Hiding, Seeking, and Culture Warring

If you came across the recent reports on visual art in the news this past December, you may have considered checking the year on your calendar. Tales of the current exhibition—Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture—at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC revived memories of Jesse Helms and the culture wars of the late 1980s. Whenever sexuality and religion cross paths there is bound to be some commotion concerning national (aka: taxpayer) support of artists and art institutions. As was the case in the 1980s with Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, and again in the 1990s with Chris Ofili and Damien Hirst, the yarn spun for the public was not quite a clear picture of the artwork actually displayed.

The National Portrait Gallery did learn something from the mistakes of another DC museum—the Corcoran. The Portrait Gallery’s exhibited photographs by Mapplethorpe are clearly far from controversial. Mapplethorpe will forever be linked with his photographs of S&M acts that led to the cancellation of the infamous exhibit at the Corcoran, after an earlier uproar in Cleveland. Though many in the arts continue to cry censorship, one wonders when common sense and prudence were abandoned. Museums may have substantial private funding, but they remain, essentially, public venues. A curator should probably always ask whether or not he or she would want a five year old son, daughter, niece, or nephew to stumble upon a work on a gallery visit. There will remain differences of opinion, but common sense prevails at some level.

The National Portrait Gallery did not simply suffer from a lapse in judgment in the choice of exhibiting the video, A Fire in My Belly, by the late artist David Wojnarowicz, it did not work hard enough, initially, to explain the goal of the exhibition. Hide/Seek is somewhat like the museum version of Brokeback Mountain—it plays the “Gay Portraits” exhibit to Hollywood’s “Gay Cowboy” movie. These may be catchy descriptors, but they are far from accurate when considering the breadth of humanity examined in each. The exhibition is touted as the first major museum show to consider the role of gender difference in the creation of artwork. That tends to get boiled down to a tagline explaining that the exhibition is composed of portraits of and by gay and lesbian individuals. That is not quite the full makeup of the show if one looks into the artists and works included. (check out the video gallery tour)

Museum historian and co-curator David C. Ward explains the goal a bit better—though after the fact—in a YouTube slideshow of several works. He describes how the exhibition was meant to discuss how sexual ambiguity and ambivalence run as a coded thread through American portraiture, allowing personal nuances that transcend gender or sexuality to get to the core issues of personal understanding and identity. Ward claims that the show attempts to go past a very simple and tired concept that art in reference to sexual orientation is only related to sexual acts, and therefore, explicit nudity.

The other curator, Jonathan Katz, however, does the show a disservice with some of his rhetoric. As the Founding Director of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University, Katz can, at times, come across as militant in his stance. When Katz defines the show as “an exhibition explicitly intended to finally, in 2010, break a 21-year-old blacklist against the representation of same sex desire in America's major museums,” he is drawing a line in the sand with the museum establishment.  His charge that “the museum world is and has been systemically and profoundly homophobic since the Mapplethorpe controversy in 1989” may hold some truth. The only problem is that he isn’t a fundraiser at any of the those museums. Museum staff across the nation may very well agree with Katz’s beliefs, but they are still running businesses and know that the American public—sex-crazed though it is—does not generally desire to be challenged with shows about sexuality when visiting museums. If people want that they can go to any number of commercial galleries where this is not uncommon.

Conversely, an enduring problem with the criticisms brought by the Religious Right is that they tend to focus on the wrong problems in the works in these exhibitions. Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary was derided as a dung-smeared Madonna. The elephant dung that was used in that work was hardly a concern if one looked more closely. The painting was covered with images of hard core pornographic photos of women. That was not mentioned by Mayor Giuliani and others when they called for a halt on public funding for the Brooklyn Museum. One imagines most children would have more difficulty recognizing painted elephant dung than graphically displayed female body parts.

A Fire in My Belly was bound to face a similar fate. Speaker of the House John Boehner led the charge in attacking the work because it depicted a crucifix overrun with ants. Many people were likely more troubled with the concept of the “Gay Portraits” show and so Wojnarowicz became an easy target. In fact, his work was always controversial in his lifetime so he was a perfect scapegoat. One would think the appearance in the video of a man stripping off his clothing and then participating in an auto-erotic act, would have caused more alarm. This is certainly one of those things a curator might want to avoid when considering the five year olds. However, this part of the video was never the top concern in the news reports.

