modulations in Sync” pounds through every aural crevice. This is art as dance-hall spectacle, a phenomenon whose roots reach back to the happenings and acid tests of the 1960s. And like a disco, the experience at first feels off-putting, a frontal assault on the primary sense. But when you consider that Paik helped originate some of the first happenings of the early ’60s, the disco curatorial style reveals a certain ingenuity.
Paik began his career in Germany in the late 1950s, studying modern classical music. While there, he hooked up with enormously influential neodadaist composer John Cage, as well as with the burgeoning anti-art movement orbiting around George Maciunas’ Fluxus group, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. For happenings and performances like the Festum Fluxorum, Paik created pieces such as “One for Violin Solo” (1962), in which the performer raises a violin above his head and smashes it.
Excited by Cage’s “prepared piano,” Paik built “Klavier Integral” (1958-63) for his first one-man exhibition, “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television,” which contained a number of prepared instruments. The “Klavier Integral” was a piano “decorated with barbed wire, dolls, photographs, toys, a bra, smashed eggs, and the various odds and ends that Paik incorporated into his performance.” During the opening of “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television,” Beuys, in an impromptu action, entered and destroyed one of the pianos with an ax.
In 1964, Paik moved to New York, continuing his work with performance artists while becoming increasingly interested in finding ways “to humanize the technology and the electronic medium” — that is, he started to make art with TVs and video. Also in New York, Paik formed his most important collaborative relationship, with avant-garde cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman, whom he worked with until her death in 1994. For Moorman, Paik constructed infamous pieces such as “TV Bra for Living Sculpture” (1969), two Plexiglas-encased televisions taped to Moorman’s breasts while she played the cello, and “TV Cello” (1971), an instrument made of three televisions of varying sizes encased in Plexiglas. Moorman, interviewed in Paik’s video “Global Groove” (1973), called “TV Cello” the “first advance in the cello since 1600.” Trying to address the question “Why is sex a predominant theme in art and literature, prohibited ONLY in music?” Paik staged “Opera Sextronique” (1967), for which Moorman performed a striptease while playing the cello. She was then arrested for public indecency.
The Guggenheim’s Tower Gallery has been reserved for documenting these early works and collaborative performances and for viewing Paik’s videos. There visitors can play with early interactive pieces, which do things like convert a person’s voice into abstract television images or create music by allowing one to rub the head of a tape player over strips of audiotape stuck on a wall. The High Gallery, just off the ground floor, is taken over by “Three Elements” (1997-2000), a collaboration with Ballard. The wall text for “Three Elements” explains that it consists of lasers, mirrored chambers, motors, prisms and smoke. And, indeed, it is a smoke-and-mirrors show: Three large, shaped chambers — rectangle, circle and triangle — form a sort of mirrored canvas across which lasers shoot their abstract lines in an atmosphere of green and red candescence. If the main gallery area produces the effect of a dance-hall spectacle, these two offshoot galleries, with their interactive works and displays of technological prowess, seem organized in art-as-science-fair spirit.
Humor and a sly, ironic sensibility save Paik’s work from the doldrums of experiment for experiment’s sake. The works in the main gallery tend to fall somewhere along a spectrum whose two poles are funniness and questioning self-mockery, while addressing more stolid concerns like temporality in a genial and lighthearted manner. “Candle TV” (1975, 2000 version), a real candle burning inside a TV cabinet, points to the fact that TVs have taken on an altarlike centrality in most homes. Similarly, “Video Buddha” (1976-78), which places a Buddha sculpture in front of a monitor set in a dirt mound, so that the Buddha can watch himself on closed-circuit TV, comments wittily on our oldest and newest sacraments.
Apparently, Paik has a thing for fish. He uses them in works that aim toward the gap between representation and reality. “Real Fish/Live Fish” (1982, 2000 version) employs two vintage TV cabinets because the extremely convex screens of older TVs look more like fishbowls. Set into one cabinet is a real fish tank with live fish that sits in front of a closed-circuit TV camera; the other cabinet contains a functioning monitor on which you can view real-time images of the fish in the tank next to it. Within the closed circuit, the TVs function both as sender and receiver of the fish images. In “Video Fish” (1975, 2000 version), a horizontal bank of TV cabinets with real fish swimming inside them sits in front of monitors on which a video of random images plays, so that one looks through the fish tanks to view the video. Of course, this also allows the fish to watch TV while they swim.
