Mz 601, 1923; paint and paper on cardboard; 17 × 15 in. © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Schwitters’ hallmark was hybridity.  He started his career as a painter and then moved to collage, assemblage, and sculpture, all while never truly leaving painting behind.  He was associated with and influenced by many movements, including Dada, Futurism, Cubism, and Constructivism, appropriating what he thought useful or provocative from each and synthesizing it with fragments from the next without becoming dogmatic about any of them.  In 1919 Schwitters coined the term merz to describe his work.  The origin of this word was a scrap of an advertisement for a bank, and is taken from the German word kommerziell (commerce).  He saw that snippet of a word as the embodiment of what he was trying to accomplish—to take a part of something and make it his own—and he organized his practice around it.  As curator Lucinda Barnes explained, “The merz approach is to connect everything.”

The works in the exhibition are mostly small, some no bigger than the palm of your hand.   Schwitters clipped bits of words from various sources and mixed them with other materials such as paper, fabric, feathers, and paint. Like the word merz from kommerziel, the words are fragmented.  But rather than making them incomprehensible, this practice opens the text up, transforming each word from a linguistic fence to something looser and more associative.  They sometimes provide clues to his interests and lifestyle.  For example, a few collages attest to Schwitters’ more pleasurable habits: snippets of labels from wine bottles, chocolate wrappers, and tobacco often make appearances.  The intimacy of each composition invites an almost forensic inspection, and I often found myself nearly fogging the glass with my breath in order to identify and understand each assortment of fragments so meticulously combined.

pink collage, 1940; collage, paper and tissue paper on pasteboard; 10 1/2 x 8 5/8 in.; Collection of David Ilya Brandt and Daria Brandt.

Mz. 310 Carneval. (1921) is one such composition, where fragments of small, readable text are mixed with parts of individual letters and torn pieces of striped paper in a confetti-like arrangement.  Another is Mz. 410 irgensowas. (1922) (“something or other”) where the text fragments take on an almost Constructivist look.  In both of these, Schwitters covered the edges of the collage with a mat to create a clean, perfect rectangle that reigns in the implied chaos of the interior composition.  By making the edges precise and regular, Schwitters creates a window from which to view this arrangement, mimicking the era’s growing interest in the camera-eye, selecting and framing the world.  In contrast, the two small examples of his Oil wiping on newspaper (1939) feature compositions mounted on top of a substrate instead of matted beneath it.  In these, the edges are irregular and raw.  Often the compositions can be “read” like a Rorschach blot.  pink collage (1940) only looked abstract from a distance, but as I drew nearer it resolved into a dark tree trunk with white mountains rising up behind it.  Up close, the compositions have a particularity and a specificity that makes them seem representational.

Mz x 19, 1947; collage, oil, paper, and cardboard on cardboard; 6 1/8 x 5 1/4 in.; Collection of Ellsworth Kelly.

At first, Schwitters claimed that the collages were “not intended to mean anything, [but] only to be strong compositions in color.”  He later amended this view: “Poetry arises from the interaction of these elements, meaning is important only if it is employed as one such factor.  I play off sense against nonsense.”  Although the work is considered historical, the approach that created it is thoroughly contemporary, and artists such as Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha have cited Schwitters as an influence.   He anticipated the rise of commercialism, created collage work to materialize the saturation of information in the modern world, and predicted the indiscriminate use of varied materials as a way to reflect on the society in which it was created. The intimacy of scale and the way the work seems simultaneously expansive and specific makes it well worth seeing in person.  Upon attending an exhibition of Schwitters’ work in 1959, Robert Rauschenberg claimed, “I felt like he made it all just for me.”

Ranu Mukherjee, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011). Hybrid film, 2 minutes 51 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

What happens at the moment when energy becomes material, and how can we even dream of documenting it? The question has wide-ranging implications, from the memories stored in everyday objects to the effects of prayer. Ranu Mukherjee’s solo exhibition at Frey Norris Contemporary and Modern, Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous, takes up these issues. A former painter who now works mostly with photography and animation, the question has particular potency for Mukherjee, as it references the creation cycle of a painting (from pigment to paint to image), the balance between the intangible and tangible found in digital video, and perhaps the link between.

