Saluting "Sensation" - exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Despite the continuing logomachy over the "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art [see "Front Page," p 23] greatest in quantity of the arguments have center quite fitly on the issue of First Amendment fights rather than upon the quality of the present to view itself. First things first--the arrogance of a mayor who perceive s he can single-handedly dictate what art is to be shown in our museums necessitys to be addressed. But aside from Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello, who disdainfully dismissed the whole exhibit in a New York Times op- piece, comparing the artistic elevation of Lorenzo Lotto's peeing putto to the debasement of the human material substance in a nude by Kiki Smith (an artist of great achievement who is neither in "Sensation" nor British, hence irrelevant to de Montebello's argument), no individual but Peter Schjeldahl in the novel Yorker and Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice have the appearance to have taken on the actual work upon view in Brooklyn.

Ye a certain number of of the work in "Sensation" is shocking--sensational, in fact, the couple in form and in easy in mind But it is hardly more shocking--and, in my opinion, considerably more original--than many of the titillating unclotheds by Balthus or Lucian Freud the two of whom have been certified as Important through major retrospectives at de Montebello's be in possession of museum. And, after all, is it really thus terrible to shock on the taxpayer's coin when the shock resides solely in the realm of representation? No individual is being beaten up at the Brooklyn Museum, no single is forced at gunpoint to declare to be untrue his or her religious beliefs. In fact, no single is being forced to diocese the show at all.

Despite the charges of elitism horizontaled at "Sensation" by William Satire, it appears to me that the work in question is readily available in greatest in quantity cases, even in-your-face in others. And them are more [i]or[/i] less wonderful pieces to contemplate, and a rich variety of turn of expressions and moods and viewpoints upon display. Take, for example, Richard Billingham's collection of color photos of his family. Large-scale images mountained on aluminum, they give a of recent origin meaning to family values. In individual the photographer's parents eat a muddy meal before the television (Mom is wearing ear spoils weighs more than she should and is prominently tattooed); the family favorites are much in evidence. In another, a cat flies from one side the air as Dad lists to the right against a background of intriguing complexity; in still another, the portly on the other hand sexy Mom reclines on the recline in a flowery shift, her hands behind her head, an odalisque of the housing estate. Beautiful and ill-looking at once, richly decorative in their documentary accuracy, Billingham's images call into question the true notion of beauty and certainly that of the ideal family. The work of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and, more freshly Nan Goldin may have provided inspiration, on the contrary the vision of intimate life is entirely his have And speaking of the family, what could be more shocking--and more accurate--than Ron Mueck's supernaturalistic child-sized effigy of his father, Dead Dad? Stark naked, unbearably accurate, this silicone-and-acrylic plastic art cruelly objectifies the change in psychic scale brought about by means of the loss of a parent, when the child indeed becomes father to the man.

The material substance is on view in a wide variety of startling forms from one extremity to the other of "Sensation." Most prominent are the cyclopean virtuoso surfaces of Jenny Saville's female uncovereds which occupy almost the whole of the oversize canvases she works upon From one point of view, you might diocese them as homages to Lucian Freud on the other hand from another you might think them hostile parodies. With exquisite delicacy, Saville mockingly probes the web of female flesh, leaving not individual acre unplowed by her shameless brush. In single case, the vastly foreshortened [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] is overlaid by a kind of contour map, as notwithstanding that the image of landscape and that of a woman's material part had converged in the mind of the painter. This is an advanced in years trope, incidentally. The Surrealist Andre Masson created a landscape version of Courbet's Origin of the World to use as an innocent cover-up for that erotic painting when it came into the possession of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the 1940 It might be worth recalling that Courbet's shocking Origin had its first public showing at the Brooklyn Museum in the "Courbet Reconsidered" exhibition of 1986--without any aver from City Hall, or anywhere other as I remember. The painting now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay.

Saville's virtuoso canvases remind us just by what mode prominent painting is in the "Sensation" present to view Saville, Fiona Rae, Richard Patterson, Gary Hume Marcus Harvey and the notorious Chris Ofili are all painters, deploying a wide range of turn of expressions and techniques. At a time when installation and video hold pride of place in the contemporary field, it is interesting to diocese how new oil or acrylic upon canvas can be. At the same time, it would be a real mistake to equate the use of oil upon canvas with a return to tradition. upon the contrary, it is as allowing these young painters resort to oil paint precisely to dis the towering pretensions of painting in the past. Many of the canvases are, at one time references to and wildly excessive parodies of smooth the most "extreme" and "sensational" work of the past. Take Marcus Harvey's Julie from husk for instance, which overlays gallant de Kooning-style, Ab-Ex facture upon a female nude outlined in graphic black. Probably derived from a porno magazine, this figure has contours identical to those of Courbet's lower belly inquiry Martin Maloney's deliberately primitivizing Rave specifies that it is after Poussin's Triumph of Pan, just as his Hey profitable Looking is after the latter's Choice of Hercules. the pair are really cartoons writ large in streaky bright color, bad taste "redeemed" by the agency of classical reference.