A few bright spots from 2017
Here’s a few things I’ll remember fondly from this otherwise largely crap year
Hito Steyerl, “Factory of the Sun,” at Kiasma, Helsinki.
Until I saw this installation / film at Kiasma this summer I didn’t believe serious work that tackles technology, social media, and the alienating politics of advanced consumer capitalism could be actually fun. This enormous production, shown in a room that looks like the set of Tron, tells a shaggy-dog story about entertainment, gaming, the commodification of fun, and the lurking threat of the surveillance state. It glides into many of the ideological fault lines of the moment, and even manages to end on something like an uplifting note.
James Turrell at Mass MoCA
The opening of Building 6 at the Mass MoCA campus last summer not only doubled the size of the already enormous complex, but opened up a few more signature, long-term works. Walking into an enormous Turrell creation, like Perfectly Clear, is the kind of experience that will change your week.
Olafur Eliasson at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
So much of the conversation around Olafur Eliasson is about anything other than the things he makes. There is the politics, the awareness raising about refugees and renewable energy, but the point of a show in Montreal was about the objects themselves. Most make you think about the mechanics of how they were put together, about how he is able to engineer that moment of awe that results. Big Bang Fountain is a jet of water in a completely dark room under a strobe. Multiple shadow house is an echo chamber for selfies. But my favorite was Beauty, a spray of mist refracted under a golden light, something strange and, well, beautiful.
“Aislin: 50 Years of Cartoons” at the McCord Museum, Montreal
Americans don’t think of Canada has riven with sectarian discord, but a show of work by Montreal’s preeminent political cartoonist showed just how whipsawed and uncertain life in Quebec has been for the past 50 years. In a series of images, you can trace how the optimism of Expo 67 and the propect of hosting the Olympics was undercut by ethnic tension, which would include a violent separatist movement and a kind of ethno-nationalist malaise that still lingers over the region (it is no coincidence Toronto is Canada’s most dynamic and essential city today). “A good cartoon, what it does, is sum up a situation, very neatly, as opposed to reading a lot of articles,” Terry Mosher (known by his pen name, Aislin) told Macleans. And indeed, the show was a history lesson, told with incisive ethnographic detail and sardonic wit.
“Renaissance Venice: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese” at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Any chance to catch priceless Renaissance masterworks is worth it.
“No Rules: Helen Frankenthaler Woodcuts” at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.
Frankenthaler’s refreshing approach to Abstract Expressionism felt more connected — even tangentially — to reality than the pure performative masculinity of her peers. And seeing a group of her paintings together last summer at the Clark was great, but the parallel exhibit of her woodcuts was the real unexpected treat. They were layered and serious, and the sort of images you can stare at and get lost in.
Akseli Valmunen, “The Same New Pet,” at Fotografiska, Stockholm
This small show by a young photojournalist for Helsingen Sanomat was like a set of film stills from a dystopian sci-fi movie. The series is about a South Korean lab that clones pet, and the sharp contrast between the sterile authority of the technology that makes it possible, and the fuzzy reality of the frail, frightened pups that are oblivious to the nature of how they came to be. Between the lines, it is about the desperate desire to cheat death and that the only answers science can offer may be the wrong ones.
“Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction” at MoMA, New York
Despite the majesty of being the subject of a “an ovedue retrospective” at MoMA, seeing a bunch of Francis Picabia’s work in one place is just plain hilarious. The whipsawing from one style to another, the use of ridiculous materials like glossy acrylic paint, the shameless copying of any other artist he found interesting (or successful). Trying to figure out if this is a big con is part of the fun, and is the great dare at the heart of the 20th century — should you take this seriously?
The answer here was probably not. Picabia’s work is intensely, joyously, rapturously shallow. It is the joy of diving into surfaces, of mindless novelty. With startling consistency, it reminds you that nothing matters.
Some Movies…
The Florida Project
Class is the great lost subject of American art, the reality, as Steinbeck once said, that every poor person carries themself like a temporarily embarassed millionaire. We can’t even look at it, let alone understand it, so we wonder why there are Dollar Generals in every small town, and think JD Vance is some kind of brave truthteller.
The Florida Project is that extremely rare thing that doesn’t treat poverty like some kind of ennobling nonsense. It captures the clutter, the noise, the warped dignity of how a huge number of our neighbors and family members live. There’s no judgment or preaching or happy endings, just a sincere effort to show how life happens today. It was convincing enough that I was disappointed in the ending, which felt like a cop out. But this is nitpicking.
The Last Jedi
I wasn’t over-impressed by The Force Awakens, so I haven’t expected from this trilogy much more than any other familiar 21st century tentpole multi-billion dollar franchise flick. So I was astonished to find in The Last Jedi a serious, challenging movie that engages the canon but doesn’t mindlessly defer to it.
Of course, I’m seriously deep enough into the story to raise a billion technical objections. Why would the Resistance invest so much in space bombers, which rely on gravity but are supposed to be used in, you know, space? Why is Laura Dern’s character dressed like that when she’s a military commander?
But what really matters is how the entire mythology of the series gets turned around. Here’s my take: Star Wars was created by Baby Boomers, by in a deep sense belongs to my generation, which I guess could loosely be Gen X. We are the ones that had all the toys and the bedsheets and the tie-in plastic soda cups from Burger King. We had the VHS tapes we watched over and over again and thought about and argued about the story for ages. And this episode directly engages this generational split — that it is really about facing a post-Boomer future. When there are the same old challenges your parents faced, and having to square up to them after inadequate, faulty or entirely absent mentoring and parenting. This is an extremely important existential question of our time, and I think we’re going to see a lot more of this in the next few years.
I’m glad that this story, which means so much to me, is going to these places. But so help me… if the third episode involves another plant-sized laser-beam…
Toni Erdmann
Yea, released in 2016, but I saw it this year, and it was so good I would name it twice.
… AND ONE MOST DISAPPOINTING THING
My general critical disposition is set between love and disappointment, so I try hard not to be a public sourpuss about things that don’t work for me. I have a lot of respect for the arts, and for artists who risk putting their work out into the world. But sometimes, the smell of bad faith and overreaching nonsense is too strong (and in this particular case, I checked in about a dozen times through the year to see if my thoughts changed at all, and they haven’t).
So I don’t take much pleasure in saying that Tonja Hollander’s “Are You Really My Friend?” is far and away the worst thing I’ve ever seen at Mass MoCA. It is shallow in conception, boring in execution, and needy in presentation — a rare trifecta! You shouldn’t expect much from a project that gestated as a TEDx talk, which like so many others is a vanity project run horribly amok, a waste of resources and space without even camp value. To the extent it is “crowd pleasing” reflects how shallow our thinking about social media can be.