Ranu Mukherjee, Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Nomadic and Luminous consists of a series of square paintings and a suite of hybrid films (so-called due to their combination of animation, photography, and video). In the first film, Auspicious Picture, Multiple Sources of Power (2011), an animated emanation, or halo, glows above a live action shot of ocean waves at night.  As the emanation fades and disappears, different articles of clothing and tapestry appear and disappear in the foreground, almost dancing, and we are left to contemplate each object—ocean, emanation, and clothing—as a source of power in its own right.

Ranu Mukherjee, Between the no longer and the not yet (2011). Ink on colored paper. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

The second film, Abundance Picture, As Told By the Element Itself (2011), opens with the image of a checkered-cloth bundle making its way across a crocodile-filled river, with children’s silhouettes in the background. After a while the silhouettes fade, and the next image features bright clothing hung from tree roots, juxtaposed against a hand-painted landscape as yet another shadowy silhouette moves in and out of the frame, eventually revealing itself to be pile of gold.  The final film, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011), shows the infiltration and spread of a pitcher of spilled milk amongst a constant rain of flowers, Indian clothing and jewelry, and other objects. The empty silhouette of what could be a deity, or perhaps a mother and child, occupies the center of the screen. Eventually, a mass of cell phones appear and pour forth the rainbow equivalent of spilled milk, which mingles with rest of the animations and references the boon that cell phone technology has brought to India.

Ranu Mukherjee, Ecstatic Picture, Spilled Milk (2011). Hybrid Film, 5 minutes 4 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

Taken together, the films provide a meditation on tangibility and intangibility; landscape, negative space, and sacred space; void, object, memory, and isolation.  And while Mukherjee describes the accompanying paintings as merely “note taking,” they should not be undervalued—particularly because they provide us with Mukherjee’s lexicon. The same pair of gold Rajasthani gypsy shoes, with their curled toes and red interiors, for instance, appears in both Rajasthani Gypsy Shoes, Dr. Gabrielle Francis (2011), and Auspicious Picture (2011). Similarly, landscape fragments based on lithographs of Indian deities, with the deities cut out, show up in multiple paintings, as well as both Auspicious and Ecstatic Pictures.

Ranu Mukherjee, Abundance picture, as told by the element itself (2011). Hybrid Film. 3 minutes 32 seconds. Edition of 5. Image courtesy of the artist and Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern.

To Mukherjee’s credit, the work never becomes ponderous, but remains uniquely well-thought out and mesmerizing. On a more personal note, the objects in the paintings also reference Mukherjee’s Indian heritage—just one more way long-stored energy materializes or becomes current.

Absorption Into the Nomadic and Luminous is on view at Frey Norris in San Francisco through July 30, 2011.

Elizabeth Taylor and Noel Coward, still from "Boom!," 1968, dir. Joseph Losey, screenplay by Tennessee Williams.

It makes a weird kind of sense that Elizabeth Taylor, who managed to move from sweetheart to sexpot to scandal then back to sweetheart more gracefully than any actress on record, would die the week of Tennessee Williams’ centennial. The playwright, not unlike the actress, had a remarkable knack for being glamorous and tawdry, Pulitzer-worthy and tabloid-ready at the same time. The two even followed one another’s trajectories—or, more likely, helped shape one another’s trajectories.

Williams would complete Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1954, debut it on Broadway in 1955 and win his second Pulitzer for it just as Taylor was preparing for Giant, her first truly memorable film as a grown-up. Then, in 1957, Taylor would sign on to star in the film version of Cat and, in ’58, snag an Academy Award nomination for her beautifully bitchy turn as Maggie. A year later, she’d receive another nomination for another Williams’ role: as the more tender Catherine who’s trying her darndest not to be lobotomized in Suddenly, Last Summer, the screen adaptation of which (Gore Vidal helped write it) cloaked all reference to homosexuality in an eerie haze.

If they flourished together, Williams and Taylor floundered together too. A decade after Suddenly, Taylor, addicted to pain killers and prone to illness, had lost five husbands and was four years into her first of two taboo-soaked marriages to Richard Burton; Williams was five years into a dark depression. The two teamed up again, but this time for a project critics savaged. In Boom!, Taylor plays an ailing husband killer who lives on her very own island, while Burton acts a stranded mystery man and Noel Coward appears as the psychic “Witch of Capri.” The footage feels like something out of a dystopian romance novel and John Waters called it “one of the most gloriously failed art films ever.” In 1989, five years after Williams’ too-early death and the same year Taylor checked out of the Betty Ford Clinic for the second time, the actress played a sinking screen siren in a made-for-TV rendition of Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.

