Two Art Fairs & Joan Miró at MoMA

My friend Diana and I caught a variety of art exhibits at the beginning of May.  First up were two immense art fairs, Frieze on Randalls Island and Art New York at Pier 94; both fairs ran from Thursday, 2, to Sunday, 5 May.  We followed that with a visit to the Museum of Modern Art for Joan Miró: Birth of the World, which runs from 24 February-15 June.

Diana and I went to Art New York, which was launched in 2015 as an off-shoot of Art Miami (established in 2012), last year (see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 13 May 2018), and for the most part this year’s exhibit was very similar to last year’s.  Diana went to 2018’s Frieze on her own, so this was my first trip to Randalls Island to see that one.  Frieze New York started in 2012.  Both fairs are hosts to exhibits of dozens of galleries from around the country and the world.  We drove to Frieze—Randalls Island is a city park in the East River off of about East 125th Street in Manhattan, west of Queens and south of the Bronx—on Saturday afternoon, 4 May (Star Wars Day, May the Fourth); we went to ANY at the pier, which is at West 55th Street off the West Side Highway, on Sunday, the 5th. 

I provided a description of last year’s ANY in my report on that exhibition (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2018/05/art-new-york-2018.html), and it’s the same for ANY 2019 so I won’t do that again.  (Some exhibitors are new and the art on display at any given gallery’s space may also be different—though there were a lot of repeats—but the layout and overall experience was the same.) 

Frieze, except that it’s in a huge tent instead of a huge building, was also very similar in set-up.  According to its own PR, Frieze, a media and events company that publishes frieze magazine, Frieze Masters Magazine, and Frieze Week, was founded in 1991 with the launch of frieze magazine, a magazine covering contemporary art and culture.  The founders established Frieze London in 2003, which takes place each October. In 2012, Frieze launched Frieze New York, which runs in May; and Frieze Masters, which coincides with Frieze London in October and is dedicated to art from ancient to modern.  In February 2018, Frieze established Frieze Los Angeles. 

Those big art fairs are exhausting.  I got back after Frieze fairly late Wednesday night, about 10:30—and very tired.  (The fair actually closed at 6 p.m., but getting back to Manhattan and then downtown was a long, slow trip!)  Then I met Diana at Pier 94 at 2 the next afternoon for Art New York.  I got home from Art New York at 6:30-ish, but I was still bushed!  Both ANY and Frieze are immense exhibits; Frieze hosted 191 sellers and ANY advertised “more than 70.” 

Though Frieze had lots of benches all around the huge tent that was its pavilion, ANY didn’t provide any rest areas except the café all the way at the end of the building—and must require miles and miles of walking (and we only covered maybe a third of the exhibit spaces!)  After about three hours it all becomes a blur.  (When I used to go to museum shows with my mom, we always figured that two hours was the max unless we took a break in the middle—and that was rare.)

I noticed a couple of things this time that hadn’t occurred to me when we went to ANY last year, since I had nothing with which to compare it.  Frieze seems to focus on contemporary artists and work—lots of art dated 2019 and 2018—with the oldest going back only to the ’80s for the most part (and not much of that).  ANY had lots of artists from the early 20th century, like Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Alexander Calder (1898-1976), and so on, as well as current stuff.  (I enjoyed ANY more both last year in retrospect and this year than I did Frieze.  The mid-century moderns are my favorite art next to Impressionism and Post-impressionism.)

I also see that non-Western artists working in Western traditions—or what might be more accurately called International—rather than the traditions of their native regions have proliferated immensely.  Both fairs, but especially Frieze, exhibited lots of Asian, Middle Eastern, and African artists, and even at least one Australian Aboriginal artist, whose works could easily have been mistaken for European or American artists.  (In some case, there were homages to the artists’ native cultures embedded in the work—it was mostly painting rather than sculpture—but the styles were very like their Western colleagues.) 

I don’t know whether these artists—I  didn’t know any of them before—studied or worked in the West, either here or in Europe, or if they worked from their native regions.  I think this is something of a phenomenon of the last few decades.  A small sample of these artists are Bijan Saffari of Iran,  Rachid Koraichi of Algeria, Zhang Hongtu from China, Tony Wong from China, Izumi Kato of Japan, Anju Dodiya from India, Srijon Chowdhury of Bangladesh, Katsumi Nakai from Japan, Danh Vō of Vietnam, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi of South Africa, Otobong Nkanga from Nigeria, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri of Western Australia. 

(In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was a boy and my parents were involved in the little modern-art gallery in Washington—see “Gres Gallery” on ROT, 7, 10, and 13 July 2018—shows like Six Painters of Japan and Contemporary Polish Paintings were notable because they spotlighted artists working in contemporary Western styles who were from areas where that kind of art was uncommon or even suppressed.  I hadn’t noticed that what had been an occasional divergence from conventional practice had become mainstreamed. 

(Among the Japanese painters in the 1960 exhibit was Yayoi Kusama, represented at Frieze by her installation of silver metal globes, Narcissus Garden, 1966, displayed on the floor beneath to take and to give, 2012, by Chris Ofili, a British artist of Nigerian heritage.  Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the sets for which at London’s Royal Opera Ofili designed, To take is a monumental painting, 17 feet high and 29 feet long, depicting in vibrant rainbow colors a group of sinuous female figures emerging from the sea from where a woman, presumably Diana, arises, and climbing, even merging with, a pyramidal mountain.)

The New York Times asserted that the fair had a “conservative vibe” in order to sell more art, but then art reviewers Martha Schwendener and Will Heinrich added, “That said, there are many islands of daring.”  Musée magazine, a digital quarterly dedicated to emerging artists, attributed the reserved atmosphere to a “diminished” “urge to present aggressively hip, over-the-top installations.”  Belle McIntyre reported, “There were a number of really fun things on offer, as well.”  ARTnews’ Annie Armstrong and Claire Selvin observed that “this year seems to be much more about the quiet discoveries,” but announced that “there are some more modest spectacles,” noting particularly Red Grooms’s 1995 The Bus (about which more in a bit). 

In a totally unrelated occurrence connected to the two fairs, I was interested to learn how variant two people’s response to art can be.  I was put in mind of a 19 September 1993 segment of 60 Minutes, the CBS television newsmagazine, in which correspondent Morley Safer (1931-2016) asked of modern abstract art, “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”  Safer, who died at 84 three years ago this week, was an amateur dauber himself, but he was bemused at what people in the art market would buy.  He posited that gallerists and dealers were defrauding an uninformed and gullible art-buying public.  One piece especially exercised Safer, a painting by renowned artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011), which the TV pundit characterized as “a canvas of scrawls done with the wrong end of a paintbrush [that] bears the imaginative title of . . . Untitled.”  Safer was nonplussed that the piece sold for $2 million ($3,540,000 today).  (In the interest of full disclosure, Twombly was born in Lexington, Virginia, and was a 1950 alumnus of my alma mater there, Washington and Lee University.)

This isn’t that exactly, but Diana kept making the same comment when she came across something at the art fairs that she didn’t much like: “What’s the point?”  I suspect that’s something Morley Safer might have contemplated when he confronted an artwork made up of two basketballs immersed in a fish tank or featuring vacuum cleaners.  It’s a question people have asked ever since Marcel Duchamp produced Fountain, a porcelain urinal mounted and signed “R. Mutt” in 1917. 

At the end of Frieze was a large mock-up of a New York City bus made of fabric.  As we approached it, I said, “That looks like a Red Grooms, but bigger.”  Turned out, it was.  Diana asked what it’s point is and my only response was that, like all Grooms pieces I know, it was pure whimsy.  A little light social commentary thrown in maybe—the passengers (viewers are encouraged to go on board) were a cross section of New York denizens in caricature and the ads on the sides of the bus were parodies of “real” ones (e.g.: “Mister Saigon”). 

Diana responded as if that didn’t compute, but I don’t think all art, even all good art, has a “point.”  What’s the point of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers or even Michelangelo’s David?  An evocation of natural beauty on the one hand and strength on the other—that’s all I see.  The Washington Color School eschewed meaning or representation in their art.  The paintings and sculptures had one purpose: to provide the experience of pure pleasure in the bright, vibrant colors (see my post “The Washington School of Color” on 21 September 2014).

Some ROT-readers may remember one of my criteria for good theater: it must do more than just tell a story.  That doesn’t exclude plays that make you laugh or smile (Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take it With You), shiver in horror (Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall), or some other response to frivolity.  I argued with my MFA classmates at Rutgers that theater for the sake of entertainment isn’t second rate.  The Boy Friend (or High Button Shoes, which I’ve just seen) isn’t less theatrically worthy than Execution of Justice.  Entertainment is a commendable goal for art.

Another thing Diana said when she saw an artist she liked: “She (or ‘He’) knows what she’s doing.”  She meant that the artist was applying (or so Diana thought) principles of line, color, and form.  Diana likes art (including theater art, i.e., playwriting) that follows “rules,” the kind of criteria a teacher might inculcate in a class like at the Art Students League, where Diana has studied.  She said this repeatedly at both fairs.  (She also said it at the Whitney when we were there a couple of weeks ago.  Edward Hopper, whose works were on display at the Whitney, is one of Diana’s favorite artists because she thinks he follows all the rules—and she’d stand in front of one of his paintings and explain how one field of color balances another elsewhere on the canvas.) 

I don’t even notice stuff like that!  I think I’ve said before that my response to art isn’t analytical—I don’t know those rules in any case, since I’ve never studied art.  It’s purely emotional or psychological: I respond to a piece of art according to how it makes me feel.  (I respond to music the same way, by the way.)  When Diana and I went to a Jackson Pollock exhibit at MoMA in 2016, she asked me what it is that I like about his paintings, and the best I could come up with was that I simply find his work beautiful and it excites me (see my report on Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, 4 March 2016).. 

Interestingly, in a variation of “he knows what he’s doing,” my companion occasionally pronounced that opinion about a work or an artist, then added, “but it’s not working.”  That was obviously her way of saying she didn’t like the art, but couldn’t get around the apparent fact that the artist checked all the boxes.  To me, what this response proved was that following the rules doesn’t always make good art.  The corollary to this, it seems logical, is that good art doesn’t always follow rules.  Which has been my point all along!

Which brings me to the MoMA show we saw on Wednesday evening, 8 May, Joan Miró: Birth of the World.  (Diana is a member of MoMA, so we went on an evening when the museum held one of its periodic Member After Hours.  The museum reopens at 6:30 p.m. after closing to the general public, and members, who enter free, and their guests, who pay a $5 entry fee, can enter and stay until 9:30.)  It turned out that just as Diana doesn’t like Jackson Pollock, she doesn’t like Miró, either.  I asked her why she came to the show and she explained that she thought she might see something to reveal why the artist is so esteemed.  (She said at the Pollock that she went because she hoped I’d tell her why I thought he was so good.  I’m sure I didn’t satisfy her.)

She may have found a glimmer of an answer on her own, however.  Birth of the World, curated by Anne Umland, the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator, and Laura Braverman, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, largely from the museum’s collection, is arranged vaguely chronologically.  The first gallery holds works that start with a 1917 oil portrait, Portrait of Enric Cristòfol Ricart.  Miró’s dates are 1893-1983, so he was about 24 when he painted this Fauvist work, which has echoes of van Gogh and Henri Matisse and includes a pasted panel of an actual Japanese print that reflects the Orientalism of Ricart’s striped yellow silk pajamas.  (The most recent piece in the show was Maquette for dust jacket for Joan Miró by James Thrall Soby from 1958.)

The arrangement of the 60 or so works, which include several sculptures and constructions as well as printed illustrations for books, a number of drawings and sketches, some etchings and other prints, and a couple of maquettes (mock-ups) for a poster and a book cover, permit the viewer to see the development over time of the artist’s style and his iconic figures and geometric shapes that start to recur as his work progressed.

When Diana entered the first gallery and looked at a few of Miró’s early works, her first reaction was that he didn’t know anything about form and line.  In other words, she disparaged his art because he was apparently not following the rules as she understood them.  (I suggested that she didn’t really know that he didn’t know “the rules”; he could be deliberately subverting them.  He wouldn’t be the first artist to rebel against the established academic standards of his time.)  As she had at the Pollock show, Diana asked me why I liked Miró.  Again, my answer was inadequate: I love his whimsy.  Even when he had something to say—he was a loyal Spaniard and Catalan (he was born in Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia) and a staunch Republican and anti-Falangist during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and the resulting Francoist dictatorship (1939-75)—he couldn’t help slipping in a little humor.

Oh, well.  To each his (or her) own, I suppose! Toward the end of Birth of the World, however, Diana came around a little, repeating a couple of times that she had to acknowledge that the artist had a sense of humor.  She said it with a smile, almost as if she was embarrassed to admit it.  Now, I don’t think Diana is a convert to the Joan Miró Fan Club—but I’d like to think that she’s not so ready as she was to dismiss angrily all the artists in whose works she doesn’t see “a point.” 

By the way, just because Diana or I don’t see the “point” of a piece of art, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.  Maybe we just missed it.  I have no doubt I have—often.  In a very early post on ROT, I wrote that when I was writing regular theater reviews, “I have even admitted when I didn’t understand a play, suggesting that others with different sensitivities might tune in where I couldn’t.  It’s simply that I don’t feel comfortable dismissing something I haven’t understood—I don’t know everything, after all, and try to be honest enough to admit it in print” (from “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009).  In another blog report, “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 2” (8 November 2009), I acknowledged that “when I’ve had to review shows with which I know I’ll have trouble [because of a personal bias], if I couldn’t get out of the assignment, I’ve always tried to admit right up front that I probably wasn’t the best person to assess the performance.”  When that happened, I would describe the experience rather than evaluate the production.

