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Three exhibits at museum address what is real about art and the far - Water Bottle Racks by e55he swrzsnb
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Three exhibits at museum address what is real about art and the far - Water Bottle Racks by E55HE SWRZSNB
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| Article Posted: 07/26/2012 |
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Three exhibits at museum address what is real about art and the far - Water Bottle Racks |
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In the surrounding space are paintings, collages, photos,three-dimensional and video pieces by 40 artists from around theNorth, including several Alaskans. It's something of a departurefrom the museum's usual big summer shows, which have recentlyfocused on natural history ("Gold" and "Mammoths andMastodons"). Funded in part by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, it has someof the edginess of exhibits from Allen's personal collection:aggressively up-to-date (I don't think I saw anything from beforethe third millennium), filled with new media, often fantastical,usually thought-provoking and, just as often, disorienting. "True North" curator Julie Decker writes, "These(contemporary) artists are attempting to define place -- not theromantic North of earlier generations but the next North, one thatis connected, pivotal and conflicted." In the catalogue for the show, Decker asserts that the frontier ofnorthern regions has long been romanticized as "a sparselypopulated place where nature is more visible ..
an angular place,unchanging and marginally inhabitable, which appeals to fewsenses." She notes that "this frontier has now faded -- replaced byglobal, digital and virtual connections ... Today's world is aglobal world, not a world of frontiers." The press release describes the artists as seeking to "portraya North that's complex, in transition." The use of "true" in the title suggests a dichotomybetween what this show represents and a second show at the museumone floor down, "Romantic North," a display of themuseum's Alaska landscape paintings from the late 19th and early20th centuries. "Contrary to what's often hanging in art galleries, life inthe North isn't always a picture-perfect landscape," says thepress release for "True North." "In the newexhibition, artists from the circumpolar North de-romanticizeNorthern life, stripping off the varnish to reveal honestdepictions of life here -- dirty snow and all." There may be no better example of that than Ken Lisbourne's"Alcohol." Originally from Point Hope, Lisbourne createsbright paintings that usually show happy scenes of villagershunting or celebrating. "Alcohol" features two despondentand weeping women watching men guzzle from bottles while a furtrader displays a pelt and grins at the viewer.
Lisbourne has said it was a painting that tourists didn't want tobuy. In a similarly startling drawing, Annie Pootoogook, from Nunavut,depicts a Native couple snuggling in bed while watching erotica ona television. Several of the photos in the exhibit show buildings in a state ofdeterioration, including the Jesse Lee Home in Seward, a WhiteAlice site near Nome and a boarded up public housing project inSiberia. They point to one of the major themes in the show, thedamage done to nature by humans.
Multi-media installations fromLittle Diomede and Shaktoolik express concern with the implicationsof global warming, while a lovely riposte is a mesmerizingseven-minute loop of video of snow falling in Rome, the luxuriousflakes floating past palm trees and a Mediterranean villa. Many of the items are intriguing simply for their technique. ChrisJordan's large image of Mount McKinley is composed of 24,000repetitions of the logo from GMC's Yukon Denali in various shades,some reading "Denali," others reading "Denial."Tania Kitchell's installation "Occupy" is a field ofintroduced and invasive plants found in the Arctic, replicated inABS plastic by means of a computer program. Another large component in the show is unposed, untweakedphotographs framing visions that seem surreal, like Brian Adams'sunny shot of a lonesome basketball hoop in the snow at Shishmaref.Or Ryan Romer's picture of a barber chair under a fish rack. OrOlaf Otto Becker's panorama of the Greenland ice cap dotted withSwiss researchers in light jackets and short sleeves takingsnapshots like a flock of tourists.
Among the more curious posed photos are "The MatanuskaProject," a series by Amy Johnson. They follow a white-facedmodel in a gaudy dress onto the glacier. The dress is displayednext to the photos, a lively juxtaposition of image and real item. Honest observers "Instead of merely creating awe-inspiring views, contemporarywork questions the very concept of the landscape," Deckerwrites. Artists experiment in an attempt to represent the sensoryexperience of an environment or analyze the cultural ramificationsof the land.
Their "value judgements are ethical, rather thanaesthetic." So far, so good. Lisa Gray's caricatures of women of the North,real and imagined, emphasize the human state with almost noreference to either the built or natural landscapes. The photographof a sign made by Kevin Schmidt and set adrift on the Arctic ice ispeppered with prophetic warnings drawn straight from the biblicalBook of Revelation. Several pieces of "True North" act asbillboards for the artist's point of view about society orpolitics.
