Perhaps we should not have started with the top floor exhibit, Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, which I should have realized based on that title might exemplify the recent museum trend in which art is either interpreted to mean whatever anticolonialist, wealth-critical, anti-appropriation [pick your own buzzword] the curator wishes or conversely is criticized for failing to be sufficiently any of the above. Did you know that when people of color create elaborate paintings of fruit, it's a commentary on class and global shortages, but when white people paint extremely similar works, it's a flaunting of their privilege?
Painting bloody pigs after slaughter is virtuous, and painting women sweating in fields is an important statement, but painting decadent French tables either means that the artist could see how atrocious the class system was or that the artist was completely blind to same, depending on who the artist was and what statement the curator wanted to make. It was a doozy, though the rest of the galleries at the museum were even worse, and thus begins a rant.
Here I am reflected in an important piece of contemporary art called "High Finish Box" which apparently exemplifies West Coast Minimalism, though you wouldn't know it from the card because this one only includes artist John McCracken's name and dates. (How come we get told that we must see Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and imperialism in the lovely homoerotic -- though don't expect the museum to point that last out -- work of John Singer Sargent, but we get no overdetermined interpretations of or even basic background on the various spatter paintings, Barnett Newman line paintings, and inevitable Rothko "Untitled"?)
This is a crop of my photo of Albert Bierstadt's Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast. (Confession: I love Bierstadt, which undoubtedly biases me and also reveals my imperialist tendencies.) The card next to it notes that when he painted this, Bierstadt had never visited the Pacific Coast, so this is entirely a fantasy landscape, created on commission for a fur merchant whose "economic interests in the region were clear. Interests that required moral and philosophical justifications, and political and military projections of power to reinforce." The card also says, "Here, Puget Sound is a heavenly realm...everything in this painting is grand -- except the Indigenous people on the shoreline. Their diminutive presence suggests that they are inconsequential to the story being told." Now, again, I'm not an art critic, but my first reaction upon looking at this painting is that the whole story of the painting is these local people, in rough seas in a gigantic rocky landscape, who are bringing their canoes safely to shore. All the light in the painting is pointing to their safe landing. And you can see how much skill it took by looking at the boat still in shadow, being skillfully maneuvered over the waves. It's the fucking curator diminishing the people in the painting, not the artist. (Interestingly, what's on SAM's web site is quite different than what's hanging next to the painting in the museum.)
Now in point of contrast, this is Shipwreck off the Coast of Alaska by Louis-Philippe Crépin (whose work I know much less well than Bierstadt's). It was, incidentally, purchased for the museum by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Art Acquisition Fund. It's the story of a real disaster in which a French expedition capsized and 21 men drowned, including the two noble La Borde brothers. The museum card explains how the La Bordes are shown trying to save their doomed comrades and adds, "At the right are two members of the Tlingit tribe, who witnessed the event and searched in vain for survivors...the story of the shipwreck remains part of the Tlingit oral tradition." Now, that may be so, but in this painting, you hardly notice the two tiny deep-in-shadow indigenous people. I'm glad the card points them out, but nothing in the painting glorifies or centers them and a viewer could be forgiven for thinking they were other colonists or even locals pointing and saying "hahaha look at these idiot French sailors." (This painting has the identical entry on the website as the museum card.)
This is "The Temptation of St. Anthony #2." Now, admittedly, being Jewish, I know very little about saints and have trouble keeping straight which one did what. And as an art dilettante, I know that Michelangelo did a painting of St. Anthony, but I don't know why it's important -- whether it's because of the content or the use of paint or its influence on later artists...and maybe this one is not even in dialogue with those other artistic interpretations, maybe it's an expression of the artist's Catholicism or anti-Catholicism or something else. The point is that THIS painting has ZERO context on its card despite being obviously allusive; it's the exact opposite of all the paintings with cards not just interpreting them for viewers but ordering viewers to have specific reactions -- to be horrified by the Orientalism or the cultural appropriation or whatever. Give me some clue why this is important!
This series of photos by Dawoud Bey are called David Hammons, Pissed Off, made to record how Hammons responded to sculptor Richard Serra's massive and controversial Tilted Arc in Manhattan. The card notes that Hammons is pissing on the sculpture as a statement about Serra's "social and art-world politics" and later threw 25 pairs of shoes over it like sneakers dangling from power lines. What it doesn't explain anywhere is exactly what Serra's sculpture was, what it looked like, why it was controversial; it was massive, rust-covered, blocking big sections of a public area that physically prevented people from getting quickly from one side to the other, was not approved by the vast majority of people who depended on work in the area, it was a security hazard, but you'd have to look at Wikipedia and various art web sites as I did to find this out if you weren't already familiar with it. Without that context, the photos look kinda like a mediocre Mapplethorpe ripoff with public urination and men in uniform. (Side note: there's an exhibit with taxidermied cats by Hammons here that I gather is supposed to make a statement about African-American excellence, but all I could think about is where the dead cats came from, and whether they were killed specifically for this exhibit, which not only didn't SAM but none of the web sites where I looked had anything to say about -- I've been told recently that it's white privilege to worry about animals when people of color are being abused/tortured every day, but I needs must worry about multiple issues at once.)
And speaking of cats, this piece by Tony Feher -- the suspended chalices -- is called GrandMa's Pussy. I DON'T KNOW WHERE YOUR FILTHY MIND IS because 1) there is zero context for this on the card on the wall, just the artist's name and dates, and 2) the museum web site (which I checked when I got home) assures me that it evokes "a sweet grandmother who aligns with the archetypal and perhaps nostalgic image of a gracious and generous giver...who implores you to eat more and not leave so soon; her home becomes a site of care, with multiple bowls and plates and jars of things from which she encourages you to help yourself" and I'm assured in the same essay that "pussy" meant something very different in 2013 when the sculpture was created than it does today. Sorry but I just have to add HAHAHAHAHAHA CLEARLY THE PORN TO WHICH I WAS EXPOSED IN MY YOUTH WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME. And I'm pretty sure Chaucer made a pussy joke. (By the way, nowhere does the web site entry mention actual pussycats, when they just might -- might -- have been able to convince me that the piece got its name because Grandma's cat knocked all these items off her counter.)
On a happier animal note, the exhibit A Room for Animal Intelligence has dozens of portrayals of animals from all over the world with placards from the animals' POV. This is Monkey Holding a Baby from 1800s Japan, so it's presumed to be a macaque, the only species of monkey native to Japan. This one expresses regret on its little card not to have been painted in color, as they have pink-red faces.
Anyway, we came home, watched the Ravens-Steelers game which was a lot of fun for the first half and let's never speak of the ending, and now we're watching The Mirror Crack'd because Amazon Prime suggested it to us and I haven't seen it in a million years and Paul doesn't think he's ever seen it. Other than chatting with neighbors as they were packing up their holiday decorations and having ham and bean soup for dinner, that was most of my Sunday excitement!