The MoMA holdings of Miró works is one of most extensive in the world and Birth of the World is judiciously augmented with some apt loans.  (I’ve posted two previous reports on Joan Miró exhibits; “Van Gogh & Miró at MOMA (2008),” 12 October 2016, recounts my visit to MoMA’s Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937 and “Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape,” 5 October 2012 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2012/10/joan-Miró-ladder-of-escape.html], on an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, includes a short bio of the artist.)

Two things about Miró’s art of which Birth of the World gives evidence are that the artist was a Surrealist and that before that, he was a Dadaist.  (For a discussion of Dadaism, see my report on Dada, a large exhibit at the National Gallery in 2006 and MoMA in 2007, posted on 20 February 2010; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2010/02/dada.html.)  From Dadaism, Miró learned an anti-aestheticism and a disdain for established art techniques and styles.  I suspect that this is where Diana picked up the notion that he didn’t know the standards of line, form, and color she looks for in good art.  He’d discarded them when he threw over the conventional art of painting (see my report on Painting and Anti-Painting, https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2016/10/van-gogh-Miró-at-moma-2008.html) in order to reinvigorate it.  “I want to assassinate painting,” the artist is alleged to have said in 1927.

Surrealism, the art style Miró began practicing in about 1924 after he came to Paris in 1920 and found this new form in its infancy, is derived from dreams and the subconscious (greatly influenced first by the theories of Sigmund Freud and later of Carl Jung).  His dreamlike images, which are compiled from squiggly lines and small, carefully hued shapes, may be hard for a viewer to understand because they aren’t the viewer’s dreams.  This may account for Diana’s feeling that Miró’s works have no point.  They do, but it’s a very subjective point.  For this reason, as Carl Daher Delnero, arts correspondent for the Rutland Herald, pronounced: “Miró is a painter to be seen, not explained.”

There’s another attribute of Miró’s art that obtains here as well.  “I make no distinction between painting and poetry,” the artist asserted.  He considered making visual art the same as writing poems.  Just as poetry isn’t a straightforward verbal communication medium, neither, then, is Miró’s painting and sculpture.  It has to be interpreted and that interpretation has to be sussed out carefully and deliberately.  Both art forms have an emotional and an intellectual or rational component and all of the signals are not immediately comprehensible. And one viewer’s reading of a Miró canvas won’t be the same another’s—and both are as likely to be right (if there is such a thing).

Impressionism is all about feelings and your response to an Impressionist painting or sculpture hits you right away—it washes over you as soon as you look at it.  You have to work out Miró’s point.  Just as Miró labeled this focus on the smallest elements of the work his “slow understanding,” his intent grows on the viewer gradually, maybe even after leaving the gallery or on repeated viewings.  Understanding accumulates for both the artist and the viewer. 

One of Miró’s most pervasive subjects in his art was unconditional freedom.  Remembering what I said earlier about Miró’s political loyalties, we should note that he fled Spain for France when the Spanish Civil War broke out because he was a Republican and a foe of the totalitarian forces led by General Francisco Franco.  He was in Paris when France was occupied by the Nazis and, now sandwiched between two fascist forces, was forced to return to now-Francoist Spain.  It’s little wonder that from 1936 to the end of Generalissimo Franco’s dictatorship in 1975, Miró’s interest would be in the evocation of personal, intellectual, and artistic liberty.

A Surrealist in style  for most of his career, Miró was an anarchist in his artistic approach, so his works here are representations of uncompromising freedom, from the amoebic shapes to the seemingly haphazard arrangement of his images to the choice of his palette.  One good example in Birth of the World is The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) (1923-24), a fantastical, mesmerizing scene of intricate geometric shapes atop beds of soft rose and pea green.  The landscape is not meant to be a reflection of what Miró called “outer reality”; the effect is vertiginous and idiosyncratic. The painting is centered on a flesh-pink eye that seems to stare at the viewer.  It “is the eye of the picture staring at me,” Miró declared. 

The imagery of Miró’s work, especially in his Surrealist paintings, can baffle viewers because the artist saw his art as a spiritual act.  He asserted, “Before taking up paper and pencil I carefully washed my hands, and then worked as if performing a religious act.”  He read works of Christian mysticism and poetry and when Picasso looked at Still Life II (1922), he declared, “This is poetry.”  A trapezoidal patch of ochre suggests a shaft of sunlight from a window falling on a flat, gray surface—perhaps a table or the floor—Still Life II was reportedly Miró’s first attempt to put recognizable, everyday objects into his paintings.  A realistically rendered slice of tomato rests in the lower left corner of the trapezoid, beneath an equally representational carbide lamp; an iron stand overlaps the right edge of the light patch.  

Though a few of Miró’s pieces in the MoMA exhibit show signs of Dadaist nonsense, such as Still Life II, the works all reward careful viewing.  The Birth of the World (1925), the show’s title work, and Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750 (1929), two works from  the time the artist was transitioning between Dadaism and Surrealism, both demonstrate Miró’s blending of the two styles, as does Mural Painting (1950-51), a later work that was commissioned for Harvard University’s graduate dining hall.

Mural Painting, which Miró replaced with a ceramic-tile mosaic ten years after the its installation because it was less destructible (MoMA bought the original oil-on-canvas painting in 1963), is approximately 6¼  feet tall by 19½ feet long.  The mural shows bullfighting figures—which the artist identified as a bull with a banderillero on the left and a matador on the right—floating over an atmospheric ground of browns and blues.  The figures are contoured with thin black lines, some of which are filled in with flat colors while others remain transparent. 

In Portrait of Mistress Mills, based on a c. 1786 portrait by British artist George Engleheart (1750-1829) of the singer and actress Mrs. Isabella Mills (1734/35-1802; Miró humorously recast her as “Mistress” rather than “Mrs.,” a manifestation of the artist’s Dadaism), Miró rejected the naturalism of his source imagery, aggressively simplifying and distorting it.  Whereas the Engleheart original (produced as a hand-colored mezzotint) is painted in the muted hues of Neoclassicism, Miró’s figure and background are vividly colored with odd shapes and bright, flat colors which are afforded weight by negative space on the canvas.  As abstract as Miró’s rendering is, the shape of the subject’s wide-brimmed hat and the paper she’s holding in her right hand are recognizable echoes from Engleheart’s portrait. 

(Also in the exhibit is Final study for Portrait of Mistress Mills in 1750, 1929, a charcoal-and-pencil sketch on paper.  The study, drawn on a numbered grid for transfer to canvas, is even more reflective of the 18th-century portrait, with a representation of the plume in Mrs. Mills’s hat and some facial features, however distorted.)

