Static|Form
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Two exquisite extensions of TBA:09 visual arts programming are on view at Reed and Lewis & Clark Colleges respectively. If you are strictly looking at time as a historical marker (and as everything takes time) this makes sense, otherwise its basic cross-institutional networking. What’s contained inside these rooms is a whole lot of eye/ear opening, jaw-drop inducing masterworks by artists over centuries.
The Language of the Nude, Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body is an exhibition of impeccable Italian, French, Dutch and other drawings from the collection of Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum. Upon entry there is a sense that you have left the building inside which one ordinarily finds the most cutting edge contemporary work. Here the Cooley has been transformed into a high museum-style space (ala Smithsonian) to great effect with dark evergreen walls, simple gilded frames and dim light. Drawings by the greatest master draughtsmen of the Renaissance (Dürer) and Baroque (Rubens) periods hang alongside images of goddesses, erotic scenes and the sumptious renderings of visceral musculature by François Lucas. This collection, curated by William Breazeale, was presented last year at its home institution but this is the first exhibition of its scale to travel from the Crocker since 1992. Lithe bodies, in reverence, stretching, lounging, solo and in group scenes - it’s a truly stunning body of work and a wonderful opportunity to have this treasure in Portland. The language, so to speak, is an eternal motif in the arts, the flesh. And here the figures bare all in pure light, and lines undulate around the lush curvature of thighs and return to the gaze, the eyes. An addendum/counterpoint titled Psychedelic Soul (curated by Stephanie Snyder and Kristan Kennedy) is also on sight though may have served better to be presented in the adjacent library. The visual context was hard to jump into given the flicker of monitors, though placed discretely, creating a slightly jarring effect to the wow factor of being in the presence of such awesome work in the gallery.
On view at the Douglas F. Cooley Art Gallery at Reed College through December 5.
Broadcast is co-organized by iCI (under new directorship by Kate Fowle) and Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum (Irene Hoffman, Director) and includes some of the leading innovators of the video medium from the 1960’s to the present including some of my personal favorites. Works by pioneers Dara Birnbaum, Nam Jun Paik and Chris Burden neatly mesh with newer sensations like Christian Jankowski and the team known as neuroTransmitter. I had just seen Jankowski’s Telemistica (1999) last week for the first time at SFMOMA as part of The Studio Sessions in a similar small installation set-up. In dealing with the medium of television and radio, however, seemed even more fitting here at the Hoffman Gallery. Authority and influence, voice and vulnerability. I enjoyed the collaborative work by Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter who in The Amarillo News Tapes (1980) worked alongside TV newscasters in an Artists-In-Residence program, taping an actual newscast with a completely phony script. Very unlike conceptual art guru Burden’s daring TV Hijack (1972), a piece hard-to-imagine in today’s climate of fear and surveillance. In it Burden pretty much hijacks a live cable broadcast, taking its interviewer hostage. Also included are some amazing short commercials that were made in response to governmental laws preventing individuals to broadcast such. The piece questions power and rights to free speech, of which he was also an early pioneer (some say brazen). Birnbaum’s video installation piece Hostage (1994) literally poses the viewer as target. The interactive laser beaming from the main monitor component aims at your chest as you view its contents while overhead ceiling-mounted monitors are shielded by front-facing targets, a six-channel broadcast depict news reports of international hostage situations. The show is startling with historical content, though feels much more open than most video-based exhibitions where one travels from darkened room-to-room. The various approaches to the medium are welcome as is the cellphone-audio tour which you could presumably ring up even before visiting, 503-205-0332.
