Arts

Ari Post • November 6, 2012

Words civilize us. They separate us fair-haired and dexterous animals of intellect from the world of beasts. A baby’s first word is perhaps the first great milestone of their life because words denote the very wonder and intelligence of humankind.

Words can also make us stupid and unbearable.

We often use our words to equivocate, deceive and inflict pain. With them we can distort reality, underscore prejudice, betray one another, and lie to ourselves.

This sort of linguistic relativity—the intention versus perception of our words—is a chance we take every time we open our mouths or put pen to paper. We try to deliver out into the world our thoughts and imaginings, in essence our very selves, and this is perhaps where words seem to falter. Words fail us ¬– or we fail our words – when they do not do justice to what we feel inside.

In her current installation at the Hirshhorn Museum, Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) takes this chance on a monumental scale, releasing her words to form a lexical portrait of our country. With phrases, questions and verbal symbols cramming the walls and floors of the gallery, “Barbara Kruger:

Belief+Doubt” paints a contemporary silhouette of a thoughtful but frustrated American society.
By the 1980s, Kruger was at the forefront of artists who brought photographic illustration and mass media techniques into the mainstream. Pulling from her experience as a magazine photo editor and designer, she reproduced large-scale photomontages from old books and magazines emblazoned with banners of her own text, turning conceptual art into a vibrant public discourse. For instance, across a Rockwellian image of a grade-school girl sweetly poking the curled bicep of her young friend (triggering an image of innocence, sentimentality and the romantic heroism of the 1950s), a bold red banner reads, “We don’t need another hero.”

Since the 1990s, Kruger has focused increasingly on creating environments that immerse the viewer in language. She has employed sound and video projection, orchestrated landscapes of words and, as in this current installation, enclosed her viewers in entire rooms wrapped in text.

However, this installation does not just stand out for its satirical witticism. In “Belief+Doubt” Kruger moves beyond pointing at the vagaries of our social mores in an effort to tackle them head-on.
Descending the escalator to the Hirshhorn’s basement galleries, the trim beneath the ground-floor banisters has written on it four questions. “Whose body?” “Whose beliefs?” “Whose power?” “Whose values?

This is the primer for the sociopolitical labyrinth you are about to enter.

The front wall of the installation, covered from corner to corner in white letters that stretch from floor to ceiling, reads, “Belief + Doubt = Sanity.”

With three words, Kruger offers a hopeful equation that encapsulates our country’s current state of erratic political discord. Though we are at polarizing odds, we all have our tenets and our reservations—and these are often things we struggle to put into words.

Taking up the walls and floors of the large room, including the adjoining gift shop and undersides of the escalators, Kruger’s words become an accumulation of social taboos, moral inevitabilities and political ponderings. “Believe anything. Forget everything. Look for the moment when pride becomes contempt. You want it. You buy it. You forget it.”

The words point to bigger questions beyond themselves. “Who prays loudest? Who is free to choose?”
There aren’t any answers, and maybe these words form the wrong questions, but she is unafraid to ask them. This project is wildly sincere and yet, in a way, unsettlingly ambivalent. These cultural ellipses are bracingly direct, but without the usual soapbox posturing we are inured to witnessing from the political milieu. I think Kruger just wants us to think, to confront our angels and demons in ourselves and in each other, honestly and simply.

“Barbara Kruger: Belief+Doubt” is on view through 2014. For more information visit www.Hirshhorn.si.edu.

Gary Tischler •

Washington is a town of monuments. It is also a town of museums.

We have museums of art, history, modern art, science and natural history, a Holocaust museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and the soon-to-be Museum of African American History and Culture.

Yet, there is still no museum that honors the achievements of American women or role of women in American history.

That cause for women came a little closer to reality recently when Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced a bill to create a federal commission to determine the feasibility of constructing a National Women’s History Museum in Washington. Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, is introducing a companion bill in the Senate.

For the National Women’s History Museum organization and its president and CEO Joan Wages, the news brings them one step closer to making the dream of a National Women’s History Museum a reality. “We are thrilled to have this legislation introduced by such distinguished national leaders as Sen. Collins, Rep. Maloney and Del. Norton and ten prominent senators as co-sponsors,” Wages said. “The establishment of a commission would be a giant step forward to help obtain an all-important site for the National Women’s History Museum on or close to the National Mall—the place where our nation shows what it honors.”

Aside from the Women In Military Service For America Memorial at Arlington Cemetery, there is no institution in the capital region which is solely dedicated to honoring women’s role in American history.

Bills to create a National Women’s History Museum have been passed in the Senate and in the House in various versions, but no bill has ever established a commission.