The Birth of the World, considered one of the artist’s iconic works, is simple, with a grayish-brown background on which appear a small red circle (perhaps a balloon) and a white circle (which appears to be the head of a stick figure with thick, black legs), a black triangle (perhaps a kite) and a shooting star.  Pencil-thin black lines shoot out like projectiles ejected from an explosion.  Miró applied paint to an unevenly primed canvas in a manner that anticipated the experiments of artists 35 years in the future, pouring, brushing, and flinging the pigment so that the canvas absorbed it in some places while it stayed on the surface in others.  According to the wall panel, “Miró once said that The Birth of the World describes ‘a sort of genesis,’ an amorphous beginning out of which life may take form.”  (Sounds like a point to me!)

Arguably, the work in Birth of the World  that’s most demonstrative of Miró’s sense of humor, even with respect (or, maybe, disrespect) to his art, is 1950’s Portrait of a Man in a Late Nineteenth-Century Frame.  According to Miró, his childhood friend Joan Prats (1891-1970) found an elaborately framed, pretentious academic portrait by an anonymous artist and sent it to him as a joke.  The subject’s pose and garb, the medal and ribbon of some award on the table, his fixed gaze of authority, and the rose garden through the window epitomize the bourgeois taste and confidence of the fin de siècle.  Within this orderly, rational, and humorless world, Miró mischievously sanded the frame down in spots and inserted his own creatures and signs.  As if to suggest the man’s puzzlement at this unexpected interruption, he punctuated his forehead with a small swirling form (which put me in mind of the twirling-finger gesture suggesting someone’s nuts). 

Miró’s unusual painting-and-frame combination ties the original image and the frame into a single composition that harks back to the artist’s anarchic Dadaist days, thumbing his nose at a whole culture he saw as self-satisfied.  (Portrait of a Man is halfway to the kind of art, like Duchamp’s “readymades,” to which Morley Safer took such exception in 1993.  I wonder what he’d have said about Miró’s Portrait if he’d seen it.)

Miró’s paintings of the female form, radically free expressions unbound by logic, render the body unrecognizable with elongated and undefined body parts painted in glaring colors.  Bather (1932), with its bright yellow figure on a geometric background composed of three horizontal bars of blue, yellow and white, and dark green is vividly painted.  The backdrop is hard to interpret, but the blue strip at the top could be read as the sky, with a red sun hanging just above the center strip.  The yellow and white blocks in the middle strip might be the sea (though why two colors and those in particular, I couldn’t begin to guess), and the shore is green so dark it almost looks black.  Because of its title, the painting suggests a weird beach scene. 

A boldly colored beach-goer, her head enormous and her contorted limbs pulled out grotesquely, sits in the center of the wood-panel painting, sun-bathing. While the bathing woman’s profile is decipherable, the rest of her body is more difficult to read.  One reviewer described Bather “as if Miró took the knuckle of his subject and expanded it like a balloon, placing it next to an elongated crease of an elbow,” adding, “It may not make sense, but Miró’s painting was Miró’s mind.”

After having returned to Barcelona in 1932 after his sojourn in Paris, Miró and his family returned to the French capital in 1936 for a visit and, as the civil war in Spain expanded, stayed as voluntary exiles.  The next year, he created Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), a painting that’s both dark, with a black or dark charcoal-gray background, and bright, with psychedelic-colored patterns that would have seemed familiar in the 1960s.  

Feeling uprooted and increasingly anxious, according to the Birth of the World curators, Miró decided “to do something absolutely different,” and Still Life with Old Shoe is both a still life and a landscape: the back edge of the tabletop across the center of the canvas can be read as a horizon line.  The painting is divided into four quadrants and the objects—a fork stabbed into what could be a roll or a vegetable, a loaf of bread, a bottle, and the titular shoe—are isolated in their own cells (possibly as a reflection of the way the artist felt being separated from his favorite surrounding, the Catalan countryside).  Against the somber background, the colors are “acidic, highly saturated, and dissonant.”  

Miró was not a political activist, which is why he left Spain despite his intellectual and emotional support of the Republican cause, but Still Life with Old Shoe, a depiction of an apocalyptic landscape, clearly conveys a sense of tension and anguish over the fate of his native land.

Like almost any exhibit of Miró’s work, the MoMA show challenges the viewer’s imagination and powers of interpretation and understanding.  The few pieces of Miró’s art I’ve tried to describe here—a small sample of this artist’s broad and deep interest in forms of artistic expression, not to mention that sense of humor that prompted him to tweak the noses of both the pompous and self-satisfied, but also his viewers—is hardly adequate to capsulize Joan Miró: Birth of the World. 

My visits to Frieze and Art New York were a flurry of brief encounters with art I knew and art I didn’t, a gallimaufry of impressions, a kaleidoscope of art.  It was the mixed grill of art—what my father described as too much of some things and not enough of anything.  The visit the MoMA Miró show was intense.  On one hand, I wish I could have stayed longer than the two hours we had—there was so much in those 60 works to contemplate; on the other, I couldn’t have taken much more.  I was wrung out, my brain was overloaded.  (Writing this report has helped me sort out the experience some, I’m pleased to report.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Michael FitzGerald observed, “Miro’s status as one of the great underappreciated artists of the 20th century extends to the Museum of Modern Art, whose remarkable collection of his work—arguably the best in the world—is rarely shown in depth.  So MoMA’s . . . ‘Joan Miro: Birth of the World’ is an exceptional gift.”  The New York Times’ Roberta Smith proclaimed, “Periodically the Museum of Modern Art orchestrates what I call a Miró Immersion, one of those experiences that can make you an art lover for life or, if that’s already the case, prompt you to renew your vows.”  So, “thanks to MoMA’s extraordinary holdings in Miró’s work and its curatorial familiarity with them,” Birth of the World, said Smith, “achieves a pervasive, extra-visual intensity.” 

Barbara Hoffman of the New York Post wrote, “Before there were Colorforms, there was Joan Miró.  Few artists before, during or after left such a colorful legacy, let alone a work built around a stuffed parrot.”  She explained, “That last, a taxidermied bird the artist perched above a derby hat with a plastic fish in its brim, is the star of ‘Object’ [1936].  It’s one of many dada-esque delights in the Museum of Modern Art’s new show, ‘Joan Miró: Birth of the World.’”  Miró “’called himself a proud international Catalan,’” Hoffman quoted curator Anne Umland.  “However he saw himself, he’s given us a world of joy.”

In the Brooklyn Rail, Jessica Holmes reported that MoMA’s Birth of the World exhibit “proceeds in laying out a case for the evolution of the artist’s visual poetics, an alphabet of forms that he developed into a singular language.”  Nora Quintanilla wrote in the Los Angeles Times that MoMA’s exhibit “is giving devotees of Spanish painter Joan Miro (1893-1983) an opportunity to immerse themselves in dozens of artifacts from the period when he developed his pictorial universe.”  Birth of the World “aims to shed light on the artist's formative years,” she explained. 

Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker dubbed Birth of the World an “enchanting show” and insisted, “Miró is fun.  He earns and will keep his place in our hearts . . . with abounding charm.”  In the Art Newspaper, Nancy Kenney reported, “The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has dug into its extensive holdings of pieces by Joan Miró for a show that demonstrates how one major work can be a turning point in an artist’s career.” 

On DailyArtMagazine.com, Howard Schwartz declared, “This collection of Joan Miró’s paintings and sculptures is magnificent.”  He added, “The art is so wonderful, it does not need an interesting theme to warrant attention.”  Sandra Bertrand called Birth of the World a “dazzling exhibition” and asserted that Umland and Braverman “have done an exemplary job in helping to elucidate this complicated Catalan genius.”

[A few words about two of the shows discussed in this post: Frieze Sculpture is a new public art initiative, presented at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Frieze New York. It opened on 25 April will run through 28 June.  Frieze Sculpture will exhibit new sculptures by 14 international artists across the Rockefeller campus.

[Joan Miró: Birth of the World closes on 15 June, after which the Museum of Modern Art will shut down for four months for a major reconstruction project.  The doors will close on 15 June and reopen on 21 October to a museum with increased exhibit space and a new plan for the display of its art.]

Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words

[In a recent post, “Words and Pictures?” (25 July), I ruminated on the way film writer Gerald Di Pego and director Fred Schepisi of Words and Pictures created a story pitting “words”—that is, language—against “pictures”—that is, images—told in a medium that relies on both words and pictures so significantly.  I noted in that article that there are “artists who use both words and pictures,” naming specifically William Blake, “who integrated text into his images,” and Jenny Holzer, “who uses words as pictures” in her work.  I also brought up the Dada poets, who “used words not so much for their meanings as for the pictures they could make on the printed page.”  One artist who also incorporated text into many of his paintings, drawings, and photographs whom I didn’t mention is David Wojnarowicz, and I’m sure there are several others as well.  I thought, though, that it would be an interesting exploration to examine the work of these artists and see what, if anything, we can glean from them.]

In the movie Words and Pictures, released earlier this year, screenwriter Gerald Di Pego and director Fred Schepisi set up a contrived conflict between Jack Marcus, a veteran prep school English teacher, once-renowned poet, and general word maven (played by Clive Owen), and newly-arrived art teacher Dina Delsanto, a celebrated painter with a successful New York career seemingly behind her (Juliette Binoche).  The two soon-destined-to-be-lovers tease and provoke one another right from the moment they meet in the faculty lounge over which medium is the better conveyor of ideas and feelings, words—that is, writing, Marcus’s specialty and obsession—or pictures—the focus of Delsanto’s world and life.  It’s not long, after Delsanto has disparaged words in her art class and Marcus responds in his English class (which share a large number of students), before the poet challenges the painter to a contest to prove whose metier is worthier: his students will compose pieces of writing and hers will create paintings and drawings and the best of each will be published in the next edition of the school’s literary magazine (which Marcus edits).  (The contest eventually evolves into a challenge for Marcus, who’s been blocked for years, to write a new poem from which Delsanto, who suffers from debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, will draw inspiration for a new painting.)  In the end, the students and faculty of the school will judge the results and decide which creation has accomplished the artist’s purpose more effectively.  

I said this was contrived, not only because Di Pego and Schepisi have set it all up very conveniently, but because there’s not really a conflict between words and pictures to begin with.  This is especially so since most of Delsanto’s AP art students are also Marcus’s AP English students, portrayed as the school’s best and brightest who manage to use both words and pictures interchangeably as the need and circumstances necessitate.  When the final show-down occurs at the end of the movie, Marcus makes a passing concession that, of course, both writers and painters are artists who “take us to another place.”  (As I observed in the first article, the movie does use music in one scene in which Marcus expresses his feelings to Delsanto, a medium that’s neither words nor pictures, but that idea isn’t developed.  I’m not going to develop it here, either, except to say that there are other artistic means, like music, dance, and architecture, which don’t—or don’t strictly—depend on words or pictures in order to communicate ideas, moods, or feelings.)  

Not even considered in Words and Pictures is the phenomenon of artists who use both text and imagery to make their art, and what I want to do here is take a look at those creative spirits from that narrow perspective: their use of words and pictures together.  It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything at all, we get from this examination—because I honestly don’t know what the results will be; it’s an honest-to-God exploration and I have no idea what’s on the other side of this mountain.  (Talk about going to another place!)  Shall we have a look-see?

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

William Blake was an English poet, painter, engraver, and printmaker who was born in Soho, London.  Largely home-schooled (by his mother) and then self-educated—he left school at ten, after learning to read and write—he was seen as a visionary and a mystic.  An outspoken iconoclast in both his poetry and his visual art, he was something of a social outcast during his lifetime as well.  He’s also considered by some to be the first multi-media artist because of the books he made for his richly illustrated poems, particularly Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794).  

Blake self-published his books of poetry, using etched copper plates to effect the integrated text and images, tinting the engravings by hand with water colors afterwards or using a method he invented himself.  Many critics find this evidence that the artist and poet never intended his poems and illustrations to be separated.  Blake printed each copy of what he called “illuminations” by hand, in different colors, with different details, and sometimes with the poems in a different sequence.  In some estimations, the books are as beautiful as medieval illuminated manuscripts, “the words enhanced by decoration of design and colour,” in the view of Kathleen Raine, a poet, critic, and scholar with a particular interest in Blake.

Blake’s designs are immensely complex, full of symbols and mythology that he invented, requiring readers to use their imaginations to comprehend the dialogue the artist set up between his texts and his illustrations.  “At a time when painting had become a manner and a mannerism,” wrote Jacob Bronowski, a mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet, and inventor who wrote several books on the artist, “Blake crowded his paintings with matter.  It was not wholly a painter’s matter; but neither was it a writer’s matter.  It was common to all that he did, the single and compact matter of a great imagination.  And Blake knew how he wanted to put this matter.  He knew that it needed a manner of its own . . . .”  Literary critic Harold Bloom contends that Blake invented a new art form that combines design and text in varied ways so that the two “illuminate one another” and Raine wrote: “Such art comes from a source deeper than the individual experience of poet or painter, and has a power of communication to that same level in the spectator.”  

Literary critic Northrop Frye, who established his reputation with a book on Blake, wrote:

In the Preface to Jerusalem [1804–20] Blake speaks with pride of having developed a free and unfettered verse, but he hardly seems to notice that he had at the same time perfected a far more difficult and radical form of mixed art, for which there is hardly a parallel in the history of modern culture.  The union of musical and poetic ideas in a [Richard] Wagner opera is a remote analogy; but the poetry is not independent of the music in Wagner as it is of the painting in Blake.  Blake seems to have worked on his text and his pictorial ideas simultaneously: this is clear from the manuscript of The Four Zoas [1797], where the pencil sketches in the margins indicate that Blake did not think in terms of a poem to be written first and decorated afterward, but, from the beginning, in terms of a narrative sequence of plates.