Outside of all the excessive press, which should make the curators somewhat happy since the exhibit would probably have never been known otherwise by the general public, there are some works within the exhibit that more fittingly engage the stated theme. Though there are clearly more erotic works by Marsden Hartley, the paintings chosen for this exhibition are more in keeping with the way an early American Modernist could use abstraction as a language to express identity in a time when even the art world was less open about sexuality. Works by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Cy Twombly skillfully exhibit the “coded language” of mid-century gay artists. Their early postmodern experiments with semiotic and appropriational imagery set the tone for later generations of artists—gay and straight alike. The inclusion of one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spill works is a prime example of this continuum.

 There are some works that seem more of a stretch. The inclusion of a painting of a proud male nude standing in an open field (The Clearing), by Andrew Wyeth, is a bit confounding. Wyeth was famous for generations though his most public notoriety came with the controversy surrounding his Helga paintings. A more appropriate connection for this exhibition would have seemed to have been the recent photographs by Collier Schorr that place an adolescent male in poses that mimic the Helga paintings. The ambiguity of sexuality is much more evident in those works.

The protestations of Katz that were actually the genesis for the exhibition reveal only a small segment of the current map of the art world. Gender and identity studies now abound in college and university course catalogs across the nation. Though this may be the first major museum exhibition of its kind, there is actually no lack of literature that discusses the role of sexual identity in the creation of art. Many artists showing at the major galleries in this country are now quite upfront and explicit about this fact.

In the new world where pluralism rules, the cacophony of specialized voices assures that no sub-culture or group can rise above the din. The voices that many would claim were the singular voices of the past—like Western Christianity—are now speaking in a foreign tongue. Consider the work of Tim Hawkinson. Many pieces are clearly influenced by the artist’s childhood, in which he was reared in Methodist Protestantism. An installation like Pentecost is equally misunderstood by the contemporary art world as the Hide/Seek artist’s works may have been earlier in the twentieth century.

At the pre-opening gallery walk for Hawkinson’s 2005 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, curator Lawrence Rinder was questioned about Pentecost. His simple response was that the title referred to a religious holiday. That the work taps out the melodies of hymns and references the New Testament coming of the Holy Spirit, resulting in the speaking of unknown tongues by Jesus’ disciples, was either not known to the curator, or more likely, was something he expected a post-Christian audience would not understand. Either way, the preferential position that Western Christianity once held is obviously no more. With this in mind, curators may consider that every new position examined in museum exhibitions will seem foreign to some segment of the viewing public. New viewpoints should be proclaimed but there are sometimes wiser ways to present them than through more controversial works.

Tim Hawkinson—Neo-Neo-Platonism in Post-Post-Modernism

(click on the image to the left for a larger view)

When the term renaissance man is applied to an individual there is invariably one particular renaissance man who comes to mind—Leonardo da Vinci. The term is probably applied too liberally if the standard to match is da Vinci. Not only was he one of the leading artists of an era, his broad knowledge of the sciences and proclivity for inventing spectacular mechanical devices placed him on a different creative strata than others.

When applying this same term to contemporary artists most fall sadly short. If we are keeping to the Leonardo model the numbers are greatly diminished since most do not share the master’s breadth of knowledge and experience once they cross outside the borders of the art world. One Los Angeles area artist, Tim Hawkinson, is an exception.

Hawkinson has proved to be one of the most inventive artists of recent decades. His 2005 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art provided a substantial glimpse into his creative meanderings. The current self-titled exhibit (May 8 – July 25, 2009) at PaceWildenstein Gallery recognizes that Hawkinson’s exquisite creative talents remain far from depleted.

Somewhat reticent and reserved in person, Hawkinson’s work vacillates between the demure and disorderly. His use of materials is equally varied; so much so that it has sometimes been difficult to recognize a specific style. His work falls within a contemporary trend called Do-It-Yourself art. Hawkinson’s non-traditional materials come from anywhere and everywhere and his conscious choices of media denote multiple layers of meaning and symbolism for viewers.

Tim Hawkinson is far more like Leonardo da Vinci in attitude than style. For Hawkinson there is no apparent divide between the invention and the art. They are one in the same. Works like Signature (1993) are created from common household goods. The artist employed materials outside the parameters of typical mechanical engineering when he constructed a machine that endlessly writes facsimiles of his own signature. Viewers are encouraged to take one from the pile left on the gallery floor.

A work like Signature ties into a recurrent theme in Hawkinson’s work. The signatures are an extension of the artist’s physical body and its processes, even while they retain an element of his personality. This is another specific parallelism with da Vinci’s output. Leonardo’s famous drawing of a man inscribed within both a circle and a square—the Vitruvian Man—visually expressed the Neo-Platonic philosophy that dominated Florentine art of the Italian High Renaissance.

