Trying-- for once in my life-- to be sophisticated and on the cutting edge, I took my date to a modern art gallery. Yes, the kind of reception where there would be wine and cheese following the exhibition of 20th century woe. I really didn't know what to expect, and did my best to keep a straight face as I hee-hawed as the canvasses.
Here's the works, and what the little plaque read on each. . . . .
"Raw emotion is dislocated from its source in this powerful black and white image. The work exists in three forms: as a film, a photograph, and as a postcard sent to the artist's friends. The recipients were assured that this was a genuine expression of grief but were not given the cause. The sadness is thus more disturbing. Confronted by the tear-stained face of the artist, and the caption, 'I'm too sad to tell you', which painfully expresses the loneliness of grief, the viewer recalls similarly distressing moments of his or her own life. Later he set out from Cape Cod in a tiny yacht for a two-month voyage across the Atlantic. His boat capsized and he was never seen again."
"Wearing opaque goggles through which she cannot see, or be seen, the artist faces the camera. With her cravat, her collar turned up and her hair slicked back, she looks more like a male pilot than a woman of the 1920's. This perverse self-portrait is characteristic of Cahun's startling work. Depicting herself in a number of erotically-charged roles, she metamorphoses from the ironically feminine-- as doll, fairy, or sex-kitten-- to the boldly masculine. Sometimes she appears exotically androgynous, at other times as a shaven-headed mutant. As a surrealist, she was influential in a major way."
"The grotesque figure of Death graps a baby with his bony fingers, deaf to the pleas of the surrounding masked figures. The macabre pessimism of this work sums up Ensor's dark vision. The theme of masks, through which he frequently expressed his gloomy view of the world, relates to the carnival costumes sold by his parents in their souvenir shop in Ostend."
"This installation is a recreation of the setting-up of a museum exhibtion. All the materials, including the worker's jacket and shoes, leftover refreshments-- a carton of ice tea and a banana-- and painting and cleaning materials have been faithfully reproduced in hand-carved, painted polyurethane. Fischli and Weiss began collaborating in the late '70s, including the film "The Least Resistance" in which the artists dress up as a giant rat and a panda bear and travel the world in search of knowledge and enlightenment".
"The performance artist Leigh Bowery stands on top of a table, his head nearly touching the skylight in this claustrophobic composition. Every element has been mercilessly scrutinized to produce a startling painting. A massive figure in every sense, Bowery is the subject of a series of portraits by Freud. Freud took to new levels his pitiless observation of flesh."
by Nan Goldin (1991)
"In this photograph of two of the artist's transsexual friends taken on the day of the Gay Pride parade in New York, Goldin is neither voyeuristic nor sentimental. Through her intimacy and affection for her subjects she reveals their vulnerability as well as own admiration for their overt sexuality and glamour. It is a life on the edge: a demi-monde of hard-living, drug-abuse, love, sex, survival, violence, and the ever-present shadow of death."
by Julio Gonzalez (1942)
"A peasant woman, wearing a headscarf, tips back her head and cries out in pain. By calling her 'Montserrat', after the mountain outside Barcelona, Gonzalez relates the suffering of the common people during the Spanish Civil War to the rough, enduring nature of the Spanish landscape itself. This particular work, made during the Second World War, expresses the distress and anguish endured in wartime. Gonzalez trained as a metalworker in his father's workshop, but took evening classes in painting. He later learned to weld and construct figures out of sheet metal."
by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1990)
"The works of Gonzalez-Torres are often discreet and ephermal, and are invested with an understated yet persuasive humanism. This is a great mound of sweets, spilling out from its corner position across the gallery floor. Viewers are invited to take one of the sweets, and in doing so to participate in an act of social communion, receiving a small gift which completely reverses the normal process of gallery commerce, in which usually nothing is given away for free. He has also made similar works with bubble gum and fortune cookies".
"This painting is typical of of the Socialist Realists, a group of artists who aimed to create a political art that would be both modern and readily understandable by ordinary people. In the late 1930's and early 1940's he was a member of the clandestine Communist Party in Fascist Italy."
"Queenie, an impassive cleaning woman, stands frozen, her expression glazed. Like many of Hanson's characters, she is a downtrodden member of the American working class-- overburdened, fatigued, and trapped by circumstance. Hanson's early work depicts riot and murder scenes."
"The artists have re-created a small, cramped hotel bedroom, complete with damp, peeling wallpaper, an old portable television set and a pair of underpants drying on a hanger on the right-hand wall. The three figures represent the same man at different points in time: he is shown lying on the bed reading a book, trying to escape the tedium and loneliness of his life: sitting on the edge of the bed, his head bowed: and finally getting up to look out of the window, perhaps thinking about escaping from the confines of his room. It's a searing indictment of American society. Their contemporary allegories focus on the decay, sexual repression, and violence that underlies the seemingly banal."
"'The Garden' is a full-scale tableau of an outdoor, woodland scene, complete with leafy trees, shrubs and rocks. This tranquil picture of nature is rudely interrupted by the presence of a middle-aged, balding man with his trousers around his ankles, engaged in a wholly unnatural act. The robotic figure, with its endlessly repetitive movements is intended to question notions of questionable behavior and sexual modesty. It has evolved out of his earlier performance work which focused on his own body engaged in extreme and disturbing acts."
by Yasumura Morimura (1991)
"Wearing sixteenth-century dress and incongruously adorned with cabbage leaves, strings of sausages, sprouts, and a beer-mug earring, she stands triumphant over the man she has just killed. He is represented as a potato head, surrounded by slabs of steak and cured meat. Morimura redefines his identity as a Japanese artist influenced by, but working outside, the mainstream of European art."
"By contrasting impoverished materials with those of historical art, Pistoletto questions preconceived ideas about value in art and society. The common theme throughout his diverse oeuvere is the relationship between artist and audience. For this, he found his most poignant metaphor in the mirror, which can either reflect, multiply, or divide."
"Blindfolded and dressed in a white, blood-stained shift, a man hangs from a crucifix attatched to a carcass. A typical Nitsch 'ceremony', '80th Action' was a lengthy, visceral performance involving the slaughter of animals and the smearing of entrails onto naked flesh. Highly choreographed and lasting over three days, the process of disemboweling was meant as a gradual coming to terms with death and destruction."
"In this study of decadent vanity, the artist paints his self-portrait, glaring back at himself, while a naked woman likes provacatively behind him, physically close but emotionally distant. The grim, industrial city beckons behind them, speaking to the modern alienation within us all."
"Complex Corner Relief" by Vladmir Tatlin (1915)
"Pieces of wood and sheet metal are joined together and suspended from the corner of a room to produce a lively juxtaposition of contrasting shapes and materials."
"This work is part of a series of photographs in which Sherman modelled clothes by a top designer. It serves as a searing indictment of capitalistic values."
by Carolee Schneemann (1963)
"Covered in paint, chalk, ropes, and plastic, Schneemann herself has become part of the work of art. Schneemann is a central figure in Performance Art, and this photograph documents an early piece in which the artist explored feminist concerns, interacting with her slippery, oozing materials to evoke primal forces that transform her body a sacred Earth Godness. Her work, 'Cèzanne, She was a Great Painter', formed part of the performance 'Interior Scroll', read from texts secreted in her vagina."
"Lay the whole floor to the torch!"
around for wine and cheese!"
and real, taken out of a modern art book!
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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