Blake’s words and pictures weren’t just the two sides of a coin or a matched set, created merely to compliment one another.  They were both independent of one another and dependent on one another simultaneously.  Frye explained:

Blake . . . hit very early on a form in which text and design are simultaneously present and contrapuntally related.  From the start Blake avoids all devices that would tend to obscure either text or design at the expense of the other. . . .  The words are left alone to do their own work.

More surprising than the independence of the words from the design is the independence of the design from the words. . . .  In Blake the poem does not point to the picture . . . .  On the other hand, the design is not, like most illustrations, an attempt to simplify the verbal meaning. . . .   [W]e can see that, so far from simplifying the text, the design has added a new dimension of subtlety and power.

So, from this brief examination, it seems that William Blake, at least, “thought” in both words and pictures, if not simultaneously then with equal import and weight.  One medium for him wasn’t more “worthy” in its capability of communicating thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and they weren’t so much interdependent, either, but co-dependent.   His poetry books were, perhaps unique (and maybe we’ll see), specimens of “words with pictures/pictures with words.”

THE DADA POETS (1916-24)

Dada, or Dadaism, was an art and political movement that evolved out of the aftermath of the start of World War I, the first mechanized war, and lasted for about eight years.  It was first a reaction to the horrible destruction technology visited on humankind, but it quickly became a response to all forms of regimentation, oppression, suppression of thought and ideas, conventionality, and conformity.  Anti-establishment, anti-conventional, and anti-regimentarian, the Dadaists were purposefully provocative and relentlessly anti-establishment—even (or especially, perhaps) with respect to the art establishment.  They weren’t, however, without a considerable sense of humor; some of their work is profoundly silly.  (For the interested ROTter, I posted a report on a 2006 and ’07 Dada art exhibit on this blog on 20 February 2010.)

Dada artists turned their hands to almost everything: painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and other usual forms of art; film, music, dance, theater and performance; printed works including posters and flyers for Dada events, books, journals and magazines; signs, illustrations; sound poems—and just about anything someone could come up with in the years between the World Wars.  Since some of the originators of the Dada movement were poets, Dada poetry was one of its initial mainstays.  In 1920, Tristan Tzara (1896-1963; born Samuel Rosenstock in Romania), one of the principal founders of the movement, even wrote out the process of creating a Dada poem:

Take a newspaper.

Take some scissors.

Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.

Cut out the article.

Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.

Shake gently.

Next take out each cutting one after the other.

Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.

The poem will resemble you.

And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

What Tzara didn’t include in his instructions was the way the words were to be assembled on the page—the patterns the poet determined they should form.  The Dada sound poems focused on words as sounds and just vocal noises; some were recorded, but they wouldn’t work too well on a printed page.  The “literary” version of Dadaist poetry, if that’s even the correct designator, are sort of the reverse: they look interesting on the page, to the eye—but reading them, especially aloud, would be very difficult (if not even impossible).  In his 1918 “Manifesto of Dadaism,” Tzara affirmed of Dada writing: “Every page should explode, either because of its profound gravity, or its vortex, vertigo, newness, timelessness, or because of its crushing humor, the enthusiasm of its principles, or the way it is printed” (my emphasis).  Using typography itself as a medium of communication, the “pictures” the words made on the page were equally important as the sense the words conveyed, if not more so, requiring readers to look “at” the words as objects rather than just “through” them to meaning.  Tzara, for example, wrote Bilan (“Balance Sheet”) in 1919 using 20 different typefaces, and German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) designed poems for Die Scheuche Märchen (The Scarecrow Fairy Tale, 1925) featuring anthropomorphic letters with feet and arms.  

Today, this kind of work, in which the typographical arrangement of the text is the significant element in conveying the meaning or impact, known as visual or concrete poetry, depends almost exclusively on what the poem looks like on the page rather than what the words say.  While some literary experts consider the two terms, coined in the 1950s, synonymous, others see visual poetry (called vispo by adherents to the form) as a subset or off-shoot of concrete poetry, while yet others consider them discrete forms.  The distinction between them is that concrete poems may still convey meaning semantically, through rhyme, rhythm, and other aspects of word meaning and poetic diction, while visual poems are entirely pictorial in their effect, the words frequently nonsensical.  I’m not going to enter into this debate, principally since Dada predates the use of either term and, therefore, Dada poetry is essentially sui generis.  (Dada poetry is what it is, let’s say.)

One significant point in Tzara’s manifesto is that he said that Dada writing should be characterized by great impact of what it says OR by how it’s printed on the page—either words as words, or words as pictures.   Unlike Blake’s illuminated poems, Dadaist poetry isn’t really an integrated, multi-media art form.  While Blake worked in both media at once, the Dadaists used an either/or approach.  They gave equal weight, perhaps, to both communications forms, but they didn’t make them work together.  Dada visual poetry (as distinguished from the sound poems) relies almost entirely on the typography, together with the fonts, which often include a wide variety in each work, and the lay-out, and less on what the words mean denotatively or even connotatively (which, as we’ve seen, are often haphazardly assembled).  In fact, when read, many of these Dada poems lose part or all their effect.  (I should confess here that I’m generalizing about Dada poetry.  Many of the artists and writers of the movement wrote decidedly avant-garde poems but still conveyed meaning through the semantic sense of the words.) 

JENNY HOLZER (b. 1950)

Born in Gallipolis, Ohio, conceptual artist Jenny Holzer went to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.  Having taken summer classes there in 1974, she enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program in 1975; a year later she moved to New York City and joined the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Though Holzer started out to be an Abstract Expressionist—she “wanted to be soft like [Mark] Rothko and ruthless like Ad Reinhardt”—like many artists in that era, she became interested in a more socially-aware, even political art, especially in a feminist vein.  The young artist began “concentrating on work that had content—accessible work,” she said in a 2012 interview. “There was a lot of talking and reading in the ISP, so language was welcome.”  Looking for a way to insert narrative and commentary into visual art, she began putting words into her paintings.  “I used language because I wanted to offer content that people—not necessarily art people—could understand,” Holzer says.  Soon she abandoned traditional painting entirely and focused on language.  She started displaying messages, mottoes, verses, and quotations in public spaces, such as billboards, the sides of subway cars, projections on building façades, plaques on storefronts, stone benches, and baseball parks—eventually mounting lighted electronic signs and her work began to share similarities with Dada art. 

“Words, in fact,” wrote artist Kiki Smith in Interview magazine, “are the marrow of the 61-year-old Ohio-born artist's large-scale, technology-driven productions.”  Holzer felt the writings she’d read in the Whitney’s ISP could be reduced down to simple phrases everyone could understand.  She called them Truisms (1978), and she printed them anonymously on paper and pasted them on building façades, signs, and telephone booths in lower Manhattan.  “Maybe I can convey some of the valuable content [of the ISP reading list] in an accessible way,” thought the artist.  In 1977, Holzer had started writing her own texts, but since 1993 she’s focused on passages by others.  These have included literary texts by respected authors but also quotations from other sources, such as declassified (and much redacted) government documents, including autopsy reports, military maps of the Iraq invasion plans, FBI e-mails from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, and letters from Gitmo prisoners.  One large LED display presented testimony from soldiers interrogated about atrocities they committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; other works in this line are Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade (2007) and Redaction Paintings (2009).  

