Museum Jaunt

After a slam bang ride on the #1 train, I bounded into the Museum of Modern Art to catch some highlights from the 1970s and 1980s. Astounded at how many artists I knew from that period who have pried their way into these exclusive collections. Once upon a time they were exhibiting in a former massage parlor in Times Square, and now the same works are consecrated as “art.” Dara Birnbaum’s “Technology Transformation/Wonder Woman” threw rhetorical power punches of color at our impoverished pantheon of superheroes where video pumps up the impact of commercial deification. “Trust Visions that Don’t Feature Buckets of Blood,” dumps on the “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos of media, which has only gained momentum since Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink created the painting in the mid-1980s.

Wonder Woman, Dara Birnbaum

The “Unstable Ground” gallery “highlights the connections and communities engendered by shared struggles, suggesting how we might better stand collectively on unstable ground.” I especially admired Reaper’s Melody by Shambhavi, an Indian artist who sensitively responds to people and their relationship to a troubled earth. Her flowing abstract arrangement of 294 iron sickles recasts them as sculpture, and yet the array also reminds us of the stoop labor still performed by millions of farmers worldwide.

Reaper’s Melody, Shambhavi

The extensive display of the work of Frédéric Brouly Bouabré of the Ivory Coast also puts the intertwined global world front and center. A self-taught artist, Bouabré, served in the colonial administration many years before finding his soul in art. And he often found his materials discarded in the streets of Abidjan.

Frédéric Brouly Bouabré

Largely working on small cards, Bouabré has created a monumental work of cultural salvage: an invented syllabary of pictographs for the oral language of his youth, Bété. Like various Akan tongues that form part of the Niger-Congo family of dialects, it is spoken by around three million people, but in the modern world has lost ground to the French widely used as a lingua franca around West Africa and the larger Akan languages from neighboring Ghana. Generally, the artist surrounds his images with text that doubles as a title, for example, “Here is why God doesn’t like war.” MoMA devotes several galleries to his various work, including a charming series on love and sexuality that communicates his humanity just as much as his series on “The Science of Democracy.”

Snails in Love and Here is Why God Does Not Like War Frédéric Brouly Bouabré

Hopping on a CitiBike, I tooled past the patient carriage horses toiling up the hill in Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum. “Before yesterday, we could fly” an Afro-Futurist room hosts an eclectic array of artifacts, among them a five-sided TV console, a sculpture of black pumps with lethal heels, a c.1800 pot from Thomas Commeraw of Corlears Hook, a marvelous hearth that could work as an escape hatch or a time machine, and stunning wallpaper of camo and historical imagery. Unlike the filiopietistic period rooms devoted to worship of the American colonial past, this imaginative rewrite takes past, present and future as question marks and a canvas for repainting aspiration. The project was inspired by the 19th century Seneca Village settlement of free Black New Yorkers which was demolished to make room for Central Park..

Thomas Commeraw, c.1800

A spacious installation of work by sculptor Charles Ray, features several large figures made of luscious carved stainless steel. Very tempting to violate the usual museum’s “don’t touch me” rules and stroke these warm, burnished inviting curves. An odalisque has such gentle billows at the hip, it was really difficult to keep hands off. Her curly flipped hair-do glinted with shiny highlights, adding a pinup babe allure.

Reclining Woman, Charles Ray

Ray has interpreted Huck Finn and Jim several times, intrigued by the mix of originality and prejudice in the Twain characters. A nine foot duo featuring Huck, bent over to scoop frog eggs from the Mississippi, posed at the side of a super-endowed nude Jim, invokes the sexual promise and threat that codes American mythologies about white and black. The pair was originally destined for the outdoor plaza of the Whitney on the High Line, but Ray’s composition was too strong a draught for them, and he refused to allow it to be installed in a more “discreet” location. A fan of Twain and his idiosyncratic embodiment of American myth, Ray notes that Huck said that he and Jim “ had no use for clothes nohow.”

Gabriel, Charles Ray

Another large figure in wood is a huge scale archangel clad in flip-flops, arms outstretched, chest bare, ready to save us from a host of looming catastrophes. Ray had a Japanese artist Yobuku Mukoyoshi carve this figure in cypress based on a mould he made from a fallen tree, and notes that the angel Gabriel is honored in all three Middle Eastern religious traditions: Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Ray originally created Gabriel for a French exhibition curated in the wake of the terrorist killings at Charlie Hebdo. Cypress is a wonderfully ambiguous wood: aromatic, a deciduous softwood that acts like a hardwood, a wood that resists rot, used for railroad ties and caskets. I especially appreciated how the light drapes the wood so differently from its impact on stainless steel — and yet, how both luxuriant materials bend light around their curves.

Huck and Jim, Charles Ray

This sculptural work raises many questions: since the Met was unusually generous in its installation, visitors are invited to think about the relationship of assertive volumes and empty space. Sometimes I like to think of sculptures as elements that can be “disappeared” — subtracted from view while etching a forceful outline. By literally carving absence in the air, Ray renders the crackling vibrations of the edges almost visible.