Smithsonian.com

This week brought the passing of Robert Rauschenberg, and with it the customary obituaries. Some are obligatory chronological inventories of milestones, neatly encapsulated with birth and death date bookends. Most are kind and reverent, hailing Rauschenberg’s genius, describing an important work or two, and drawing a line in the family tree of art movements to help us understand his place in the lineage. (You can read pieces in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post). The week also saw a record-setting $14 million sale of Rauschenberg’s Overdrive by Sotheby’s.

Amidst the flow of misty tributes are a couple of dissenting voices: Jack Shafer at Slate, and Jed Pearl at The New Republic. Both take on the less popular task of speaking prickly truth about the dead and questioning the significance and quality of the artist’s work.

As I read through the reports, tributes and criticisms this week, what came through for me was Rauschenberg’s work ethic. He made art through fame, unpopularity, age, and the infirmity of a stroke. He showed up, even in a wheelchair. Good art or bad, hits or misses, he just kept making art.

It’s hard to know which version of Rauschenberg’s story will persist through time–the one that plants him firmly in the history books as a Dadaist innovator, or the one that elevates his failings as larger than his accomplishments. Whichever version persists, I hope that it includes the fact that he made art right up until he died. This, I think, is the essence of an artist.

(Photo: Reservoir, Robert Rauschenberg, 1961. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Last week I visited The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery, a delightful space in the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. Their current show “L(A)TTITUDES” attempts to mediate a discussion surrounding the borders and boundaries of Israel and Palestine.

On the surface, I expected a historical survey of the area’s cartography, giving perhaps a sterile, graphical representation of the boundaries and as they moved to and fro with the political winds. Happily, this was not the case. The works show more personal views of the effects and repercussions of drawing these lines, whether figuratively with a “security fence” or physically through a look at where a virtual map line falls on the ground. These lines show the inclusions and exclusions, the trusts and distrusts, the hopes and realities, and the “us vs. them.”

In the photographic series “The Green(er) Side of the Line,” Alban Biaussat documents places and spaces along the Green Line of the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement, and thereby shows the improbability of separating the physical space of a family’s back patio or a local butcher’s shop that happens to be on the line. Yoav Galai’s “East Jerusalem Outside the Slogans” is a photojournalistic essay that documents the physical wall/fence that runs through East Jerusalem and the neighborhoods it bisects.

Karey Kessler’s “Desert” maps her personal journeys and memories of traveling through and living in Israel. Joyce Kozloff’s love of traditional technique is displayed in a series of small frescos that display how a culture’s societies and biases become evident in the way they draw their maps.

Anna Fine Foer and Doug Beube examine the alternate scenarios. Foer’s collaged “Vayikra” looks at what an absence of Israel could mean to its neighbors. Beube’s “Amendment,” an altered atlas, takes the idea a step further by physically zipping other countries onto Israel’s borders.

Wendy Fergusson, the gallery’s director, navigated heated discussions, tensions, and withdrawals of both works and donor support to curate a show that reaches across the line to embrace many difficult and divergent points of view. Such courage in the time of political correctness is both refreshing and commendable.

(Photo Credit: Sam Hunter. Joyce Kozloff’s “#31. Knowledge: The Holy Land, 1584.” Permission for use granted by The Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery at the Washington DCJCC.)

Have you seen the latest crop of album covers? It is a rather uninspiring diet of head shots and text, with the occasional hip or grungy urban backdrop.

Like most people, I got into music via my parents. I spent hours playing the records in their collection, but I also spent those hours equally captivated by the packaging the music came in. I remember being hypnotized by the yin-yang design in the center of the “Day Tripper” single’s label, and studying every inch of the Beatles’ “White Album” until the cover’s cardboard went soft. When I was old enough to buy my own music in the late 70s, my first treasures included the likes of Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” as much for the art as for the tunes. I got into Yes because of Roger Dean‘s intensely mysterious covers. I even started playing around with marbling paint in my studio after studying “Views,” the book of his early work.

Remember all the different Chicago covers? Rendered in multiple ways, from skyscraper to chocolate bar, that logo immediately heralded something new from the familiar in quintessential graphic tradition. And on Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” what about the New York City skyline built from restaurant products? H.R. Giger’s treatment of Debbie Harry’s face on her first solo album, and similar honors for “Brain Salad Surgery” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer? Both Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell ably illustrating their own album covers with self portraits? And all those covers for Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Genesis and Pink Floyd created by the Hipgnosis team – could there be a more conceptually perfect cover than that of “Dark Side of the Moon“?

