The Modern Blog

Seeing the Warm Broad Glow

“Rose Johnson was a real black negress. Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine. Rose was never joyous with the earth-born, boundless joy of negroes. Hers was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter.” Gertrude Stein, novella Melanctha in Three Lives, 1909.

Spell check doesn’t recognize the word “negress” and it wants to capitalize “negro.” There are plenty of words that the program doesn’t recognize or misinterprets but, as if these words don’t already have my attention, my computer insists on underlining them in red and green. Like much of Glenn Ligon’s work, Warm Broad Glow—a neon sign, painted black that reads “negro sunshine” and is set against a reflective background —provokes its viewer.

I say viewer as opposed to reader because as it is presented in this context, the work is viewed rather than read. To enter the Modern and see those two words hanging at the edge of the balcony overlooking the lobby is very different from reading them in the context of the sentence, paragraph, page, and book in which they appear—Gertrude Stein’s story of a young, mixed-race woman whose pursuit of acceptance is played against other characters such as Melanctha’s friend Rose Johnson.

It is noteworthy that Ligon created a neon sculpture based on the writings of Gertrude Stein, who was as engaged with art and objects as Ligon is with literature and language. Stein might even be seen as distorting and manipulating language through repetition and stream of consciousness in ways that challenge the reader and that parallel Ligon’s own use of text to press conventions of “viewing” art. Of course, the words negro sunshine are read in Warm Broad Glow and associations between the two are unavoidable. However, this word pairing, lifted from Stein’s story and presented as art, is “read” the way all art is. The figures, colors, objects, etc., in a painting are “read” as they are named and assigned associations that inform the viewing experience as much as the artist’s formal and material decisions. In the case of Warm Broad Glow, the choice of a font that replicates old typewriter characters creates a sense of bygone days in concert with the outdated word “negro,” which seems alien and obtuse to the contemporary viewer.

A group of fourth graders who recently visited the piece reportedly read Stein’s “negro” as the Spanish word negro, meaning black, and questioned the contradiction of black sunshine. This interpretation is reinforced by Ligon’s decision to paint the neon tube, or blacken the light, and then place it against a reflective backdrop to produce a shadow made of light. These observations might also remind viewers of Ligon’s earlier paintings made with stencils and oil sticks that appropriate the phrase, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” from Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” another text-based work that challenges the concepts of reading and seeing as they apply to art.

The Large in the Small

The three works in Focus: Katie Paterson deal with notions of the miniscule and the infinite, triggering my mind to race between these extremes. In works such as Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Sólheimajökull, 2007, the grandeur of a glacier is coupled with the sound a long-playing ice-record makes as it spins on a turntable. Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight, 2008, juxtaposes the quality of light cast by the earth’s moon (with all its expansive, nocturnal associations) within the confines of a gallery-turned-gray environment and a single dangling light bulb. And All the Dead Stars, 2009, is fueled by those things I often take for granted, the glowing, glaring balls of light that are stars, continuously hovering above and often an unfathomable number of miles away.

Each work by Paterson begins with an idea—a curiosity. She wants to know about the ins and outs of the world (and space) that surrounds her. The idea is a kernel that matures as the artist engages in a dialogue with various scientific professionals in order to learn more of her chosen subjects. What sounds does a glacier emit? How are our lives tied to the earth’s moon, and what connections does this pairing evoke? How can the cataclysmic death of stars be visually presented and documented? After spending time with this exhibition, I have questions of my own. Does the meaning of a specific sound change when mediated via contemporary technology? Is the simulation of a natural occurrence an effective doppelgänger for the real thing? And what year did we begin counting “years”? I am aware that the arbitrariness (and simultaneous exactitude) of time is something that gnaws at me as I engage with the works in the exhibition. Paterson’s investigations elegantly scratch the surface of the limits of our understanding of the natural world, prompting me to look at everything from the water in my glass to the waxing and waning moon with renewed attention.

