You know what's annoying? Art education.
Specifically, art education techniques in museums that are aimed at adult audiences. Nothing brings a soaring masterpiece crashing to earth faster than an overwrought label or the raspy sputtering of those long, institutional plastic audio sticks that museumgoers beat against their heads in an effort to "understand" the art. Even worse is being trapped in the gravitational pull of a docent tour led by one of those ill-pallored volunteers with an entirely middling knowledge of the exhibition and an unfinished quilting project awaiting their return to an efficient and charmless apartment.
Certainly, excellent docents do exist and, certainly, everyone ought to be entitled to as much information as they desire in a museum. Still, the fervor over education is at an awful tenor, mainly due to museums having to defend their social value and pull funding from the pockets of philanthropists convinced that no harm can come from helping somebody somewhere learn something. The terrible irony is that
objects and artworks alone are capable of offering all necessary enlightenment from a trip to the museum: It's why museums are full of such things. Even the most complex relationships, histories and ideas may be offered by a museum's collections and exhibitions if positioned thoughtfully by the curator. I can only assume that so many museum exhibitions rely on extensive labeling and audio tours, rather than careful placement of the items being exhibited, because the curator's time is consumed with generating labels and content for audio tours, leaving no time to actually arrange objects. But then, it is such absurd mediocrities that serve to punctuate excellence-and entering the Sherrie Levine exhibition currently at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (217 Johnson St., 946-1000, through May 13) is excellent indeed.
Called
Abstraction
, the show contains only three series by Levine, imbuing the prime gallery space with a sparse and captivating air. Entering at the north end of the long hall, one is met with a row of polished, cast bronze antelope skulls, positioned high along the right-hand wall, perfectly spaced, with a filigree of shadow scattering beneath each work in contrapuntal scribes to the aching bronze brilliance. Across the space, like a second deliberative body legislating equally open possibilities, is a row of full-size, 4- by 8-foot plywood sheets, bare but for a litter of small pink ellipses painted at sparse, irregular intervals. Against a wall at the far end of the space hangs a grid of small, grayscale bursts-each about a foot wide and less than 2 feet tall-iris-printed pixilations based on Alfred Stieglitz photographs. And that's that.
That Levine's grayscale abstractions are literally generated by manipulating Stieglitz' exact imagery (from a huge series of cloud photography dubbed
Equivalents
and meant to represent Stieglitz' own notions of abstraction) speaks to her status as an appropriationist, an artist who makes use of existing art or imagery to generate new questions or pose new theories and arguments through recontextualization. Even when Levine is not appropriating directly (as is the case with the plywood sheet paintings), her work is immersed in theory, concept and history. It's the kind of insular art conversation that is frequently annoying and often demands an audio tour, or a docent strong enough to hold people down, just to keep them from fleeing to the hotel and firing up some blissfully understandable NASCAR.
Two factors, however, turn what should be heady and difficult art into a populist crowd pleaser of an exhibition. First, the work itself is startling and enthralling. Even the particularly challenging plywood pieces-collectively and casually "Knot Paintings" because the pink ovals are painted over the existing outlines of the plugs that are inserted over knotholes in the veneer layers that comprise plywood-absolutely grip a viewer. They are visual essays on the nature of randomness, manufacturing, form and surface as it applies to the school of abstraction in the history of art, but they are also raindrops, windborne petals and lush, antiphallic coves. As much as they conjure a demanding academic conversation about art, they conjure the swift and beautiful vertical
kakemono
landscapes of Japan. Levine never favors theory to the extent that she leaves its visual expression behind-her recontextualizations rely much more on general recognition than on specialized knowledge, at least to begin with.
The second factor is how well placed the exhibition is, both in terms of Levine's few potent works and several painstakingly selected works by O'Keeffe and Stieglitz, positioned, respectively, in a partitioned area and an adjacent room. These pieces aren't placed side by side with Levine, which would be mightily distracting, if practical for audio tours and docents, but near enough that any visitor may easily intuit the interplay and the relation between the works. The curating, done in collaboration by Levine herself and O'Keeffe curator Barbara Buhler Lynes, is entirely noninvasive and diabolically effective. That a critical connection exists between O'Keeffe, Stieglitz and all the artists at the crucible of American modernism and Levine is clear without being explained and is important without being stressed.
University of Virginia art history professor Howard Singerman offered a lecture on the Sunday after the opening. Here was education from an expert ready to answer questions, but only from people compelled by the exhibition to ask. In Singerman's analysis of the dynamic between fine art and mechanized process (like photography, printmaking or digital technology), I found an unexpected suggestion that, at a point when the human mind actually has so much to say, so many conclusions to draw, the poetry and mystery of an idea can sometimes be better conveyed within the uncomplicated grace of machine replication. It may be as possible for mystery and romance to be instilled in an artwork as much by removal of the artist's touch as by its presence. That's not exactly what Singerman said and not exactly in relation to Levine, but it was a thought inspired by both, and one that kept me happy and churning for hours. Try getting that from an audio tour.