The other co-sponsors of the Senate bill include Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Sen Mary Landrieu, D-La., Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Sen. Amy Klobucher, D-Minn., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

Gary Tischler • August 10, 2012

We talk a lot these days about the effect of technology–sweeping, growing like mushrooms, constantly changing every nano-second–of our lives.

We talk about smart phones, iPhones, iPads, Kindles, texting, tweets, blogs and e-mails (already considered a dated technology). We talk about aps, wi-fi and the net.

We still talk about video games, as in “All they ever do is play video games.” That means these days Nintendo, XBox as well as games that resemble movies and games that become movies. Rarely, however, do we talk about the art of video games.

Now, though, you can talk about the art of video games. At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, there’s a popular (and big, big, big) exhibition called “The Art of the Video Game.” Oddly enough, it focuses not only on the art of the video game but — just as important — on the history of video games across five eras and 40 years of video game development. It focuses on graphics, technology and storytelling by way of examining 20 gaming systems that range from the Atari VCS to the Play Station 2, which continues to wreak havoc with the budgets of the parents of budding gamers all over the United States.

“Video games are a prevalent and increasingly expressive medium within modern society,” said Chris Melissinos, the former chief gaming officer of Sun Microsystems and founder of Past Pixels, who is the guest curator for the exhibition. “In the 40 years since the introduction of the first home video game, the field has attracted exceptional artistic talent. Video games, which include classic components of art, offer designers a previously unprecedented method of communicating with and engaging audiences by including a new element. The player who completes the vivid, experiential art form by personally interacting with the game elements.”

There are 80 video games in the exhibition, which were selected with the help of a popular vote. The games are represented by way of images, video footage and interviews with game developers, graphic artists, backed up by actual game consoles and large screen shots from current and past video games. If that sounds a little bit dry, the reality is far from dry or academic.

You may, at first, not be able to concentrate on getting your mind around the thematic “Art of the Video Game.” Try “Sounds of the Video Game,” bells and whistles of the video game, or the sheer presence of so many video games in one place, making that area set apart for the exhibition, a giant arcade.

Best of all for gamers of all ages, you can even play video games: five of them, to be exact, from each key era in the history of video games. For this writer (and video game luddite), it doesn’t go back far enough, given that I used to play pinball machines at a time when whatever remaining arcades survived were being taken over by, you guessed it, video games like Pac Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong before the revolutionary arrival of Super Mario Brothers. We remember playing Pong, a kind of electronic ping pong game which could be played by two people at a bar table, which was as slow as molasses, perfect for people who were drinking and playing at the same time.

When you walk into this exhibition, you might feel as if you’re being ambushed. It’s alive. Located near the entrance are the five playable games, where at an early visit to the exhibition back in April (it runs through September 30), we watched a father and son–two generations of gamers–take turns at Pac Man, where ravenous heads-with-toothy mouths–ate their way through mazes–or not. “I thought dad did pretty well,” the son said. “Naw, I was a lot quicker back in the day.” Pac Man, from 1981, was a game impossible to forget probably because of its figures and their voracious appetites, which would eventually expand to include a Pac Woman.

As art goes, it was simple, like an early Disney cartoon or a Japanese comic book. The other four games which visitors can play all advance the “art” of the video game. You look at Super Mario Brothers, which was actually made into a movie with their villains and heroes and bouncing characters, and the plot line and atmospherics of The Secret of Monkey Islands, and later the much more intricate Myst and Flower. You begin to see the creation of stories with sequels, increasingly difficult environments to navigate, requirements for imagination, the ability to think ahead and faster and faster reaction times.

If you go through the exhibition, with all its noises and high-spirited colors, the energy created by older visitors (nostalgia) and younger visitors (excitement along with a nerdy feel for gaming esoterica), you get a good sense of the boundless potential for the world of video games. More than that, you get a hint of how games are connected to everything else that’s going on inside smart phones, on computer screens, in the wired, miniaturized, instantaneous world we live in, as well as its explosive nature.

Thousands of gamers attended back in March when the exhibition held a three-day, “GameFest,” with talks, discussions, open game playing, music and movies. Attendance remains high: it’s after all about the gamer generation, triumphant and validated.
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Gary Tischler •

Pop quiz: See if any of these persons, events, battles and none such ring a bell.

