MEDIA SAVVY

Sculptor Rachel Feinstein’s retrospective at the Jewish Museum, Maiden, Mother, Crone, is less powerful as an examination of those female archetypes than as as study in various formal media. Feinstein uses different techniques to model the mostly life-size female figures here: painted wood, enameled aluminum, resin, mirror, nylon, foam, plaster, majolica, and plastic. Though they are shaped boldly, even sloppily, there is a balance and fineness to them. It doesn’t surprise that Feinstein first conceives them as drawings and small maquettes before building them to scale. They are more line and space than mass.

The exhibit is an elegant affair. In one light-filled gallery there are maidens, mothers, and one madonna. In another gallery, dim, with silvered wallcovering, there are crones. This dichotomy reinforces the misogyny built into the archetypes, but that seems beside the point. The depictions all feel remote, intellectualized, with no real women implicated. Only two figures – Angel (a Victoria’s Secret runway model) and Butterfly (a stripper) – flutter to life, perhaps because they are rendered in overtly sexual postures, and rather unkindly, with pads of crazily-colored flesh smeared along their slender figures. Although they are meant to be ugly they remain, in line and form, poised.

All the sculptures are undone, casually, by a series of small portraits hung on one wall in the maiden/mother gallery. The gentlewomen in them are rendered warmly, expressively, and particularly, with loose strokes of enamel on oval-shaped mirror panels, in the manner of eighteenth-century cameos. They move beyond caricature, getting at the character of the women depicted. These are not attractive women; they are rich, idle, haughty, bored, clueless and agitated. But they are real. And this undoes, casually, the archetypes in which women are everywhere elsewhere frozen here.

Photograph courtesy of The Jewish Museum.

February 12, 2020 by Nalina Moses

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

OF TWO NATIONS

I walked into the exhibit Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963 - 1983 with questions. Was black power achieved in these years? Would all the artworks featured have a strident political focus? And would this art be good?

This art is great. The exhibit features a cadre of American artists executing museum-caliber work in styles conversant with the dominant aesthetics of the time: expressionism, conceptual art, and the new figuration. Yet almost all of the artists were unknown to me, as if they had been working in a parallel hidden universe.

Photographs by Roy DeCarava have spare compositions and a shadowy graphite-like finish. They render daily scenes with gravity, distance and mystery. Painted portraits by Barkley Hendricks honor their subjects, often himself, with particularizing details but without sentimentality. These life-size renderings possess awesome graphic authority, and bring the white-walled gallery to life. Canvases by Carolyn Mims Lawrence – packed with figures and words – carry the narrative force of epics, and call one closer.

Why haven’t these artists been featured in prominent group shows or individual retrospectives, as their art world peers have? Are they best considered when isolated culturally, as they are here? Certainly many of the artworks tackle political themes, but all can also be understood formally. These artists are producing work that complements or exceeds that of their peers. So why do most of them remain undersung?

Barkley Hendricks. Blood (Donald Formey), 1975. Oil and acrylic on canvas.

August 19, 2019 by Nalina Moses

NOWHERE MEN

After seeing the Giacometti retrospective at the Guggenheim, one considers his work in a new way. His figures are sculptures and also portraits. They are not abstract symbols for the human condition but depictions of this person and that person, though those individuals may not be named. Each figure has the nuances, character, and dignity of a real human person; it carries a soul. Some of the loveliest pieces are of his wife Annette.

The show also offers lessons about scale. It’s a handsome installation, the best sculpture installation I can remember at the museum. Larger than life-size figures have been placed singly, in private niches on low pedestals, and cast dramatic shadows across the curving outer walls. Small figures are collected in standing vitrines closer to the inner railing, and are swallowed in streams of museum visitors. Medium-sized pieces are set in groups on low curved tables that permit views from both the front and the back. Surprisingly, it’s these mid-sized pieces that have the most powerful presence. Together, they make engaging compositions that call one forward.

Even those figures that share a platform or base seem entirely disconnected from one another, entirely alone. Whether walking about or standing still, they worry. To consider numbers of them at once is shattering. These impossibly elegant figures, who we see as real men and women, are doomed by their individuality, They cannot connect to the world around them, or to each other.

Photograph courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum.

September 30, 2018 by Nalina Moses