I expect that the Marden show will be on the fourth floor, where we saw the Kiefer show together. Those galleries had some walls removed for the Matthew Barney show this past summer (pfft!), so there is wide open space and long walls, which serve the Kiefers currently there so well, and I presume will serve Marden well, too.
Thinking back to the Kiefer show, Heaven and Earth, I keep bouncing off of Twombly and Serra. Part of it is color (narrow), and part of it is size (large) and scale (large things feeling intimate, large things feeling human). With Serra the connection is very much about material and about the plane- Serra's flat weathered surfaces (real and natural) and actual physical spaces, and Kiefer's painted crumbling surfaces (representation and artifice) and depicted deep spaces- there is a similar operation of providing the viewer a space, locating the body, Serra like architecture, Kiefer as illusion.
With Twombly there is a color and material connection, but the most immediate is a use of history, story, narrative, and poetic language, and Kiefer connects with that. In each of these three artists there is a grandeur and ambition. The space they fill is cultural, social, political. It is interesting that Serra's corner splash of thrown lead was revealed in the company of Kiefer, and it's a shame the museum didn't take the opportunity to hang nearby the majestic, juvenile, rich, pre-literate, architectural, "speaking-in-tongues"1 blackboard-like surface with white-scrawled-loops Twombly that it acquired in 2000 and has not shown in two or three years2 (see a bad JPEG).
I also think that it is a terrible shame that SFMoMA has not made what I think is an obvious connection between the Kiefers and the many Clyfford Stills that it owns. The current directorship and curators seem to have no interest in the nearly thirty paintings that Still himself gave to the museum. It's a missed opportunity. There is an analogous ambition and poetic subject, though different pictorial and strategic approach, between these two artists. Both painters' surfaces make for a tactile, shallow painted space, but pictoriallly there is a deeper space. Still's geologic, landscapish images- wall faces, canyons, empty areas- engage the viewer in ways similar to Kiefer's images, by acknowledging the viewer outside the painting's plane and allowing a space for the viewer on either side of this inside/outside boundary, even though Still's images are unpopulated, and Kiefer relies on artifacts of humans- architecture, plowed fields, historical contextualiztion of the world through human-constructed systems. Anyway, history overlaps, and the museum snoozes, and it's a lost opportunity to draw connections between artists from different periods with different approaches, different images, and, at least outwardly, apparently different intentions.
I expected to feel oppressed by Kiefer's dense, knotty surfaces, very limited color, and the excessive use of single point perspective. Instead, I was wowed. This is a terrific show.
On this same fourth floor the wonderful Eva Hesse retrospective showed in 2002, and I think it has to have been one of the smartest, most moving, and surprising exhibitions at SFMoMA since its move to the new building. It was amazing to follow Hesse's innovations and development, to see how inventive she was in developing a unique language and use of materials, and how she redefined, clarified, and expanded the possiblities of sculpture. Amazingly, I think she was a rare combination of classic form (say, Henry Moore's biology and archaeology), process (Giacometti's construction and Arp's happenstance), and conceptual (Duchamp's notion of the found and decision). Her accomplishmnet is especially amazing when considering that she did it before dying in 1970 at age 34(!); the pace at which she worked, the development she accomplished, and the impact of her work, is akin to Van Gogh.
In the coming days I want to talk about three things I (Ann and I) saw at the de Young last Saturday: the Gee's Bend quilts, Ruth Asawa, and five Joan Mitchell paintings from her estate on loan hanging in the large open lobby. What an afternoon that was!
I titled this post "speaking in tongues" simply because I needed a title and in this entire post that might be the most unexpected bit in talking about art. But I also think there is an aspect of glossolalia to art that I welcome- it's exuberant and ecstatic, spontaneous and inspired, it doesn't or rarely makes sense although it does stand for or mean something, it's in reponse to something external made internal, it's unique and unplanned, it's in the moment, though it can occur again, and it happens within a tradition, history, or framework.
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[1] I say "speaking in tongues" because, as it's well known, of course, much of Twombly's line wobbles back and forth between writing and drawing, and many of the blackboard paintings with rows of white looping lines can be seen as pre-literate or emerging-reader writing, where the writer is using the conventions of writing- connected figures in uniform rows- but hasn't yet learned the alphabet and the symbol system of writing to represent words. Not that Twombly is pre-literate, but his "writing" is more connected to the pre-verbal, or non-verbal experience of full-on visual perception. The "speaking in tongues" reference is alluding to the question of what Twombly's "writing" might sound like. Looking at a row of loops in one of the classic Twombly's might read it literally as "oh oh oh oh oh...," or phonetically as "oooooooh," or physically as "ai yi yi yi yi," or "wow wow wow wow wow...," or "er er er er er...," or some other repetitive sound that is evoked in guttural response to the physical experience resulting from visually following the loops of Twombly's marks. The SFMoMA Twombly is full of dense, overlaid scrawls that make a different sound, perhaps one like white noise.
[2] From the San Francisco Chronicle, February 1, 2000:
Twombly's "Untitled, 1971" is the first work in SFMOMA's collection by this major American painter. It's one of the artist's classic ``blackboard'' paintings, composed of swirling white and gray scribbles and graffiti-like gestures on a field of black. The painting, which has a seven-figure price tag, was purchased from the artist's private collection with money from an anonymous Bay Area donor. Made with oil-based house paint, wax and crayon on canvas, the work is one the largest by Twombly, 72, who lives in Italy.
"The acquisition of this exceptional Cy Twombly painting fills a major gap in the museum's collection of postwar abstract art," said SFMOMA director David Ross.
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