In addition to several successful exhibits at galleries and museums both in the U.S. (the Guggenheim, New York, 1989; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1991) and abroad (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1988; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, 2000), Holzer become the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.  The 1990 U.S. pavilion housed her LED signboards and marble benches.  Holzer was one of the first artists to embrace new technology for her work—later she began using computers to manipulate and generate her texts, offering her a greater variety of possibilities in both text size and configuration—and the lighted messages became the artist’s main medium after 1996.  In 2010, Holzer returned to painting on canvas, though her medium is still words.  As she explained to Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian of London in 2012: “I wanted to show time and care.  I wanted it to be an indicator of sincerity and attention.  I wanted it to be human.”  The artist also asserted, “The paintings seem true because nobody wants me to do them.”  She insists, “I hope to show the truth.” 

In 1993, while New York‘s Times Square was undergoing a massive renovation (some called it “Disney-fication”), Holzer created scores of signs and messages for the vacated storefronts of onetime porn shops and empty marquees of former grind houses along 42nd Street.  Slogans such as “alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries,” “abuse of power comes as no surprise,” “raise boys and girls the same way,” and “laugh hard at the absurdly evil.”  She has emulated the diction of advertising and political sound bites, and Smith asserts, “Holzer simultaneously honors the value of language to communicate and critiques its ability to control and contain.”  In the words of Stuart Jeffries, Holzer’s “characteristic” texts are “as punchy as a headline, yet confusing to unsuspecting passersby.”  

In contrast with William Blake, who was both a painter and a writer/poet, Holzer doesn’t perceive herself that way.  “I really wasn't—and I'm not—a writer,” she admits.  “[E]ventually writing wore me down because it didn't come naturally,” the artist explained.  “The visual is easier for me”—which is why she turned to quoting others in her messages, “people who really are writers.” 

The Dadaists were intent on ridiculing all that was conformist and establishmentarian.  Their messages were anarchistic and provocative, and often hidden in obscurantism and nonsense.  Holzer wants to illuminate with her messages, to throw light (if you will) on subjects previously hidden and secret, like the Abu Ghraib violations.  While the Dada poets and artists were political only in a general way, espousing a kind of muscular libertarianism, Holzer is conscientiously political in her art.  Her messages question consumerism and power; describe violence and torture; lament oppression, war, disease, and death; celebrate sexuality and feminism.  She doesn’t offer an opinion or commentary on the words she displays, however, leaving the viewers to come to their own understandings of what the texts import.  “I think the material speaks for itself,” Holzer told Jeffries. “There's no reason for me to give my pathetic opinion.”

“Ms. Holzer has infused Conceptual Art’s playful language with real-life seriousness,” wrote art critic Roberta Smith in the New York Times.  Her intent is to provoke a response in the viewer and, critic Smith says, her work “regularly succeeds in taking us deep into the machinations of human frailty and power.”  Holzer’s said, for instance, “The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration.  If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.”  In addition to the more substantial structures on which Holzer inscribes her words, they’ve also appeared on T-shirts, baseball caps, and even condom wrappers.  “I like placing content wherever people look,” declares the artist, “and that can be at the bottom of a cup or on a shirt or hat or on the surface of a river or all over a building.”  

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-92)

Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, painter, photographer, videographer, sculptor, writer, and activist (among other things) David Wojnarowicz dropped out of New York City’s High School of Music and Art at 16 and ran away from home to escape a violently abusive, alcoholic father.  Most of his short life was fraught with hardship, artistic, political, or personal.  After hitchhiking cross country and back between 1970 and ’73, Wojnarowicz settled again in New York, living for a time on the streets and working as a prostitute, thief, and hustler.  The world in which Wojnarowicz lived is recorded in a graphic (and autobiographic) novel, Seven Miles a Second (DC Comics, 1996), created with artist and cartoonist James Romberger, and in the monologues he transcribed from some of the people he met on the streets, published in The Waterfront Journals (Grove Press, 1996).  The artist’s own journals have also been published: In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (Grove Press, 1999).  His world’s also visible in much of Wojnarowicz’s art, especially his paintings, which often contain images and sometimes words reminiscent of the childhood he always carried with him.  Sadly, when he died of AIDS in 1992—he was diagnosed in 1987—he hadn’t gotten very far chronologically from his childhood.  (I posted a profile of the artist, “David Wojnarowicz,” on ROT on 15 March 2011; he’s also mentioned extensively in “The Return of HIDE/SEEK,” 4 January 2012.)

As early as 1970, Wojnarowicz began writing and taking photographs (with a stolen camera and film) to document his life and the life he saw around him, and also as a way to take control of his life, which was already painful and difficult.  He was bearing witness to the history that the official record didn’t tell because, the artist thought, “People should witness things.  They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed.”  This might be called Wojnarowicz’s creed and would be the prevailing impulse of the artist’s work in all the forms, including his writing— perhaps particularly his writing.  His visual artworks were eclectic in their use of media, ranging from conventional canvas, to masonite, maps, advertising posters, photographs, trash-can lids, “found objects,” and such unlikely material as loaves of bread and plastic sharks—and he often incorporated texts into his paintings, along with other visual media.  Wojnarowicz offered his art as testimony of life he felt no one else acknowledged.  According to writer and cultural critic Cynthia Carr, “Art was his way of witnessing.  On some level, the work was about putting information out there, exposing what’s usually hidden and creating cultural counterweight.  Where the marginal were ignored, he would exalt them.”  Personally shy and reticent (as was Jenny Holzer), art and writing gave him a way to say what he couldn’t in a social setting.  It became the artist’s mission to call attention to any injustice he perceived in American society, especially (but not exclusively) where it concerned the gay community.  

Wojnarowicz saw himself as an outsider in the art world; in fact, Wojnarowicz at first didn’t think of himself as an artist at all.  “Artists,” according to him, “were such-and-such people,” people who were special, different from the rest of us.  Wojnarowicz “wasn’t particularly an artist,” he insisted; he was just a guy with something to say who tried hard to find ways to say it—like music, writing, or installations.  He’d been writing since he left the streets—poetry, transcribed monologues of street people—but photography was another way to chronicle the world he was witnessing and which few others, especially the established media, were recording.  “A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history,” Wojnarowicz asserted.  Some of his later works, including photographs, incorporate disparate visual media and written texts in the form of short stories, which, as in William Blake’s art work, are integrated into the painting with the other media (see He Kept Following Me and I Feel a Vague Nausea, both 1990).  

