“Precarious Worlds” delves into the rich German post-war art tradit

Grace Fung | Student Life

“Cloud-Specific” by artist Tomás Saraceno is on display at Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Saraceno’s work turns the gallery into an interactive space.

In the past hundred years, Germany has had a constantly-changing cultural and political nature—nationalism in the nineteenth century to the Great War, Nazism and World War II, the country’s reunification at the end of the Cold War—and as a result, this exhibition’s work often deals with flux and the melding of different styles.

Drawing comparisons to “Chance Aesthetics,” a previous Kemper exhibition, these artists attempt to balance abstraction with the substantial, mixing non-pictorial designs and concrete portrayals. The common themes of fragility and our human frailty underlie much of their work.

Upon entering the gallery, one of the first works seen is “Untitled (yet),” a painting by Franz Ackermann that acts as a keynote for the entire exhibition. The painting is a tangled mass of shapes—both concrete and abstract—with vine-like cables connecting them. One is able to discern a railway suspended in the air and what appears to be a housing unit. This, however, is the extent of the tangible nature of the work. The rest of the painting appears to be a series of abstract shapes and ropes set against a dark background. It brings to mind a tree house, lashed against a sapling with cords to stabilize it. The railroad and housing block thus serve as a sort of beacon of solidity against a backdrop of chaos. This perfectly balances the concrete and abstract nature of the exhibition and effectively acts as its thesis: That our tangible, palpable lives are counterweighted with some degree of tenuousness. They are, as the title of the exhibition states, precarious.

Next to “Untitled (yet)” hangs Corinne Wasmuht’s “Llanganuco Falls,” a depiction of Peru’s mountainous Huascarán National Park. Created by constructing a collage of photographs, projecting them onto a wood surface and painting it, the picture is complete with waterfalls, lush paths, pools and mountains. It is not purely realistic, however; in keeping with the exhibition’s theme, it blends the unrepresentable with the concrete. Much of the color is washed out, and sections of the painting seem to have been painted on top of, or at 90-degree angles to each other. It appears almost chopped and pasted together—which, in a sense, is true. The overall effect highlights the ease with which we can change or alter the world, demonstrating its impermanence and uncertainty.

Other notable works include two columns of mirrors by Isa Genzken, in which the viewer’s face is ruptured by the cracks in the glass, and Michel Majerus’ “mm6,” reminiscent of the 1950s British-American Pop Art movement, especially of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

“Precarious Worlds” is an excellent example of the trend in art to synthesize new forms out of old; the combination of realistic depiction with abstraction allows the viewer to notice the disparity—and, thus, the lack of stability—between life and the randomness that surrounds it.

Unlike “Precarious Worlds,” “Cloud-Specific” is the work of one artist, Tomás Saraceno. While “Precarious Worlds” chooses to focus on the insecurity and unpredictability of life and the world we live in, Saraceno instead concentrates on making the gallery an experimental, interactive space.

With a background in architecture, Saraceno blends science, art and architecture into something new. He draws on influences as disparate as Archigram, the avant-garde architectural movement of the 1960s known for its technology-inspired projects, and Buckminster Fuller, a former Wash. U. professor best known as the designer of the geodesic dome. In his work, Saraceno creates webs of spheres and plywood roped together with cords.

Saraceno has taken the age-old tradition of fusing science and art—exemplified by works such as Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tulp”—and brought it into the modern era. Replete with 21st century materials, such as PVC films and solar panels, these creations hang suspended in the air. Some are made with balloons, some with plywood, all are connected to each other via rope. Reminiscent of neural networks and carbon rings, Saraceno’s opera of airborne objects—though technically separate works—blend together to create a visual symphony.

The main attraction of the exhibit is “One Cloud Module,” a new take on the inflatable castle. Made out of aluminum, a PVC pillow, transparent film and solar cookers, visitors are allowed to bounce and roll around the inside of the work. This ability to interact with the work allows closer inspection, permitting the viewer to become a part of the exhibition, instead of merely an observer.

A large photograph occupies the back wall of the gallery. A variety of buildings—including the St. Louis Arch in the lower left corner—take up the lower half of the chromogenic print. It is the upper half, however, to which the viewer is drawn. This portion of the wall has been digitally altered, and appears to be filled with floating replicas of the works dangling in the gallery. Black outlines of humans are visible, walking around the inside of the creations. This creates an unnerving duality; the human figures seem to make the picture more “real” while, rationally, the whole scene is unbelievable.

In “Cloud-Specific,” Saraceno successfully melds a variety of different disciplines to create something that evades a single label. It is not merely art, science or architecture—he fuses all three and takes off in a new direction with them. The exhibition is greater than the sum of its parts.

