'A(nother) Very Political Show'

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A(nother) Very Political Show
By JAMES PANERO
June 26, 2007; Page D5

It isn't every day that you find yourself sitting beside Robert De Niro in a water taxi as he tries to lose two boatloads of paparazzi pursuing him in a slow-speed chase down the Grand Canal. Or that Bobby D asks you to explain Matthew Barney, the shock-jock artist now on display at Venice's Peggy Guggenheim Collection whom the New York Times once called "the most important American artist of his generation." ("Installation art and Vaseline," I say, which he repeats with a down-turned smile.)

Then again, it isn't every day that you're there for the start of the 112-year-old International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, when the Renaissance city fills to the brim with contemporary art. Leading up to the official opening, which took place June 10, the art world descends on Venice for its biggest, most spectacular and certainly oddest schmoozefest -- and departs just as the gates open to the general public.

The Arsenale, which houses the Biennale show's less established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom.
The Biennale mainly takes place in the docklands past San Marco and in a park nearby, the Giardini. Here the exhibition space is divided up among nations that maintain permanent pavilions and an international group show, this year organized by Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art and formerly a curator at MoMA.

Seventy-six nations are participating this year, spread out not only in the pavilions across the Giardini but also in palazzos and other buildings throughout Venice. For the preview days, which began on June 6, hotels in Venice booked up months in advance. "Collateral" art events filled the city. Mr. De Niro was in town with the gallery owner Larry Salander to meet with journalists and present an exhibition of work by the actor's father, the accomplished and under-recognized New York School painter Robert De Niro Sr.

The De Niro show is now taking place at the San Marco Casa d'Aste in the center of town -- timed to the opening of the Biennale, but unconnected to the official exhibition. Neither Mr. Salander nor Mr. De Niro even made plans to see the central shows of the Biennale. For many, it's been a long time since the Biennale hosted must-see art.

The Biennale will remain open through Nov. 21. But visit Venice past the preview time and you miss half the point. Indeed, while the Biennale as an art fête may never be more important, the Biennale now faces stiff competition as a pre-eminent international art show from more nimble gallery-driven art fairs -- Frieze in London, the Armory Show in New York, Basel Miami, and Basel in Switzerland, which took place a week after the Biennale preview. Even Dubai now hosts its own contemporary art fair.

The Biennale has not been a "selling" fair since 1968. And with so much world-wide attention now focused on the marketplace, the exhibition has felt the pressure. Enter Bob Storr, the Biennale's first American-born curator.

At the preview press conference in Venice, Mr. Storr spoke only in English as he introduced this year's group show, an exhibition he calls "Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind: Art in the Present Tense." The title is meant to bridge the gap, as he sees it, between "conceptual" and "perceptual" art. "It is not a political show," Mr. Storr promised, but a "sober show at a time that lots of people are intoxicated by cash. The cash will go away some day. I hope the works in this show will not."

In fact, Mr. Storr has put together a very political show. Meant as a catch-all, "Think With the Senses" is instead an international survey with an all-too-narrow, tidy scope. Rare is the art here without a conceptual if not overtly political component. The Arsenale, a former naval factory building that houses his show's less-established artists, comes off as a gantlet of gloom, steps away from multimillion-dollar yachts parked outside.

One of the first rooms here is dedicated to the theme of crashing airplanes (by the artists Charles Gaines and Léon Ferrari). There is a work that explores the "politics of flowers" (by Yto Barrada). There are machine guns (by Nedko Solakov). There is a meditation on the Pinochet coup (by Melik Ohanian). There is a video of a child playing soccer with a human skull (Paolo Canevari's "Bouncing Skull"). There are portraits of tenured radicals like Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm (by Rainer Ganahl).