In his essay in the catalogue for Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz (New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), art historian and critic John Carlin wrote:

Simply put, David was not just an artist; he used art as a vehicle for something else, not as an end in itself.  David was more like a shaman, the witch doctor of our tribe, than someone purely interested in formal relations or being smart. . . .  He was less concerned with aesthetics than with communicating—about himself and society, about things that were real and actually happening but that no one wanted to talk about.

His artistic matrix, however, wasn’t beauty or even aesthetics in general.  He had no interest in being “decorative.”  Wojnarowicz wasn’t interested in design or composition—he hadn’t had any training in that anyway.  He wanted to communicate, to show people what the world he saw looked like—even if they didn’t want to see it.  He was a habitual truth-teller, even as a second-grader when he learned that everyone dies: “I remember running down the block and to every kid that I saw I said, ‘We all die, one day we’re all going to be dead!’”  The kids cried and their parents decided Wojnarowicz was a sick child—because he thought everyone should know the truth.  Leo Shapiro, the stage director whom I’ve mentioned often on ROT, believed that artists are society’s oracles.  “The point of an oracle,” Shapiro asserted, “—you support the oracle, you don’t support what it says.  It doesn’t always give you good news.” 

In a 2011 Brooklyn Rail review, Kara L. Rooney called Wojnarowicz’s art “often elusive, sometimes dangerous, and always brutally honest.”  Shapiro called Wojnarowicz “the canary in the mines—the ones that die first.”  Rooney put Wojnarowicz in the category of the “selfless” artists whose artistic impulse 

derives from a genuine passion for change, seeking to foster political and social awareness among disparate economic classes.  The work of these artists challenges the status quo.  It shakes things up.  It provokes.  It is groundbreaking in its execution and often only appreciated in hindsight.  In short, it haunts us.

While writing had long been a mainstay of the artist’s creative life--he started keeping a journal when he was 17—text began appearing in his visual art in the 1970s.  Wojnarowicz’s generation, in addition to being impelled to address issues of sex, race, gender, and ethnicity, was also drawn to mixing their media, including non-traditional ones like pop culture and even pornography and recycled materials like posters, maps, and even derelict cars.  Like his contemporaries, Wojnarowicz saw little distinction among the various means of making art or making his statements, working in paint, sculpture, photography, installation, and collage with equal force.  Wojnarowicz also made films and videos and was, as noted, a prolific writer and speaker as well. (He also played in a band, 3 Teens Kill 4, known as 3TK4, from a New York Post headline.)  “Often juxtaposing text, paint, and collaged elements with photography,” observed Melissa Harris in Aperture magazine in 1994, “his works animate ideas and images, playing them off one another both ironically and metaphorically.  Experiencing Wojnarowicz’s art is like being in the wake of a dream—or perhaps a nightmare.”  Richard H. Axsom concluded of the artist’s legacy in a 2002 profile on glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture: “Of all the media and formats for which Wojnarowicz is known, the works that combine image and text are the most complex and moving, offering the best summary of his art.”  

At a 2004 retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work that combined image and text, Out of Silence, the Chelsea gallery PPOW asserted: “Wojnarowicz's juxtaposition and overlay of the two signifying systems, the visual and the linguistic, is central to his artistic development.”  In the works where the artist combined images and text, the words seem intended to be both read as text per se, and simultaneously to be seen as part of the overall visual message in tandem with the pictorial aspects.  Wojnarowicz’s words enhance the pictures’ points, illuminating and concretizing them.  In his graphic (in both senses) autobiography, 7 Miles a Second, for example, we can see very clearly that the text isn’t a direct narration of the pictures and the pictures don’t actually illustrate the words: they function separately and together, contrapuntally.  In his essay on the artist, English professor Bill Albertini points out that “the text and visuals comment ironically, and darkly, on one another.”  In some of Wojnarowicz’s mixed-media work, it’s not the picture that’s dominant, but the words: in Untitled (One day this kid . . .) (1990-91), for instance, the center of the piece is a ’50s-style photo of a freckle-faced boy, clearly the artist himself as a child, while all around the innocent-looking picture, occupying two-thirds of the space, is a text predicting the boy’s possible tragic future.  

More akin to Blake than Holzer, Wojnarowicz was impelled to use any and all media to convey his ideas for several reasons.  First, he just didn’t know any better: never having had any formal training in art or its establishment practices, the artist learned by observation, experiment, and imagination.  Second, he possessed an endlessly restless and curious mind, always searching for new and more effective ways to communicate.  Third, he was good at a lot of the forms, visual and textual.  His painting was raw, rough, and powerful, and his writing was just as moving and brutal, poetic and honest.  (He was an equally effective orator, by the way.)  Oddly, though, he innately distrusted words, especially the way they were used (or abused) by politicians, bureaucrats, and advertisers—a kind of Postmodern Newspeak—in what he called “the preinvented world”: “The bought up world; the owned world—the world of coded sounds; the world of language, the world of lies; the packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion.”  (In fact, he sounds a little like a less-gentle Dina Delsanto and less in tune with Jack Marcus.)  Yet, he subverted the establishment’s hegemony over words and turned them against those he saw as responsible for society’s ills and injustices or who should have helped but didn’t.  If pictures were successful in showing the world what no one else was revealing—the responses of people like Donald Wildmon, Jesse Helms, and William Dannemeyer proved that they were!—then words and pictures were even more effective.  If anyone wasn’t sure what the pictures meant, then the words would leave no doubt.

In a 2012 interview with Matt Fennemore about a stage adaptation of Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (Vintage, 1991), the performance artist remarked: “Visuals and soundscapes will support and underpin the text and further assault the senses”; that precisely captures, perhaps in reverse expression, the way Wojnarowicz’s words and pictures work symbiotically in his visual art as well.  It may be ironic (but only slightly) that this multifaceted artist was thrust onto the main stage of American culture because of words—“Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” his controversial essay in the 1989 catalogue for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space)—and then rose once again in a controversy over pictures—the excerpt in 2011’s HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (National Portrait Gallery) of his 1986-87 video, A Fire in My Belly.  

Most artists devote themselves to one medium or the other, pictures or words.  There have always been some who’ve shared the same spaces: N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), the father of artist Andrew Wyeth, made a career of illustrating boys’ adventure stories—one artist’s pictures encapsulating the words of another.  But William Blake and David Wojnarowicz, separated by two centuries, found they needed both words and pictures to make their art, integrating the one form with the other; and the Dada poets and Jenny Holzer both made the words into pictures—or at least visual images.  In all their cases, I’d say, theirs would have been poorer, far less powerful art (if, indeed, art at all) if they hadn’t worked simultaneously in both media, if both forms weren’t present in their work at one and the same time.  Gerald Di Pego and Fred Schepisi can make Jack Marcus and Dina Delsanto conceive a conflict between words and pictures, argue over which is a truer conveyor of meaning and emotion, but not all artists can keep the two separate.  Proving, I think, that words and pictures aren’t in conflict—it’s only the imaginations of some artists that are.  QED.