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Visual Arts :: Massage Art A new exhibit at Boston's MFA features American art from the '60s to the present. "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. by Mary Sherman Boston, MA - August 12, 2002 - Strolling through this exhibit, which covers art from the '60s to the present, is an eerie trip down memory lane. Looking at Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon style send-ups and Andy Warhol's silk-screens of Marilyn and Elvis, examining Ed Ruscha's seminal paintings of words and Jean-Michel Basquiat's graffiti-inspired canvases, you experience a landscape of radical change, one in which America loses its status as the center of the art world.
The works dramatize the demise of the notion of the Romantic genius. It's an alarming story -- like everything else in our culture, high art becomes just another commodity, another item on the cultural supermarket shelf. By the time you reach the last gallery, which is dedicated to Jeff Koons, it is clear artists have embraced a slick capitalist makeover: they are market-conscious and consumer-savvy. Marshall McLuhan's phrase, "The Medium is the Massage," sums up the reigning aesthetic's intellectual credo. Koons, the most controversial artist in the show, and one of the best represented, perfectly fits that sales bill. Starring in his own work, making front-page news with his grand-scale porcelains of such popular figures as Michael Jackson, Koons, like the pioneer in hawking artistic wares to the masses, Warhol, is a PR genius who has transformed himself into a brand name. Koons represents our time, adeptly intuiting and then catering to his audiences' fleeting wants and simple desires. For instance, there can be no more likable sculpture than his "Balloon Dog." Standing 10 feet high, painted shiny blue, and beautifully crafted out of stainless steel, the piece is a tour-de-force of fabrication know-how and shrewd psychological insight into our collective likes.
As John Baldessari's ironic painting, "Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell," would have it: "Subject matter is important." And Koons wasted no time figuring out what the next cuddly item on the wish list should be: "Images of puppies, the more playful the better." The MFA saw this as a great marketing opportunity, and capitalized on Koons' crowd-pleasing piece with a celebration of dogs on July 31, 2002. Supposedly inspired by the sculpture, the MFA invited dogs to its front lawn, where its director, Malcolm Rogers, awarded prices for such things as "the most creative pet trick." The Broad collections include over 700 art works, so the MFA exhibit could have taken any number of different directions and thematic permutations. The selection presented here is probably the most efficient illustration of how the art world's vaunted image of itself as a cultural "outsider" has been wholly co-opted by marketing values. The current curator at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, Jessica Morgan, presented a smaller, but far edgier, conceptual exhibition culled from the collection nearly a decade ago at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, while she was an intern there.
The MFA's sprawling collection begins in the Gund Gallery, with two early flag paintings by Jasper Johns, which alone, make a visit to the show worthwhile. They are rarely exhibited, especially in Boston, where Modernism is often avoided like the plague. The paintings are primarily known through reproductions, which do not prepare you for the lusciousness of Johns' rich surfaces. The artist breathes new life into one of the most ancient painting techniques - encaustic, creating canvases that combine illusionism with literal fact. The emblematic work, "Flag," forces the viewer to see the work both as a painting and a representation of a flag. Over the years however, Johns retreated from this dense, virtuoso handling of paint to a more conceptual, hermetic, collagist approach to symbolism and art historical references. Johns' works hang next to Cy Twombly's epic paintings of graffiti-like marks, which were influenced by Rome's ancient walls, with their multiple layers of markings, a palimpsest of history, signs, and modern day scrawls. What is great about this show, as well as the Broad collections in general, is that the featured artists are collected in depth, so that one can see how creative spirits like Johns and Twombly matured.
In the '80s, the time period the show focuses most on, a certain restlessness is afoot, in both the art world and the world at large. A healthy skepticism sets in. The heroic myth of painting is quickly undercut by the popular media's democratization of imagery. Artists were not immune to this evolution in cultural taste making. After all, many of them, such as Lichtenstein and Warhol, began their careers as commercial artists: they swiftly realized the possibilities of incorporating that profession's eye-catching tactics and camp appeal into their contemporary paintings. Lichtenstein brilliantly manipulated a comic book style as early as 1960s, translating masterpieces by Mondrian and Picasso into pop-a-delic look-alike versions. What's amazing about these copies is not so much their cleverness, but their cool and confident brushwork. The green swipe in "Two Paintings: Radiator and Folded Sheets" could only come from an artist at ease with his materials, confident in his gift for pulling off outrageous gestures with aplomb.
During the '80s, art was also losing its status as a unique object and aesthetic experience. The sense of loss resulted in a pervasive atmosphere of ennui. Eric Fischl's paintings of upper-class suburbia, such as the images in "Haircut," latch onto a nasty undertone beneath a bored and affluent lifestyle. As Cindy Sherman makes clear in her series of self-portraits, which depict her as everyone but herself, modern life is increasingly becoming a parade of recognizable poses. Or, in the case of David Salle's layered paintings, life has become a pastiche, a self-conscious parody of the blight of visual overload. With these works, the art of the '80s reached its alienated heights. The economy boomed, and people enjoyed the high life. Thus, it's no surprise that, when the Germans arrived on the American scene, their paintings tackling grand historical subjects, including the Holocaust, artists, critics, and consumers took notice. The art world found something "real" to believe in, something with substance to chew on. The grand, mural-sized paintings by Anselm Kiefer, in particular, with their rich surfaces and even richer intellectual import, mark a decided shift in the period (as well as the tone of the show). The effect, however, proved to be short-lived. The market crash of the early '90s produced a more socially conscious art, which is not represented in this exhibit. Aside from Baldessari, Ruscha, and Charles Ray's frighteningly large-scale corporate woman and his earlier photographic stabs at Minimalist art, the exhibit does not include other works from the '60s Minimalism and Conceptualism movements. The same is true for installation and video art -- the art most clearly associated with the turn of this century. In fact, as Eli Broad notes in the MFA catalog, "Video is harder for me. It's difficult to show it. I'm not sure that I want to live with those sort of things."
Still, the figurative and narrative strengths of this show make it a perfect match for the MFA and Boston, which are uncomfortable with Abstraction. The exhibit comes off as an easily accessible take on late 20th century art, without the thorny challenges posed by a stronger Modernist collection, more major Minimalist pieces, and a solid presentation of Abstract Expressionism. Baldessari's painting aptly points out that, to most people, "Subject Matter Is Important." To many, it might as well be everything. The "Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections" show will be on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA, through October 20, 2002. For ticket information, operation hours and other related information, please visit MFA's website.
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