Made, Found and Collected: So Many Things
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THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 N C19 PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICOLE BENGIVENO/THE NEW YORK TIMES The artist Oliver Croy and the critic Oliver Elser preserved “The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz (1916-1992) Insurance Clerk from Vienna, 1993-2008.” The show includes 126 of them. Made, Found and Collected: So Many Things gallery here — in the belief that they From Weekend Page 17 prevent evil from destroying the world. Poland, where she lived. Although by And the label falls squarely on the the time of her death, in 1997, she hadn’t career of Arthur Bispo do Rosário reached her goal, she had made an (circa 1910-89), a Brazilian artist who, impressive start, shooting the interiors after reporting that he’d had a visit of 20,000 rural homes. Most, however from Christ and some angels, was com- poor, were packed to the roof with mitted to an asylum where, using un- things, their walls plastered with im- raveled clothing and rubbish, he creat- ages of pop stars and Christian saints. ed tapestries, arklike ships and a line of Documenting — which is a version of celestial formal wear, all on view in the collecting — existing collections like museum’s lobby gallery. these constitutes a genre of its own in Yet art isn’t outsider just because it the show. In a 2013 video called “The looks that way. If that were true, the Trick Brain,” the contemporary British market would have long ago jumped on artist Ed Atkins adds terrifically creepy Shinro Ohtake, a highly regarded Tokyo spoken commentary to an old film tour noise-rock musician, who has for of the personal art collection amassed decades been compiling cut-and-paste by the French Surrealist André Breton. scrapbooks that suggest bulging, erup- Beginning in 2005, the Swiss photogra- tive crosses between Rauschenberg pher Mario Del Curto began to photo- “combines” and Warhol “time cap- graph the astonishing architectural sules.” structures by the Canadian artist Rich- Yuji Agematsu, his contemporary, ard Greaves on a patch of woodland in would be a big outsider name, too. A southern Quebec, each an immense New York City resident since 1980, he assemblage of discarded matter held sifts bits of organic matter from the together by wire, and all now de- streets — cigarette butts, chewed gum, stroyed. pins — and encloses them in tiny cello- And in 1993, the Austrian artist Oliver phane wrappers. The results, which Croy and the critic Oliver Elser rescued resemble mini-terrariums or museum almost 400 tabletop-scale models of vitrines, do the heroic job of preserving imaginary Swiss buildings from junk a culture’s base matter but are as port- shop oblivion. They were all made from able and personal as talismans. cardboard, matchboxes and magazine As to the view of art’s being essen- tear sheets, by one Peter Fritz (1916- tially talismanic, there’s a museum- within-the-museum devoted to the idea 1992), an insurance clerk from Vienna Ydessa Hendeles’s collected about whom nothing further is known. here, in the form of an installation photos of people with teddy called “Partners (the Teddy Bear A sampling of the Fritz collection — or Project)” by the German artist Ydessa is it the Croy and Elser collection? The bears, and the real thing. Hendeles. Designed as an insanely show deliberately confuses the roles of Left, over 300,000 drawings neat, claustrophobically dense collectors and artists — is at the New by Vanda Vieira-Schmidt. ethnological display on two levels, it Museum. A group was also included in holds some 3,000 framed photographs, the main exhibition of the 2013 Venice many from early-20th-century family Biennale, “The Encyclopedic Palace,” State Museum.) albums, of people and teddy bears organized by Mr. Gioni. Approximately What emotions propelled that artist’s posed together, and a few vintage ex- hand? Fury? Despair? A spirit-focus- a third of the participants in “The amples of the real thing. Keeper” were also in that Venice show. ing, nerve-steadying desire to deliver The teddy bear was introduced to truth to history? We can’t know. The Danish artist Henrik Oleson was, America around 1902 — Germany also Spiritual love was the force behind the too, though he’s at the New Museum lays claim to inventing it — as a work of the Swedish mystic Hilma af with different work, his 2007 survey homage to President Theodore Roose- piece called “Some Gay-Lesbian Artists Klint (1862-1944), whose 16 paintings velt and quickly assumed an independ- and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social here are the largest number I’ve ever ent pop-cultural life. Ms. Hendeles, Culture Born between c. 1300-1870.” A seen in New York, and are alone worth