The other half of Mr. Storr's group show, which as usual is displayed in the Padiglione Italia of the Giardini, may contain more established artists, but the message is often the same. Here in a video, Mr. Ganahl repeats the words "I am not a terrorist" in different languages (at the Biennale, terrorists are the grievance group of the moment). Elsewhere, Raymond Pettibon has graffitied up a room with a diatribe against American politics. "America loves (adores) Israel," "Hillary Clinton, Hillary Kristol, Hillary Kramer: Post-op or same person" and "Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz" are scrawled besides images of the Star of David.

One can only imagine that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are the natural extensions of Mr. Storr's understanding of avant-garde art. The national pavilions, outside of Mr. Storr's control, do offer some relief. At the French pavilion, Sophie Calle has put together a chic piece occasioned by her break-up with a boyfriend. In a building off the Arsenale, the Italians have created a sensuous exhibition by Guiseppe Penone, a sculptor once associated with Italy's Arte Povera movement, which sought to create art from common, "poor" materials, and a humorous (for once) meditation on the American political process by Francesco Vezzoli. The Russians have a sophisticated work by AES+F Group, computer artists who channel Wagnerian mythology and Symbolism.

The U.S., meanwhile, under the aegis of the Guggenheim Museum and the State Department, has put on an uninspired posthumous show of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born artist who died of AIDS in 1996.

Mr. Storr promised to bring to Venice a diverse display of international contemporary art. But most of the artists in his Padiglione Italia -- Gerhard Richter, Elizabeth Murray, Nancy Spero -- can be seen in any major museum (often in exhibitions organized by Mr. Storr). Several of the younger, foreign-born artists in the Arsenale now work and exhibit in New York.

Mr. Storr's show, at the center of the Biennale, will be a disappointment to anyone who believes there is a place for art outside politics. The message here can also be downright bizarre. In his opening statement, Mr. Storr maintained that "the social barrier to enter a gallery is enormous. The barrier to come to Venice is not." They must be laughing on their yachts at that one.

On my way out of Venice, past the parking lots of the Piazzale Roma and a world away from the Biennale, I met up with Augustus Rylands, the 25-year-old Anglo-American son of the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This year, timed to the preview days of the Biennale, Mr. Rylands organized a modern and contemporary art fair called Cornice. It featured 52 galleries. "Unofficially, the Biennale is extremely commercial," he told me as we walked up and down his tent of gallery stalls. "To complain about art fairs is hypocritical to say the least. The gallery is always the greatest champion of the artist."

Outside, Mr. Rylands showed me the mockup of a monument to 9/11, a work by Helidon Xhixha sponsored by the Young Artists Foundation in association with Cornice. The sculpture reconfigures the Twin Towers as a vertical American flag -- a stirring tribute destined for Battery Park City. And unless I am mistaken, it does not include a single reference to Halliburton.

This summer, should you find yourself in Venice, be sure to check out the Scuola di San Rocco -- the guild hall with Venice's original art installation, a 16th-century cycle of paintings by Tintoretto, culminating in a 40-foot "Crucifixion" -- and side shows like the De Niro before making your way over to the Biennale.

Daniel Buren, the curator of this year's Sophie Calle show, once noted, "Increasingly, the subject of an exhibition is less likely to be the exhibition of works of art, than the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art." If you really want to experience the latter in Venice, best get yourself on the preview list for 2009.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'

THE NEW YORK SUN
Books

'A Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism'
BY JAMES PANERO
March 14, 2007

The problem with art biographies is that they tend to contain very little art. You cannot quote a painting the way you can a novel, a letter, or a line of poetry. To compensate, art biographers toss in everything about an artist but the kitchen sink — the models and the mistresses, the comrades and the critics. But without direct contact with the work — the reason we are reading the biography in the first place — can an art biography ever really describe the heart of its subject's life? And I'm not talking about including a few color reproductions.

In just more than 200 pages of "Marc Chagall" (Schocken, 256 pages, $19.95), Jonathan Wilson solves this problem with an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted. This is not a biography that settles on describing an artist's life. It is a book that looks out from the artist's work — the literalization of an oeuvre.