Isaac Brock, Tenskewatawa (The Prophet), Red Jacket, Fort Erie, Charles-Michel d’Irumberry de Salaberry, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, James Lawrence, Thomas Macdonough, General Robert Ross, General Edward Pakenham, the Hartford convention or Leap No Leap, Lord Castleragh, the “Wellington of the Indians,” the Bayonne Decree, the Non-Intercourse Act (not what you might think), Spencer Perceval, the Battle of Beaver Dams, the Battle of Queenston Heights, the River Raisin Massacre, Battle of Sacketts Harbor, Provo Wallis, Lewiston and Youngstown and Manchester, Buffalo and Black Rock and the USS President.

No bells? You’re not alone, I’m embarrassed to say.

How about these?

The Battle of New Orleans (in addition to the Johnny Horton song), Andrew Jackson, Tecumseh, Oliver Hazard Perry, Stephen Decatur, the Battle of Lake Erie (“We have met the enemy, and he is ours” . . . “Don’t Give Up the Ship”), the Treaty of Ghent, Charlton Heston, James Madison, Dolley Madison and her red dress, the Burning of Washington, John Quincy Adams, Francis Scott Key (in addition to the park in Georgetown), “What so proudly we hail,” the Star-Spangled Banner, Fort McHenry.

Feel better now? A little iffy on the Treaty of Ghent? And what’s Charlton Heston doing here? (He played Andrew Jackson at least twice in the movies – “The President’s Lady” with Susan Hayward, playing his beloved wife Rachel, and in “The Buccaneer,” a Cecil B. DeMille movie which was more about the rascally pirate, Jean LaFitte (Yul Brynner), who helped Andy defeat the British at the aforementioned Battle of New Orleans.

Sometimes, we imagine we were there when the British occupied and burned Washington (at least most of the few government buildings and the White House as well as the offices of a newspaper which had been unkind to the British commanding officer). But the British also burned the towns Lewiston, Youngstown, Manchester, Buffalo and Black Rock — arsons which are less famous that our hometown blaze.

All of these people, events, decrees, happenings and pieces of history can be found in one form or another in “1812: A Nation Emerges,” the grand exhibition which includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, artifacts (the red dress, a flag or two, decrees and proclamations, a compact and comprehensive catalogue, videos, — including one narrated by the Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey — and documents, now at the National Portrait Gallery through Jan. 27.

On the occasion of just celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812, which went on until 1815, blazing on oceans and lakes, the lower parts of Canada, and as far away as New Orleans, the NPG has come up with a vibrant exhibition that should excite the imagination of viewers with its depth, breadth and sweep, with its great art (yes, there is lots of it) and with a new — or renewed — sense of the young, bursting and eager American soul of the times.

Having said all that — forget about all those obscure facts as well as the celebrated ones. It’s just a way to get you into this story and get you to go and make you feel either very smart or not so smart. Go into this with a pure heart and sharp eye. It will feel like being in a De Mille epic just to be there, although one with smarts, intelligence, a point of view and a focus.

Note the subhead, “A Nation Emerges.” The War of 1812 is always confusing in its highlights — there’s big set pieces, like the burning of Washington, Francis Scott Key inspired to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry, the post-peace-treaty victory by Jackson over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, the naval heroes at their finest — Decatur and Perry, as well as the above named Johnson who died bravely on his ship, the Chesapeake, and left us his immortal words, “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”

But the start of the war — in which President James Madison saw British restraints on U.S. commerce and shipping as a cause to start the war — are less noted. The war aims of the U.S. — including an invasion of Canada which was essentially a debacle, are less clear, meanwhile. The war in U.S. history is seen essentially as a kind of draw, and to the British, as a footnote, a theater of small importance. Neither Wellington nor C.S. Forester’s fictional hero Horatio Hornblower fought here, being busy fighting Napoleon. To the Canadians, it has some significant iconic value, but Canada has not had as many wars to choose from as their cousin to the South.

What you feel in the many rooms of the exhibition is a kind of vivid energy. The War of 1812 can be felt here as a kind of second wind birth of the nation — the founders played significant roles, but the results fed into a restlessness that brought America westward: it was a bloody invitation to expansion, imagination, and invention. All this can be seen in the exhibition — beginning with a rather bucolic painting by George Beck depicting Georgetown and the budding City of Washington in 1795.

The war itself is loud — you can almost smell the gunpowder from frigate broadsides, feel the billowing sails of the USS Constitution, hear the roar of cannons on ships and the screams of men in battle on land and sea. “Those cannons make a lot more noise than even The Who,” a commentator says to Daltrey who narrates a video on the battles on Lake Erie.

The War of 1812 resulted in heroes, myths and policies, such as Jackson and John Quincy Adams who helped negotiate the treaty at Ghent. The Native Americans in the eastern United States suffered badly in the conflict, no matter which side they took — including U.S. allies who ended up on Jackson’s “Trail of Tears.”