multitasking as artist, curator and maze of funky digital prints attached to a visit. Her mind was on history, too. collector, has arranged her pictures in panels, it approaches art history She asked that her paintings be hidden units of classification to illustrate some through a queer eye, dividing it taxo- away for 20 years after her death, by of the toy’s social uses: political mascot, nomically by such categories as “The which time, she hoped, a new age emblem of class status, embodiment of Appearance of Sodomites in Visual would have the eyes for them. It did. commercial success, protector of child- Culture,” “Female Societies, Amazons, it has a reliquary air. Howard Fried, a That event is the subject of the But if she had not lived a middle- hood innocence, adult comforter in a Myths” and “Some Faggy Gestures.” California-based Conceptualist, exhibits show’s single most piercing entry: class life and been academically harsh universe. (Ms. Hendeles is a It’s no-such-thing-as-too-much-informa- the wardrobe of his mother, who died in reproductions of pocket-size pencil trained, would her paintings now be child of Holocaust survivors who lost tion brilliant. 2002. The dark, fetid-looking assem- drawings, probably dating from 1943, slotted as “outsider art” rather than everything in World War II.) It’s also quite personal, as the most blages of the reclusive Hannelore Bar- that are eyewitness depictions of the classic early Modern abstraction? As it As an object, single or multiplied, it absorbing work in the show is. Some of on (1926-1987) were made in the securi- daily horrors of life inside Auschwitz, as is, the outsider label hovers uncertainly serves the basic function that collecting ty of her Riverdale, Bronx, home but recorded by an artist who signed the over the Berlin artist Vanda Vieira- — call it hoarding, call it installation art “The Keeper” continues through Sept. 25 are saturated with a sense of panicked pictures MM. (The original sheets, Schmidt, who turns out streams of — does. It lets us keep the illusion that at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Man- fatalism instilled by the Holocaust, found stuffed in a bottle, are in the abstract drawings, sometimes hun- we can forever embrace, and be em- hattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org which she had narrowly escaped. collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau dreds a day — 300,000 are stacked in a braced by, what is forever fading away. From left, “Estrela de São João,” by Arthur Bispo do Rosário; a detail from the artist Shinro Ohtake’s scrapbooks; and some of the Wisconsin whittler Levi Fisher Ames’s creature creations. C20 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2016 On the Sidelines: Sport Photographers as Artists From Weekend Page 17 for inches with the opposing linebacker. In conversation, Ms. Buckland com- pared the ball carrier to a Picasso Mi- notaur, for brute power and intent. “My killer photo,” said Heinz Kluet- meier, the photographer, one of the leaders of the pack in the past genera- tion. Mr. Kluetmeier was punning about the fact that the ball-carrier, Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patri- ots, is currently serving a life sentence for murder. During a recent visit to the museum, Mr. Kluetmeier recalled how he caught this primitive physical battle in 2011. He knew the light in the stadium was com- ing from the left, so he positioned him- self to get the best contrast between red and white jerseys. “And then the helmet came off,” Mr. Kluetmeier added with a smile. He said he knew it was a good photo as he looked through the lens. He made his own luck. The best photographers often do. A personal note: In 50 years of writ- ing, predominately about sports, I have had the privilege of working with proud photographers who were competing not only against weather and light and time and space and whatever transpired on the field but also against one another, and most importantly, against their own inner sense of style. I saw them hate themselves when they missed a shot and exult when they had nailed the shot. “A lot of photos have a religious, iconographic aspect — particularly basketball, where somebody is ascend- ing, somebody descending,” Ms. Buck- land said about the cover photo of her accompanying book — Bill Russell DONALD MIRALLE, LEUCADIA PHOTOWORKS GALLERY Guards Parade Ground, with the sun giving the clouds and the historic Lon- don skyline a rusty glow. Mr. Burnett said that he had also photographed that view, using black and white — a perfectly good picture, he allowed. “Then I saw this one, and I realized somebody had eaten my lunch” — a tribute to Donald Miralle, who took the photo and later told Ms. Buckland that his best work is “pre-con- ceptualized,” that is to say, no accident.