Where are the big art campaigns now? Blame it on the CD – the tidy little five by five window demands a different graphic treatment than the acreage of the twelve inch LP cover. On the LP, not only could you get into detail, you could frame a whole album’s concept in the illustration (and no, I’m not going to touch the death of the concept album here). And let’s face it, in this age of buying music electronically, the album art is further reduced to thumbnail on the computer screen, or a PDF addition to the download. I haven’t even opened the PDF for the last album I bought. It didn’t look interesting enough to spend time with.

Los Angeles County Art Museum has a shiny new building, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. It is a welcome addition of large, beautiful space to the institutional LA art scene, with Jeff Koon’s “Tulips” offering a shiny welcome in the entrance plaza. Once you pass the ticket check, an escalator takes you to the top floor to begin your visit with a splash of the top works of the last fifty years.

The inaugural exhibition is set up to show groups of works by various artists, a change up from the “one-piece-per” that often limits a period survey. The galleries have walls that allow for room-like groupings, and the work was installed with plenty of space to let it and the viewers breathe.

But what’s the story on the security guards? They are everywhere – even present in LACMA’s own picture in the link above. I got one in my snapshot of “Tulips.” They were in every quadrant of the galleries, hovering like nervous nannies. There was one stationed less than three feet from the Jeff Koon’s stainless steel balloon-like “Rabbit” at all times. “Rabbit” is barely more than three feet tall itself, and so the experience of it was dwarfed by the aggressive presence of the guard. Not that I’m a fan of roping off work, but a discrete foot high rope four feet out could have done a similar job of keeping sticky fingers off the steel, while affording the viewer an uninhibited 360 view.

The final indignity was their presence in the Serra galleries on the lowest floor. Interacting with a Serra is a deeply personal experience for me, as I like to take the time to really feel the emotional manipulation inherent in the spaces his work creates. Serra’s “Band” is a continuous ribbon of undulating steel that takes you through interior and exterior spaces as you follow its line. Each interior space can act as cocoon or confinement, depending on how the angles at the top lean in or out, inciting alternating anxiety or relief. Truly masterful. But my contemplation of this was severely cramped by the guard that followed me into each interior space, at one point going so far as to interrupt my thoughts with an extended greeting.

Come on, BCAM, back off a little. Yes, your art is valuable, but loosen up on the tight orchestration of how we get to experience it.

Photo credit: “Tulip” by Jeff Koons, BCAM, entrance plaza, March 2008, by Sam Hunter.

A few years back, I had the pleasure of training to become a Getty Volunteer – one of the beige clad folks that direct human traffic to the trams, restaurants, and Van Gogh’s “Irises” at the Getty Center. As part of our education, we were treated to a wonderful lecture by Scott Schaefer, Getty’s curator of paintings, who took us on whirlwind tour of the last five years of painting and sculpture acquisitions.

One painting, Degas’ “After the Bath” stood apart from the crowd, not necessarily for its fine illustration of Degas’ later work, but for what Schaefer had to say about it. He pointed out that the nearby Norton Simon had a great collection of works by the artist, specifically of the “dancer” genre. When it came time to fill a Degas hole in the Getty’s collection, Schaefer didn’t want to get something that was already available to the local museum aficionados, unless it was of far superior quality. He felt that his task was to not only acquire the best piece he could find for the Getty, but one that also served to augment the collection of “greater Los Angeles.” Thus he wasn’t really on the hunt for another ballerina. I remember thinking that this was such a broad minded and refreshing perspective: to look at the area collaboratively, while maintaining a healthy, competitive eye for excellence.

I was reminded of Schaefer’s vision again as I read Suzanne Muchnic’s Los Angeles Times coverage of Getty’s newest treasure, Gauguin’s “Arii Matamoe (The Royal End).” At the end, Muchnic lists the other Gauguin works in LA, and quotes Schaefer’s assessment of the city’s Gauguin holdings, “Together,” Schaefer said, “the artworks represent the entire sweep of Gauguin’s career.” Should I ever get the opportunity to curate at such a level, I will keep my eye on Schaefer’s vision.