There were plenty of heroes and sad stories to go around: Tecumseh, called by one observer “the Wellington of the Indian tribes,” fell in battle, as did the beloved British generals Robert Ross near Baltimore and Edward Pakenham (Wellington’s brother-in-law) at New Orleans, and, even in the end Decatur, killed in a duel because of, but years after, the war. We learn, too, that Herman Melville was a sailor in the war and that Key became a noted prosecutor.

We learn again that Gilbert Stuart was a genius, perhaps the most brilliant and evocative portrait painter of his time, if you discount Gainsborough from an earlier time. The famed painter of Washington was also a noted painter of the heroes and generals of the war, and you can always tell when it’s a Stuart: the faces take on energy, passion and hyper-character, and there’s music in their cheeks and eyes, martial or otherwise. His portraits of fallen naval heroes James Lawrence and Thomas McDonough, of Decatur and Dolley (Madison) are almost precursors to the not-so-distant impressionists. Only Rembrandt Peale can rival him in America.

The exhibition is, in the end, about history, what you know and what you don’t know. It echoes loudly in our own sense of American self even if, like this writer, you’re an immigrant. It’s a portrait of an America about to take its place in the world after a war, an America rich in imagination and energy, warts and all. ?

“1812: A Nation Emerges” is on view at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery — www.npc.si.edu — through Jan. 27, 2013. [gallery ids="100875,127384,127381" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • July 24, 2012

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, (its final and only venue outside of Europe ) will be on view at the National Gallery of Art from May 6 through August 12.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape traces the arc of Miró’s career while drawing out his political and cultural commitments. The exhibition presents these themes through three principal periods: Miró’s early work, rooted in the Catalan countryside, and then transformed under the influence of the surrealists in the 1920s; his artistic response to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), the fall of France, and life under fascist rule; and the artist’s late work just before the demise of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in 1975. [gallery ids="102446,121173" nav="thumbs"]

Mary Bird • May 17, 2012

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Smithsonian Craft Show Celebrating the Creative Spirit of America which will take place April 19 through 22, with a preview benefit on April18 at the National Building Museum. First Lady Michelle Obama has agreed to be the honorary chair of what is widely regarded as the country’s most prestigious juried show and sale of fine American craft.

On April 19, Michel Monroe, former curator-in-charge of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, will present an illustrated lecture, “The White House Collection of American Crafts,” featuring the collection of contemporary American crafts he curated for the Clintons in the White House. On Sunday, “The Craftful Table,” a panel discussion with leading designers on creating a table that is a feast for the senses will be followed by White House florist Laura Dowling’s demonstration of gracing the table with flowers.

One-of-a-kind or limited edition works in 12 different media—from furniture and ceramics to glass and wearable art—will showcase the work of 121 distinguished craft artists, 44 new to the show this year. In addition, students from the Savannah College of Art and Design will present their innovative work in a special exhibition of emerging artists.

The Craft Show is even going green. This is the first year of a “Repurposed Materials” award. Artists have been asked to include in their artist statements the use of repurposed materials, including found objects given new uses and meanings.

An online auction, running April 11 through 25, will feature more than 100 exceptional craft objects generously donated by current and past exhibitors and other talented artists, as well as a limited number of tickets for local attractions and special tours. Visit SmithsonianAuctions.org

Anne-lise Auclair-Jones and Ann Peel are Craft Show co-chairs. Wendy Somerville Wall is president of the Smithsonian Women’s Committee which produces the annual event to support education, outreach and research at the Smithsonian Institution through an annual competitive grants program. More than $9 million has been awarded since 1966.

For additional information, see www.SmithsonianCraftShow.org [gallery ids="100736,121499,121474,121493,121481,121489" nav="thumbs"]

Nico Dodd • May 3, 2012

Tour Like A Local
Are you tired of looking at the same sandstone buildings during your vacation? Bored by innumerable, serious looking statues? This is the nation’s capital, but not everybody works on the hill, or talks about polls or the next election nonstop. We like to do other things, too. Like free concerts? Local dives? Skee ball? If you’re in Washington this summer, look beyond the federal district. Abe will still be here for your next visit.

Fort Reno Summer Concert Series
Mondays during the summer, Fort Reno puts on a series of free concerts featuring local rock groups. All the concerts begin promptly at 7:15 p.m. and end at 9:30 p.m. The atmosphere is very casual. Concertgoers sit on the grass or dance along. Babies are welcome, alcohol, however, is not.
Visit FortReno.com for this summer’s schedule.