“She’s the opposite of her public image,” Williams said of Taylor two years before his death. “She’s not a bitch, even though her life has been a very hell. . . . Pain and pain. She’s so delicate, fragile really.”

“I adored Tennessee,” Taylor said of Williams. “He was hopelessly naive, however.”

Justin Lowe, Untitled, 2011, collage, 10 x 8 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pepin Moore, Los Angeles.

The Tennessee whose bust was on a chocolate cake at Skylight Books in Los Feliz last Sunday did not look naïve. He looked dapper and slyly omniscient. In celebration of what would have been the playwright’s 100th birthday, Skylight staged an afternoon of readings that ended with  playwright Chris Phillips’ tribute, Garden District, set to debut at Celebration Theater in May. Like the best of devoted, obsessive fans, Phillips has trolled through Williams and unpacked the stories behind the stories, fixating on the three gay men whose deaths spur the plots of Williams’ most iconic plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly, Last Summer and Streetcar Named Desire. The scene read on Sunday was between Maggie—Taylor’s role, here played by redhead Karah Donovan with an inebriating Southern drawl—and Skipper, the best friend of Maggie’s husband Brick; Maggie eggs Skipper into admitting he’s been in love with Brick.

The play, in its entirety, will likely be charming—Phillips channels Williams-esque verve with a precision that must be difficult to come by. Still, the project feels a bit like teenage love, the sort that makes you believe saying what your object of desire has left unsaid is equivalent to intimacy.

The Williams centennial reminded me of a different kind of precise and obsessive fandom: the kind at play in Justin Lowe’s frayed collages, currently on view in his exhibition Hair of the Dog at Pepin Moore. Small, smartly assembled, and all culled from trade paperbacks of the ’60s and ’70s, the collages recalls Boom! with their surreal aesthetic and borderline vulgar romanticism. Instead of unpacking and exposing, Lowe has allowed the mystery of his already-strange sources to swell. The psychedelic is compounded by the exotic, the criminal tied up with the sacred, the primitive paired with the polemical and the hopeful with the fatal, until trashy paperbacks feel as weighty and terrifying as Lord of the Flies. Reverence for the mystique of what you’ve immersed yourself in: that’s a fandom with cavernous possibilities.

Justin Lowe, Untitled, 2011, collage 5 x 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Pepin Moore, Los Angeles.

One of Lowe’s images strikes me as particularly inspired. It starts on the left with a dinosaur gazing at a haggard cross–a confluence of eons of real and imagined time–and ends with on the right with a man furtively disappearing into a dark city. It makes mortality feel like a slippery, sci-fi crime novel. It also reminds me of this, an experience Tennessee Williams described in the Paris Review: “I do think there was a night when I nearly died, or possibly did die. I had a strange, mystical feeling, as if I were seeing a golden light.” He added, “Elizabeth Taylor had the same experience.” It sounds as pulpy as a paperback (he saw a golden light?), but Williams, Taylor and, it seems, Lowe, all prove that pulp has an unmatchable potential for veracity.

Michaela Eichwald, Pofalla, (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?) 2010.

It’s not that Michaela Eichwald doesn’t give a crap about her paintings; she just beats the shit out of them. It’s part of a lengthy weathering process that imbues them with the perfect balance of attraction and repulsion.  Before they get to the gallery, they’ve been stepped on, left out in the rain, randomly stained, and often chemically altered. Eichwald decimates boring oil painting clichés (think “fat over lean”) by glopping oil, acrylic and varnish seemingly at random. Yet, despite their abject quality, her work feels uniquely intimate. She stakes a claim somewhere between the automated work of, say, Wade Guyton and the ubiquitous “special moments” abstraction crowd that seems destined to follow the Nozkowski/Tuttle/De Keyser rules in perpetuity.