Hearing Voices

Glenn Ligon: AMERICA presents a chorus of literary and cultural sources, including James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Zora Neale Hurston, Gertrude Stein, Richard Dyer, Jesse Jackson, Richard Pryor, friends of the artist, acquaintances, and strangers. Each famous, infamous, or generally unknown voice is made visual in works such as Stranger #20, Untitled (I Am Turning Into A Specter Before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going To Haunt You), Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), Untitled (I Am Not Tragically Colored), Warm Broad Glow, Untitled ( I Am Somebody), Cocaine (Pimps), and Notes on the Margin of the Black Book. “Given its preoccupation with literary narratives that illuminate different agendas of disclosure, Ligon’s work is perhaps best addressed by reflecting upon it as a series of readerly, writerly, and speakerly responses to acts of reading, writing, and speaking a subject into presence….”** There is more to this quote from Okwui Enwezor’s catalogue essay but, for my purposes, in relation to my experiences thus far with the work in Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, Enzwezor speaks to questions that the exhibition engendered for me as early as the first gallery: What does it mean to appropriate language from various sources and present it as art? How does reading differ from looking and looking from hearing and so forth? Whose voice is in my head as I read, listen to, and reflect on Ligon’s work? Throughout the run of the exhibition I will focus on specific pieces with these questions in mind while considering the various voices of Glenn Ligon: AMERICA.

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** Okwui Enwezor, “Text, Subtest, Intertext: Painting, Language, and Signifying in the Work of Glenn Ligon” in Glenn Ligon: America, ed. Scott Rothkopf (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011), 54.

Bell’s Continued Relevance

A tall, clear pedestal supporting a cube made of glass stands in a small, rectangular gallery on the Museum’s second floor. The box’s support—shiny chrome strips that meet to form precise corners—clarifies the cube’s shape and volume. The thirty-eight-inch-high Plexiglas support is translucent, highlighting the smoky-gray color of the glass box. This subtle coloration, created by tinting clear class with a High Vacuum Optical Coating Machine, imbues the sculpture with a sense of mystery. Too heavy a tint would render the interior of the cube invisible; an absence of coloristic variance would cause the viewer’s perceptual experience to be a tad one-dimensional. I find it especially interesting that each pane of colored glass is slightly more heavily tinted at its edges, growing less opaque toward its center. This alteration implies movement and is a subtle, but powerful, influence on my interaction with the piece.

In fact, the artist, Larry Bell, aims for his sculpture to work continually, always prompting the viewer to move about a piece, thus changing their viewpoint and augmenting their perception. This quality, coupled with the sculptures verticality—with its pedestal, Untitled (from Terminal Series) (1968) is fifty inches at its tallest plane—causes me to relate to the cube as if it were the head on a human body. I can peer inside the glass shape and witness the varying levels of opacity that occur as my eyes change position and see through one or more layers of the graphite-colored glass. That the bottom plane of glass and its support is translucent allows for a full visual comprehension of the both exterior and interior of the sculpture. This all works to strengthen my perceptual experience of what initially appears to be a simple, uncomplicated sculpture in a low-lit, side gallery of the Museum.

Consequently, because the piece is tucked away in the smaller, more intimate west galleries of the second floor is also significant to its interaction with the viewer. Whenever I come across this work, it is as if a discovery has been made. Rather than being positioned in a more spacious and airy gallery, Untitled seems to wait for the viewer to engage with it. The moodiness of the cube’s color, paired with the reflective quality of its chrome skeleton, work in tandem to produce an effect that mirrors and beckons the viewer simultaneously. Not surprisingly, Bell is considered a leader of California’s Light and Space movement. His interest in the quality and variance of light—and dedication to a perceptual experience via modest means (glass, metal, space, and light)—is clearly conveyed in the glass cubes of the artist’s Terminal Series.

A related work by Bell, though not in this series, Iceberg and Its Shadow (1974) is a work that I would very much like to engage with. After listening to a podcast featuring Bell and Modern Art Notes blogger Tyler Green, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this work (the artist’s largest) was on display at the Modern in 1977 (in our days as the Fort Worth Art Museum). This ambitious work, comprised of fifty-six mirrored panels arranged in two parallel sections, was never installed in its entirety. Instead, segments of it were installed in various iterations and according to the time and space constraints of its host institutions. After listening to the entire interview, it was a delight to learn that Iceberg and Its Shadow was most completely installed during its time at the Modern (time constraints prohibited the full installation of the piece).