Millenium Stage
The National Opera may be great for some, but it’s not for everybody. The Millenium Stage at the Kennedy Center puts on free concerts every day at 6 p.m. This is a great way to experience KenCen without tying on a tie. Performers come from around the world, so check out the Kennedy Center’s website for the full schedule.
Price: FREE – every day at 6 p.m.

Jazz in the Garden
The National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden hosts weekly jazz concerts every Friday during the summer. A wide range of jazz styles is featured, so there is something new every week. Performances start at 5 p.m. and end at 8:30 p.m. Visit NGA.gov to find this summer’s schedule.
Fridays 5-8:30 p.m.

H Street Country Club
Tour the monuments in a way you never expected. H Street Country Club is the only bar in Washington with an indoor miniature golf course, billiards, shuffleboard, and skee ball. It’s whimsical astro-turf décor will be sure amuse any tourist in a city that can sometimes take itself a little too seriously.

Ben’s Chili Bowl
Can we write a tourism guide without including this D.C. landmark? I don’t think so. Ben’s is the only place in the world you can find the original chili half smoke. Since 1958, the Ali family has served their signature chili dogs to everyone from President Obama to Nicolas Sarkozy. Ben’s is the perfect launch pad to a night out on U Street.

Granville Moore’s
Granville Moore’s is a Gastropub with big Belgian Flavor in the Heart of the H St. Corridor, named after the doctor who used the building as his practice. It is best known for its selection of mussels, frites, and vast beer selection. As impressive as the food is the pub’s cozy, cavernous atmosphere. Great for anybody looking to skip another burger place!
1238 H St. NE
Hours: Mon-Thu, Sun 5 p.m.-12 a.m.; Fri-Sat 5 p.m.-3 a.m.

Jumbo Slice Pizza
Walk down 18th Street in Adams Morgan, and you will likely find a place advertising the “Original” Jumbo Slice. Pick any of them, and prepare yourself. Generally speaking, a jumbo slice will take up 2 paper plates. Brooklyn we’re not, but the novelty of being able to purchase a month’s worth of pizza at once is pretty enticing if you ask me.

Live Like a Tourist
Living in Washington affords one unlimited time to take advantage of the major sites in the city. “Wow, everything is the national this, and the national that,” one friend told me while driving on Pennsylvania Avenue. If you live here, you’ve probably visited all the major monuments on the mall, and maybe a few of the galleries. It can be easy to take so many great resources for granted, though. Cruise through the National Mall on Duck Boat or Segway, or get up close and personal with hundreds of butterflies and other insects at the National Museum of American History. See the Marine Corps Band on the steps of the Capitol Building. See where money’s made! Best of all, most of these things are free. Don’t be the jaded local – if you don’t take time to tour your own city, you’re missing out.

DC Ducks
You’ve seen them on the street. You’ve seen them in the water. Now hurry up and ride one! Originally developed for the military, Duck boats are able to carry passengers around the National Mall and the Potomac River.

Segs in the City
Seeing all the sites in Washington can be hell on your feet. Segs in the City offers many different tours to choose from, like monument tours after dark, and Embassy Row. These tours are a real blast, and are great ways to test ride a Segway scooter.
$31.50 adult, $22.50 child

United States Marine Band
See “The President’s Own” live in Washington! Founded in 1798 by an Act of Congress, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band is America’s oldest continuously active professional musical organization. If you’re into pomp and circumstance, this is right up your alley. The band gives free concerts on Wednesday on the West Terrace of the U.S. Capitol, and Thursday at the Sylvan Theater on the grounds of the Washington Monument.

The Smithsonian Castle
The Smithsonian Castle predates the Civil War to 1855. One of the original landmarks of the National Mall, the castle served as the original Smithsonian museum. Today, it holds the permanent exhibit, America’s Treasure Chest, as well as the final resting place of James Smithson, founder of the Smithsonian Institution.

Butterfly Pavilion at the Museum of Natural History
Have kids who love bugs? The Butterfly Pavilion at the Museum of Natural History has dozens of foreign species of butterflies on live display and demonstrates the evolutionary relationship shared by butterflies and plants. The exhibit closes on September 4, so don’t miss this unique opportunity.
Admission, $6, FREE on Tuesdays

The Textile Museum
The Textile Museum has probably one of the most unique collections of any museum in Washington. Through September 11, the museum’s main exhibit, “Green: The Color And The Cause,” charts the history of the hue’s use, as well as its modern association with environmentalism. People swear by the museum’s gift shop, which carries garments and jewelry as interesting as anything else in the museum.

