Old and Private Myths

John Haber
in New York City

Simone Fattal and Mrinalini Mukherjee

Tom Anholt and Chris Hammerlein

Simone Fattal may not seem all that in need of a self-portrait? Her retrospective opens with the brute anonymity of Torso—a hefty chunk of alabaster that she found in war-ravaged Beirut and could barely be troubled to fashion into something human. Yet there she is on camera in the museum's theater, holding a microphone and trying to think of what to say. And there, too, she breaks off into fragments of a history.

Fattal is not an obvious candidate for a casualty of war. She was too busy exploring late Modernism and making it into myth. So was Mrinalini Mukherjee, in her dual fascination with Modernism and the myths of her native India. If they seem impossible to reconcile, they drew her to local materials to make the myths her own. Even now, Tom Anholt and Chris Hammerlein have some fine stories to tell. They are old stories at that, the kind that art has always helped elevate to myth.

Mukherjee worked in fiber for more than forty years, so it seems only natural that her retrospective at the Met Breuer opens not with a wall but a curtain. The entry holds barely a clue to what comes next beyond the artist's name and a title, "Phenomenal Nature"—not even wall text at the side by the stairs. Penetrate within, and the curtains multiply, almost sheer but thoroughly opaque. One can still marvel at the former Whitney Museum, but its movable partitions have fallen completely away. They leave a space no less divided and mysterious for that. One might have stepped behind a stage curtain, only to find that the performance is just underway.

To the right, her art unfolds chronologically, but one might do well to turn instead to the left for a living theater. A space directly behind the curtain might serve as a late-career survey all by itself, with work from 1996 until her death in 2015. It includes all three of her chosen media—dyed fiber, ceramics, and bronze with a patina close to gilding. There is no telling what holds up the knotted rope, in the shape of gods or humans. There is no telling, too, whether the rest represent sacred vessels, vegetation, savagery, or fossils. Mukherjee named the earliest sculpture here in Sanskrit, after a goddess of the woods, and the entire space might represent an enchanted forest, while Fattal does better to face up to a bruised and beaten torso.

Shored against my ruins

Torso rests on a weathered block that looks less like a pedestal than a shipping container. It came as a breakthrough in 1988, and it seems a wonder that it has not broken through the floor. It may also seem as remote from day to day existence as the subject of her bronze Adam and Eve. Titles often invoke the larger than life, from goddesses to Gilgamesh. Yet Simone Fattal knew all too well the streets of Beirut, and from that point on she worked on a small scale, with people and the things that they inhabit. Set in large groups on platforms and tables, the nearly two hundred works look left over from a yard sale.

One might have seen the chaos coming in 1972, with her Autoportrait. Sharing a table with family and friends, she explains in French that she looked to video for something "richer" than a still photograph. It sounds reasonable enough, give or take the young man who climbs right over her to put out a cigarette. Give or take, too, a grainy projection that now and then dissolves into black. And then, just when one wants to interrupt her to point out her limits, she goes on to confess that she found not a narrative, but broken accounts only partly her own. Somehow, though, she persists with her ambition as well as its fragments.

Fattal had every reason to consider both a higher calling and a heightened skepticism. Born in 1942 in Syria, she studied philosophy in Beirut and at the Sorbonne before returning to Lebanon. If the video looks right out of Andy Warhol and his Screen Tests, she may have known about those, too. Besides, as another show of art of the Arab world had it, "A Storm Is Blowing in Paradise." And the storm soon hit her, too, with the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975. Like Huguette Caland before her, she fled to California in 1980 and now lives in France.

The changes left her career in fragments, too. She began as a painter, and work on canvas and paper lends the show much of its highlights and its continuity. There she works halfway between abstraction and landscape—and between that higher calling and felt experience. Work in color from the 1970s describes The Summit, but also Rain During Sunset. More recent painting includes black oxides on lava from 2006 and geometric shapes in black and white from 2013, with the blunt impact of Minimalism. Drawings incorporate calligraphy to allude to an Arabian tale of two woman, like a correction to the bro' epic of Gilgamesh.

She needed her encounter with sculpture to get her started again in America, and even then she broke off for the most part until the millennium. Still, her ceramics look much of a piece, in their ambition and their comedy. Man on the Street finds common ground with The Odyssey, while still smaller figures slump on household furniture as if unable to reach for the remote. People morph into Grecian urns and back again, in the clumsy contemporary stoneware fashion. Legs and hips conform to the rectangle of a ceremonial arch.

Like the stone from Beirut, Fattal's art is only obliquely political. The victors may pass through that arch in triumph any minute now, but I would not count on it. The legs and hips have left their torso behind, too. The retrospective's title, "Works and Days," quotes Hesiod, the Greek poet, but also T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." She could just as well recall the Eliot of "The Waste Land": "these fragments I have shored against my ruins."

The enchanted forest

Mrinalini Mukherjee cannot often sustain the enchantment, but she felt it in her bones. The overall layout could stand for successive inner sanctums of temples in her native India. Her largest work in fiber looks like the fragment of a temple wall, with a deity at its center. It is, though, King of the Forest, and dark ceramics from 2000, her sole without a fiery glazing, are Night Blooms. Slightly earlier ceramics, Fluorescence, might be temple flames. The tree growing tightly around a woman might be her temple canopy.

