This morning I enjoyed a special benefit of my impersonation of an art critic when I attended the press opening of the Brooklyn Museum’s 200 Anniversary Celebration exhibitions, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” and the extensive reimagining of the museum’s ” American Art” collection. The “Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” includes over 200 artists and occupies the ground floor galleries which once held the magnificent American Indian collections. And the massive reconstitution of the museum’s incredible holding of American art has taken over the fifth floor reassembling and dismantling the grand old hall with a spectacular salon style installation of a seemingly infinite array of the visual art of our niche of the hemisphere. Themes like Water and Flowers separate halls that hold 19th century portraits, figurative paintings including an amusing wall of buttocks and a giant room full of faces, which form a collection of persons and their personalities which would vex a convention of psychiatrists . Curatorial decisions can be critical and can be criticized but the matter at hand is that the staff has chosen to proverbially “Kick out the Jams” and what I saw constituted an ambitious and hugely successful retelling of our visual culture. The term awe is accurate on many levels.
In this review however I will concentrate on the contemporary offerings and include as a matter of critical local interest the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition recently mounted concurrent show “Salon de Refuses”which was a direct response to the open call from the Brooklyn Museum.. The museum’s press release states that over 4000 artists responded to their solicitation. BWAC, like Brooklyn Museum chose to limit the number of accepted entrants to 200. And BWAC allowed only those who were in receipt of an official rejection letter to apply. Plus there was no curation to speak of, as it was a matter of first come first served. These bookend exhibitions still left at least 3,600 Brooklyn artists without wall space, a staggering number and an indication of the depth of the artmaking well in the borough. The prospect of 200 rejected works and 200 selected works promised a survey which might help demystify the strange currents within our local tide of artmakers. Both programs are wildly ambitious and far ranging and both have a sweeping range of mediums and artistic visions and both share a striking similarity in presenting work of extraordinary varying quality. A working subtitle might be:”The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”.
The noble task which the museum set was to mount a representative survey of work by artists residing and working within the borough over the last five years. BWAC offered a kind of spoiler. Together we can see exactly how richly varied, deeply confused and largely derivative the contemporary artworld. has become. Perhaps there is not enough oxygen to support so many life forms or perhaps we have arrived at a position of encyclopedic diversity which promises and threatens the very concept of “meaning” in the visual arts, And perhaps, as I suggest we celebrate this collapse and potential rebirth as the Modernists we purport to be.and embrace this catholic eclecticism as the true and only real culture we have have ever known. The preferred versions of art that are so routinely made fashionable one year and de rigueur the next have cheated us from the full and possibly final embrace of the infinite. And so in the words of a favorite cartoon hero I say;”To infinity and beyond!”
As I toured the Coalition’s old warehouse space nested between the canal like corridors of New York harbor, revealing the views of a harbor whose history has seen so much tumult and change, and with hurricane Helene reminding us of our fragile hold on our homes, lives and loves I was reminded how precious still is the practice of artmaking. An unkempt spatter of expressionist paint, an over-ernest rendering of a family, sepia toned photos and then along the stone wall some remarkable and punctual gesture full of heart and vision delivers me to the full house of an artist’s unique vision. In the museum the presentations were nobly high end, and frames which cost thousands of dollars lined the pristine white walls. The logistics of transport and registration and insurance and security and and… And then similarly among the orchestrated offerings a small gesture of solidarity with the soul of humankind, a standout and a beacon. I cannot name a single work from these two incredible gatherings because the myriad sensations are quilted too loosely for me to comprehend.but I can strongly recommend that you see them both and find in them some meaning for yourself. To paraphrase our local Red Hook art hero, Tiffiney Davis, in the remarkable film “I AM NOT OK” by Gabrielle Lanser included in the Brooklyn Museum’s survey: “Art Saves Lives”.
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