Leonardo clearly expressed the first century Roman architect Vitruvius’s theory that ideal architectural works should be based on proportional relationships found within the human form. By the time of da Vinci the Greek concepts of ideal forms were being revisited. This Neo-Platonism was then blended with the prevalent Roman Catholic thinking in Italy. In light of this, the body is seen not only as the measure on which buildings are based, it is a building unto itself. The human structure is equated with the temple of God (I Corinthians 3:16-17) and Leonardo expressed the Christian unity of body and spirit through the merging of the perfect forms of the circle and square, each containing the crowning achievement of God—man.

Much of Hawkinson’s work is directly connected to his own physical body. It is not simply autographic in the egoist mode, a tendency that can often exemplify contemporary art. Hawkinson’s work reveals the physical body epistemologically, as a means by which we know. One of his most recognized works incorporating this thinking is 1999’s Pentecost. The figures represented in this large installation are all based on the artist’s own body. The three dimensional modeling was achieved in a rather low-tech manner. As Hawkinson laid within a bathtub, photographs were taken of him from above as ink filled the tub at incremental levels. The revealed body at each of those levels was then replicated in sheets of foam to form nearly identical self portraits in a variety of poses.

The figures in Pentecost populate the branches of a tree made from hollow cardboard tubes. The work is kinetic and aural. When one enters a room where the work is installed he or she is greeted with a pattering of drum beats. Upon further consideration the sound is found to be the tunes of old church hymns tapped out on the tree branches by the figures. The sound is the Holy Spirit, which came to rest on the apostles on the day of Pentecost, providing them with the ability to speak in unlearned foreign languages. These physical beings are not only connected through the tree (the Tree of Life? after all, it is the mechanics of the tree that give the figures a life, a voice) but through a common spirit.

The use of the term Pentecost is a more overt reference to Christian terminology and theology, but Hawkinson provides subtle hints to the same throughout much of his work. A trio of Lilliputian works from 1997 also touches on these entanglements between physical and spiritual realms. More than both Pentecost and Signature, Bird, Egg, and Feather actually incorporate the physical matter of the artist. The diminutive Bird is a replication of a bird skeleton utilizing clippings from the artist’s fingernails and toenails, glued in place with super glue. Both Feather and Egg are made from the artist’s hair. In the case of Feather, super glue was once again employed to fix together single hairs into the form of a bird feather. The hair was ground into dust and made into a paste to form the shell for Egg.

Again, the bird references are acknowledgements of the spiritual. The dove is a traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit in Western art, but birds of all types are seen in many cultures and religions as messengers of the spirit. The use of the egg, in particular, can provide a symbol of birth, or even rebirth and resurrection. When one considers that Hawkinson is using the obviously dead parts of his living self in these works, bringing new life to cast off materials, resurrection is not an untenable symbolic reference.

More recent works revisit this avian symbology. The concept of an ideal physical form is considered from a different vantage in Bather (2009). Hawkinson incorporated actual egg shells when fabricating this replica of the Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf. Conceptions of ideal physical forms have not always remained the same throughout time. The fact that the natural curves of the eggs so easily mimic the curves of the ideal stone age woman suggests that ideal forms are tied directly to the natural world. There is an innate link between the physical and spiritual.

The masterwork of the current exhibit is Sherpa (2008). Looking to nature, Hawkinson observed that an ostrich plume recalled the graceful curves of a Harley Davison gas tank. From that initial correlation he searched for feathers from other birds that suggested specific additional elements of a motorcycle. The completed form is both concrete and ephemeral. It is not simply the substance of the feathers, but the aerodynamic styling of the completed form that alludes to a speedy journey—a path taken by the spirit.

These observations represent but one conceptual aspect of Hawkinson’s work. The majority of works coming from his studio have no connection to birds, though their recurrence conveys the importance of this theme. The examinations of physical and spiritual natures, their interrelations and particular properties, remain a thread that runs through all the work. The surface readings of Tim Hawkinson’s various projects produce a dizzying diversity of materials, methods, and subjects. Without commonality among those elements, the thematic underpinnings exist as a way to find cohesion within the full body of work. That, and his inventive approach. Hawkinson’s pursuit for new approaches to answer age-old questions reveals that the spirit of renaissance thinking is alive and well in L.A.