In addition to the fish pieces, the show includes a number of works that make metaphoric use of TVs for humorous or inquisitive ends. “TV Clock” (1963, 2000 version) positions 24 monitors in a row at eye level, each with a single electronic line angled like a clock’s hour hand set at a different hour of the day. “Moon Is the Oldest TV: Colored Version” (2000) makes the clever argument that the moon, because it reflects light from the sun, functions like a primitive television receiver. Perhaps the largest of the show’s installations, “TV Garden” (1974, 2000 version) scatters TV monitors with Paik’s video “Global Groove” playing among an Eden of potted plants.
Paik has also spawned an entire hilarious family of single-channel video sculptures called “Family of Robot.” Each member of the family is composed of vintage TV cabinets — with video monitors set in displaying images appropriate to the age and gender of the member depicted — which form TV people with arms, legs, torsos and heads. Sadly, only the grandparents and “Hi-Tech Baby” made it to the show.
When I stopped by “The Worlds of Nam June Paik,” laughing visitors filled the ramps and galleries. Not surprisingly, children seemed particularly taken with Paik’s whimsical creations. Today, because words like “experimental” and “avant-garde” are so frequently applied to work that is sullen, whiny, angry and self-important, an artist who gives experimentalism a good name delights us all.
Early last fall Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry published a thin book called “On Beauty and Being Just.” The prospect excited me because, throughout the ’90s, critics and artists had stirred up notions of beauty like the settled ingredients of a soup. In 1992, Arthur Danto wrote one of the first essays on the topic in “Beauty and Morality.” The next year, Dave Hickey caused a minor but lasting fracas with his concept of transgressive beauty in his book “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.” To reduce their arguments to one line, you could say that all three worry that, in the last 20-odd years, artists and academics alike have ignored beauty in favor of political question.
I hoped Scarry would bring to a boiling point the quarrels somewhat tepidly inaugurated by art critics Danto and Hickey. In her book, professor Scarry mounts a defense of the idea of beauty, which, she says, has “been banished or driven underground in the humanities for the last two decades.” She tries to prove that, contrary to what the anti-aesthetes in the academy have written, promoting beauty in art is not an inherently elitist activity, nor is it harmful, as some feminist critics believe. (Scarry doesn’t buy the feminist argument that the “male gaze” objectifies women.)
In the end, though, Scarry’s book is a stale concoction. To those who attack beauty on political grounds, she replies with a similarly political defense — that beauty leads to social equality; that beauty is democratic. Reading her book, I got the sense that her admirable liberal principles wouldn’t let her deal with the truth: Beauty is elitist. Creating beautiful artworks or advancing their cause both entail recognizing excellence, establishing hierarchies, refining taste. However, the most annoying thing about “On Beauty and Being Just” is what Scarry chooses to leave out. She ducks telling us who exactly has been attacking beauty for the last two decades, she doesn’t include any quotes from the anti-beauty crowd, nor does she refer to or reproduce any contemporary art, thereby depriving the reader of examples of what she’s talking about.
Luckily, the curators of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington have organized an ambitious exhibition called “Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late 20th Century,” which addresses many of the recent arguments about beauty with an assortment of artworks by 36 artists from the last 40 years. As the double meaning of its title indicates, the show entails a two-part proposition — regarding beauty in the sense of being about beauty and in the sense of looking at art that aims for beauty. It is a show crowded with words — wall texts, quotes stenciled throughout the exhibition and long catalog essays. At times, all this curatorial verbiage gets in the way of the art itself, which ranges all over the scale of quality, media and age, from Picasso, dead for 26 years, to the American mulitmedia artist Matthew Barney, who turned 32 in 1999. The show is divided under two broad rubrics, “Beauty Objectified,” which focuses on “the figure and changing ideals of physical beauty,” and “Intangible Beauty,” which “examines the subjective realm of perception.”
For anyone expecting a break from the overdetermined messages of conceptual art, the show’s first several rooms will be a trial. The first piece, an untitled installation presenting a doorway blocked by “fragments of reproductions of Classical and Renaissance sculpture and slabs of broken marble” by Jannis Kounellis, has all the sensuality and intellectual resonance of an art-school project. The pieces nearby dish up more of the same dry conceptual, all of which appropriated or speak to notions of classical beauty: a plaster-cast Venus facing a mound of rags by the Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto; two reproductions of the “Medici Venus” facing each other in a work called “Mimesis” by Giulio Paolini.