The impetus for Green’s interview with Bell is the current bevy of exhibitions in Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980. This enormous survey includes sixty Southern Californian cultural institutions exhibiting work that represents every major L.A. art movement from 1945 to 1980. That Bell has a history – and a present – in our galleries makes a listen to this interview all the more rewarding.

Contemporary Pop Art

I grew up in the age of Super Nintendo and Nickelodeon cartoons. Bright colors, animated characters, and pixilated shapes were familiar aspects of my world, part of the visual language of my childhood. Therefore, it is with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia that I’m beginning to see such well-known elements of my youth reappearing in artworks hung on museum and gallery walls, most noticeably in the Modern’s current FOCUS exhibition, FOCUS: KAWS.

In our post-Andy Warhol world—indeed, in a post-Pop-art world—incorporating popular culture into fine art is not a new or novel idea. Warhol captured the people and products of the 1950’s and ’60s— Marilyn Monroe, Coke bottles, celebrity portraits, Campbell’s soup cans—by making them the subjects of his work. The exhibition catalogue for Andy Warhol: The Last Decade elaborates, explaining that Warhol utilized “methods of mechanical reproduction to create a pantheon of images that became icons of the mass culture of the era.”

But the era of Warhol is gone. For those of us who didn’t grow up in the age of Marilyn Monroe, Standard gasoline stations, or the Rolling Stones, it’s difficult to associate those things with contemporary popular culture. They simply pre-date us. My generation grew up with Star Wars, Tweety Bird, Mickey Mouse, and SpongeBob SquarePants. As evidenced in the KAWS exhibition, images of Monroe and Campbell soup cans are being replaced by the characters that make up the present visual language.

KAWS, however, doesn’t necessarily attribute nostalgic elements to the incorporation of such beloved animated characters in his work. In Interview magazine, KAWS claims that “SpongeBob was something I wanted to do because graphically I love the shapes. But honestly, when I’m painting SpongeBob, I’m not thinking, ‘Oh, I loved this episode.’” He also says that “most of the time when I’m using an image like SpongeBob, I’m trying to attain a quality in the painting that is visceral and has less to do with the narrative of the character.” Andrea Karnes, curator at the Modern and curator of the KAWS exhibition, suggests that while no direct narrative is portrayed, per se, it cannot be entirely absent: “SpongeBob is known for being eternally boyish, with his childlike ways and naïve mistakes…KAWS depicts him in a way that does not completely silence this impact by showing us something instantly recognizable, while also impelling us to reconcile it with an essentially abstract vocabulary of painted forms. SpongeBob is a universally recognizable symbol. KAWS uses the image as a jumping-off point.”

Whether KAWS is exploring these cartoon characters simply as animated shapes, as elements of nostalgia for the millennial generation, or some combination of both, it has definitely been interesting to see a more contemporary version of “Pop” on the walls.

Clarity of Concept

Is it not the nature of creativity to be boundless and open-ended, free of restraint? Several of this summer’s educator workshops focused on the work of artists who decided on a clear set of limitations in which to work. Through intense looking in the galleries and considered discussion of a range of artworks, participants came to understand that it is precisely a narrowing of options that allows many artists to communicate what is essential in their work. Our investigation revealed that a complex set of ideas are sometimes most successfully conveyed when couched within the surety of creative restrictions.