"The man in the air in my paintings ... is me," Chagall said to an interviewer in 1950. "It used to be partially me. Now it is entirely me. I'm not fixed anyplace. I have no place of my own." In the air, floating over the mundane non-essentials of an artist's life, that's where Mr. Wilson finds Chagall.

Mr. Wilson filters his story through a Jewish lens. His biography is just one of several dozen new and forthcoming books on "Jewish Encounters" published by Schocken/Nextbook in a series edited by Jonathan Rosen. Rather than limiting the narrative, Mr. Wilson's focus reveals Chagall in high relief. As an artist, Chagall discovered a unique resonance between the modern Jewish Diaspora and the modernist condition. Born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, Chagall utilized the color-and-line principles of the French avant-garde to document the "twilight of a Jewish world."

In life, as in his art, Chagall floated over adversity. He skirted the race laws of Imperial Russia to study art in St. Petersburg. He made his exit of the Iron Curtain just as Kazimir Malevich's "Suprematist Academy" was moving in on his Vitebsk Free Academy. He took his last step on Vichy soil, with the help of Varian Fry and other American supporters, just as the Reich was sealing up the French borders.

Chagall also floated over distinctions that might have hemmed in more Earth-bound personalities. "His work and his life both reveal a reactive desire to be a Russian to Russians, a Jew to Jews, and a Frenchman to the French," Mr. Wilson writes. In his paintings Chagall often incorporated the figure of Jesus, whom he saw as the embodiment of Jewish suffering as a stand-in for the artist and, after the war, the Shoah. "[T]he Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there." Mr. Wilson argues that as a Jew working in Christian iconography, Chagall was like Irving Berlin, his painting "White Crucifixion" like the song "White Christmas." For Chagall, this meant imagining a "pre-Christian Jesus" who was "a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the modern world," as the artist said to Partisan Review in 1944.

In subject matter, Chagall drifted between the ascetic parameters of high modernism and the nostalgic sentimentality for a lost home. For art purists, this has been the one fact that grounds Chagall's reputation. The critic Robert Hughes once called Chagall "the Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism." But Chagall was more than a mere Jewish Surrealist, as Mr. Wilson writes, "preserving it in schmaltz." A novelist and literary critic, Mr Wilson himself floats above the etiquette of art biography to write magical paragraphs like this one:

A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality ... has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desper ately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists — think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.

Mr. Wilson begins his book with the acknowledgment that "sophisticated art aficionados weren't supposed to love or even like Chagall. His lovers and his rabbis, his massive bouquets and his violins were equally dubious, equally cloying, not kitsch, but living somewhere dangerously close to that ballpark." Two hundred pages later, Mr. Wilson returns his subject from the dustbin of college poster art to the skies above Vitebsk, where Chagall belongs.

'A Diorama's Moving Story'

Mountain Gorilla
Akeley Hall of African Mammals
American Museum of Natural History, New York

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 17-18, 2007

'A Diorama's Moving Story'

Masterpiece: Anatomy of a classic
Carl Akeley never lived to see his most lasting achievement

by James Panero

A silverback gorilla stands proudly before his family. Wild celery and Ruwenzori blackberry, Cusso and Tutsan trees fill the foreground. The volcanic Kivu range smolders in the view beyond. All on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

New York’s cathedral to the natural world, the American Museum of Natural History, is built on the belief that one’s betterment through education will lead to the betterment of all. The museum’s mountain gorilla diorama is an expression of this faith. Through the transformation of stones and bones into an art without artifice, we feel empathy for an unseen world.

The master of the habitat diorama was a larger-than-life figure named Carl Akeley. He was an artist who genuinely suffered for his art. Over two expeditions to Africa in the 1920s, he faced down charging elephants and strangled an attacking leopard with his bare hands. With a genius for invention and a polymath’s interest in science, naturalism and art, he took museum education into the 20th century with his affecting tableaux of plants and animals. His legacy of diorama art is finally getting its due.