Despite their differences, the two exhibitions successfully accompany each other. They are unified by their examination of the limits of art and life. “Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany” and “Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific” are on display at the Mildred Kemper Lane Art Museum from Sept. 9 to Jan. 9. Admission is free.

Matt Lanter | Student Life

Above, a sculpture from the exhibit “Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection” at the Kemper. The exhibit runs until Sept. 20.

The art itself, consisting of post-World War II abstract expressionism from the 1940s to the 1970s, keeps with the theme. The museum chose to draw entirely from its own permanent collection for the exhibition, a decision made more and more over the past several years because of the economic recession, and this decision has its risks. A show can be limited by the depth of the museum’s holdings and often falls short of complete. But in this case, the curator manages to maintain the exhibition’s strength across its entirety, thanks to the depth of the Kemper’s postwar collections.

Walking into the room, the first thing you see is Roberto Matta’s painting, titled “Abstraction.” Punctuated by brief colorful scenes blurring in and out of view, the canvas is awash with an amorphous blue-gray storm. Where the shapes begin to become distinct and vivid, it is reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings for Edwin Campbell, the founder of Chevrolet Motor Company. Considered the first true abstract artist, Kandinsky was a leader of the movement for years, and Matta follows ably in his footsteps. He combines formless chaos with barely-defined forms, creating a dramatic contrast and drawing the viewer’s eye across the entire work.

Just to the left of “Abstraction” hangs “Golden Brown Painting” by Arshile Gorky. This work takes a dramatically different tone than Matta’s, as Gorky has chosen to paint a specific topic: the land surrounding his Connecticut home. It is not a traditional landscape, however; it echoes Vincent Van Gogh’s work of half a century before, displaying dramatic colors not normally found in nature. Gorky takes Van Gogh’s well-known distortion of forms to an extreme, blending the topography around his house with the building itself. This creates a sinkhole in the center of the painting, into which everything seems to be collapsing.

On the far side of the room sits Ibram Lassaw’s “Eden Now,” the exhibition’s most eye-catching sculpture. Suggestive of Alberto Giacometti’s famous emaciated figures, Lassaw has created a skeletal shape redolent of the expanding spheres that children play with. Made of metal, parts of the bronze look like they have been fashioned from misshapen human torsos, and, in one horrifying instance, a metal lizard claw appears to be grasping futilely outward. While looking at the tortured shapes that are the fundamental building blocks of the work, it feels at times like they will come alive and begin screaming and struggling for freedom.

The final section of the show, in the corner just to the left of the entrance, warrants particular notice. It consists of three works: “Gran Ferro M1,” “Cuadro No. 82” and “Blanco y Grafismos.” All of the pieces blend together to create a disturbing, eerie sensation. “Gran Ferro M1,” by Alberto Burri, is perhaps the most somber piece in the entire exhibit. It consists of several rusted iron plates welded and nailed together. The work echoes the influence of war and manufacturing on society.

Immediately following this are the remaining two pieces, by Manolo Millares and Antoni Tàpies, respectively. They are by far the two most violent works in the show; gouges, savagely torn burlap and stains abound across the surfaces of the pieces. This almost unholy trio manages to end the show on a negative and primal note. It’s a fitting ending, considering that many of the artists in the exhibition lived through World War II.

Sitting in the center of the gallery, the room acts as a cathedral to the exhibition. Light streams down onto the paintings, both from the windows located at the top of the walls and the track lighting on the ceiling. “Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate” may be drawn only from the Kemper’s holdings, but it still manages to adroitly encapsulate the abstract expressionist movement in 16 works of art.

“Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection” is on display until Sept. 20 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University. Admission is both free and encouraged.

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Matt Lanter | Student Life

Matt Lanter | Student Life

Matt Lanter | Student Life

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Your performance this weekend (or what we witnessed of it, through the unfortunate auditory version of beer goggles) was truly stellar, bringing “cool” to Wash. U. in a way it hasn’t known since that night in 1997 when a few freshmen created a drinking game based on utterances from their chemistry professor. Whether we witnessed your music from a vantage point of standing in an infinitely long pizza line, grinding in what became a literal passion pit or looking up at you in the midst of a crowd-surfing experience—the thrill of which is only matched by the time we got a 98 on our price theory exam—we couldn’t help but think one thing: Why can’t you be here all the time?