For all that, Mukherjee had an ambiguous relationship with native traditions, not to mention modern art. Born in 1949, she took to fiber in response to local craft, but also a break with traditional figure painting. She studied with K. G. Subramanyan, who advocated a distinctly Indian art and Indian architecture, and she shopped for dyed fabric in local markets, like Jodi Hays in today's Deep South. Still, she would not admit to working "in opposition to Western modernist values," she did further studies in England, and she expressed bewilderment at her found materials, as "something close to hemp." Was it flax or jute? "Maybe it is something in-between."

Did she take them up out of necessity or ideology? As uncoiling and separating rope became onerous, she tried ceramics—and as kilns and glazing became less available, she turned to wax on its way to cast bronze. Her imagery is no easier to pin down, not even with a text-laden handout. She named one work, from 1982, after a deity of terror, and one bronze, segmented like vertebrae, recalls Woman with Her Throat Cut by Alberto Giacometti. Still, I mistook a squirrel's tail in her very earliest work for a sorcerer's cap and her contribution to the 2015 edition of "Greater New York" at MoMA PS1 for an empty suit. What you see and feel are up to you.

The curator, Shanay Jhaver, sees mostly terror, but it may be up to you to feel it in your bones, too. It may help to imagine yet another theater, at the opposite extreme from a closed curtain or the diverse forms of life in that final room. The gradual unfolding of motifs and materials at the Met Breuer has little room for a solo act, but any of the largest fabric pieces could stand as one. Imagine one of them in lower lighting but back-lit, so that an otherworldly character confronts you, but at a distance that not even art can bridge. Is it still smaller than life and an empty suit? That could be what makes this god or ghost so elusive—and so modern.

Mukherjee was late in gaining recognition in the West, and you can see why. She may straddle traditions, but she preferred to work exclusively in India. She has trouble fitting into either set of traditions at that, in a telling contrast to Raghubir Singh and Gauri Gill—or the abstract and ritualized forms of Zarina Hashmi and Nasreen Mohamedi. Singh and Gill used the ceaseless crowding of a caste- and class-ridden culture to put modernity in perspective. Zarina, as she prefers to be known, and Mohamedi use near-abstract drawings and prints to document their travels and to map their dislocations. Mukherjee, meanwhile, seems all too eager to believe at once in myth and modernity.

If all else fails, she can create them. They cannot make her a political artist or an icon of cultural diversity, but she is quite willing to sacrifice identity politics to her magic act. Terrifying or not, what stands out is a highly personal approach and a growing mastery of materials. Fabric comes down from wall, at first suspended from the ceiling, somehow rises on its own, broadens and deepens in space, and finds ever richer dyes before giving way. Even at just fifty-seven works, much seems more charming than phenomenal. Taken as just the final room or a single installation, it can briefly regain its theater, its mysteries, and its enchantment.

Missing myths

Tom Anholt paints Pygmalion, while Chris Hammerlein in ceramics takes up Orpheus and Circe. Actually, he titles a work Orfeo, like the very first Baroque opera, for a sense of how the arts can share stories across media. Opera itself arose as a hybrid between music and theater. And these are hybrid times, too. Now that painting and sculpture are back, big time, too many artists revel in private myths, fantasies, puzzlement, and excess. This time out, though, the old stories get some serious competition.

Anholt and Hammerlein convey other stories as well, of a kind that has little to do with antiquity. This being the aftermath of Modernism, which did its best to abolish cozy narratives, they have at least as much to do with art. Anholt's flattened shapes barely distinguish foreground and background, abstraction, and representation, or figure and landscape. Like Jacob Lawrence in Harlem and August Macke in Munich, they juxtapose dark and acid hues, with a scraping and layering close to collage. They may form vertical strips or diagonals that hint at perspective. Thin streaks on top compete with stippling from the ground below.

Hammerlein, too, looks back to the early twentieth century. The gallery compares him to the Symbolism of Odilon Redon, but his bright colors take him closer still to Henri Rousseau. So does the seeming naiveté of a lion ripping into a white stag. Either comparison points to the sculpture's roots in painting. Often as not, it presents distinct images on front and back, set on pedestals in the round. The glazed ceramic, much like impasto in paint, opens onto a shallow but treacherous depth.

For either artist, things get messy fast, and myths get hard to recognize. Anholt's Pygmalion, with a man in a doorway at left and a woman stock still at its center, has less to do with ancient Greece than with Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Other scenes stick to an indefinite present, like a city street or backyard. Titles speak of an outdoor bath and a summer holiday, but leisure time is in short supply. Compositions seem to exist somewhere between indoors and out. Even sunlit colors are confining.

Hammerlein's stores are more overtly dark and mythic. He shows Orpheus without a lyre, caught between a huge hand and a snake, rather than hoping to rescue Eurydice from hell. A huge red or yellow sun looks threatening. Still, as with Rousseau, it is hard not to smile at the innocent colors and the not so innocent ways of men, women, and wild animals. Circe may be turning men into pigs. Still, the black boars appear to be chasing one another rather than scraps of food or freedom, even as one morphs halfway into or out of a man.

Anholt's sexes never quite meet, while Hammerlein's women preside over the dirty deeds. Their heads may appear at the top, like his dark-skinned Circe. At least in myth, madwomen will soon tear Orpheus to shreds. This art is not, though, about macho assertion and male fears. It insists on multiple storylines, even as old and new myths no longer have their old authority. It can err on the side of private symbolism, but it should keep one busy trying to suss it out.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Simone Fattal ran at MoMA PS1 through September 2, 2019, Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer through September 29, and Tom Anholt and Chris Hammerlein at Derek Eller through March 10. The review of Mukherjee first appeared in a slightly different form in Riot Material magazine.