0.cached.png
By Peter Plagens
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
The 1997 exhibition "Sensation" certainly was one. The show caused a big ruckus at the Royal Academy of Arts in London because of a giant painting of Myra Hindley, the infamous child-murderer, made with imprints of children's hands. Academicians resigned in protest, and the British press quivered with outrage. When "Sensation" traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year, Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary (embellished with porn cutouts and balls of elephant dung) enraged local Roman Catholics--including New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who tried to shut down the BMA. Perhaps predictably, "Sensation" proved a huge publicity generator and ticket seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Now the Royal Academy--being no royal fool--has opened another festival of shock value called "Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art." And the question on everyone's mind is, will "Apocalypse" be another sensation, or will it end up an apocalypse--a fatal reach too far into what might be called the P. T. Barnum school of curating?
Academy exhibitions director Norman Rosenthal makes a passionate case for his new offering. "The idea is that the apocalypse can take place in the bed-sitting room, as well as California in the 1950s, or in the 21st century," he told NEWSWEEK as the first viewers poured into the RA last week. ("Apocalypse" runs through Dec. 15, and there are no plans yet to send it to America.) "Art is dangerous, art is magic and art can turn the world upside down," Rosenthal added in cheerful hyperbole. For "Apocalypse," Rosenthal did things a bit differently from "Sensation." Instead of operating solo, he brought in freelance curator Max Wigram to add a younger viewpoint, and went international with the selection of artists. ("Sensation" was all British.) Rosenthal also gave each of the show's 13 participants an entire gallery to work with.
The result? A lot of nominal horror--which is to say Holocaust references. Very little beauty, mostly because few unironic attempts are made to achieve it. A whole bunch of tiresome takes on prettiness in mass culture. A few outright gags, such as Richard Prince's cheesy two-liners printed on large canvases. And, surprisingly, a kind of professional cool that makes "Sensation" seem, by comparison, like the crazy art rave "Apocalypse" wants to be. Or is it simply that the year 2000 art audience is that much wiser to the carefully concocted art scandal?
Read More on News
"Apocalypse's" centerpiece is an enormous depiction of "Hell," by Jake and Dinos Chapman, best known for their genital-faced nymphet mannequins. (Indeed, a visit by Rosenthal to the artists' studio to see the work in progress was his aha! moment in the exhibition's genesis.) Consisting of some 5,000 variously deformed and mutilated Nazi toy soldiers deployed in eight big glass cases (arranged in swastika formation), "Hell" is a model railroader's HO-gauge acid nightmare: an unbelievable orgy of shootings, beatings, crucifyings, cannibalism and chucking people into ovens. The piece is filled with grotesque cleverness--from the almost-indistinguishability of sex acts and genetic mutation to the sculptured eagles atop the ruins of a German temple morphing into live vultures. But it's also oddly flat, even a little dull. None of the Chapmans' mini-monsters seems to be suffering and, after a first tour around the vitrines, it hits you that the work is essentially an overwrought instance of what boys do when they're left alone in their rooms too long. "Hell" is a marvel of obsessiveness without actually being marvelous.
If you want real horror, Jeff Koons's room is the place. Koons--of chrome-bunny, giant-flowering-puppy and ex-husband-of-porn-star fame--says, "Early on I was involved in a Duchampian dialogue, but then I developed more of a sense of humanity." His paintings (executed mostly by assistants) of bright, puffy things toddlers drool over, and a shiny, outsize metal replica of a balloon animal, are alleged by the artist to be innocently beautiful in a totally nonelitist way. "It's important not to use the power of art to alienate and segregate," Koons says. A studiously anonymous-looking man in an anonymous gray suit with a voice like HAL 9000, Koons is almost convincing in his role as The Stepford Artist. But not quite. A whole lot of anger (he admits the balloon dog is a Trojan horse filled with "negativity") and irony (who but a Teletubby really wants to look at big paint-by-number renderings of stuffed animals?) oozes from his work. Ten minutes in the Koons gallery gives you the shudder of terror the Chapmans can't.
A beauty/horror dichotomy is tweaked throughout the show. Mariko Mori's ghostly meditation chamber appears to imagine what Liberace's boudoir would be like if the pianist had converted to Zen Buddhism. (A day into the show, an electrical failure temporarily shut it down.) The British couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster pile up a bunch of trash that casts a piquant shadow on the wall of a loving couple sitting on a hill. Chris Cunningham probably comes closest to successfully baiting the bluestockings with "Flex," a film of a nude couple's violent sexual congress. The Academy and state censors are at a standoff regarding this over-FX'ed and oversoundtracked (there's that obligatory techno-rumble from outer space again!) combination of soft porn and alien abduction.
The best piece in the exhibition is, however, a cosmic joke that has little to do with either beauty or horror: Maurizio Cattelan's "The Ninth Hour." In the midst of a vast red carpet lies the life-size, realistic and completely vestmented figure of the current pope--felled by a meteorite that has just crashed through the skylight overhead. (There's a real hole up there, and shards of glass on the floor.) John Paul II is eerily unbloodied and still clings to his staff. Cattelan invents a new art category here--slapstick blasphemy--and at the same time asks a disturbing question about miracles, the one that struck down the pontiff in the first place, and the other one that saved him.
While most of the art in "Apocalypse" is brand new, none of it was commissioned especially for the exhibition. That means that the parts and plans for the installation-art pieces constituting the bulk of the show were already lying around the artists' studios, waiting for a curator with a unifying concept to come along. Perhaps that's why "Apocalypse" feels like a psychic tag sale that aims to clear our esthetic garage of late-20th-century baggage: all this trying to be profound and smartass at the same time. If there's a beauty part to this exhibition, that's probably it.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines