Canadian Art International: Faces in the Crowd
Whitechapel, London
Over the last 100 years, figurative art hasn't exactly been a hot category in art criticism or history. The curators of "Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today," Iwona Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, even admit: "The great revolutions in twentieth century art tend to be associated with abstraction." This vast group exhibition, however, boldly argues for an equally vital alternative history that tracks the human figure in art in the context of modern social history, and marshals artworks by more than a century of acknowledged masters to do so.
Édouard Manet's Le Bal masqué à l'Opéra, from 1873, is the point of origin for this parallel history. What is important is the world Manet depicted: crowded, vibrant, urban. The exhibition identifies the experience of the city as the fundamental precondition of modern life and the underlying preoccupation of its artists. Painters like Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec and photographers such as Eugène Atget exemplify artists' fascination with the city's heterogeneity and with the collisions of disparate lives that urban venues made possible. Soon to follow were expressions of the isolation and alienation that also inevitably result; examples are paintings by Grosz, Munch and Beckmann and the photographs of Brassaï. Walker Evans's Subway Portraits of isolated public-transit riders offer another proof of how normal it had become by mid-century to be an anonymous face in the multitude. As the century progressed, standing out in a crowd seemed to require more and more extreme measures. Performance art as a genre could be said to be a reaction to this condition, and exemplary performative works by Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy and Carolee Schneemann suggest the lengths to which the modern individual must go to make a distinctive statement.
Photography offered 20th-century artists the ability to witness life more broadly than ever before, whether through the identification of social types (August Sander, Malick Sidibé), photojournalism (Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold) or a dedication to the street as a place where identities are both observed and performed (Helen Levitt, David Goldblatt). With so much witnessing, the watching of other people and an attendant self-consciousness gradually became modern inevitabilities and persistent themes for art. They are most literally realized here in Marcel Broodthaers's The Visual Tower (a sculpture with eyes looking out in all directions), Michelangelo Pistoletto's mirror works and the stalking exercises of Vito Acconci and Sophie Calle.
Such concerns lead to considerations of celebrity (Warhol) and to doubts about the stability of identity and subjectivity. With such heightened scrutiny of the self comes anxiety about the vulnerability of individual identity (read the existential questioning found in Magritte and personality breakdown in Francis Bacon). Other artists have reacted to the premise that individual subjectivity has no viable core with playful excitement at the possibility of new identities (Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman). The exhibition also suggests how much contemporary art, whether inflected by a confessional tone or an identity-politics outlook, responds to a perceived need to make individual lives matter, to make differentiated voices heard. Some potent examples here include contributions from Christian Boltanski, Jeremy Deller and Anri Sala. An Andreas Gursky photograph of a thousands-strong rave crowd manifests the tension between the power of identifying with a group and the powerlessness of being lost within it. While the themes are ubiquitous today, they seem unthinkable for art produced before the 20th century.
Among the 100 artists included in "Faces in the Crowd" are many of the defining practitioners of modern and contemporary art, and it is a revelation and a bracing pleasure to discover them seeming so newly relevant in this context. Literary, sociological, political and psychological thought have revolved around the exhibition's theme for a century, so viewing art within this frame seems obvious, yet overdue. It gives rise to the question of why art is so frequently debated in terms outside the realm of life to begin with. The basic definition of art has exploded in countless directions over the last century, and perhaps this is why the discussion of art tends to engage with its own history, with a self-referential, medium-specific emphasis on formal developments. This inward critical gaze also validates and perpetuates the elitist view of high art as something that transcends and stands apart from life's concerns (Clement Greenberg is not the only one responsible). The curators here are determined to prove that art's gaze has been turned outward all along.
Manet would concur: "Who was it that said that drawing should be the transcription of form?" he once wrote. "The truth is, art should be the transcription of life."
Summer 2005
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