Regarding Themes in Art

NY Times Article Sept 1, 2006
Art Review- Roberta Smith
"Power, Injustice, Death, Loss
Out of Time, A Contemporary View, at Sea in the Here and Now"

"Out of Time, A Contemporary View, at Sea in the Here and Now" is a superb article by Roberta Smith- not so much as there is any interest in the actual "review" of the Art in question, but for the way she knows how to remove a few pebbles from her shoes while she is writing her homework article. Let me underline the most cogent portions of her article...

"It is only among installations by R.G. and the sisters Jane and Louise W. that this unusually sterile selection of 49 works by 36 artists coheres with anything close to the kind of resonance and emotional usefulness that should be expected from an Art museum"

Wow.

"The point is that these selections and juxtapositions in "Out of Time" are so orthodox, so true to the minimalist, conceptualist gene pool, so loyal to a familiar cast of pre-approved artists and so risk-adverse and eccentrically intolerant that the art feels frozen and isolated like deer in the headlights"

"This display seems to have involved less thought than an exceptional summer group show in a commercial gallery. It makes me wonder about the curatorial imagination of the team behind it: Joachim Pisarro, curator of painting and sculpture and Eva Respini an assistant curator of photography. But mainly it makes me think about how MOMA is imprisoned by its own history and its new building."

Usually when it is felt necessary in an exhibition of art work to introduce a theme, that theme is seen by the purists among us as a contrivance, imposed by those who find themselves to be in positions of authority. Hence these super impositions in the form of a theme should be considered to be a distraction to the main subject, which is of course, the art work itself. We should remember that the theme should be spontaneous, in that it emanates from the art work to be shown rather than from something else which is superimposed on the art exhibit by a museum or gallery etc., here it is in danger of being viewed as a distraction.

"one wonders wether the theme of time was at least partly imposed by some higher up who felt the public needed an idea to hold on to. That may be no where near the truth, but it would explain the shows half-hearted alterations between the obvious and the arbitrary."She goes on to give examples like Robert Morris, B. Anastasi and Janine Antoni. Plus an example by Bill Viola's lugubrious slow motion video installation. paraphrase second to last paragraph . art is not illustration...."

"The basic question here is- what are the curators supposed to do? Perhaps they should give into the irrational, subjective nature of visual experience. This would mean letting their eyes betray them and take them places where carefully worked out theories and current fashions do not. Caught between fear of its supposedly formalist past and the apparent desire for a canon- any canon- the museum of Modern Art has its own particular problems. But for starters it needs to get over itself and figure out how to free its curators to do their work."

Amen,

Vincent Pepi, March 20, 2007