It was a quiet Friday lunchtime. Some of the galleries at
the Geary Street buildings in San Francisco had closed their doors. But some doors
to fabulous shows were open. The
three artists below seem to me to embody something a critic once wrote about
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” that it is “about the image in its otherness
locked in with the real world” (Lisa Florman on Picasso in “The Difference
Experience Makes in ‘The Philosphical Brothel,’” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 4, Dec. 2003, p. 777).
The “image in its otherness locked in with the real world”:
what, exactly, is “otherness”? Difference… distinguished by achievement or characteristics?
or simply non-conforming? Strange? or distinctive, memorable? Me, and not-me. The expected. The unexpected. I want to take us into “otherness,” step
by step, through the galleries, and return to Picasso at the end.
Ian McDonald’s chosen “difference” in this show (called, tellingly, “Parts and Pottery”) is not the province of the totem or the icon, but total, brazen, sensuality… the unexpected aesthetic pleasure of clay nearly morphing into iron. A gleaming crankshaft, a rusting piston, screws, nuts and bolts laid out for a repair, looking under the hood of a ’65 Mercury … all these implements in the idea, now made soft and quiet and things-in-themselves by the touch of a hand:
This is my favorite of the 12 exhibits in this show, “Arrangement #3 (Split Shelf).
The materials list reads “glazed ceramic, powder coated
steel, wood and paint.” The show is calming, surprising, beautifully lit,
wonderfully sculpted. It is “otherness” because it brings the pistons and
crankshafts of the “real world’ into a soft, silent rebirth.
The second gallery exhibit was -- a “mixed media on paper”
dress -- but not just any mixed media, and not just any dress -- by Isabelle De
Borchgrave at Serge Sorokko, at 55 Geary Street. (Isabelle De Borchgrave is one
of several artists represented (http://www.sorokko.com/artists/de_borchgrave/blue_delphos_dress/blue_delphos_dress.html).
De Borchgrave immerses her work in art-historical riches. The
Legion of Honor here in San Francisco exhibited rooms filled with her paper costumes inspired by
paintings (http://artistinanaframe.blogspot.com/2011/04/thick-rugs-and-thin-paper-at-legion-of.html).
For this piece, a sculptural column at Serge Sorokko, the
Charioteer at Delphi is the first source:
but the second source layer is a pleated silk dress with
glass Murano beads hanging from the shoulders, designed and made by Mariano
Fortuny y Madrazo in Venice in 1907…. it was designed, in the era of corsets,
to be worn over bare skin:
In the “Blue Delphos Dress,” there is also “nothing”
underneath, “nothing” but air and imagination:
It isn’t just that De Borchgrave’s work is different, that
she re-interprets the fabric of painted portraits or Greek statues or fashion
designed in a Venetian palazzo and twists and irons and otherwise bends paper
to serve as her art. It isn’t, here, just about the process. It’s about the new
“real world” she makes us see.
The third artist will bring us back to Picasso and “The
Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Picasso wrestled with several sets of drawn images, at last
confining his women within a flat space, body parts touching, overlapping or
going missing in folds of drapery. I find myself disagreeing with Lisa Florman. This painting is
not about “the image in its otherness locked in with the real world”; only half of this poetic statement is true. This
painting is, instead, only “locked in with”
a strange kind of powerful “otherness” of its very own. There is no “real world” to see “locked
in” or otherwise, here. Picasso
never pursued anything with this level of ferocity again. He didn’t seem to know where to go from
this point, and so backed away from connecting these women up with any kind of
“real world.”
But there is an artist whose work pulls the “Demoiselles” --
and his other portraits -- into a fierce struggle with “the real world.” The Haines Gallery, at 49 Geary Street
in San Francisco is showing the work of Aimé Mpane (http://www.hainesgallery.com/mainpages/Exhib_Current/Exhib_Current.html)
The preoccupied figures in this massive piece, “La Peche
Contemporaine,” are themselves caught up in a net (they are made of painted
wood pieces floating on string, and the piece measures 81 “ x 84”) and are
fishing for something they cannot eat, that peculiarly Western preoccupation
with getting the ball into the net.
Mpane comes from Kinshasa (once the capital of the Belgian Congo, now in
the Democratic Republic of Congo).
The question of exactly what one
ought to fish for -- for food, for fame, for one’s country and history or for
someone else’s profit -- might serve, all by itself, as a sufficiently pressing
subject for art.
But then there’s the larger question of identity, present
not just as an issue for the fishermen but for the rest of Mpane’s compelling
show as well. Mpane has “drawn”
portraits (with layers of glued plywood that he edges with an adze -- a tool
first used in the Stone Age), portraits of people that he knows in the
Congo. The resulting
paintings/carvings are complete and missing, here and there, parts and whole,
almost giving us the rings of years in the wood. Here is my favorite single portrait, because it is so spare
and simple, “Kinoct #40”:
There is enough left of her portrait head to give the wall a
shadow. Are we looking “through”
or “beyond”? Is this woman hiding … or gone? How much do we actually see when
we look? Anything that is not a
self-portrait is “other,” another, me, but not-me as well, a person, but not my
person. How do we reconcile ourselves with the world?
Mpane’s strongest suit in the show -- for me -- is his artistic
dialogue with Picasso and his “Demoiselles,” a conversation that is very much
in “the real world.” There are seven of these two-sided masks arranged along a
shelf in the gallery’s middle wall.
The wooden sides of each face are three-dimensional Demoiselles. Here is
the face Picasso painted in as he completed the painting, the face we see to
the far right:
And here is Mpane’s “La Demoiselle Perde/Masque Bi-Face:
Picasso-Pende #2,” a two-sided piece, 12” x 12.5,” in that same adze-edged
wood:
Look back and forth at these two. Picasso’s Demoiselle-face would be physically impossible, not
just for its jarring features, but because her back is towards the viewer; she
could not be cupping her chin in that enormous hand. When we first look at her face, her expression might seem
angry, but the mouth is pursed, questioning, and she could also look….
surprised. Is she about to ask a question? She has that look. Mpane’s response is to make his jagged
face seem more human, the expression even more ambiguous, and then just as we
are taking that in we see the other side of this face:
And we see the inner light. It’s an astonishingly uplifting
image. These works will stay with me for a long, long time.
Thanks to the galleries and assistants, particularly Kate and
Blake.