This art is not passive or detached in the sense of the oldlandscapes, Decker says. "It suggests activism, notobservation; science, not romanticism." Yet science is nothing if not observant, and the "RomanticNorth" exhibit shows that the landscape artists of the pastwere keen observers, even if they recorded their observations inpainterly styles familiar to their contemporaries. SydneyLaurence's 1912 painting of Seldovia or his 1917 depiction of asunset over Cook Inlet are sufficiently detailed that one couldlikely find the spot at which he made his initial sketches.Likewise Frederick Dellenbaugh's painting of the mountains on thesouth side of Kachemak Bay done in 1899. Rusty Heurlin's colors -- the alpenglow on Mount Hayes, the yellowleaves of Interior birch in autumn -- are honest captures of thesame colors that continue to so excite Alaskans who see them,colors that stimulate an emotional reaction that one is unable tocommunicate to those who have not experienced them. The true North can be, in truth, a very stunning place, a placewhere the scope and beauty of the land can humble and delight theheart in ways that a constructed environment can never quiteduplicate.
Perhaps the older generation understood this better than ispossible now, when rapid communication, travel and transportationmakes it possible to buy a banana in Barrow in January. WhetherAlaska's "old masters" drank in the country as an"uplifting, moral, spiritual" experience -- as thecatalogue states -- or perceived it as the "direct sensoryexperience" attributed to the "True North" artistsis a matter of hypotheses. And associating their "calm"or "passive" paintings of that beauty with the romanticmovement, originally criticized for its heated emotion, may not bequiet accurate. What seems likely is that Laurence, Eustace Ziegler, TheodoreLambert and many of the other "romantic" landscapepainters knew the north in a visceral way that most modern artistsdo not, perhaps cannot. They were, of necessity, closer to theelements than we are now.
Human intrusions were novel necessities,but not out of place. When Laurence put a canvas wall tent withstovepipe into one of his landscapes, or Lambert made a cozy cabinthe focus of a painting, they were not romanticizing; they werefaithfully showing their world as they knew it. Types of truth Perhaps the most romantic of all Alaska landscape artists has ashow of his own on the fourth floor. Bradford Washburn was aphotographer rather than a painter, but his crystal-clearblack-and-whites of Denali and other scenic spots falls in linewith the aesthetic of the "Romantic North" canvases. Thegrandeur of the land is his only subject; people are incidental.
Ina rare shot that includes humans, he refers to them as"Lilliputians." It's worth noting that, while Washburn is remembered today as agreat photographer, explorer and mountaineer, in his life his mainfame was as a master cartographer. Maps are among the mostscientific of art forms. Each line and notation means one specificthing, like a chemical formula. If you follow a well-made map youwill encounter the same detail until there has been a geographicshift, perhaps millions of years in the future. What we draw from these three exhibits is that there are two kindsof artistic truth (at least).
One is the correlation, as accurateas possible, between the real object or event and the record of it.The other is the intellectual link between reality and what onethinks of it -- what some call "a type of truth." A good example in "True North" is Sarah Anne Johnson'smanipulated photos. Her picture of a towering black box on thetundra is being used to promote the show. Other images areeye-catching blends of real models with dolls of those individualsthat Johnson has made. They have a bewildering aura of fantasy. Another example can be found in the museum atrium, part of thesummer show about Mount McKinley, "The High One." Thatexhibit is mostly about science and history, but it includes avideo of the Athabascan story about the origins of Denali, recitedby Patrica Wade of Chickaloon and illustrated by her son DimiMacheras.
The definition of a legend is that it is a past eventthat can neither be proved nor disproved. It is recounted for thebroad lessons it conveys. It too is a "type of truth." All art is some form of construct. People are not dolls and MountMcKinley does not exist in two dimensions, either in a Lambertpainting or a Washburn map. A drawing of a pipe is not a pipe.Works of art are always analogs for something outside themselves --a place, a community, an event, the artist's thoughts -- even whenthey purport to be about nothing except themselves.
Which brings us to whether a piece of art works aesthetically ornot. (In the case of "Cloud," it didn't even workmechanically. The pumps attached to Water Bottle Racks bottles, intended toraise or lower the helium-filled sack, were either blocked orbroken during my three visits.) Few pieces in "True North" would be called ingratiating.Sonya Kelliher-Combs' assemblage of 76 black and white polymerstrips suspended over canning jars by pins and lined up around acorner from the rest of the exhibit is an exception. So are theelegant but straight-forward photos of landscapes or caribou inmigration by New Yorker Subhankar Banejerie. But the overall ambiance of the show is power, not grace.
The majorthemes (global warming, etc.) are shouted, not sung. Some viewers -- maybe all -- will find something bewildering in"True North." Still, take time to seek out the details. You may view the Washburn photos and "Romantic North"with a sense of awe. But you will leave "True North" withyour mind abuzz. "TRUE NORTH" will be on display through Sept.
9 at theAnchorage Museum, 625 C St. " THE ROMANTIC NORTH" will be on display at the museum throughApril 30, 2013. Other examples of "classic" Alaskalandscape paintings can be found in the main museum collections onpermanent display. "BRADFORD WASHBURN: GLORIES OF THE GREATLAND" will be ondisplay at the museum through Sept. 2.
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