Lost in the fog of Contemporary Land

As one can tell from my blog of September 26^th on John McCraken’s “Sound”, I am not a fan of contemporary art. I intellectually get the principles behind the modernist and post-modernist movements thanks to the amazing education that I am getting, but I still have a tough time reconciling blobs of paint or a big blue rectangle leaning against the wall as art that belongs in the same building as the great renaissance masters.

Upon hearing that we would have class at the Walker Art Center and would be treated to a private tour, I pretty much wanted to claw myself in the face with a garden rake. A two hour trip to an unlicensed dentist with a New Jersey accent could not be more excruciating than being forced to ponder an entire museum full of the “art” I loathe.

Here is the record of my agony.

The first piece I’d like to talk about is from French artist Yves Klein. “Suaire de Mondo Cane” or “Mondo Cane Shroud” was painted in 1961. Supposedly a performance piece whose meaning (if it ever had one) is lost in time, it was painted by a bunch of naked women rolling around in a tube of Yves Klein blue paint, then crawling around on the canvas in time to some French hippy music. Being that Yves did not actually touch the canvas during the creation leaves me a little short of being able to call him the artist, but I suppose one could say that since he invented the color, chose the music, recruited (and probably drugged) the women, and came up with a composition that had no point other than his own arrogance- it can be called a pure representation of form. I call it a desperate attempt to see some naked women by a guy who probably did not have an outstanding record in that department.

“Kiki” by Chuck Close is another piece that I’d like to talk about. Done in 1993, this piece is painted in small cells of vibrant and diverse color grouped to form a collage of Kiki. Combining realism and abstraction, the content that I get from this piece is far more important that the brilliance of the painting itself. It’s chameleon-like ability to break apart and reform to shift hues and shimmer depending upon the angle you view it from really is a great way to parallel the abstract aspects of our lives. There are so many different personalities and moods that hide within each and every one of us that after viewing this piece I pictured they movie scenes of hurried New Yorker’s rushing down the side walk with their features melding and shifting, breaking apart, and coming beautifully together as their moods changed from minute to minute, step to step.

Halfway through the tour, we came upon a piece that completely reinforces my belief in that contemporary could possibly be the biggest con game to ever have been played on the world stage. Isamu Noguchi did a sculpture and called it “Mortality”. It looks to me like an oversize bronze mop head in a museum. One can’t even make the argument of form that one could make in the big blue rectangle, or one of those canvases painted bright red. What is the content- it’s a mop head. Our tour guide was so kind as to point out that it was not a mop head, but it was supposed Japanese calligraphy for the word mortality, and that the original was made of balsa to give it movement and add to the impression of life. I tried to picture that and still got a mop head- albeit a wooden one that blows in the wind- but still a mop head. If you don’t know Japanese, and last time I checked I don’t how would you get anything out of it. It would be like me making up a language, then building a made up word out of toothpicks, and then putting it on display for some people in Germany- ridiculous.

There was an untitled piece by Kazuo Shiraga that really captured my eye. Done with paint in the Gutai style, this piece carries both form and content. Shiraga suspended himself above untreated canvas and swung himself back and forth, pushing and sliding around waxy globs with his feet in a creative frenzy. The color choices, the choice of direction and force in his suspended movements, and the form of the piece has layers of depth and meaning. After learning the back story from our guide and realizing that the piece came about in post-WWII Japan, I could really get the content implied in the angry red and black loops and swirls. Reminiscent of the Hiroshima atomic explosion you can get the rage and despair that Shiraga transfers to his piece. An apt statement on the horrors of war, this artwork is a sign of where mankind is headed with nuclear weapons and out of control wars.

My favorite piece at the Walker is Hans Hofmann’s “Image of Cape Cod: The Pond Country, Wellfleet.” Done in 1961 it is an abstract composition of different geometric forms. As we all know by now- I don’t get abstract- or forms really. This one I got! Our guide asked what we saw when we looked at the piece. I immediately said “Chicken”, and most of my classmates looked at me like I had sprouted a third head. I backed myself up by pointing out the clear orange baby chick in the upper center of the piece along with the red barn, green grass, and blue pond. Our guide then told us the name of the painting and the theme behind it and I was right. You can usually make whatever you want out of abstract paintings, but this one was clear to me. This piece tells me that there might be something to this contemporary crap after all. Hans was very clever to break a rural scene down to what he felt were the purest elements and yet to still translate that it was a rural scene. Kind of makes me want to get out the finger paints and revisit some of the kindergarten abstraction I did.