The artists whose work we spent time with—Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Tony Feher, and Carl Andre—placed self-imposed boundaries on their working method and reduced their compositions to simple forms. Repetition of these forms served to clarify function. Through close attention to a carefully selected set of materials, each artist highlights the power of their preferred materials. These artists chose to leave the materials unembellished, adopting a set of rules and a clear formal strategy. Martin, for example, knew what she would paint next: a grid. Judd had a distinctive working method: to have fabricators build a series of identical steel and Plexiglas boxes. Feher does not search for subject matter or materials: use ordinary items that are stripped of their original signifying elements and give them new life. Andre, too, need not spend time looking for materials or subject matter: arrange “elements” (squares and strips of metal and blocks of wood) in a manner that follows what these materials want to do; wood blocks stack, strips of metal lay flat. By eliminating choices such as subject matter and narrative —and, often, the juxtaposition of shapes—each artist is freed from being driven by such things. Clarity of form translates to clarity of concept.

Through study of, and conversation on, works such as Martin’s Leaf (1965), Andre’s Slit (1981), Feher’s Just So (2002), and Judd’s Untitled (1967), many participating teachers felt the conceptual threads running through these works. Where perplexity and doubt cropped up, a return to fundamentals proved helpful. We talked about the notion that when confronted with work that is simple and reductive in nature, it is the ideas that come to the fore of the conversation. What concepts are driving the artist to make this work? How does it make me feel; how do I relate to it? For those teachers who began their time at the Modern unfamiliar with minimalist and minimal-looking works of art, these questions began to receive answers.

Between the Lines

Agnes Martin’s work has recently been reinstalled in one of the smaller galleries on the first floor. Leaf (1965), Untitled (1977), Untitled XVI (1996), and nine of the thirty prints from the suite On a Clear Day (1973) are displayed on four walls facing opposite each other, creating an environment that allows viewers to become completely immersed in the grids that are sketched on their surfaces.

Martin’s work evolved from representational imagery to biomorphic abstraction over the course of her career before she finally settled on geometric forms as an appropriate means of conveying spiritual content. According to Barbara Haskell’s book titled Agnes Martin, the artist once wrote that her decision to paint rectangles was inspired by the phrase, “surely the people are grass,” a passage from Isaiah 40:7. “All the people were like those rectangles; they are just like grass,” Martin wrote. “That’s the way to freedom. If you can imagine you’re a grain of sand… all your troubles fall away.… In a big picture a blade of grass amounts to not very much.”

While the titles of several paintings allude to grass, trees, and other elements of the natural world, it is the transcendence associated with opening oneself up to nature—rather than imposing oneself on it— that Martin sought to convey in her work. When asked why she had titled a painting Grey Geese Descending, for example, Martin replied, “We have certain feelings when birds descend. And that’s what the painting is about…descending feelings. They’re beyond words.” Haskell also notes in her book that “it was not that geometry could represent the reality of the sublime, but that it could offer a means of attaining ‘a plane of awareness’ upon which the perception of sublimity depended.” That sense of sublimity that Martin had in mind revealed itself as I gazed at her On A Clear Day suite: lines and columns of various densities, alternating between open and compact grids that expand or contract on the page like ripples on a pond. Ultimately, Martin hoped her work would evoke “a state of perfect restfulness; not a slackened, closed, or unconscious state (like sleep), but an expansive, meditative consciousness.”

In her book, Haskell states that Martin’s “pictorial style” is influenced by an idea that was popular in antiquity. “The Greeks,” Martin wrote, “made a great discovery. They discovered that in nature there are no perfect circles or straight lines or equal spaces. Yet they discovered that their interest and inclination was in the perfection of circles and lines, and that in their minds they could see them, and that they were then able to make them.” In short, Agnes Martin and the Greeks recognized that, “the mind knows what the eye has not seen, but that what the mind knows is perfection.”

Details

“The level of detail and craft is something that’s inscribed within the original design concept. And so when I begin to draw, I know what kind of detailing I want the building to have.” Tadao Ando

Photos by The Modern’s summer photo intern, Max Fields.

Full Circle

Every time I walk past the Modern’s Cornwall Summer Circle, 1995, by Richard Long, it reminds me of Stonehenge. The two structures share the obvious circular/stone construction, but there are also underlying elements of ritual and a shared sense of void. (Stonehenge is composed of a series of concentric circles, formed by monumental rocks that were hauled and placed there by Neolithic people in three phases beginning around 3100 BCE. Long’s Cornwall Summer Circle is a single circular outline populated by 237 slate stones.)

