Until Now: The Contemporary Art Tour

Welcome to Until Now, the MIA’s first exhibition of Contemporary Art. We’ve picked the period from 1960 to 2010, which happens to be half a century, a nice round number. But is there a significance to this particular 50-year span? I think you will see that there is, and the place to start is where one definition of contemporary art starts, with Andy Warhol.

You will see many objects that are new to you on this tour; but if there is one with which you are already familiar it is probably this: Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can. When he first publicly exhibited this image, in Los Angeles in 1962, Warhol had made 32 paintings of soup cans, identical except for the variety of soup on the label. What was he up to? Was he, as some critics suggest, celebrating our consumer culture, slyly implying that in the post-Eisenhower years our convenience foods took the place of the Madonnas of the Renaissance? Warhol, after all, had been a very successful commercial illustrator. Or, as others suggest, was he mocking our consumer culture, slyly implying that convenience foods had taken the place of religious imagery? One thing all seem to agree on is that Warhol was using the soup cans to make some comment about our culture – and this is a thought I want you to keep in mind as we go through the show.

Another matter beyond debate is how he depicted the soup cans: he stripped his painting of all painterly effect. He made it as simple as possible – no background, no shading, no texture. And in this suite of prints, published in 1968, he takes matters one step further, by mass-producing the image through screenprinting, a commercial process. Warhol took the “art” out of art. And by doing so, some historians believe, he freed art from its history. Anything could now be “art,” something else you will see borne out in the rest of this show.

We are not going to talk about everything here. In fact, I will touch on about one in five objects in each gallery. So please feel free to look around on your own while I am talking, and by all means come back and spend more time here, either after the tour or on another day.

As we leave this gallery I want to point out a piece by an artist I doubt you have heard of, but whose work I am sure you have seen.

Peter Blake created Drum Majorette in 1957, five years before Warhol’s soup cans. He attended art school in England, but rather than look to fine art for his subject matter, he focused on images from popular culture. This, of course, is where the term Pop Art derives from. Our curator Liz Armstrong has organized the exhibition by themes, and this whole first gallery is devoted to Pop Art, which arose, in the work of Blake and a few others, in England before it reached America. Look closely at the medals that adorn the uniform of this individual. Cigar bands, coins, matchbook covers, biscuit labels. Even more “anti-art” is how Blake has depicted his model’s sunglasses – by using an actual pair of sunglasses. Ten years after this piece Blake created one of the most famous record covers of our time: the cover art for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

We will go from the earliest work in the show to one of the newest, which tells you something else about the exhibition.

Anselm Reyle is a German artist, living in Berlin, who completed this stripe painting in 2006. Clearly, then, this is not a chronological survey. Going from America to England to Germany, we also note that it is not arranged geographically. Liz Armstrong has tried to group works thematically, but since this work, unlike others in this gallery, has nothing to do with Pop Art, we can see that she has not felt constrained by themes either. Where connections can be made, fine; but she is not shutting out contemporary voices just because they don’t fit.

Reyle’s work does have one thing in common with Peter Blake’s: his use of found materials – in this case, a strip of mirror and another of PVC foil. It also has something in common with Warhol’s: he is making a comment, in this case on a school of art from the ‘70s, the Color Field painters who discovered acrylic paint and made paintings of lines and stripes and circles. But Reyle not only plays with his materials, he leaves some jagged edges; and in one spot here he crafts a very painterly abstract swirl that totally defeats the purity of the earlier artists he is reflecting.

One reason I think it was placed in this gallery is for its reflection in a very different work, the most realistic in the show, the Girl with a Soft Drink Bottle by Michelangelo Pistoletto.

See how the Reyle is reflected in Pistoletto’s mirror. But see what else is reflected there: us. Pistoletto is creating a new kind of art, art that changes with every new person that stands in front of it. His art is interactive. He is, in effect, painting the background. The girl in the picture draws us in, but she is hardly the important figure: all we see is her back.

Takashi Murakami, whose Panda dominates this gallery, can be thought of as the Japanese Andy Warhol. As with the other Asian artists in this room, his work can be classified as neo-Pop. It comes 40 years after Anglo-American Pop, and it draws more heavily on the cartoon culture of modern Asia, but it shares the Warhol sensibility of obliterating the line between popular culture and fine art. Murakami even takes Warhol’s commercialism a step or two further: he doesn’t just ape the Louis Vuitton trademark, a la Campbell’s soup, he creates his own trademarks and sells them. In this painting, the eye is a Murakami trademark (one that covers the walls outside the Walker Art Center’s restrooms), which he intersperses with the Vuitton LV.

