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News That Stays News
John Haberin New York City
Home Is a Foreign Place: Recent Art from the Met
Louise Nevelson: Works on Paper
For a critic fifty years ago, the story of contemporary art was "the triumph of American painting." For the Met Breuer, it is neither an unalloyed triumph nor all that American.
Recent acquisitions hang beside chestnuts from the Met's permanent collection. Like contemporary drawings at the Morgan Library, they signal a museum's commitment to the present. And yet, as the show's title has it, "Home Is a Foreign Place." As a postscript, Louise Nevelson finds the inner chambers of home in another show of a museum's collection. Nevelson's works on paper at the Whitney shed light on the darkness of her constructions in 3D. For all the tendentious curating, there is no place like home. 
The trumpets of victory
One might not think of a foreign place right off. The show opens with an undoubted triumph and an emblem of the United States. Jasper Johns never painted as lushly and on so large a scale as with his White Flag from 1955. It shines all the more in white. Newsprint thickens and animates a surface that will never furl or flap in the wind. As Ezra Pound said of literature in The ABC of Reading, this is news that stays news.
Then again, America's image has been bruised and battered a great deal since then, and this flag is as stiff as a board and as white as a ghost. Its newsprint buried in encaustic, charcoal, and oil hints at layers of history that no one will read again. It also hangs next to thirty-six woodcuts that lend the show its title—one starker and more cryptic than the next. Zarina created them in 1999 while far from her first home in India and while facing eviction from a New York loft. For the Met, art today labors in the shadow of "culturally transformative events, from devastating wars, social and humanitarian injustices, and mass migration to economic and environmental change." For all that, though, the news is good.
The show places contemporary art in context, but not as a succession of pairings. One or at most two older works anchor acquisitions from the last five or six years. And those newer works speak almost uniformly to diversity. Even Michael Rakowitz from Great Neck, on Long Island, copies artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq as American troops rolled in. He, too, buries newsprint, this time in Middle Eastern food packaging and glue. Nearby a British Guyanese artist, Hew Locke, crosses continents with model sailing ships out of Homer and Derek Walcott's Caribbean, as The Wine Dark Sea.
That room may also include Edgar Heap of Birds, the Native American artist, and such African Americans as Thorton Dial, Glenn Ligon, and Faith Ringgold. It might range as well to Sopheap Pich from Cambodia, Adriana Varejão from Brazil, Elias Sime (like Hana Yilma Godine) from Ethiopia, and Wael Shawky from Egypt, depending on when you go. (Some works swap in and out halfway through the show's run.) They are artful as well as global juxtapositions. Dial's dark but shallow space of castoff objects plays off against Pich's woven grid of South Asian materials—and against bones, antlers, and broken plates from Julian Schnabel. Should you care to ship all this to your own native country, Robert Rauschenberg supplies cardboard boxing, as the most makeshift and monochrome of paintings.
Irving Sandler published The Triumph of American Painting in 1970, as the product of twenty years in the company of artists in the Tenth Street galleries and the Cedar Bar. Since then, curators have insisted on the postwar triumphs of women artists, black abstraction, Latin American art, and more. So indeed has the Met, in rehanging its holdings of "Epic Abstraction." Here, though, the trumpets of victory fall on deaf ears. Ringgold overwrites another American flag with black history. The curators find a "melancholic resonance" in the most abstract and apolitical of traces.
I had not often felt the melancholy in Rachel Whiteread, who casts the underside of a table. And I had forgotten the direct impression of his surroundings by a second artist, Robert Overby, this time on canvas. Cuts into ceramics by Anna-Bella Papp from Romania echo absent spaces in much the same way. Nearby, Mark Bradford leaves his incisions, too, but in masking tape and prints, as Crack Between the Floorboards. For him, urban workers out of Gustave Caillebotte in Paris in 1875 are still scraping the floors, but in downtown LA. Make yourself at home.
Desperate attempts
The framing also revisits the past, in its selection of older art. Abstract Expressionism had its triumphs, but only after the Holocaust and the bomb—and Adolph Gottlieb, who introduces a room for signs and symbols, felt "a desperate attempt to escape from evil." Johns refuses politics or personal confession more than any living artist. Yet he did put himself in the direct line of fire with his Target the same year as White Flag, and he represented America again in his Map six years later. Since then, he has introduced skulls and a soldier with head in hands in Vietnam. Was home a foreign place all along?
Still, Gottlieb does not leave one in despair, and neither should contemporary art. Andy Warhol keeps returning to consumerism and death, but are his silkscreens of Chairman Mao really about the "commodification of violence"? Simryn Gill finds a ghostly silence in deserted vacation homes in Malaysia, but do his photos "gesture darkly toward social inequities due to economic changes"? Dial had no illusions when it comes to politics, and he titled his relief sardonically Victory in Iraq. Schnabel's Neo-Expressionism could be self-involved and complacent in its male privilege. Yet both found it liberating to break things—including barriers in art.
