[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: January 18, 2008]
Traipsing the increasingly chill streets of midtown in search of aesthetic diversion, I ducked past the ghastly giant flayed woman installed - permanently? - by Damien Hirst in the courtyard of Lever House, and went to look at a temporary installation by the same artist in a space off the lobby.
Since seeing the piece or pieces, I have learned that Damien calls it "School: The Archaeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity and the Search for Knowledge". Not as good as some of his titles - "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" being his classic - it doesn't really tell you much that you couldn't guess by looking at the stuff.
I say "stuff". Twenty-eight, by my count, dead sheep, with their severed heads, are preserved in a series of transparent tanks - some lit by strip lights, some not; each with a drip feed; each accompanied by half a glass of water and a small mound of soil or some brown powder (not, I think, dessicated elephant dung).
New York magazine said "several sheep". Don't believe them; twenty-eight there are, at least, and they're sickly pallid too. This ovine mortuary is surrounded by medicine cabinets stocked with Damien's standard pills and lotions. I seem to recall a show some years ago where he'd subsituted the names of British dishes for the names of the drugs - fish 'n' chips, pie with mushy peas, and so on. Such whimsical détournement is not essayed here - just the drugs.
Two statements in a different style frame the installation: the one I can remember featured a rather hackneyed image of a bird (stuffed presumably) in a cage, wings outspread, the cage set within the rib-cage of a big, split hanging cow. There's an umbrella too, which made me think of Francis Bacon.
If this show works aesthetically at all, I think it does so as an environment. It's like walking onto a very strange movie set; the availability of the "normal" outside street through the surrounding windows makes it weirder. The individual components struggle to retain aesthetic attention. Dead sheep look creepy, but that's not, I think, an aesthetic response.
Much more useful is a small show of Ellsworth Kelly at MOMA (one of the "Focus" series, in which a room or space in a larger gallery is given over to a concentrated show of an artist's work). For many - which probably includes me - Kelly is not the most accessible of abstractionists. One is tempted to wonder whether he is offering anything more than certain large colorful shapes.
This well-curated baker's dozen of drawings and paintings (or wall sculptures) assists understanding. It includes pages from a manual Kelly developed as early as 1951 to demonstrate his basic vocabulary of shapes and colors and their interrelations. It includes works on paper in which Kelly explores the juxtaposition of repetitive shapes and colors, both by deliberation and by chance, and it finishes with a representative wall-piece, three large, painted shapes, which seem to dance a happy and colorful jig.
It may have been the simple, bright pair of canvases Kelly painted for a priest friend which reminded me of Matisse (his vivid chasubles). Matisse - or a part of Matisse - is surely the touchstone here. Unlike the earlier generation of New York abstractionists, Kelly's project is not the expression of passion or emotion, but a celebration of perception. The pleasure and challenge of seeing the work seems to be his main subject - the "rapture" of seeing, as he is reported as saying here.
He is also reported as insisting that his work is based on things seen "in nature" rather than imagination. This is another claim I've struggled with in the past, but the painting "Brooklyn Bridge" shown here is highly suggestive. Indeed, there's a real leap of aesthetic - yes, aesthetic - glee as one recognizes the angle of observation which the painting proposes.
This put me in the mood to see more of Kelly's works again. Twenty-eight sheep, on the other hand, were enough.
MOMA has the Kelly works online here. On show through March 3.