Akeley built the first diorama for science education—a muskrat habitat, still on display at the Milwaukee Public Museum, in 1889. He also created a culture of taxidermists, foreground sculptors and background painters at the American Museum that elevated his craft into an art form.

On the museum’s 1926 Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition to Africa, artists joined scientists in the field. Shoebox-size mockups were ported from camp to camp. Armed guards kept watch over the painters for fear of animal attacks.

Akeley was there preparing material for a two-tiered hall of dioramas dedicated to African mammals, which he envisioned would include a herd of elephants as its centerpiece and the mountain gorilla display as its cornerstone.

Each diorama scene would be a precise reproduction of the flora and fauna of an exact time and place. Each display would require extensive on-site analysis. Each animal specimen would be sculpted in clay prior to mounting (before Akeley, taxidermists stuffed hide with straw).

When the Hall of African Mammals opened 10 years later, it become Akeley’s most lasting achievement. He never lived to see it.

In 1926, Akeley died of dysentery and malaria on the slopes of Mount Mikeno in Africa’s Belgian Congo. He is buried just beyond view of the site now depicted in the museum’s mountain gorilla diorama. Using scientific information gathered from his 1926 expedition, along with gorilla specimens Akeley had collected and prepared in 1921, Akeley’s colleagues completed this diorama in 1936.

It was a fitting tribute. Thanks to Akeley’s efforts on behalf of gorilla conservation, Belgium’s Leopold II established Parc Nationale Albert, Africa’s first national park and research facility, in 1925. The park now spans three countries, including the area around Mount Mikeno. Today, the forest depicted in this diorama would undoubtedly be gone, and the mountain gorilla would most likely be extinct, were it not for Akeley. (Dian Fossey, a naturalist who walked in Akeley’s footsteps, was killed near Mikeno in 1985 protecting Akeley’s “amiable giants” from poachers; her story became the subject of “Gorillas in the Mist.”)

After Akeley’s death, such background artists as James Perry Wilson, foreground sculptors as Raymond DeLucia, and taxidermists as Robert Rockwell went on to exceed Akeley’s artistic achievements. By mid-century, individual dioramas had taken on theatrical story lines. The diorama artist attacked the challenges of dusk, variable weather conditions, and animals in motion. The Hall of North American Mammals, one floor below Akeley Hall and born from the spirit of Akeley’s mountain gorilla display, contains many of these examples.

“All of the talents, all of the staff and techniques and methods and tricks of the trade that were utilized in the Akeley years were then brought to bear on the North American mammals groups,” says Stephen Christopher Quinn. As the heir to Akeley’s exhibition department at the museum, Mr. Quinn published “Windows on Nature,” the definitive, illustrated guide to the dioramas, last year.

As a kid, I remember becoming attached to the small winter scene of a Canadian Lynx creeping up on a Snowshoe Hare along a rime-encrusted ridgeline. I imagine I wasn’t the only one with feelings for the lynx’s prey crouching beneath a balsam fir. A similar emotion swept over Akeley upon encountering the mountain gorilla. “I envy that chap his funeral pyre,” Akeley wrote in his journal of 1921.

Theodore Roosevelt spent his own boyhood in this museum; his father was influential in its founding in 1869, and the original charter for the museum was signed in his family’s home. The Theodore Roosevelt rotunda, the museum’s entrance hall designed by John Russell Pope, has for generations served as the institution’s lofty shrine to our conservation-minded president.

Affixed to the wall of this hall is the following Roosevelt pronouncement: “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.” With his own form of virtual reality, Carl Akeley developed a way to reveal nature’s hidden spirit without words.

Next time you are at the American Museum of Natural History, step out of the lobby into the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, make a left at the Mountain Gorilla diorama, and you will find a masterpiece of diorama art that is as profound as anything in the museum.

Mr. Panero is the managing editor of the New Criterion.