Alfredo Jaar, Nina Simone, and Fifty Years of Incrementalism

This post leads me to questions I cannot answer.

Art Basel Miami Beach isn’t where you’d expect to find works made by a subtle and politically engaged artist. But, tucked away in a corner of the Kamel Mennour Gallery’s booth was Alfredo Jaar’s Mississippi Goddam.

Using the title of Nina Simone’s 1964 song, Jaar created a two-part work: a framed and wall-mounted white-on-black print and, in front of it, a pile of black-on-white prints on paper for visitors to take.

The works are simple and unphotogenic. In them, text is arranged in a five column grid of about fifty-five rows. Except for the top left position, there is a fill-in-the-blank space in each of the grid’s cells. The blank space is underlined, and followed by the word “GODDAM.”

At the top left, the blank space is filled in by “Mississippi.” As in Mississippi Goddam.

When I saw the piece in Miami, several place names quickly came to mind. Cleveland, Charleston, Baltimore, Chicago, and Ferguson could have filled some of the blanks. And then there were more places that I looked up later: Barstow, Opa-locka, Minneapolis, Oakland, San Diego, Richmond, North Miami, Memphis, Los Angeles, Houston, and on and on and on. I’m not sure that Jaar’s 255 blank spaces are enough.

Here are a few lines from Nina Simone’s song:

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam

Nina Simone said that Mississippi Goddam ruined her career.

So, Alfredo Jaar.

I had taught his work in a few of my classes, and he’s the only artist I’ve ever written a fan letter to. What I love about Jaar’s work: his implication, “You know what to do.”

What has resulted from fifty years of going slow? Has it been fifty years of going backwards?

Alfredo Jaar, The Geometry of Conscience

This installation in Santiago, Chile commemorates the victims of the Pinochet regime, mixing their silhouettes with those of living Chileans. The work is experienced in a controlled sequence: one minute of complete darkness followed by 90 seconds of gradually illuminated silhouettes, then back to darkness, when afterimages of the silhouettes remain in the viewers’ brains. Brilliant!

photograph cristobal palma. © alfredo jaar

Louise Nevelson, Smart Kids, and a Great Gallerist

How Installations Create Connections

The artist Chris Burden, who was known rather reductively as, “the guy who shot himself,” thought carefully about the involvement of the public in public art. He wasn’t optimistic. Burden claimed that, “Almost everything that isn’t Bambi—you know, big brown-eyed girls, cute cocker spaniels and Hallmark cards—is offensive to the general public.” *

I was reminded of Burden’s assessments of public art recently when I saw the Pace Gallery’s installation of Louise Nevelson’s work at Art Basel Miami Beach.

I’d like to think he was wrong. But maybe, in a way, he wasn’t.

In 1975, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology commissioned Louise Nevelson’s Transparent Horizon, the first public art commission under its then-new Percent for Art program.  I.M. Pei, an MIT alumnus and the architect of the nearby Landau Building, had suggested Nevelson’s sculpture for the commission and had selected its site on the campus.

Almost immediately after the sculpture was installed, MIT students who lived in the adjacent dorms objected. They thought it was ugly. They were mad that they hadn’t been consulted. And it got in the way of their Frisbee games.

Transparent Horizon was defaced several times by MIT students. It was painted over in 1976, and again in 1977 and, even twenty years later, students attached balloons to it, with a note saying they’d hoped that the sculpture would float away. Soon after it was installed, the situation was defused, somewhat, when MIT sent a group of students to visit Nevelson in New York.  She was not amused by their behavior, and she told them so.

I mentioned these incidents to a representative of the Pace Gallery when I saw Nevelson’s work in Miami, and he knew the story well. But we also talked about Black, a great installation in 2013 of Nevelson's work at the Wellesley College art museum.

I saw the exhibition at Wellesley almost by accident. I’d gone to see something else, but I noticed the Nevelson show as I was leaving. There, her work was installed in a dark gallery, as Nevelson preferred it to be, with just a little bit of blue light. As I recall, there was a place to sit while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. And in that darkness, I got it: Nevelson’s attachment to black, her intense interest in shadows, the mysteries in her work.

In Miami, I learned that Arne Glimcher, the founder of the Pace Gallery, had been deeply involved in installing the Wellesley exhibition. So in the midst of that crowded and crazy Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition hall, I discovered once again that a great gallerist can and should make connections between people and art.

In the Wellesley installation, I could see Nevelson’s work because Arne Glimcher showed it to me.

Of course, there are huge differences between a museum exhibition and a public art installation. And will admit to my reservations about whether Nevelson’s outdoor works are as strong as her indoor pieces. But I have no doubts at all about the gratitude I feel when gallerists and curators install works in a way that helps me to understand them.

I’ll have more to say about Arne Glimcher when I write about Agnes Martin. But, until then, I’ll conjure up a performance that never happened: Arne Glimcher sitting beside Transparent Horizon for a few weeks, and talking to those smart kids who didn’t get it, and weren’t given the chance to.

Nevelson's Sky Cathedral. Photo by Neil Barrett from his Notebook, May 12, 2011, http://notebook.neilbarrett.com/it/news/?ids=2&idc=15&idb=146

* Nicholas Drake interview with Chris Burden, “Excuse Me!” Public Art Review, Fall/Winter 1994. The article doesn’t seem to be available online, but you can read parts of the Public Art Review at http://forecastpublicart.org/public-art-review-home/

Art Basel Miami Beach: A Few Highlights in a Few Posts

I won’t write my “best of,” “worst of,” “most outrageous,” or "best value" selections from Art Basel Miami Beach. I’ll just say that I saw a lot of work there, and some of it was strong. My next few posts will look at artists whose work I found particularly engaging.

There’s a lot to dislike about ABMB (it’s crowded, it’s huge, and some of the conversations I overheard were repellent) but there’s a lot to like too. With persistence, I found works worth spending time with, galleries taking chances, and gallery people who were more than willing to talk about what they’d brought to Miami and why.

For the past several years, I’ve been giving a tour of ABMB for the MIT Alumni Club of South Florida. The tour focuses on art that’s related to science or technology, art that’s related to people who have studied or worked at MIT or whose work is in its collections, and a few other works that I show for no reason other than that I think they’re important. Or, this year, just because I had seen them as I was preparing the tour and I wanted, or maybe needed, to see them again.

Satisfying all those categories, I’ll be focusing in the next few days on Louise Nevelson, Peter Campus, Alfredo Jaar, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and my new favorite, Agnes Martin.

Installation view of the exhibition Form, Line, Contour at Dominique Lévy in New York, 2013. The striped painting is by Agnes Martin. It seems simple from a distance.