Day 347 - Contemporary art

 June 12, 2023

I spent an exhausting couple of hours in gallery 915, a huge space housing 23 contemporary oil paintings, many of them humongous,  along with five sculptures on pedestals. Many of the works are by artists of color or gay artists and have political overtones; a few are purely abstract, composed of squares and rectangles of various colors and sizes. 

Most have descriptions attached, and I read these in order to better understand what's going on in these works. What a vain hope, in many cases! The texts too often read like parodies of art crit, overlaid with PC language. Who knew that the shacks thrown up by poor people are examples of "improvisational architecture"?  I look at a painting that appears to be a pure abstraction to me, with sharply defined straight lines and curves, and read that the artist, a lesbian activist, has "reclaimed these shapes for radical, feminist ends." Oh yeah? Just how? Yet another description of a large painting entitled "The Abolitionists in the Park" notes that the painter "imagines the event as a mural,  creating links with artists like Luca Signorelli and Diego Rivera" and "claims this genre for people of color and gay and transgender individuals." Not that I can identify figures in the painting who look identifiably gay and trans - and the whole write-up strikes me as incredibly pretentious. I could go on with other examples, but I think I've made my point. The Met needs to hire an editor with a low tolerance for BS to review this stuff.

Two works especially grab my attention.  From across the room, I keep noticing a large square oil painting (perhaps 5 1/2 feet on a side) depicting a bright orange curvilinear shape against a red ground. The shape suggests to me a heart, albeit with an elongated "tail."  But the white slit in the middle also conjures up for me labia set in a vulva. (I realize that I had this association to forms in a Kandinsky painting as well, leading me to wonder whether this is the artist's intention or my obsession!) The painting, executed in 1973-1974,  is entitled  "Bribes de corps #296 (Body Parts)," so I've got the body image right, although the painting's description talks about "curved thighs and buttocks and swelling breasts and stomachs."  It goes on to say that the painting "places a woman's body at the center of a larger discourse around abstraction" - presumably because so many abstract painters were men. (I think one problem with these descriptions is that they use shorthand that may be intelligible to cognoscenti but not to people like me.)  The painting strikes me as clearly erotic, tracing  the connection between emotion and sensuousness, love and lust.  I'm a bit surprised to learn that the painter was a Lebanese woman, Huguette Caland, since I imagine that she grew up in a fairly conservative culture  (With a name like Huguette, I suspect she was Maronite rather than Muslim, but still....). I looked up her obituary in the Times, and indeed, she led an unconventional life, having left her husband and teenage children in Beirut to paint in Paris.  

The second work I can't stop looking at is a 1965 sculpture by American artist Jack Whitten.   Five or six feet long and made of wood, metal, and paint, it appears to show a carved hand holding a curved blade; the hand  emerges out of a two-part "sleeve," the lower part a smooth cylinder, the upper part rough, with nails and other small metallic objects sticking out of it.  The sculpture conveys masculinity and strength. I am not surprised to learn that, according to the description, the work  references Kongo power figures, nor that the sculpture is entitled "Homage to Malcolm."