Thankfully, there’s more than enough personality on view here to keep Eichwald away from the ugly-on-purpose thing. Pofalla, (willst Du mir jetzt komplett den Garaus machen?) is downright epic.  Spanning the entire length of the gallery, it includes photos, posters, packaging, tribal imagery, personal notes, geometric forms, splats of paint and tons of lacquer. The overall effect is like a Rauchenbergian run-on sentence—Eichwald seems to be spilling and organizing her guts right on the paper. And like Rauschenberg, she understands when to let the material do the talking. The yellowed lacquer also performs a rather tawdry version of Sigmar Polke’s experiments with alchemy.

Michaela Eichwald, Auer Dult, leidinde Mangel, 2010.

Unlocking and then encasing both personal and universal mysteries, Eichwald’s work has an authenticity that feels organically unforced.  She combines cave painting motifs with silhouettes in Auer Dult, leidende Mangel, referring to the centuries-old market and folk festival in Munich. Installed behind a pipe in the well-worn “bar” area of the gallery, the unstretched painting has both a nomadic and site-specific feel. The Three Cravings, the most straight ahead painting in the show, could almost pass for a roughed-up riff on U.S. abstraction, like an Amy Sillman painting stripped down to its essence.

Michaela Eichwald, The Three Cravings, 2010.

Eichwald’s powers seem extra concentrated in Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), a horrifying cast resin sculpture of a hand resting on a small plunger. I’ve never been so drawn to something as utterly untouchable as this. The hand oozes and drips and tiny nails stick out of its mangled fingers. A spent gum packet is encased inside, and random bits of trash and dirt float about. Installed on a windowsill, this terrifying talisman becomes oddly beautiful as the sooty light from the Lower East Side shines through it.

Michaela Eichwald, Peinliche Verhörung mit Tortor (Hand), 2010.

Overall, there’s an almost teenage sense of vitality in Eichwald’s work, a tendency that is unfortunately forced out of artists while they are in grad school. Because of this, the show might not live up to the bullshit standards of a typical Chelsea affair (after a while you start to pick apart her repetitive palette, and the dependence on lacquer can be a bit much), but I like to see an artist who believes so strongly in the power of physical presence. As grimy as her work might look, Eichwald seems to be coming from a place that is surprisingly pure.

Bürotisch-Matte, Bali-Mosfellssveit, 1994—1996

When I was in art school, there was a painting professor who would shock new grad students by propping their palettes up next to their paintings and explaining, in great detail, why the palette was aesthetically superior. The students were crushed. How could a perfunctory manipulation of materials possibly be more successful than their über-personal paintings? He’d then rebuild their egos until they painted exactly like him, but I think he had it right the first time—materials are everything.

For Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998) everything in life was potential fodder for work. He brought a kitchen sink approach to the German concept of Gesamtkunstwerk that included rotting food, photographs, paint, crayons, film, sound and all sorts of random crapola. Although it could be considered a bit OCD, Roth saved the gray mat boards that covered his worktables and considered them objects d’art in their own right. Called Tischmatten (German for table mats), these works are currently enjoying their own lofty retrospective at Hauser & Wirth.

Forcierte Matte (Abandonnements=Etüde), 1983—1993

The best Tischmatten seem barely able to contain the avalanche of stuff that came across Roth’s desk. In Bürotisch-Matte, Bali-Mosfellssveit, layers of photos, Q-tips, straws, ribbons and drawings cling impossibly to the surface. Similarly, Forcierte Matte (Abandonnements=Etüde) includes gravity-defying plops of acrylic paint that give the work a visual heft that is lacking in the rest of the show. Although a couple of the early works are daringly spare, the magic is lost when the sheer number of alike works visually reduces them to a few stains, a math problem and a couple of paint squiggles. Unfortunately, and although it goes against Roth’s conceptual ethos, some editing might have worked in his favor.

Table Hegenheimerstrasse, 1980—2010

In the upstairs gallery, entire desk set-ups have been reinstalled as sculptures. Empty chairs and desks make the artist’s absence palpable. I tried to picture the famously reclusive Roth doodling away at these desks while ignoring calls from curators and galleries but somehow the whole thing felt sanitized. They’re way too boring to be good sculptures and way too clean to serve as some sort of studio period piece. Rather, they feel like lonely archival shrines that just scream “dead artist.”