Among the initial offerings by European art stars are pieces by the expected home-grown celebrities. Cindy Sherman’s ubiquitous “History Portraits,” in which the artist photographs herself costumed and posed in the manner of famous paintings such as Carravaggio’s “Bacchus” and da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” thankfully inject some comedy into the first series of rooms. The Bahamian superstar Janine Antoni fastens on to “issues of the body’s public presentation” in “Lick and Lather” (1993-’94), with its two rows of busts — one in chocolate, one in soap — in which the artist has licked or lathered away details from each of the faces. Some of these busts are already deteriorating, so if you don’t find them appealing, you can take comfort in the fact that they won’t be around much longer. On the other hand, what are they doing here in the first place?
When the opponents of beauty (named in the show’s catalog as, among others, theorists Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and Douglas Crimp) point to artists who oppose purely aesthetic art with issues-based work, people like Sherman and Antoni are the very ones they champion. I can only suppose that their works and many of the other conceptual pieces included in the show are there because they critique the concept of beauty. They may not strike the eye, but they’re about beauty. Still, if I’d wanted messages, I could have stayed home and watched public service announcements on TV. I hoped to find aesthetically gratifying art at the Hirshhorn, not a bunch of installations assembled by studio assistants for artists with something to “say.” Luckily, the curators saved the meat for the middle.
Oddly enough, I found some of the most compelling art in a room with the heading “Difficult Beauty,” devoted to work that assigns ugliness an essential role in beauty. Hung only with paintings, the room also boasts the best known artists in the show. Pablo Picasso’s “Reclining Woman Playing With a Cat” (1964) hangs next to Willem de Kooning’s “Woman, Sag Harbor” (1964). In both, the power of execution — the quality of line in Picasso’s drably gray woman and the evocative color in de Kooning’s woman — is emphasized over the charm of the images themselves. Alone on another wall, three recent canvases by the English painter Lucien Freud stand up surprisingly well next to the two masters. Again, these paintings, two nudes of the mammoth, bald performance artist Leigh Bowery and one of an obese nude woman entitled “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995), defy conventional subject matter with their unappealing protagonists. But with his gorgeous paint handling and novel perspectives, Freud creates arresting, dignified and beauteous images.
He orchestrates slovenly elements in a sensuous minuet of texture and color. The mottled flesh and shadows in the benefit supervisor’s sleep-slackened face virtually rhyme with the camouflage colors in the couch’s torn fabric where she rests. In the two male nudes, Freud attends to every lump and wrinkle with all the lingering care one would expect if he were painting an odalisque. His is an unidealized beauty, one that forces us to reconsider what it is in a painting that triggers aesthetic pleasure.
Freud’s affecting ugliness has an unlikely counterpart in Matthew Barney’s stills from his series of “Cremaster” films. Barney, the youngest artist in the show, evinces one of the most personal visions of beauty on view. His unsexed faeries with crimson hair from “CR 4″ (1994) and his bizarre giant standing in enormous flower petals, with its ribbon-sheathed penis and birds roosting on its arms and shoulders, reveal the delight of monstrosity in a manner not unlike Freud’s paintings. Barney composes the grotesque in exquisite color photographs that gesture at sexuality without ever affording release.
One of the few arguably conceptual artists whose ideas actually result in beautiful canvases, French artist Yves Klein, who died in 1962 at age 34, also operates in the realm of sexuality. To make “FC1 (Untitled Fire Color Painting)” (1961), Klein used naked women as paintbrushes, directing the movements of their paint-slathered bodies on the canvas, and then burning it with a blowtorch. One sees in the outcome the ghostly forms of the naked bodies floating in a haze of International Klein Blue and burnt orange pigment.
The show’s second half, “Intangible Beauty,” mixes conceptual works with paintings, photographs, sculptures and drawings that deal with landscape and abstraction. Although one-liners like California conceptualist John Baldessari’s “Pure Beauty” (1967-’68), a square canvas with nothing more than the words of the title painted across it, speak less to the topic of beauty than to the gullibility of curators over the last 30-odd years. Why such visually inert work needs to be included remains a mystery, particularly when the curators already have conceptually based work like Andy Warhol’s “Oxidation Painting” (1978), where urine is used as paint, evincing an aesthetic richness. Beautiful like a natural phenomenon, like a rust pattern, “Oxidation Painting” has such decorative qualities that it might be taken for mall art, if it weren’t for the association with Warhol.