Hirshhorn Museum
The Smithsonian’s museum for contemporary art. The Museum is featuring four exhibitions this summer. Friday, July 15 and July 22, the gallery is hosting free talks about its exhibit “Fragments in Time and Space.” The Hirshhorn also has its own sculpture garden. Most importantly, The Hirshhorn is the building on the National Mall that most resembles a doughnut.

Newseum
Right on Pennsylvania Avenue, the museum of news has an amazing collection of photography and artifacts covering world events. A visit to the museum is always enlightening. After your visit, you can stop next door at Wolfgang Puck’s The Source for a very classy, very gourmet meal.

Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Ever seen a million dollars? The Bureau of Engraving and Printing is the place to go to see where the Benjamins come from. Learn all about the new 100 dollar bill, and the process by which greenbacks are made.

Ari Post •

Museum exhibitions are not always user-friendly. There is an occasional air of intimidation or coldness about them, as if you need a cultural license in order to appreciate the exhibited work.

Even as a lifelong student of the arts, I sometimes feel like an embarrassed school kid who didn’t do his homework upon entering particularly esoteric exhibits. It’s frustrating. Sometimes, it’s best just to let your mind go and consume art the way a dog eats a bone —ravenously, ecstatically, intuitively, palpably — without reading a dissertation on relational aesthetics or mid-century spatial polarity as interpreted by the German avant-garde. This is not to say we don’t appreciate the analytical endeavors of artistic traditions. Just as every meal should not be a course in molecular gastronomy, we sometimes simply want to eat some good lasagna, see some artwork that we feel with our hearts and walk away satisfied.

The current shows at the Hirshhorn work both ways. “Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space” shines light (literally) on a rich and rarely displayed modern Latin American art movement, and it’s also the most fun you’ll have in a museum this season. Another featured exhibit, “Dark Matters,” is equally satisfying, bringing together works from the museum’s collection that draw upon the associations and implications of darkness, physically, psychologically and otherwise.

“Suprasensorial” presents large-scale installations by five artists who abandoned traditional art in favor of ephemeral and subjective forms based on light, color, motion and space between the 1950s and early 1970s. Until recently, these artists have received little attention in the United States, where audiences are more familiar with light works by such American artists as Dan Flavin (also on display in the Hirshhorn) and Doug Wheeler. “Suprasensorial” shows us how these Latin American artists independently and contemporaneously devised comparable methods and effects.

What immediately jumps out is the difference of warmth between the Latin American and American intention of working with light. The “Suprasensorial” artists’ formal and social motives were nearly one in the same, working to involve the viewer in the experience of their work, whereas their American counterparts were chasing a more polarizing, post-modern agenda whose intentions seem far more erudite and conceptual. By choosing light, color and space as their materials and configuring them in ways that required participation from the viewer, these Latin American artists worked to engage the viewer completely, effecting a significant change in the customary dynamic of looking at art. And it’s awfully enjoyable.

The first major installation in the exhibit, Julio Le Parc’s “Light in Movement,” sets the tone. Walking into an enclosed passageway, a dim spotlight about the strength of an old light bulb shines light against a wall of polished metal squares suspended on threads, flickering light about the room. There is a mirror behind the squares, and you see yourself between and amidst the rippling squares of light as if underwater, momentarily free of burdens and floating within these fabricated fissures of space.

In the next installation, Carlos Cruz-Diez brings you into a world defined by color relationships. Like stepping into a Joseph Albers or Mark Rothko painting, Cruz-Diez explores the ways in which color activates space, expands perception and elicits emotions. Upon entering his room, viewers move through spaces of vibrant blue, magenta and green light, whose hues appear almost tangible against the walls and floors, while the boundaries of their interactions remain tantalizingly elusive like a horizon.

Farther along the lines, you get to lie down and listen to Jimi Hendrix, run through a field of nylon string and gaze up at a white neon pattern that looks like the tread marks of a renegade shooting star. Throughout the exhibit, what is striking is how aware you are of fellow viewers. The experience is effected entirely by those that surround you. Following me was a young mother with her sandy-haired son, no older than three. Watching his eyes light up as he ran between the luminescent room of Cruz-Diez, laughing and jumping as his skin changed between hues of purple and blue, was the highlight of my experience. I left feeling light and inspired, wondering when I could return and whom I wanted to bring with me.

