#Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism

[madforfashiondude]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Schedule of Spring and Summer 2018 Exhibitions

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the schedule of its upcoming spring and summer seasons. Highlights of the upcoming 2018 exhibition season are: Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism Exhibition Dates: January 17–July 15, 2018 Exhibition Location: Gallery 851 William Wegman, Before/On/After (detail), 1972. Gelatin silver prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,…

[blakegopnik]

ED RUSCHA’S ‘ARC’: A RICHARD SERRA IN MOTLEY?

THE WEEKLY PIC: When I saw this 1967 drawing by Ed Ruscha, titled “Arc”, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I was immediately struck by how it seemed to foreshadow the Torqued Ellipses that Richard Serra was making some 30 years later. The friend I was with argued that this was nothing more than pseudomorphism – an accidental, superficial resemblance between two things that are fundamentally different. But I’m not so sure. For one thing, the comparison gets at the strange way that Ruscha often manages to give small, delicate images a secret monumentality. Or rather, the complicated realisms at play in Ruscha put scale into abeyance in a way that rarely happens with other artists: “Arc” could be trying to render a twisted slip of paper or a massive sculpture in torqued steel.

More importantly, the subtle and intricate humor embedded in this Ruscha points to a major failing in the always-ponderous, unavoidably self-important late works of Serra. The Ruscha revels in the inherent absurdity, and absurdism, of just about all of modern art: Most of modernism’s propositions are essentially “against nature” (a rebours), and their great cultural battle has always been to naturalize themselves as the same kind of “normal” artmaking that went on in the centuries when art had more evident social functions. That’s the battle that Serra’s late works are busy fighting; their sheer heft means they often come close to winning it. Whereas a lot of his early works – his thrown molten lead; his card-play with color – seemed willing to fight it with a wink and a nod.  They are more like this Ruscha which, as it happens, has a militancy that it keeps hidden in its medium: It was drawn with gunpowder.

Ruscha’s “Arc” is part of an exhibition called “Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism.” It shows how an entire generation of West Coast artists recognized the absurdity inherent in some of the grandiose aims and claims of the latest winning –isms in art.  And then those artists crafted their own work – comic and weighty at the same time – out of that recognition.  (Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

For a full survey of past Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.