Reviews of Stories of Almost Everyone at Hammer Museum
No championship (n.d.), petrified woods from the studio of Carol Bove, 27 × 12 × 10 in. (prototype courtesy Carol Bove, photo by Adam Reich)
LOS ANGELES — The question that nagged at me every bit I walked through the Hammer Museum's exhibition Stories of Almost Everyone was: "What is this stuff?!" If at many shows of contemporary art this question remains a repose hum buzzing in the back of your mind, at this exhibition information technology becomes piercing and urgent.
The show'south self-proclaimed aim is to examine "the relationships between material objects and the stories nosotros tell most them." The first sentence of the exhibition'southward introductory text informs you upfront that it "privileges the narratives that accompany objects." At other exhibitions, one turns to didactic texts with a feeling of repose inadequacy to make heads or tails of an inscrutable object, moving towards the wall label like a floundering person swimming to shore. Here, the indispensability and, indeed, the primacy of the verbal supplement pokes you like a stick in the eye, though the show ultimately does more to celebrate than critically examine curatorial arbitration as a crutch for artists and visitors alike.
Curator Aram Moshayedi, together with curatorial assistant Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, gathered an impressive array of objects which are mysterious by virtue of their utter mundaneness — at that place is a broom standing upright in the centre of the gallery, a pair of checky socks strewn casually on the floor, a mail box, a trash bin, and an oversized Christmas ornament dangling from the ceiling. The prove sets out to explore how artists, curators, and institutions become about giving meaning to these reticent readymades, but remains neutral in evaluating the artistic trend on which it puts its finger. Information technology does, however, acknowledge the art'southward inaccessibility in a wryly hilarious "promotional" video made with actors Will Ferrell and Joel McHale. Mayhap Ferrell'due south argument, "I'm warming upwards to information technology, just ultimately, no!", would have been a more apt championship for the show.
Stories of About Everyone, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (photo past Joshua White)
The curators position the works, all made in the final 10 years, every bit descendants of "conceptual and post-conceptual" practices, which oft used text to turn otherwise obscure objects into commentaries or polemics on a variety of problems. At the Hammer, I was struck by the caste to which so much postal service-post-conceptual fine art has become a reductio ad absurdum of conceptualism's original impulse, with contemporary artists one-upping each other in how much they tin can negate any attempt at communication with the viewer and pass on the inconvenient responsibleness of generating some coherent significant to the curators.
Conceptualism, as practiced in the post-war period, set before itself the job of making the invisible visible, of demystifying art as a process and a product of social relations. One might think of the direct connexion of art to economics and politics, as explored past Hans Haacke; the want to make their own artistic process transparent, as explored by John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha; or how discourse inevitably shapes our perception of visual art, as explored by Joseph Kossuth or Lawrence Weiner, to give merely a handful of canonical examples. Today, the goal seems to be to adopt conceptualism's formal language (a deeply ironic plow of events) in order to plow flotsam picked from a vast sea of material culture into vague gesturing at cultural theory or obscure references to "research." Artists will allude to earlier radical gestures to legitimize this enterprise. In his "printed paradigm" (n.d.), Darren Bader prints equally his own work 1 of Louise Lawler'due south graphic "tracings" of her before photographs. Haris Epaminonda's framed empty page, "Untitled #0/four p/1000 (V)" (2012), evokes Robert Rauschenberg'south 1953 "Erased de Kooning Drawing." The problem here is non that the concerns the artists enhance aren't new — reflections on the crunch of originality should hardly be expected to exist original. But if the work seeks to betrayal the language games that make "art" possible, information technology should be clear in its own right.
Stories of About Everyone, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (photograph by Joshua White)
The two most compelling pieces in the prove practise convey their "story" through the materials of the works themselves. Jill Magid's "The Proposal" (2016) combines two legal documents with a love letter of sorts and a diamond ring whose stone was made out of the ashes of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán. Together these items shed lite on the gray zone in which one individual's (in this example, the wealthy Swiss architectural historian Federica Zanco'southward) legal claims to tangible belongings (the Barragán archive) clash with the ethical claims of others (the people of Mexico, scholars, and Jill Magid herself) to intangible cultural heritage.
By contrast, Tino Sehgal's "Selling Out" (2002) has no paper trail at all — not even a wall characterization. Instead, the artist instructs the museum to hire dancers who perform a total striptease for visitors, speak the work's tombstone info, and then get dressed again. The resulting encounters are, to be sure, highly open-ended. Only the intense experience of the risqué, unexpected situation in the gallery guarantees that whatever emotions the viewer feels — from bemusement to arousal, discomfort, or outrage — are strong enough to arm-twist reflection on the relationship between stripping and art.
Stories of About Anybody, installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (photo by Joshua White)
Other works that stand out are those that insinuate to histories of colonialism and global inequality. Works in this group borrow urgency from stories embedded in capital "H" History where a lot is really at stake. The museum'south second, more earnest promotional video focuses on 1 such piece of work, Cian Dayrit'southward "Tiis Ganda, Kutis Amerika" (2017). Yet these works also often relegate their "stories" to dry out curatorial lingo and experience like missed opportunities, or, worse, exploitation of the trauma of others.
Antonio Vega Macotela'southward "Equivalence of Silver" (2011) is a prime number example. A small, smooth, unremarkable nugget of silver sits on a hooded plinth. This lump is meant as a stand-in for a grand and tragic narrative, perhaps an keepsake of commercialism itself. The amount of pure argent used to cast information technology, the wall label tells us, is what a Bolivian miner in Potosi extracts in one day. The nugget is too equivalent in volume to the rolled-upwards coca leaves that the miner will chew in a twenty-four hours to become through the grueling and dangerous piece of work. This nugget, then, is the congealed toil of an wearied human being who sells his time and health — likely at poverty wages — to produce a paltry corporeality of a putatively precious metal.
Fayçal Baghriche, "The clock" (2017), vintage clock, motor, 19 11/xvi × 7 7/8 × iii 15/16 in. (image courtesy the artist and Galerie Jérome Poggi)
A generous estimation might say that this slice urges u.s.a. to pay attention to the of import stories that surround the states but oftentimes remain invisible in daily life. Nevertheless the compelling story the piece attempts to narrate remains strangely separate from the mute object that in the white cube looks like a misplaced geological curiosity.
Whatever the artists' intentions, the curators' approach to the evidence accentuates, rather than mitigates, such muteness through dry out and minimally informative texts, a misguided committee of a short story in lieu of an audio guide, and a lack of whatever endeavor to reconstruct the original context of the works' creation and presentation.
The exhibition, we are told, "questions whether objects can reliably narrate their ain stories and histories." The answer to this question has long been, for art historians, a resounding no — objects are entangled in vast networks of stories and histories that no single object tin can narrate reliably or exhaustively. In this day and age, an effort to demystify the "aura" of the democratic fine art object is an exercise in battering down an open door. That said, there is enough of contemporary art that eloquently conveys the stories and histories that led to its creation. Just those works are not, mostly, found in Stories of About Everyone. Instead, the testify raises an important question: Why practise so many artists and curators no longer intendance about actually engaging audiences with stories they merely nominally acknowledge?
Stories of Well-nigh Everyonecontinues at the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles) through May vi.
Source: https://hyperallergic.com/440862/stories-of-almost-everyone-hammer-museum/
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