Meanwhile, the “Dark Matters” exhibit, while it may seem like an ominous and joyless endeavor, was a congenial and thought-provoking experience. It never asks us to embrace any great darkness within ourselves — it just shows us its potential. The darkness of a chalkboard, of the human psyche, of racial and social barriers, the depths of the sea, apocrypha, even the style and warmth of darkness, are all enveloped within this exhibit, among with much more. From Frank Stella’s stark geometric canvases, to Thomas Eakins’s photographic anatomy studies, to the bracingly lifelike sculptures of Ron Mueck and the trend-setting “surrogates” of Allan McCollum, there is much to take in, all of it engaging.

The curators at the Hirshhorn has put together a series of exhibits that could draw interest from an infinitely varied audience, an increasingly difficult thing to do in the visual arts these days. For that, if nothing else, we should thank them. They have drawn light from the darkness and brought forth an energy that is often alluded to but rarely displayed. [gallery ids="100593,100594" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler • November 3, 2011

Consider “Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg,” the new photographic exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.

Of course, Ginsberg, the renowned, iconographic, legendary poet laureate of the beat generation and maybe the rock generation that followed, took the photos. Give him credit.

But let’s also give a serious shout-out to Sarah Greenough, the senior curator and head of the department of photography at the National Gallery.

Something about these photos — a mix of snapshots writ large, and later more formal photographs — inspired Greenough. In the end she constructed a work of art out of the 80 photographs on display, a work that’s part biography, part social and literary history and for some viewers, part nostalgic road trip. In an exhibition about poets, full of portraits of poets, she’s managed to come up with a photographic poem very much resembling some of the works of the poets and writers on the wall.

It’s fair to say that the photographs that Ginsberg made aren’t necessarily self-conscious examples of photography as art, and, at least initially, weren’t intended to be. The initial batch of photos were made with a quick-and-easy Kodak, and they allowed the great mad-as-a-fox poet to record a generation of his literary pals, boon companions, rivals, and sometimes lovers who collectively came to be known as the Beats, a word and description that escaped their loose grasp and jumped right out into the American culture at large.

The bulk of the photos are at heart snapshots, quite often made large and dramatic through print, but with all the impetuousness of the moment intact, every one of the mostly men portrayed seem as alive as the moment they were captured, notably Ginsberg himself, not shy about cavorting, doing a naked cartwheel.

The best of the photos are about the Beat arrivals, the moments in time when they became a group, jostling against each other in their travels, exchanging words, sharing their poems, their books, their bodies, their nights and days on the road or on the coasts in New York and San Francisco.

You know who we’re talking about here: Ginsberg, whose masterpiece “Howl” was a spit into the ozone, a regular angry lament against American conformity; Jack Kerouac, the handsome, sullen prince of the road, restless, nervous, who burst on the scene with these words: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up,” the first line of “On the Road”; William Burroughs, the dangerous, lean, mean gun-toting author of “The Naked Lunch”; Neal Cassady, everybody’s favorite daydream and catnip of inspiration.

All of them are here on the wall in a visual flashback to the immediate underbelly of the 1950s, Eisenhower’s decade of normalcy, suburban and small-town morality, a state of the nation which the Beats crashed like escapees from a lunatic asylum. The status quo responded with scorn and fear, but their offspring smelled a whiff of undeniably appealing strange music and noise. They were reflected to some degree in the wild improvisational riffs of Charley Parker, black blues, James Dean and Marlon Brando.

Those photographs from the 1950s are so kinetic — especially in their original snapshot form — that they have a quality that is both holy and holographic: look at Cassidy standing with his girlfriend in front of a Times Square movie marquee, advertising “The Wild One,” “Stranger with a Gun” and “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

These 1950s pictures are a passing parade, and Greenough, in the arrangement of the exhibition and in the descriptive words of her essay in the accompanying catalogue, has set the parade in motion. Fittingly, she quotes Walt Whitman: “Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” Ginsberg used the line as an epigraph for “Howl” in 1956.

At heart, Ginsberg, as well as the others, were poets and prose writers of personal experience and reaction, they were every bit as embracing or reactive as everything in “Leaves of Grass.”

While some of the Beats died young or faded, Ginsberg found his way, like a prophet, into the next generation, where he became a sage to Bob Dylan’s followers. It was then that he re-discovered his pictures like an old aunt in the attic, it was then he protested the war in Vietnam, chanted “ohm” at every turn and gave poetry readings the likes of which no one had heard before — very much like a scruffy, scatological Pan. It was meeting Robert Frank, another roadie of the visual sort, that made him started taking photographs again, although photos that are closer to art, less joyful, but more studied: Dylan, Frank and his son Paul, his dying uncle Abe, the pop artist Larry Rivers, Corso and dangerous photos of Burroughs.

