Yesterday's Tomorrows: Modernism Makeover
Arni Haraldsson Lobby, Trellick Tower, London 2006 Courtesy the artist
The exhibition “Yesterday’s Tomorrows,” curated by Lesley Johnstone at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, brings together 10 Quebecois, Canadian and international artists. It introduces audiences to a number of practices that revisit modernism, its formal attributes and its conceptual premises. The works exhibited in “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” reference particular projects by various modernist architects and designers—and in doing so, they recontextualize aspects of the movement. The show resists the temptation to put forward a hypothesis about the successes and failures of modernism’s pursuits or the outcomes of its influence on contemporary art practice. Instead, it presents examples of artistic fascination with the recent past and with the disputed legacy of modernity’s aesthetics and ideals.
From British social housing blocks to California bachelor pads, monolithic domes and concrete slabs create sexual overtones that can be found throughout modernist architecture. John Massey’s large-scale inkjet prints explore a fetishistic relationship between sculpture and domestic space, while Dorit Margreiter’s captivating 10104 Angelo Drive is based on one of John Lautner’s iconic Hollywood residencies. Margreiter’s dreamlike film focuses on the automated house, its sliding glass doors and surrounding, voluptuous greenery. Still images of the house are interjected with brief, eccentric sequences performed by feminist troupe the Toxic Titties. Shots in which minimal, atmospheric movements create subtle variations in an otherwise steady frame are prevalent in here and elsewhere in the show, such as Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s installation Le Baiser/The Kiss and throughout the intelligent film program, curated by Hajnalka Somogyi, that accompanies the exhibition, featuring works by Johanna Billing, Ursula Mayer and many other artists.
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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Le Baiser/The Kiss 2000 Installation view Courtesy Max Protetch Gallery New York |
The darker side of utopia is more thoroughly investigated by Arni Haraldsson’s project, which combines film references, original photographs, archival memorabilia and video to investigate the legacy of Ernö Goldfinger’s social housing projects. Nairy Baghramian, in collaboration with Janette Laverrière, reconstructs and alters a dressing room design that Laverrière originally created in 1947. The artist adds a messy stack of large Carlo Mollino photographs to the revamped room, and on a nearby wall she's installed an elegantly framed collage of pinups. The suggestion seems to be that modernism’s feminist legacy—a legacy that artist Paulette Phillips attempts to highlight with some of her homages to designer Eileen Gray in an adjoining room—has not been recognized to its full potential.
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John Massey Phantoms of the Modern/Action in Chains 2004 Courtesy Georgia Scherman Projects |
Finishing off the exhibition is Toby Paterson’s soaring 2-D rendition of Basil Spence’s British pavilion for Expo 67. Spence, one of Britain’s pre-eminent brutalist architects, is a contested figure whose social housing projects have become associated with failed utopian ideals and urban planning. Paterson’s immaculate wall painting is an ode to the harsh outlines of Spence’s buildings. The temporary work, which will be painted over after the exhibition ends, echoes the way in which Spence’s buildings and the ideologies they represent have disintegrated over time.
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Nairy Baghramian Entre deux actes III (Loge des comédiennes) 2009 Installation view Courtesy the artist |
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