Mars Explorer
"Mars Explorer" by Richard Rhodes, Fall 2008, pp. 52-56
The Carnegie International has been around for more than a hundred years. In its modern form over the past two decades it has consistently been one of the top contemporary survey exhibitions in the United States. Forget the wavering, style-conscious Whitney Biennial: the action is in Pittsburgh, where the Carnegie puts its philanthropic largesse and impressive resources behind thoughtful, curatorial-driven exhibitions that explore contemporary art’s thematic foundations.
In its last manifestation, in 2004–05, the curator Laura J. Hoptman created an exhibition that took on the subjective weight of politics and history in the post–9/11 world. Reversing the usual continental drift of curatorial influence, she set a direction that the artist Maurizio Cattelan (who was included in Hoptman’s show) later fleshed out when he co-organized the remarkable 4th Berlin Biennial in 2006. In 1999–2000, Madeleine Grynsztejn, current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, framed a Carnegie International that stressed the fragile status of authenticity in the virtual space that postmodernism has established as a new norm in counterpoint to material reality’s overwhelming nature. In 1995–96, Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art for the past 12 years, assembled a collection of artworks that engaged various aspects of nomadism and the indeterminacy of place. These were exhibitions that, in hindsight, traced the arrival of globalism and the fading promise of modernism. They were shows about the uneasy end of the 20th century and the fraught void of the new millennium. And they represented no slim accomplishment. The Carnegie International turned Pittsburgh into a place where art plays hardball and speaks to its audience about significant things.
“Life on Mars,” the playful title of the 55th Carnegie International, on view through January 11, 2009, might seem out of keeping with this heritage—bad Hollywood sci-fi films cluster like flies on its three syllables—but the show’s curator, Douglas Fogle, formerly of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, knows a good metaphor for strangeness, distance and existential isolation when he sees one. With its otherworldly premise, the title ambitiously takes aim at the future of art and its current state of dislocation. Mars is among the most elsewhere of elsewheres. It is also our planetary neighbour and registers in the imagination as both a comfort and a curse: a possible second home in the universe and, alternatively, a marooned, inhospitable, post-apocalyptic outpost. In the catalogue, Fogle remembers the Pioneer 10 spacecraft from the 1970s. While embodying the most advanced propulsion and imaging technologies of its day, it also carried a plaque bearing a simple line drawing of a man, a woman and Earth as positioned in our solar system. As the spacecraft proceeded on its mission to Mars, Jupiter and beyond, the drawing carried a message of identity for any audience that might be waiting. Mission Control presumed that space was not empty.
In Fogle’s show, habitation and voyaging are recurrent tropes. When the sun goes down on Pittsburgh and the silhouettes of the surrounding hills begin to blend into the night sky, the facade of the Carnegie’s modern Heinz wing lights up with the California artist Doug Aitken’s film Migration (2008), which is projected from an apartment rooftop across the street. For the film, Aitken hired animal wranglers from the film and TV industries to bring their charges before the camera in a series of motel rooms. Like an innocent, family-friendly No Country for Old Men (only with more likeable characters), the film shows us an American buffalo, noble and iconic, standing stiffly in a budget-priced room; an owl perching on a bed amid a storm of feathers; a beaver settling into a bathtub; a fox scrambling over furniture… Aitken’s film inverts the natural order to make a sly, moving statement about the domestication of the wild and our isolation from its fascinating strangeness. Trapped in their rented rooms, framed by the museum facade, the animals are vestiges of an increasingly displaced reality as well as players in an allegory about the nature of art. It’s a tour de force of public art.
Not to be outdone, inside the gallery the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has remounted his 2002 installation Cavemanman. Hirschhorn’s cavern, entered through a closed door (like the portal in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), contains winding pathways and a series of linked chambers—all covered in the brown plastic packing tape that has become his signature. Mannequins made from aluminum foil form several clannish groups and flat-screen video monitors mounted on some of the walls show cave drawings from Lascaux. On other walls (and the floor) Hirschhorn has pasted pop-culture imagery and piled up non-fiction books. The cave is both a library and a cargo-cult warehouse. It registers as a conflicted space of both high-tech cocooning and societal regression. In one room, the equation “1 Man = 1 Man” is written again and again on a wall like political graffiti. Repetition turns it into a mantra that mirrors the primitivism of Hirschhorn’s title. The slogan registers as an entropic variant of the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal,” but the rising rhythm of Thomas Jefferson’s original phrase has gone flat—a liberating political program has become a numerical recipe, its idealism morphed into something rote. With its close, glue-tinged air, Hirschhorn’s cave is no safe haven; it’s a bunker.
Fogle shows a certain braveness in mounting a six-year-old work in a big international contemporary show, but it is a move that supports the idea of a long life for art, beyond fashion and style. He has included venerable figures from 1970s Arte Povera, like Mario and Marisa Merz, as well as the late Paul Thek, a Europhile who injected an intimate, diaristic sensibility into the American art scene. Fogle has also resurrected the 1970s-era Angel photograms of the West Coast visionary Bruce Conner and given the 1990s art star Mike Kelley centre stage in the Carnegie’s column-lined, old-style sculpture court with an installation of sci-fi models of Kandor, capital city of Superman’s home planet of Krypton, under glass domes and topped with life-support cables. The 90-year-old Austrian painter Maria Lassnig is also included, represented by a suite of cheery-coloured but aggressively brushed figure paintings. In an exhibition where theme and mood are all, artists from various eras mix seamlessly. Matthew Monahan, Katja Strunz, Mark Manders, Susan Philipsz and Haegue Yang, relatively new names for North American audiences, add to an ongoing dialogue about the open, unrestricted materiality of contemporary art. The California artist Barry McGee even engages the graffiti scene, presenting mechanized sculptures installed in a hallway and dressed in baggy, hooded clothes, looking like a team of street taggers piggybacking to paint a high wall.
Title notwithstanding, the strength of Fogle’s show is its affirmation of art’s engagement with life on Earth. The British video artist Phil Collins shows a moving documentary about refugee camps in Kosovo that leaves us with a haunting image of loss when a mother holds out a small photo of her murdered son for the camera. The Chinese artist Cao Fei presents a video detailing every step in the factory fabrication of light bulbs. The painters Friedrich Kunath (from Germany) and Wilhelm Sasnal (from Poland) create images of postmodern drift and isolation that return painting to its humanist roots—but in an updated form that reflects ecological challenges and survivalist humour. David Shrigley, a British artist based in Glasgow, Scotland, may be the most literate of all contemporary artists. Usually he hides within a naive, cartoonish drawing style, accompanying his works with funny, philosophically complex captions, but at the Carnegie he offers up small objects in a special vitrine room. In one of the glass cases, a stuffed kitten stands on its hind legs, holding up a placard that reads “I’m Dead.” It is literally dead, with dry, stiff fur and unnatural lime-green eyes, but Shrigley’s work cuts across sentimentality, animal rights, life and death and the ontological status of art. Life on Mars is right here.
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