Thank a large institution for sticking to its permanent collection. And thank a large curatorial team for putting on a small, focused show with so many unfamiliar places and names. Still, they can seem trapped in trends and artspeak. Even when it comes to politics, wall text runs to fashionable terms of identity rather than class. When Cornelia Parker crushes antique sugar bowls, she might have in mind the sugar trade and "colonial oppression." She could, though, be thinking more of a proper tea service.
She is also having fun, and so for all the melancholy should you. Maybe Pich feels only a loss of home when he builds from bamboo and beeswax, but he is taking some of the past with him. So is Kathleen Petyarre in bringing to abstraction the texture of a lizard's skin. So, too, is Prabhavathi Meppayil in bringing to gesso copper wire and the craft of a goldsmith. Even in white on white, they find optical activity. And even in a foreign place, they seem very much at home.
For the museum, home is still a foreign place, and one can see why. You can take contemporary art out of the Met, but you cannot take the Met out of contemporary art. At least it can take art to the Met Breuer, but not for long. It is abandoning the space prematurely out of financial woes, leaving it to become for a year the Frick Madison. To compound the ironies, those woes came about precisely because of the drive toward museum expansions into new spaces and contemporary art. Will it still have space for this art when it returns?
If the show leaves grounds for optimism, they lie in art's silences and ambiguity. As the Whitney put it in reopening downtown, "America Is Hard to See"—and so much more so is the world. Maybe Robert Smithson was thinking in terms of earthworks and architecture with stacked glass, but its jagged edges thrust the work into the room. Maybe Kazuko Miyamoto was thinking of home with black threads of Japanese cotton, but they take on new shapes and new density with every step around them. Maybe color and line for Agnes Martin "tremble and stutter across the painting's surface," in one last bow to catastrophic events. And yet they glow.
The color of night
Even in a small show, Louise Nevelson takes one out of the museum and into the night. The Whitney calls just twenty-six works on paper from its collection "The Face in the Moon," after the title of an etching, but their faces are as elusive as moonlight in the darkest hours before dawn. One can sense it indirectly in the shades of black. Her etchings from the early 1950s often incorporate aquatint for its murkier edges. They accept a tear that might have begun not as the artist's gesture but as a printer's error. Their misty textures may belong to the sky or, as other titles suggest, an ancient or magic garden.
Moonlight bursts out more directly in lithographs from 1963, where black cannot efface the white of the paper. It becomes the glow within darkness in collage from 1972. A black mark scoots across a field of dark gray, much as in Francisco de Goya's last paintings. Dark brown frames another collage, like a passage through the woods—or the page. Nevelson also adopts gold, silver, or violet foil for its glitter and the color of night. It is the rare touch of color in dark show.
Color may come as a surprise, even for those who know her from a Nevelson retrospective at the Jewish Museum (and my longer review back then did her more justice). Her black sculpture uses dowels and other forms to draw the eye into shallow compartments like a dark closet. White reliefs work much the same, but as sculpture's ghost. An ingenious 2018 show in Chelsea placed the first in dark rooms and second in stronger lighting to heighten the contrast. It helped bring out her connection to Surrealism. It also affirmed her place as Minimalism's dark unconscious.
Born in 1899, she broke through once and for all with "Sixteen Americans" at MoMA in 1959—along with a painter of much the same black glow, Frank Stella. Her late work brought her renewed prominence, with a mass and frontality that an early modern like Constantin Brancusi would hardly recognize. It suggests female presences as well, like Post-Minimalism for Louise Bourgeois or Eva Hesse. A figure by Kiki Smith seems tormented by gallery lighting, like the harshest of daylight. Nevelson's interrogation persists after hours. The work also interrogates art, by remaining abstract.
An artist who lived to age eighty-eight was not just a part of her time. Rather, she was a part of many times. She seems most conscious of a woman's body in work from around 1930. They include elongated nudes in red chalk, vaguely Cubist faces, and the bare outlines of a single hand beside a sagging breast. A drawing from 1937 looks to folk dancers in her native Ukraine, the site of art for Lesia Khomenko today. Her later lithographs have the irregular stains of Jackson Pollock in black, and the still later collage parallels works on paper by Robert Motherwell in much the same years.
The Whitney's third-floor gallery is not an obvious place for a descent into night. It serves as entryway to the education department on one side and a conference room on the other, complete with kitchen. Their bareness and function make the white walls all the brighter and the art all the more out of place. Still, it will do for now as a space for works on paper—like recent shows of Harold Edgerton, Patti Hill, and "photocopy art." Here a reverse chronology confronts one with the steady glow of collage from the first. There is no emerging from the darkness.
"Home Is a Foreign Place" ran at The Met Breuer through June 21, 2019. Louise Nevelson ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through October 8, 2018, and at Pace through March 3. A related review looks at Louise Nevelson in retrospective.