In all seriousness, we’re a pretty tightly wound community, and we think you really helped us loosen up. We were unsure as to whether or not we were chill enough to hang with you, but once you invited us to light our marijuana cigarettes on the Quad, we started to see what life would be like if you always hung out here. We didn’t know if you’d like our classes, but then you started to introduce questions of gender and sexuality, asking about female arousal and really getting at the thrust of contemporary debates.

There was just one more thing you could have done for us, and impressively, you pulled through in just one weekend. We’ve always liked the Kemper, but we feel like Wash. U. lacks something substantial in the realm of visual culture. You gave us that, in the form of a few well-done, emotionally driven pieces of chalkboard art.

Courtesy of Student Life staff

Even if you don’t want to come hang out again, we beg the administration to leave your chalk work here for posterity, acting as a visual catalyst to our highest of academic pursuits and reminding us of the impermeable nature of mass culture’s place in higher education. Moreover, we encourage our administrators to take strides to ensure that only gender theory and narcotics policy classes are taught in the classrooms that have been graced with your presence.

But then again, we suppose it’s not that peculiar that the two of you are so familiar with our needs as a community and as an institution. After all, you did get into Harvard, and most of us didn’t.

Peace,

The Editorial Board

“Chance Aesthetics” and “Metabolics” are two very disparate exhibitions, yet, on some level, they accomplish the same purpose. Their opposing natures allow the two exhibits to play off each other to create an idiosyncratic duality. The viewer suspends reality for a short time in both galleries, allowing him or her to be swept up either by the uncertain connection between chance and choice or by the hypothetical urban and architectural future of humanity.

‘Chance Aesthetics’: Serendipity or intent?

Walking into “Chance Aesthetics,” one is immediately struck by the notion that some of this couldn’t possibly be called art. Found art hangs suspended from the ceiling, violently smeared paintings are affixed to the walls and several glass cases stand in the middle of the room. The entire exposition exudes coincidental haphazardness.

This is fitting, as much of the work in “Chance Aesthetics” was created by artists who believed in “anti-art,” that is, challenging, rewriting and expanding the currently accepted definition of art. One of the two exhibits that opened at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum last Friday evening, “Chance Aesthetics” attempts to capture the relationship between randomness and self-determination. Artists as varied as Ellsworth Kelly, François Morellet, André Breton, Jackson Pollock and the ever-controversial Marcel Duchamp are represented in the mid-sized gallery that houses the exhibition.

There are several pieces of note in the gallery. Possibly the most unusual (and disgusting) are the three works by Dieter Roth titled “Big Cloud,” “Kleiner Sonnenuntergang” (“Small Sunset”) and “Small Landscape.” Roth uses food to create his art. In these three particular pieces, he used a combination of sausage, mayonnaise and soft cheese. These objects were left to decompose after being placed on the paper, thus removing all control Roth had over the creation of the oeuvre. The result is something incredibly revolting yet simultaneously captivating.

Max Ernst, an artist the Nazis once labeled “degenerate,” has what is perhaps the most surreal painting in the exhibit. “L’oeil du silence” (The Eye of Silence) depicts a valley in which a structure made out of green goo rises out of the floor and up the crags of a cliff. The piece brings to mind Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” with its fantastical structure constructed with fictitious materials in the middle of a desolate valley. One could argue about where the “eye” in “L’oeil du silence” is; there seem to be several eyeballs scattered throughout the green, goo-like structures, and the most prominent one appears to be blinking.

Finally, a Japanese artist named Kazuo Shiraga captures the emotion felt throughout the exhibit. Like many of the artists featured, he railed against the idea that chance has no place in art. In doing so, he created works that are suggestive of a collaborative effort between Jackson Pollock and Vincent van Gogh. Shiraga applied the paint in heavy swathes, often appearing to spread it directly on the canvas from the tube, much like van Gogh. He did this with Pollock’s sense of “splattering,” that is, spreading it in an almost random fashion. The result, “Dragons Emerging from the Forest,” is an angry tumult of red and black, looking for all the world like the streaks of paint will rise off the canvas and attack someone.

There are many more pieces worth mentioning, but these adequately encapsulate the essence of the exhibit. “Chance Aesthetics” is like the inside of somebody’s mind. One knows that order exists, but must dig deeper in order to grasp it.

‘Metabolics’: The future of building

Across the hall from “Chance Aesthetics,” “Metabolics,” the second exhibition to open at Kemper, could not be more different. It draws from three groups of artists: the Metabolists (a society of Japanese architects and city planners who envisioned cities to be large-scale, futuristic, organic entities), Constant Nieuwenhuys (an early member of the Marxist artist collective and revolutionary organization Situationist International) and the British cooperative Archigram (a futurist industrialized architectural movement that focused on hypothetical ventures).

