Unfinished History
Though it might seem hasty to judge a curator on the basis of a single exhibition, the MCA has been adrift for so long it’s hard to refrain; based on this show, the prognosis must be guarded at best. On the one hand, the exhibit brings together a number of artists not seen in Chicago before; some of the art is very good; and the show has the provocative theme of increasing cultural diversity in the coming millennium, an idea somewhat muddled in the wall texts and introductory video but a bit clearer in the catalog. (“History, as a business, is now finished,” Bonami writes in his catalog essay. “The next one will be written by a community of peaceful mongrels, not us.”) On the other hand, there’s as much bad as good art here; aesthetic judgment seems to have taken a backseat to the issues the curator hopes to address; and the works are so different that the viewing experience is rather inchoate. Bonami quotes (with apparent approval) that ace mass murderer Chairman Mao: “Chaos is the perfect condition for a society in transformation.” This show’s messiness hardly equals the moral abyss of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but it does make for muddled seeing and thinking.
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Of course, art doesn’t have to be handmade by the artist to succeed. The exhibit’s strongest work, Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent, is a two-screen video projection about gender roles installed in a medium-size room, the images projected on opposite walls. One shows a man singing into a microphone with an appreciative audience behind him, while in the other a woman stands silent facing the same auditorium, which is empty. Halfway through the videos, the man stops singing and the woman begins. The wall label tells us that women are banned from singing in public in Neshat’s native Iran, and Bonami in his catalog essay suggests that history often involves an imagined future; Neshat both reveals the present reality and projects a better future. Her biases are clear. The woman’s complex vocalizing is infinitely more interesting and inventive than the man’s somewhat banal pop singing, and while the video of the man is a static shot, the camera rotates lyrically around the woman when she begins singing, echoing her soaring vocal lines. These choices support Neshat’s point, but what really makes the piece work is its formal elegance: the two images are presented as equivalents as well as opposites–identical camera movements along the theater seats, for example, precede the singing in each. These images face each other in an eloquent confrontation, at once reminding us of inequality and arguing for equality.
Also effective is Yutaka Sone’s Amusement, a marble sculpture of a roller coaster based on one near Tokyo, made by Chinese stonecutters to Sone’s design. Focusing on the work’s content, Bonami writes that “the significance of the roller-coaster structure is that it contains within itself the potential for human annihilation.” I was more interested in Sone’s choice of marble–the material of classical sculpture–to depict a kitschy amusement-park ride. Rendering the roller coaster’s complicated scaffolding as solid marble gives the whole a permanent feel–less an endorsement of the present, however, than an ironic commentary on our own age’s impermanence.
Group shows are supposed to have a thesis–but I also think that each work should help the viewer see and appreciate the other art on view. The results can be splendid when the work is from related cultures, as in the Art Institute’s recent “Ancient West Mexico” exhibit, or when a more diverse exhibit has an underlying aesthetic intelligence, as in the Chicago Cultural Center’s show of outsider art two years ago. In “Unfinished History,” unfortunately, the juxtaposition of very different pieces often detracts from one’s ability to see them. Viewers who’ve seen Kingelez’s Ville Fantome will look in vain for order in Hirschhorn’s mess; viewers who enjoy the precision of Neshat’s two-image video installation are likely to be baffled by the chaos of Hjelm’s and Bowers’s. It’s as if the work here were chosen solely for its social content.
Hints as to how this disregard of aesthetic considerations could have crept into an exhibit presented by two major art museums can be found in Bonami’s catalog essay, in which he discusses a number of films but almost always in terms of their plots, rarely mentioning compositions or camera movements. Much of the art he discusses only in terms of its subject. Bonami takes a similar leveling approach to language. At one point he writes, “We must leave–even momentarily–our identities behind, in order to move ahead into a world made of real differences, into a dialogue where English is nothing but a useful tool, a medium of exchange, and not a language related to a people, a country, a History.” Later he calls art “this contemporary esperanto of expressions and ideas.” Perhaps lowercasing the E in Esperanto is meant as a sign that he means the language metaphorically, but it’s hard not to notice his positive attitude toward Esperanto and disparagement of English, which he apparently wants to Esperanto-ize.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Mappa” by Alighiero Boetti; “Turbulent” by Shirin Neshat; “Ville Fantome” by Bodys Isek Kingelez.