Kaffeetisch-mit-Telefonecken-Matte, Bali/Mosvellsveit (with Björn, Karl, Vera Roth and others), 1990—1993

Despite the dialog surrounding Roth’s work, which tends to focus on its abject qualities, a warm sentiment creeps into the Tischmatten that were family collaborations. Reluctant to play along with conventional art world systems, Roth included his family into his working process. Kaffeetisch-mit-Telefonecken-Matte, Bali/Mosvellsveit (with Björn, Karl, Vera Roth and others) reads like a haphazard scrap booking project as a chessboard mixes collage-like with photos and childlike drawings. Given the long history of male artists isolating themselves in their studios, it’s nice to see that Roth was a dad who didn’t care if the kids spilled stuff in his.

British artist Lucy Williams is further developing the definition of collage. Her detailed, low-relief work focuses on mid-20th century Modernist architecture and involves the careful layering of materials such as card, Perspex, fabric, thread and pillow stuffing. Each material is layered precisely by the artist to illustrate railings, lamp cords and other structural elements. In an interview with Wallpaper Magazine Williams said she sees her vacant images as spaces to be inhabited. “The era was about belief, ideas that we now no longer hold, of social cohesion through the design of a building, Utopian dreams long dissipated,” Williams says in her interview. She had her first solo exhibition in London in 2007 titled Beneath a Woolen Sky, at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. Williams has also exhibited with the McKee Gallery in New York in 2004 and 2006. She has her B.A. in fine art from the Glasgow School of Art and her postgraduate diploma in Fine Art and Painting from the Royal Academy.

This article has been updated from its original posting on October 25th, 2008.

Andy DuCett is a Minneapolis- based artist working with a multitude of media, utilizing sculpture, collage, drawing and installation.  His installations predominantly feature site-specific pilings of mostly found objects.  The sculptures are temporary, and are most typically indicative of the cultural location in which they are built. His first solo show, entitled AOT Has Been Here Forever, Except When It Wasn’t,  recently on view at Art of This gallery in Minneapolis chronicles the history of the buildings, residents and streets around the gallery. The installation uses items from thrift stores and cast objects in order to draw attention to our interactions with the world. This assemblage of objects typical in his sculptural work is mimicked in his drawings, which pull together various occurrences and locations, illustrating for instance, events taking place over the course of a month.  His interest in found objects is apparent in his collage work, as well.  Using only found photographs and illustrations, DuCett constructs impossible scenes that subvert comfort, utilizing imagery of youthfulness to depict hazards and barriers.

DuCett received his Masters in Fine Arts from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006.  He is also currently presenting work in a group exhibition of artists using collage entitled CUTTERS: An Exhibition of International Collage at Cinder’s Gallery in New York.

]]> http://dailyserving.com/2009/11/andy-ducett/feed/ 0 http://dailyserving.com/2008/03/destroying-prettiness-wangechi-mutu-and-kara-walker/ http://dailyserving.com/2008/03/destroying-prettiness-wangechi-mutu-and-kara-walker/#comments Mon, 31 Mar 2008 07:00:00 +0000 Catherine Wagley http://localhost:8888/?p=502 Wangechi Mutu will never experience the heated backlash that Kara Walker experienced. No one will call Mutu the “patsy of the white art establishment,” accuse her of selling fellow black artists down the river, or launch a letter-writing campaign to keep her artwork from being shown. There are good reasons for this: unlike Walker, the Kenyan-born Mutu does not share the slavery lineage of African-American artists and she does not make work with a lucid historical context. Yet Mutu’s work is often as disturbing as Walker’s, reconfiguring sexualized representations of women and creating visceral collages that appear more pornographic than critical. Continue reading for the complete DailyServing article by Catherine Wagley.

Article by Catherine Wagley for DailyServing – Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“Eat Drink Swan Man”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 43″ x 63″ (nine parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu and Walker both probe the ways in which women’s bodies have been caricatured and both use craft-inspired materials to create compositionally seductive images. Both also provoke the same question: is this work compelling because of what it says or because of the way it speaks?

Mutu received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Since leaving Yale, Mutu has participated in celebrated group shows internationally and her inclusion in Saatchi Gallery’s USA Today made her, at least fleetingly, an art world sensation. The critical discussion surrounding her work often hovers around terms like mutilation, fashion and empowerment, emphasizing the contrast between representations of gender in Africa and the West. But there’s something missing from the discussion of Mutu’s art. The compulsive, sentimental, and seductive quality of her imagery overwhelms any social criticism that she might be articulating.