While “Chance Aesthetics” portrays humanity’s relationship to coincidence, Metabolics has no such tendencies. Its purpose is to display the sinuous twisting nature of technology. Rather than being clustered in the exhibition by happenstance, every work in “Metabolics” winds together. Each appears to be subordinated to the exhibit as a whole, creating one larger individual work of art. In short, “Metabolics” almost appears to be an organic living being: All the separate parts are necessary, but they do not make the exhibition by themselves. Only when they are combined does Metabolics come into existence.

The viewer enters the gallery and walks along the edge of the room. On the wall are a series of pictures that resemble the lovechild of M.C. Escher and Picasso, a mix of mathematically inspired, impossible constructions and early analytic cubism. They boggle the mind and make the onlooker do a double take.

Strolling along the edge of the museum, observers pass along the outside of a serpentine warping, white guardrail of sorts. On the rail is a series of drawings by Kisho Kurakawa, one of the founders of the movement. The studies, made with a felt-tip pen and India ink on tracing paper, depict various areas of Japan, ranging from Tokyo to the entire country, in a manner reminiscent of the human body’s circulatory or nervous system.

Moving further along the wall, one sees designs for hypothetical blimps and something appearing to be a cross between a roller coaster and a coal-processing plant. Next to these are architectural drawings for futuristic buildings, none of which were designed to ever be built.

The bulk of the exhibit continues in this vein, with several works of art that make one stop and think twice before truly capturing what is going on. Requiring particular consideration is an edited photograph by Hans Hollein, titled “Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape.” An image of a large, super carrier is superimposed over a picture of an empty field. The image was the end result of Hollein’s interest in utilizing existing machines to create architecture, rather than designing buildings and cities from scratch.

Finally, one comes to the end of the exhibit and is able to walk around the inside of the guardrail. There is a 15-minute Dutch film that the viewer watches in bucket seats as it is projected onto a clear sheet of plastic. Exiting the gallery, the observer notices a work of art that appears almost out of place. Several pages from a comic book, featuring Ben-Day dots, are on display. While the rest of the exhibit resides in the future, this 1960s-era comic is most certainly rooted in the past. A closer look, however, reveals that the buildings in the background are evocative of numerous designs of the exhibit, thus justifying its inclusion.

Walking out of the exhibit and returning to the present, one feels almost let down. After all the breathtaking designs featured in the gallery, real life seems so ordinary and monochromatic.

Brandeis University is closing its art museum in an effort to alleviate some of the stress placed on the liberal arts school by the economic crisis. There appears to be no evidence, however, that the University will follow a similar path.

“We will definitely not go the route Brandeis University is going,” said Sabine Eckmann, director and chief curator of Kemper Art Museum. “Something like that will not happen here. We would never sell art in order to help other areas.”

Eckmann said she believes that selling art and closing an art museum would be a last resort.

“All museums were hit by the economic crisis,” Eckmann said. “In general, museums are losing their status as an accredited institution if they sell art. There are a couple museums who already have had to lay off staff and cut exhibitions.”

Art Council (ArtC) President Jenny Murphy, a junior, said she believes that closing Kemper would be devastating for cultural education on campus.

“It sends a really clear message to all the students of how [the University] values what they’re doing as a commodity,” Murphy said. “I would be really disturbed if that happened here.”

Eckmann agrees that the effects of losing an art museum would be detrimental to an institution of higher education.

“I think it’s a horrible idea because this is something they will never be able to get back. It’s horrible to lose art and culture to solve a financial crisis,” Eckmann said. “If we get rid of art and culture in order to make some financial advances, it [would not] reflect well on us.”

Those in the artistic community here believe that Kemper is vital to the education of many on campus. All art students, for instance, are required to take 15 credits of art history courses at the University.

“When studying art in class, to be able to see it is such a valuable experience,” Murphy said.

In response to the discussion that has arisen from Brandeis University’s decision, Controversy N’ Coffee will be hosting a discussion on the role of arts in education on Monday, Feb. 16, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in Danforth University Center, room 276.

Eckmann said that Kemper is financially secure despite the crisis.

“So far nothing has been cut. We have full support of the University administration for the museum. So far we’re doing okay,” Eckmann said. “But we are always funding our own exhibitions, in addition to the University’s funds through grants and sponsors like other museums.”

Although Eckmann acknowledged the uncertainty of the economy, she remains optimistic that the Kemper Art Museum will remain unaffected.
“We’re in a situation where we don’t really know what will happen, so we’ll just have to see what will happen in the next few years,” Eckmann said. “So far we’re good. We’re lucky.”