For centuries, “art” was about devotion, or recreating a window on the world, or producing an object of beauty, or in the more introspective 20th century, expressing the artist’s emotion. Contemporary art doesn’t seem to be about those things. As we have seen, it is more about the artist making a statement, or a comment, about something in the culture around him. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the next gallery, where three major artists from four continents create their own art by copying others.

Kara Walker is an African-American female, so she can get away with making sexually offensive images of black women. Her trademark style is the silhouette, based on a 19th-century art form, which gives her work historic patina. Yes, slave women were cruelly subjugated before the Civil War, we think as we look at this print. But then we realize this was made in the 21st century and we are made to ponder, are racist attitudes still with us?

Yinka Shonibare, who made this photograph, is also black, and I give him two continents because he was born in England but grew up in Nigeria, and he has gone back and forth, both in his life and his work. Here he has appropriated a famous 18th century print (1799) by Francisco Goya and recreated it as a tableau. But he has replaced Goya’s white model with perhaps an Asian man. He has kept Goya’s title, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, but turned it into a question and added “in Australia,” further deracinating this Spanish image. In fact, he made five versions of this composition – called America, Asia, Europe and Africa – with ethnically varied models, commenting on the complexity of cultural identity.

But for utter confusion, it is hard to top the work of Yasumasa Morimura, who has dressed up as Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist, in another photograph on the opposite wall. To begin with, by printing the photo on canvas, and using a painted backdrop, my eye is confused as to whether this is a painting or a photograph, let alone whether it is a man or a woman, a Japanese or a Mexican. This photograph is copied directly from a Kahlo self-portrait, with some unsubtle changes: in accidental echo of Murakami, Kahlo’s peasant dress is here replaced by a Louis Vuitton shawl.

If these artists have moved through space and time through their art, the next gallery focuses on artists who have physically moved, due to war or economic hardship.

I want to comment on this piece here, partly because it is the newest painting in the show and partly for what it says about the collectors who have loaned it. Gordon Locksley and George Shea have dealt in contemporary art since they started a hair salon in Minneapolis in the ‘60s. Although they don’t live here anymore, they have been wonderfully generous to this museum; and if you go to the third floor modern galleries you will always find major pieces on loan from their collection. As you peruse the labels of this show, you will see that Locksley-Shea Galleries is the single largest lender. And as this work from 2010 shows, they are still collecting and still on the cutting edge. This piece, by Ahmed Alsoudani, reflects the horrors of war, specifically the Iraq War. Alsoudani is an Iraqi national who now lives in the U.S., but in the specific images as well as the overall furor of this piece, you can see that the conflagration in Iraq stays with him.

When we move to the next room, we will see another major work by an artist in exile from the Middle East.

You may know of Siah Armajani for the bridge that goes over Hennepin Ave from the Walker to Loring Park, or for the cauldron he designed for the Atlanta Olympic Games, or the park across from the Wayzata Post Office. He lives in Minneapolis and is probably the most famous artist working in Minnesota today. But he is Iranian by birth – having come here to attend Macalester College in 1960 – and he still identifies very deeply with Iran, although he has been estranged from his homeland for political reasons ever since. The piece’s title tells us that this figure is an exile, and Armanjani has said that the figure’s body is based on his own. The rest of the piece is a dream, open – like most dreams are – to multiple interpretations. We do know that the figure with the halo, above, refers to Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher whom Armajani considers a genius; who was also exiled, from Hitler’s Germany, but who returned to Germany after the war and led a successful life as a university professor and writer, on music and popular culture in particular.

This work is also referential, as its form and its principal elements are taken directly from the most famous Surrealist sculpture, The Palace at 4 A.M. by Alberto Giacometti. If this interests you, you really should come back with time to spare, to study and think about what this might mean.

Another artwork that takes time is this video piece by the world’s most important video artist, Bill Viola. He photographs his actors then slows the action down, to a meditative pace; and if you sit here for several minutes your mind will slow down with it. [Describe what is happening at the time – sexy, spiritual, contemplative, ethereal.] Although the work is not overtly religious, it strikes a spiritual chord in most people, if only because of its pace. [In fact, Viola also produced a multiple video of individual figures coming through the wall of water, which he titled The Apostles.]