Kara Walker, Philadelphia, Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Like Mutu, Walker jumped through the hoops of academia. She graduated with a BFA from Atlanta College of Art and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. After her breakthrough show, Selections 1994, at The Drawing Center in New York, Walker became controversial. Despite, or perhaps because of, accusations that she promulgated stereotypes, Walker’s career flourished and she won a Macarthur genius grant in 1997. Walker’s mid-career retrospective, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love,” is on exhibit until June 8 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Mutu’s current show, “Little Touched” at Susan Vielmetter Projects in LA, runs through May 3.

Mutu’s and Walker’s concurrent exhibitions call to mind a gut wrenching scene from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In Morrison’s novel, a heartbroken Hagar tries to reclaim the self-esteem her lover took from her. She buys panties, a night gown, heels, a little yellow dress, perfume, red lipstick. Walking home with her purchases, she gets caught in a storm that destroys her finery. Still, Hagar is determined to make her self beautiful and lovable. She uses the soiled finery to turn herself into ca garish, overly made-up caricature. Then she collapses in exhaustion. By the end of the chapter, Hagar dies, destroyed by her desperate attempts to feel attractive.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“You pretty, no you pretty”, 2008 Watercolor and collage on paper Overall dimensions 14 ¬º ” x 23 ¬Ω” (two parts) Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

A similar self-destroying occurs in “Little Touched.” Mutu’s “You pretty, no you pretty” consists of two drawings in which opulent water color stains morph into approximations of faces. Mutu has collaged photos of vegetation, leopard skin, and a human figure onto the stains, inviting sleek magazine imagery into the discussion of prettiness. But the discussion can go nowhere since the materials silence each other. The magazine imagery allows no room for the stains to assert themselves and the drawings become passive. Like Hagar, “You pretty, no you pretty” disappears in a puddle of aimless finery.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

“A’gave you”, 2008 Mixed media collage on mylar 93″ x 54″ Courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Mutu’s “A’gave you” pushes the problem of passivity to a further extreme. A large work on Mylar, “A’gave you” uses an assortment of materials and collaged body parts to depict a woman’s figure. Her body is in an excruciating position, exploding as if struck by a grenade. Yet the lusciousness of the materials turns the violence into something decorative. This seems to be Mutu’s obsession: the violent seduction of mass media images and the places where the violence and beauty converge. Violence appears so natural that we react to the opulent imagery of Mutu’s work more strongly than we react to its confrontational content.

Bette Sayre waged war on Kara Walker in the mid-1990s because she feared that Walker turned stereotypes into seductive, formally compelling imagery. Sayre had reason to fear: Walker’s art is lyrical. Her large paper cut-outs and her projections work together like a perfect poem; each word plays an irreplaceable role in the overall composition. Yet the work also has an unavoidable brutality.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

While an unsuspecting viewer could approach Walker’s “Excavated” innocently enough, the narrative portrayed by the installation will eventually set in: baby-knapping, genital grabbing, defecating and other vulgarities. This contrast between visual lyricism and content does not make Walker’s work didactic; instead it makes the work unsettling in the worst possible way. There is nothing we can do about 19th Century representations of slavery and Walker’s work does not give us an easy prescription for making the world a better place today.

The videos in the show depict lyrical scenery reminiscent of Gone with the Wind — silhouette hand-puppets move rhythmically across the frame with sunsets and mystic rivers in the background. But Walker’s narratives uninhibitedly probe rape, mutilation and death. Anyone who does not leave the exhibition feeling sick to the stomach has not truly seen Walker’s work.

Photo Credit: Robert Wedemeyer

Walker: “Excavated from the Black Heart of a Negress.” Cut paper on wall. 13 x 99 ft. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkea Jenkins & Co.

The problem with Walker’s work is that it’s as deadly and confrontational as it is lyrical. On the other hand, Mutu’s is as visceral as it is beautiful, but it is not confrontational in the least. The two artists occupy different spheres — Walker the sphere of context-specific, historically driven art and Mutu the sphere of diffuse, media-driven art. Yet both artists have a similar net affect: they seduce us with sensual, rich imagery but ultimately leave us feeling destroyed.