For anyone who’s had any contact with that world in their youth, this is like a whiff of dry, non-medicinal marijuana, none more than the picture of the poets in their mid-youth standing arms linked in front of the City of Lights bookshop in San Francisco, five guys hanging out — including the owner Lawrence (“Coney Island of the Mind”) Ferlinghetti, a poet still railing.
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Gary Tischler • July 26, 2011

These days, we take pictures for granted. They’re in our heads, in our phones, on our computer, in our digital cameras, makeable, and erasable. We live in an ocean of photographic imagery—the world of click and snip. In this environment, it’s hard to tell what’s art and what’s not. The question of art at the dawn of the age of photography, and the decades that marched ahead, was a question that was asked with great passion and answered in infinite ways by several generations of photographers, all of them searching for ways to elevate a technical innovation into the rarefied clouds of high art.

Two current exhibitions, at the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, take up the banner of that debate, how it was conducted, and the results it produced. Both exhibition titles sound like Masters of Fine Arts theses, but don’t be put off by that. If you have any interest in photography and art, photography IN art, and, for that matter, if you have a camera and use it often, you’ll find these exhibitions thought-provoking, imagination-stimulating, debate-instigating, and, with the presence of so many great works of photography, a great pleasure.

The National Gallery of Art exhibition, “The Pre-Raphaelite Lens, British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875,” is, as the title suggests, narrowly focused in time and art. It successfully connects the dots between early photographers, like the remarkable Julia Cameron and Henry Peach Robinson, to the groups of artists encouraged by the English uber-critic and cultural sage, John Ruskin, led by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The latter group was devoted to the art which preceded Raphael, hence the name they adopted. Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites were also keenly interested in the arrival of photography, which they tried to incorporate into their art.

The Pre-Raphaelites constitute a tight group of rebels—albeit very well dressed, crusty, upper class Victorian elite rebels. Ruskin, a Renaissance man of endless expertise, was a kind of titular leader and arbiter of art and culture in England, if not Europe, at mid-century when the effects of photography were beginning to be felt.

Pre-Raphaelites and photographers intersected at so many points that the connections seem almost incestuous. Artists like Rossetti believed that they should paint from and in nature, getting the very effects that photography could produce, and exacting details of landscape and dramatic details of personality, dress and features in portraits. They also loved to create illustrative paintings of scenes from poetry, literature, Shakespeare and legend—something photographers like Cameron also did, surprisingly, to much greater effect.

The Pre-Raphs, in a way, rejected the modern and tried to achieve an intense romanticism, especially in their efforts at portraits. Except for a few paintings—Rossetti’s effects in color and Ruskin’s watercolors—the photographers seem almost always to trump the painters. But then the painters had no one of the stature and brilliance of Cameron in their ranks.

“TruthBeauty: Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945,” at the Phillips Collection, is broader in its reach, wider in its geography, and more varied in the work on the walls. In the exhibition, the debate and comparison between photography and painting continues in the realm of photography as a vehicle for great and fine art.

The photographs in this exhibition have a haunting quality. They seem touched by some sort of mist, and it’s that artful, powerful quality that pervades much of the works of the photographers in “TruthBeauty” at the Phillips. There’s an insistence that a photograph is, can, and should be more than just a photograph—a mirror to reality.

Cameron, who may be a guiding, informing spirit, is represented here. But those photographer-artists who came later: Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, even the modernistic Edward Weston, and the edge-pushing F. Holland Day acknowledge the debt and direction of photography of art. In landscapes and in cityscapes, is there anything more haunting than Steichen’s “Flatiron—Evening”?

Cameron in her portraiture, which seems more like Tolstoyan novels, is more of a painter than the painters. Consider, for instance, Lord Tennyson, the great Victorian of British nationalism and empire, as painted first by George Frederic Watts in somber, beautifully lit fashion. Then look at Cameron’s photo portrait (dubbed “The Dirty Monk”), where you can see some wild, inner restlessness—something of the fanatic in the face. Tennyson, by the way, much preferred “The Dirty Monk.”

Still, nothing quite like Rossetti’s portrait of Jane Morris, the wife of his friend and his paramour, was achieved by the photographers. Here color and details create a miracle of hypnotic beauty.

“TruthBeauty” is rich (120 images) and diverse, a best of the best in many ways, and the Phillips is the last stop on a grand international tour, which was organized by the George Eastman House and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

“TruthBeauty” continues at the Phillips Gallery through January 9. “The Pre-Raphaelite Lens” continues at the National Gallery of Art through January 30. [gallery ids="99565,104793" nav="thumbs"]