Since the Romantic era, aesthetic philosophers have considered awe-inspiring landscapes — mountain vistas, say, or the churning ocean — and grand abstractions as instances of the sublime rather than the beautiful. For “Regarding Beauty,” the curators sought out a number of small-scale landscapes (largeness having everything to do with sublimity) and unheroic abstractions to demonstrate how the beautiful can modulate into the sublime. For instance, American painter Vija Celmins’ depictions of seascapes and stars in the night sky might ordinarily fall into the category of the sublime because they take the vastness of nature as a subject. But Celmins has wrought these drawings on relatively small sheets of paper, so the viewer attends to the delicacy of treatment rather than the overpowering force of nature they portray.
An entire room is given over to paintings by the venerable German artist Gerhard Richter. In this show they alternate between complete abstractions and eerie landscapes painted from photographs. Composed with squeegeed or rolled on layers of oil paint, Richter’s abstractions appear to embrace the local details of texture and color, rather than the grand gestures usually associated with sublime abstraction. His landscapes, with their almost photo-realist technical bravura, attend to the banality of the countryside with a sort of snapshot matter-of-factness, suggesting that the actual subject of these paintings is the photographs instead of the landscapes within the photographs.
Closer to the sublime, American minimalist Agnes Martin’s wondrously still grids provoke a sense of infinitude and majesty, qualities that some might argue put her paintings beyond the category of the beautiful. Yet, upon closer inspection, you can’t help noticing that the imperfect lines and tiny stray marks are exactly what save these paintings from grand sterility, keeping them in the fallible, human precincts of the beautiful.
With their tactile pleasures, the sculptures chosen for the exhibition fit neatly into this show’s themes. An involute red hole receding into the wall, British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s abstract “My Body Your Body II” (1993-’99) shifts its color depending on where the viewer stands. Its graceful sensuality doesn’t get bogged down in fashionable statements, but it does suggest the kind of emotional connection common to true works of beauty. That same sort of emotionalism is apparent in American sculptor and installation artist Louise Bourgeois’ metamorphosed bodies made of rubber, fabric or marble.
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s video installation, “Ever Is Over All” (1997), juxtaposes on adjacent walls floral images with a sequence featuring a woman walking down the street, smashing car windows with a flower. An insouciant rhetorical tone, not to mention the loveliness of its music and images, allows this video to explore the intimate relationship between violence and beauty without seeming preachy.
Not many exhibitions jump right into current art-world disputes. “Regarding Beauty” should be praised for its willingness to do so. About the worst that can be said of this show is that its two discrete aims often confuse the choices of art included: Some are here for how they look, some for what they mean, and the two groups do not measure up equally. One dictum could have clarified the choices: Art that is about beauty is not always beautiful, whereas beautiful art always says something about beauty.
For the last week New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has tried to convince us that he is deeply disturbed about the state of contemporary art and in particular the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s mounting of “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” His credentials as an art critic would be more solid, however, if he had actually taken the trouble to see the exhibit. What set the temperamental mayor off this time was not black Catholic artist Chris Ofili’s painting “The Holy Virgin Mary,” but rather a photo of the work in the show’s catalog. There is, of course, a world of difference between a photo of a painting and the painting itself. But Giuliani is more interested in scoring political points than in carefully considering what he has dismissed as “sick stuff.”
Thank God this farce is now in the hands of the courts. As Floyd Abrams, chief legal counsel for the museum, has argued, once the city funds an art institution, any attempt by the mayor to dictate the contents of that institution amounts to censorship. By the way, the “Sensation” catalog clearly states that “the exhibition has received no city, state or federal funding.” The museum itself “is supported in part by the City of New York” — the taxpayers, not the mayor — “for the maintenance, security and staffing of this City-owned building.”
Had Giuliani actually paid a visit to the exhibit’s Thursday night preview, he would have seen, in Ofili’s “Virgin Mary” painting, a large, exuberantly decorative black Madonna, made sparkling by the addition of map pins, on a fluorescent yellow-orange ground. Its colors, shiny pins, and Mary’s benign expression all combine to give the painting a celebratory air. True, cut-out rear views of buttocks with pussies peeping underneath surround the image of Mary — these are meant to refer to the naked little putti of traditional religious art. Are painted versions of naked cherubic boys less offensive than photographs of parts of mature nude women? Is there only one way to paint a Madonna? And come to think of it, when are we going to see Giuliani’s painting of the Virgin, since he said he could do it as well as Ofili?
