Detail, Ellen Gallagher (full image is below)
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“We are living through a moment” has become a code phrase for encountering yet another art installation or exhibit that puts art in service to a credo or ideology. Social justice, political identity, equality—these are all vital causes that matter, and matter deeply. But a proclivity to enlist the visual in service to these causes has become a trend. As a result, a number of recent exhibitions have been staged that feel more akin to virtue signaling than an opportunity to allow the visual a chance to do what it does so well all on its own—speak in a voice that is mysterious and well outside the realm of language.
Art in service to an idea or belief system is not a new concept. The visual has been a harnessed horse pulling the cart of religion or regimes many times in the Western canon. But in our more pluralistic era, the open pasture has been a more common metaphor. So yes, this current pendulum swing does feel like a moment.
My particular and personal way of engaging in visual language comes from the belief that form possesses an intelligence of its own, one that exists outside the bounds of language and linear thinking. I am most engaged when art objects are allowed to speak in their own tongue, on their own terms.
Two recent exhibits have exemplified that “art objects allowed to speak in their own tongue” approach. One is Making Past Present: Cy Twombly, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Curated by Christine Kondoleon, the exhibit brings the work of Cy Twombly together with objects from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Near East. Some are sourced from the MFA and some are from Twombly’s own vast collection of antiquities. The array of work on display is stunning, and visitors can listen to the rich and rewarding conversations taking place between these many disparate objects. This is an unforgettable way to experience Twombly’s work, one that can be seen through May 7.
Another exhibit that also exemplifies this approach is at the Addison Gallery of Art in Andover Massachusetts: Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now. Curated by Gordon Wilkins, the show has been assembled primarily from works that are included in the museum’s collection.
From the curatorial statement:
This exhibition explores how women have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction…
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Through the inclusion of works created hundreds of years before the advent of abstract expressionism as well as objects historically denied the status of fine art, this exhibition explores how women have deployed the visual language and universal formal concerns of abstraction—color, line, form, shape, contrast, pattern, and texture—to create works of art across a wide variety of media (including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, ceramics, and textiles) from the 18th century to the present day. Rejecting chronology, hierarchies of medium, and the restrictive definitions of art movements, Women and Abstraction invites the viewer to draw aesthetic connections across seemingly disparate objects, complicating ingrained notions of what abstraction is and is not.
How expansive it feels to wander the galleries without an overlay of curatorial “guidance.” Those frequently imposed narratives—history, chronology, art movements—are meant to be helpful, but they can stifle the free flow that form relishes. Art longs to speak on its own terms, and that is exactly what this exhibit has done.
I’ve selected a few images to share here arranged alphabetically. Many of the artists included in the exhibit were, as Wilkins pointed out, historically marginalized and overlooked. What an opportunity to discover so many women whose work was extraordinary. Maybe there should be a call to cull through the coffers at every museum.
Women and Abstraction: 1741-Now runs through July 30.
