ANIMALISTIC

The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee, as installed now at the Met Breuer, has a ferociouscharisma. Though often classified as textile art because they’re made from hemp rope, they’d be better described as monumental sculptures. Scaled just larger than the human body, and hanging, standing and sitting directly in front of visitors, without vitrines, pedestals and labels, many have the fera; presence of Rodin’s figures. They’re so richly realized formally that they come alive emotionally. One almost expects them thrash about.

The installation, with mesh curtains and a flat beige carpet pulling one through the third floor gallery in a meandering path, plays brilliantly off the museum’s rough concrete walls and ceiling grid. It opens a soft, secret, shadowed space within the building, a kind of grotto, for these fleshy figures. Some depict characters from Hindu mythology, some depict people, and some depict plants. All have a fundamental axial symmetry that recalls bodies and trees, and curved surfaces that recall organs and leaves.

Weekend visitors were chatty, discussing, with various degrees of success, the iconography (”Look, it’s the peacock god!”), the work (”It’s meant to be seen in the round, not like this.”), and the artist (”She died in 2015”). It’s all rather priceless, since many didn’t know Mukherjee’s work until reading Holland Cotter’s rapturous review in the Times, or hearing about the show through word-of-mouth. At least this crowd took the work seriously. For many this show will be understood as womens art, Asian art, textile art, folk art, and craft, or, cynically, as a political corrective to museum shows celebrating the work of well-known white men. This is, simply, figural sculpture. It can compete with the marble figures on display in the classical wing at The Met, and, in terms of sheer physical charisma, it can win.

Mrinalini Mukherjee, Yakshi, 1984, hemp fibre, 225×105×72 cm. Photograph Courtesy of Jhaveri Contmeporary.

September 08, 2019 by Nalina Moses

UGLY

So much contemporary art, particularly installation, has a purposefully unattractive aesthetic: rough, unbalanced, distended, and downright ugly. The works of contemporary American sculptor Ed Kienholz certainly do. These diorama-like set pieces are assembled from found objects (old furniture, carpets, appliances, and automobiles) and life-size cast figures, and tell stories of domestic violence, tawdry sex, and male aggression. When seen in photographs they can appear exploitative, engineered for titillation. Women often appear naked and dismembered, and men often appear masked and armed.

Kienholz’ best known work, Five Car Stud, first shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, has been reinstalled at his current retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. One approaches it dramatically, after passing through a string of brightly-lit galleries, through a floor-length black curtain, into a room piled with dirt, so dark that one can only step forward guided by the guard’s flashlight.

The sculpture depicts five rural, working class, masked white men castrating a black man, lit only by the headlights of their trucks, which are parked in a circle around them. It might be the most viscerally affecting artwork I’ve ever seen, a deep, direct critique of American life. The other gallery-goers, older, well-to-do, Milanese couples, didn’t seem to find anything amiss. They stepped gingerly to the center – careful not to get sand in their drivings shoes – and inspected details of the grotesque, cartoonish figures closely, laughing. One woman, in an ankle-length mink coat, posed for a photo standing right above the black man’s head.

Though this piece was made over forty years ago, it might have been been made in the summer of 2016. The five rednecks with their trucks could have rendered just as powerfully as five uniformed city cops in patrol cars. The racial and sexual violence lying just below the niceties of American life remain relevant, as does the disregard for black life. The ugliness in Kienholz’ sculptural expression – the bloated figures, the melting-wax faces, the horror movie lighting – equals the subject matter. It captures the terror correctly.

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72. Photo: courtesy of Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio.

December 11, 2016 by Nalina Moses

HOUSEBOUND

There’s no photography allowed at Kai Althoff’s show at MoMA, which might be for the best. This sprawling multi-media installation, that fills a large gallery on the sixth floor, is something of a mess. It obscures the artist’s signature works – lyrical, exotically-colored watercolors and acrylics. Instead of highlighting these small panels, it drops them within a distracting, disorderly stage-set.

The exhibition resembles a family home that’s been imploded, with the contents of its closets and attics spilling out. There are low white painted partitions, scuffed wood floor boards, and scrims hanging from the ceiling, that all outline a ghostly house with a peaked roof. Within it, household objects (appliances, cutlery, magazines, furniture, dolls, suitcases, clothes) are piled on platforms, packed inside vitrines, pooled on the floor, and pinned on the walls. Because these things are old and worn the place seems highly personal. It’s as if the artist is trying to capture a life – his own – by collecting all the things that passed through it. Althoff is my contemporary, and some of the objects brought back all-but-forgotten sense-memories from the mid-seventies: hand-thrown pottery in speckled glazes, dolls with stiff faces and thick synthetic hair, poorly composed black and white family photographs.

But Althoff’s paintings pack a much mightier punch. These small canvases, no larger than album covers, have a pungent, unpretty realism. They depict characters that seem to be based on real people, observed from up close, capturing particularities in face and figure that only a loved one would note. The scenes are rendered in secondary colors, in opaque fields and patterns, in claustrophobic, aspatial vignettes. Althoff’s brushwork is delicate, his palette feverish, his tone straightforward, and his effects quite moving. But here, at MoMA, rather than showing us his work, Althoff shows us his life. The world captured in his paintings – of the people around him – would have given much more.

Untitled, 2007, Cloth, acrylic, lacquer and dispersion on cloth, 38 7/8 x 50 x 2 inches (98.7 x 127 x 5.1 cm). Image courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Kai Althoff.

November 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THESE CHAIRS CAN TALK

Doris Salcedo’s retrospective at the Perez Art Museum shows her sculpture to great advantage. The large, bare, squarish concrete galleries it fills flow seamlessly into one another. Her sculptures, assemblages of found objects (furniture, clothing, hardware), are set out within them loosely and purposefully, pulling a visitor this way and that, in a state of semi-distraction, as she moves through.

Salcedo’s most powerful works, made from 1989 to 2008, take, slice, turn, reassemble, and seal shut with concrete traditional wood tables, chairs, bureaus, bed frames, and almirahs. This is the kind of furniture that filled our grandparents homes, and that can be found in thrift stores today. By recombining them and filling their voids with concrete the artist renders them useless, helpless, mute. The pieces are immaculately crafted; the wood frames are precisely cut and fastened, the concrete is poured to a soft sheen. Their careful syntactical play (a chair turned to face a wall, a table stacked upside-down within the frame of a dresser) engenders a sense of unease and confusion. Ominous questions arise: Whose bureau is this, and where is she now? Things are deeply and quietly out of order.

These are gorgeous sculptures. They recall Eva Hesse’s ability to infuse common materials with talismanic power, and Rachel Whiteread’s quiet disruption of conventional architectural scale and language. But what’s most remarkable is the power of each piece to speak – clearly and seriously – about silence, history, political oppression and personal dignity, themes Salcedo has spoken about throughout her career. With works like this, she doesn’t need to say a word.

Installation View, Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016. Furniture by Doris Salcedo, 1989. Photo by World Red Eye, courtesy of Perez Art Museum and Doris Salcedo.

June 26, 2016 by Nalina Moses