Oh yes, I forgot the dung. By now we all should know that in Africa, where the dung idea came from, elephant droppings carry none of the horrible connotations that shit carries in New York. Before offending us all with his own bullshit, Giuliani might have troubled himself to learn about the sacred nature of pachyderms and their dung in other parts of the world. Once again, had Giuliani gone to see “Sensation,” he would have come across another engaging Ofili canvas called “Afrodizzia.” With its multi-hued, rhythmic swirls of paint and shiny pins, “Afrodizzia” features lots of little pictures of black men wearing afros. The painting also contains a number of elephant-dung clumps on which the names of black heroes like Miles Davis, Cassius Clay and Shaft are inscribed. Standing in front of this remarkably affecting, energetic painting, I found it hard to imagine that Ofili is really bashing blacks. According to the mayor’s dung-obsessed logic, Ofili is not only a Catholic basher, he’s a racist too.
Why all this whining and griping about the sensationalism of “Sensation”? For 500 years artists have been courting hype; it was virtually a Renaissance ideal. Michelangelo, Cellini, Vasari and Caravaggio were some of the greatest self-promoters of all time. To them you can add David, Delacroix, Courbet, Rodin and Picasso. The question is, does the Brooklyn show merit the hype?
“Sensation’s” virtue is breadth rather than depth. It brings together the work of some 42 young artists from Britain, many of whom gained attention in the early and mid-’90s. In general, you can put all decent artists into two categories: innovators and extenders. The innovators come up with something new; the extenders refine the work of the innovators. As might be expected from a broad survey, the majority of artists in “Sensation” fall into the extender category. Even some of the most famous among them — like Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracy Emin and Ron Mueck — do little more than rehash older American-born styles. Hirst’s animal-filled vitrines inevitably recall Jeff Koons’ work of the early ’80s. Mueck’s “Dead Dad,” a small silicone and acrylic sculpture of the artist’s deceased, naked father, might have shocked American viewers had we not already been treated to similar sculptures by Duane Hanson and Charles Ray.
A frequently mediocre artist, Hirst seems like a thoroughly agreeable person. About 10 years ago, he curated shows that helped put many of the artists included here on the map. Still, getting rid of a few of Hirst’s less successful pieces, such as the static and literalist “No Feelings” — merely a cabinet full of pharmaceutical bottles — would have opened more space for some of the better artists. Among the innovators, Sam Taylor-Wood is represented by only one, albeit really big, photograph (she had several pieces in the London version of the show). Almost 4 yards long, Taylor-Wood’s “Wrecked” depicts a ravishing last supper of present-day partiers, with a bare-chested woman standing in for Jesus. Interestingly, one of the most compelling and original artists in the show is an abstract painter, who’s also one of the show’s youngest contributors. Jason Martin, born in 1970, executes his oil-on-aluminum abstractions with a single “brush” stroke. The resulting monochrome paintings combine deep textures with beguiling wave-like optical effects.
For those, like Giuliani, who got hold of a catalog before “Sensation” opened on Saturday, attending the show in person will bring its share of surprises. Representations of Gary Hume’s neo-pop paintings look far better than the enormous, overly glossy originals. On the other hand, Jenny Saville’s equally large nude-scapes — landscape-like figurative paintings of fleshy females — appear in the catalog as rip-offs of Lucien Freud’s recent nudes. An injustice, really, because you have to experience first-hand Saville’s magnificent paint-handling, her muted tones and spectator-dwarfing scale to appreciate that there is more than mimicry in these canvases. Indeed, Saville gives the extenders a good name.
Rachel Whiteread’s chunky sculptures of negative space certainly require in-person viewing. “Ghost” gives form and weight to the space inside a bedroom. “Untitled (One-Hundred Spaces)” fills in the area underneath a hundred chairs with sweet-smelling (ah, the sensations) resin in a variety of colors.
I was also delighted by the wit in Sarah Lucas’ conceptual sculptures. Instead of the staid installations of ready-mades that dominate American conceptualism, Lucas turns objects into metaphors. “Au Naturel,” her portrait of a man and woman, uses only fruit, a vegetable and a bucket propped on an old mattress to evoke her couple reclining in bed. Definitely check out “Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab” too, though the explanation would be too offensive to publish here.
The best things the young Brits bring to America are wit and humor. You’ll find them in Lucas’ works, in Hirst’s wry titles, in Richard Billingham’s quietly disturbing photographs, and certainly in Chris Ofili’s excellent paintings. You will not find much lightness or humor in the mayor, who clings to his ignorance like a drowning man to a broomstick.