If video art is a relatively new phenomenon, the next two galleries show contemporary takes on two more traditional genres: realism and abstraction.

I said “realism,” but even here contemporary art offers a twist. Jennifer Steinkamp offers one of the oldest subjects of art – a bouquet of flowers – but she uses digital projection, a new technique. The chrysanthemums don’t look quite real, but of course they’re not. I don’t know where the music is, but the piece is titled Hurdy-Gurdy Man, and the flowers are supposedly swaying in time to Donovan’s song from the era of Flower Power. [sing a few bars?]

The painting next to it, by Neil Jenney, could be a pure abstraction except for the big letters below it which identify the subject as “Atmosphere.” Query whether either or both of these works, clever as they are, are one-joke wonders or do they have staying power? This is a question worth asking of all contemporary art and maybe something we can discuss later on the tour.

The most important European artist working, part-time, in the realist tradition is Gerhard Richter, of Germany. Like Chuck Close, he merges media by painting a photograph, in this case of his daughter Betty. In this instance, he has added another layer of reality confusion, as this is a print of his painting of a photograph. I am reminded of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, with its sharp camera-like focus and black background. Vermeer’s women are often enigmatic in their expression; and Richter goes one step further again: instead of turning to face us, as Vermeer’s girl does, Betty turns away.

Our next stop will bring us to a work that is also clever but, in my opinion, has a depth, a power and a beauty that is rare in contemporary art.

Don’t be distracted by the sensors that beep as you walk around this sculpture. They could be a part of it, but so far as I know have been installed by MIA security. I’m not sure why anyone would want to touch this: it is not real barbed wire – it’s sculpted steel – but it has the intimidating feel of barbed wire. What is it supposed to be? Well, let me mention that the artist, Mona Hatoum, is a Palestinian who is deeply political in her art. I didn’t see this as a cage at first, but let me show you a drawing from the Star Tribune about detainees in Iraq. It is unsettlingly close to this work. Whatever message the piece is meant to convey, though, it has a startlingly formal beauty. As you move around, different lines coalesce, the steel wire seems to take on a dizzying movement and life of its own. This is one piece in the show I come back to, every time.

Another artist who is political, or at least feminist, is represented by this wall hanging next to the Hatoum sculpture. I say “wall hanging,” rather than painting, which it appears to be at first, because if you look closely you will see that most of the lines are created by colored thread. This is a work of embroidery, a woman’s craft. And if you look more closely still, you will see that it is not really an abstraction, although it is placed in this gallery of abstract art. There on the right is Snow White, and some of her creature friends dance around her. On the left, harder to see, are five women, apparently topless, taken not from Walt Disney but from a men’s magazine. Ghada Amer, an Egyptian who lives in New York, is perhaps commenting on how men have depicted women in art, or at least popular culture. Or, as we asked with Andy Warhol, is she celebrating these two sides of the feminine?

For the last stop on our tour we will look, fittingly, at leftovers.

Swoon is a 31-year-old artist who lives in Brooklyn and celebrates the street scene around there. So much so, that instead of painting on canvas for a gallery or museum, she paints on the sides of walls. More accurately, she paints on paper and then surreptitiously affixes her figures to abandoned storefronts. She says she is trying to understand the world and to create a document of that process. Street art like Swoon’s is seemingly a rebellion against the art of galleries and museums, but contemporary art, as we’ve seen, knows no boundaries; and now her work is commissioned by collectors like Locksley-Shea, who bring her exploration of the streets into their gallery.

Another artist who uses leftovers on the street but dispenses even with the drawing is the older French artist, Raymond Hains. His art consists of torn wall posters found on the Paris streets. Whereas Warhol showed us the cans of soup and Brillo boxes inside the supermarket and called them “art,” Raymond Hains, I like to think, has stuck with the advertising outside the market, advertising that has taken on a new existence as its shelf life has expired.

I said near the start that Warhol opened the door, and henceforth anything could be art. I think if you look around this gallery you will be convinced of that concept. You may like some or all of it, or not, but I hope our brief tour has given you a better feel for what we call “contemporary art.”