While stones are used in both structures, their physical appearances are quite different. The rocks in Stonehenge are monumental in size, smooth and rounded by time spent in the elements. The rocks in Cornwall Summer Circle are, by comparison, smaller and more angular. The sharp, pointed objects of Long’s work lie in contrast to their arrangement. If Stonehenge can be considered a symbol of early man’s triumph over his natural environment, (the stones that compose the historical site were hauled more than 150 miles by man, according to National Geographic), Long’s work too can be associated with the triumph of nature—the rocks as a component of the natural world recontextualized within a manmade environment.

An article in the New York Times asserts that Stonehenge was at least in part a burial ground, but National Geographic contends that the circular configuration was possibly intended for worship. The circle has symbolic ties to many elements in the natural world: it is the shape of the planets; it holds astronomical implications; and suggests the cyclical nature of the seasons, as well as the most basic cycle of all, life.  Long frequently incorporates circles, as well as lines and spirals, into his work, stating that archetypal shapes and their basic elements carry a sense of symbolism and ritual. And the circular nature of both spaces can be linked to the idea of ritual if one considers the act of circumambulation, to ritualistically circle something on foot.

Our ability to walk around the circular formation of Long’s work accentuates the most powerful aspect of Cornwall Summer Circle: the central void created by the rocks. The desire to experience the empty space is a fundamental part of both the artwork and Stonehenge. There is a perceived sense of importance granted to the center of the circle, made even more profound by the inaccessibility of the space: the surrounding rocks make it nearly impossible to experience in Cornwall Summer Circle, and the conservationists at Stonehenge have roped off the structure prohibiting foot traffic.

All we can do is walk around both structures, admiring them for their complexity as well as their simplicity…until at last, we come full circle.

Remember when. Remember how. Richard Tuttle’s Relative to Our Society

A yellow light bulb, soon to become obsolete, casts a dull glow that faintly washes the once white, now jaundiced wall.

One, two, three, four, five, maybe six, small, milky-white light bulbs line up horizontally with one out of step.

Red. Red. Red. A red stick branching out and straight down as if looking for water. Another red branch in relation to the small, milky bulbs. And again a red stick, bringing to mind a red wheelbarrow and a white chicken, or something like that. There’s also my grandmother’s little red hatchet given to a black-eyed girl at an early age, before the world knew better.

A chain hangs. A presence, doubled up and cool, leaving its trace and moving on. My heart beats solid and swift, enjoying the absence and the desire that it left behind. The thought becomes a feeling, moving to my throat and then to my core. Saliva gathers and forms white clouds stuffed in cloud compartments.

How do you make a shape without a name and make something heavy behave as if it is weightless? Puncture the shape with countless holes. Let it breathe without sinking it. Have it touch down on twin points. Make contact, but no commitment.

Plugged in and lit up.

Made for one viewer at a time.

That’s how I remember it.

In recalling, revisiting, and reconsidering Richard Tuttle’s Relative to Our Society, 1990, recently reinstalled in the Modern’s galleries, I was drawn to the concept, “no ideas but in things.” This profound little quip of the early twentieth century American poetry movement—imagism—relates to my initial encounter with Tuttle’s sculpture. Looking carefully and naming the elements, those that could be named, it seemed clear to me that meaning in this sculpture is in the materials, the parts, the things. With every individual element maintaining its own identity, Relative to Our Society speaks to the modernist/imagist poet William Carlos Williams’s claim that a poem “must be real, not ‘realism,’ but a reality itself.” I remember sitting for as much as an hour, drawing every detail, every connection of this piece when it was first installed about five years ago. My pencil followed where it went in and where it came out, learning it as I looked. I thought I was committing the piece to memory, but I wasn’t because it resists being known in that way, in a single memory. I thought that to memorize it was to conquer it, to own it, to display it as a trophy—a lifeless trophy hanging in the brain, collecting dust along with other such trophies. I’m glad I was wrong. I’m glad that Relative to Our Society defies memory, making it forever new.