The international exhibition visiting T\u0101maki Makaurau from Virginia aims to rewrite history. The Spinoff\u2019s Emma Gleason went to see what it had to say.<\/p>\n
Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Alma Thomas, Cy Twombly, Helen Frankenthaler and, of course, Andy Warhol. The canonical names of modern American art can all be found in Toi o T\u0101maki Auckland Art Gallery right now. \u201cThis exhibition is not just about Jackson Pollock splatters,\u201d explains the gallery\u2019s senior curator of international art, Sophie Matthiesson. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s a response to them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pollock\u2019s splatters \u2013 glossy, expressive drizzles of enamel paint \u2013 are actually the first thing we see when we enter Pop To Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. His piece \u2018Number 15, 1948: Red, Gray, White, Yellow\u2019 is the earliest work in the exhibition. It acts as an entree to the large abstract expressionist works in the exhibition\u2019s first room.<\/p>\n
Next, we find Hedda Sterne\u2019s surreal, hazy vision of New York, created using the then-new medium of aerosol paint. Darker still is a big inky Rothko that sucks me into the canvas like a vortex. It\u2019s entrancing. Turning around we spot a dynamic duo, with two vibrant de Koonings \u2013 Willem\u2019s \u2018Lisbeth Painting\u2019 and Elaine\u2019s \u2018Bull\u2019 \u2013 hanging side-by-side with their rough sweeps of colour. Cy Twombly\u2019s Synopsis of a Battle intrigues me, rendering a classical battle in a chaotic frenzy of abstract expressionism.<\/p>\n
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Pop art is a big draw for this show, and many of its biggest names are represented. There\u2019s Roy Lichtenstein\u2019s ambiguous \u2018Gullscape\u2019, which leaves me wondering where those vapour trails came from. Ed Ruscha\u2019s \u2018Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western\u2019 and Andy Warhol\u2019s \u2018Brillo Soap Pads Box\u2019 \u2013 fittingly \u2013 sit together, happy in their commercial subversion. Warhol\u2019s famous \u2018Triple Elvis\u2019 hangs ominously before the next room where the exhibition begins to take us far beyond pop art.<\/p>\n
In the minimalist section are restrained, colourful panels by Ellsworth Kelly and boxes by Donald Judd, while in the photorealism room we\u2019re confronted by Duane Hanson\u2019s lifelike sculpture \u2018Hard Hat Construction Worker.\u2019 He\u2019s clutching a can of Coke and is surrounded by hyper-real paintings. Urbanists will love the street scenes of Richard Estes (Paris), John Baeder (Manhattan) and Robert Cottingham (Los Angeles) that hang nearby.<\/p>\n
Curated by Alexis Assam and Dr Sarah Powers of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), the show presents a comprehensive survey of post-war American art. There are 52 impressive pieces on loan. Together they span eight decades of American art and the movements that emerged from a modern nation in the throes of 20th-century flux.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pop to Present also surveys the history of activism in modern art. \u201cWe have many of the African American and Native Indian artists who are working in these movements, but got dropped out of the record, and they had very important things to say and original innovations to contribute to the story,\u201d explains Matthiesson. \u201cSo it\u2019s a much richer story than we might have had 20 years ago.\u201d As it introduces visitors to many artists who had, until recently, been ignored by history, Pop to Present offers an opportunity to rediscover and recontextualise modern America.<\/p>\n
Artists in the show like Native American pop artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith addressed indigenous rights and politics, while pioneering artist Benny Andrews advocated for better inclusion of black artists in New York\u2019s galleries and museums. Do works like theirs help us to reappraise America\u2019s past and our own, I ask Matthiesson. \u201cI certainly hope they do,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are many artists trying to bring the lived experience of racism into the popular conversation about art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977) (installation view), Willem van Heythuysen, 2006, Oil and enamel on canvas, 96 x 72 in. , Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund, 2006.14 \u00a9 Kehinde Wiley<\/p>\n
There are many mediums represented in this show, but the sculptures are particularly engaging. Two of the most moving can be found, facing each other, in the Politics of The Figure room. There Alison Saar\u2019s figure expresses the duality of suffering and resistance, with nails roughly rammed into the beseeching body. It\u2019s mirrored by Kiki Smith\u2019s life-size bronze \u2018Ice Man\u2019, a moving exploration of mortality made in the aftermath of the AIDs epidemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The exhibition is bursting with deeply human stories. And with feelings drawn from the rebellious and radical subtext of post-war America. \u201cEmotion, I don\u2019t think, was terribly cool in many of these movements,\u201d says Matthiesson. \u201cWomen got suppressed, homosexuality got suppressed. It was a very tough man\u2019s world in a lot of post-war American art.\u201d Many artists in the show worked to reclaim feminine art, decorative art and crafts as a form of liberation.<\/p>\n
You can find them in the Pattern and Decoration room, which is dedicated to the avant-garde movement that saw female and male artists embrace femininity, decoration, craft and applied arts. It\u2019s tempting to touch the lusciously thick, raised brush strokes of Cynthia Carlson\u2019s \u2018Horseman\u2019 in a palette of cosmetic shades (though resist I do). Lucy T Pettway\u2019s quilt, meanwhile, is a deeply moving example of the art form, laden with traces of the human touch. With its inclusion in this show, it\u2019s among many works that challenge the very premise of recent American art.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The most recent work on display is \u2018Screaming into the Ether\u2019, painted in 2020 by Gary Simmons. Who is this wailing figure? \u201cThis is from a 1929 cartoon about a character called Bosko who jumps out of an ink bottle and sings black minstrel songs,\u201d Matthiesson tells me. Part of Simmons\u2019 erasure series, it\u2019s about the memory of racism from childhood and how it can be perpetuated by cartoons. \u201cHe\u2019s saying that there is great harm in the entertainment industry and that these are stereotypes that continue to hurt, but it\u2019s also a way of disempowering that racism, this is reclaiming it. And he believes that that little image of Bosko with his mouth screaming is almost a universal symbol for all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gary Simmons, Screaming into the Ether (detail) (installation view), 2020, Oil and cold wax on canvas, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of the Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, by exchange, and Gift of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Fund, by exchange, 2021.68. \u00a9 Gary Simmons.<\/p>\n
Here, as in all the other 51 works, the past and present are in dialogue. \u201cThat is one of the great strengths of this exhibition,\u201d says Matthiesson. \u201cWhat it shows is that even if we\u2019re looking at a pop artist like Andy Warhol, he did not reject what went before. All of these artists were absolutely steeped in other people\u2019s art, in other movements.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
By treating pop art as an anchor, one that\u2019s part of a wider story, Pop to Present provides a rich view of recent American art. \u201cOne of the things that we see in this show is how these artists were working in the present, but always referring back to the past,\u201d says Matthiesson. \u201cThis is going to be the new canon of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The international exhibition visiting T\u0101maki Makaurau from Virginia aims to rewrite history. The Spinoff\u2019s Emma Gleason went to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,163917,501,156,111,139,69,143],"class_list":{"0":"post-297535","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-auckland-art-gallery-pop-to-present","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-new-zealand","16":"tag-newzealand","17":"tag-nz","18":"tag-partners"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}