Museum Day: Nicolas Baier "Hunting Gallery" at Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
Hello onlookers,
Sorry for letting down this blog if you've been following,
I've been absent but I did manage to see a lot of art in the
past couple months, visiting New York, Washington (just one day) and Philadelphia
(just one day). I cancelled other trips, it's not been easy.
I'll be back this week with words on what I saw from Late April to mid-May,
but for now I wanted to say a few words about Nicolas Baier's work, which I saw at the Museum Of Fine Arts today (and another exhibit earlier but this is another topic).
I can't believe I waited the last day to visit this exhibit, "Hunting Gallery" at MMFA, but while being there (after having waited 20 minutes to enter on a heavy-packed free-opening museum day), I thought that the situation was judicious: it was much fun to watch the general public stop by every piece that were dispersed throughout the museum and observe their surprise and curiosity. I think I had the greatest time on a "Museum Day" yet (an event I usually try to avoid).
They have been talk on some other blogs (Zekes' Gallery blog) about the question wrether the interventional aspect of this exhibit was a first within such a large institution. I'm hesitating about my opinion: there have been many shows where an artist or a group of artists were asked to do art that reflected upon objects or pieces from a museum collection, but usually all these objects and artworks are brought together in the context of one singular exhibit, in specially designed temporary rooms (just look at the past years activities calendars from Mass Moca, Peabody Museum, Quebec Civilization Museum, and countless others, or for a solo I'll simply mention Kara Walker going on right now at the Metropolitan). Or there have been a few rare cases of some interventions throughout an entire museum, but as far as I remember, those were either group shows or unique piece commissioned from one artist (say, Maurizio Cattelan's head sneaking through the floor of a museum's permanent collection, or the Montreal CCA Shaughnessy house series, or for group shows I'll mention a recent sound art exhibit among the collection of the Victoria And Albert Museum (London)).
Which is to say that I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about a full
solo show of one artist (the pleonasm is intentional) with works dispersed throughout all the collection rooms in a museum, on every floors (erratum: except for Louise Bourgeois which is happening right now at the Walker Art Centre...but I heard of Baier's first). Jonathan Horowitz's faces of the September 11 terrorists spread throughout the Whitney this past season doesn't count: it was one work, and once you had seen a couple of the faces, you easily got the point. Moreover, those were usually placed in leftover spaces surrounding the usual art, like parasites. In Baier's exhibit, the works take holistically the places of other works, that they replace temporarely, what made them all seem so "seemless". Even with the map handout they were a couple pieces that I had a hard time finding out so much that they blended with every other (usually non-contemporary) art surrounding them. This is (no playing around the pot, and even though some claims that the photographs were better at the recent solo at Rene Blouin) truly one of the most interesting art experiences I've had this year yet.
And it's not exactly the photographs themselves that "make" this show: as individual pieces they're not all of equal qualities. The "abstract pieces" especially (Steamé, Miroir, etc..), are playing on a trick that has been a little too prevalent in recent Baier's art (the idea that mundane traces look as neat as AbEx masterpieces), and are starting to pale in comparison with no-concept, "pure" abstract photography, like with the recent work of Wolfgang Stillman. With Baier, it becomes a case by case affair: the best one was the large piece in the large contemporary room, "City",
but yet that wasn't even exactly an abstract piece. It just looked so much like one that I was certain in fact that it was a large 70's painting (by..whoever...Pierre Soulages, or Richard Mills...) and because I didn't expect such a large piece by Baier I was really trying to find the piece until I came close to...IT (!....eyes
at 5 mm from the canvas). A while after, when you finally discover the group of people walking towards the edge in the corner of this work (and after reading the title), you are sort of forced to follow Baier's now familiar ambivalences between the abstract and figurative, the monstrative and the represented. This art is as bipolar as you'll get.
The fascinating aspect of the show though, is how it demonstrated that Baier succeeded at bypassing the cul-de-sac of dialoguing with the artists of recent generations (the vaulted theories of contemporary art to which his art is most usually confined), and permitted his photographs to evoke archetypes of a large variety of other artforms, through a similar method of abstracting mundane motifs, sort of exploring how what we perceive is being conceptualized and accepted as cultural form. Pointing exactly toward that moment of transgression between form and culture. But more to the point: the most peculiar (and unique) aspect of this exhibit was that it functioned purposefully just like an hide-and-seek child play, where the audience was obliged to open all eyes and see if they could distinguish Baier's photographs among various art masterpieces from different art historical eras.
Obviously Baier loves to trick his audience.
"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" and "Harpy" both play on banal effects of wood branches meeting light to evoke essences of Baroque or Renaissance painting. You can easily imagine the form of a bird-demon in "Harpy" even though it will never formulate itself precisely. Before you even read the title of "Harpy", you would actually "sense" a process of imagination taking play, grasping with vague impressions of a dark romanticism, or earlier "flashlight" spiritualism, as you attempt to decipher what this obscure image is actually showing. The mundane has turned into a Rembrandt! And the question as to know wrether such aesthetic comparisons were enhanced by the position of the piece between older european paintings, or not, only helped mystify the experience, making it seem worthwhile. It was as such, an opportunity. Here you could really start pondering wrether anyone ever really "saw an harpy" in the first place, or if every images of harpies we think we're getting were only ever imprinted from uncertain motifs, from impressions. The question is interesting: if no one ever really saw an harpy, than does its image come from the shapes of branches at night?
"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" recalled a large roccoco cameo, playing on the ambivalence between the representation of wood and the close-up of logs, oversightly spousing the form of a decorative design imitative of an era that often relayed on excessive vegetal details. In the end, it borrowed from similar baroque strategies to make the whole look like a large piece of jewelry. Just like with "Monolith", a photographic collage of used marble flagstones that was placed in the islamic art room, which evoked either ancient hyeroglyphic tablatures (the photograph is posed on the floor and leaning against the wall like a large stone) or simply motif-regulated religious design, these two works served to remind us that throughout history there have been other quests to form than the merely abstract and representational, like the decorative, the pragmatic, or the symbolic. And through his photography Baier is trying to stir it all up, provoking conceptual tours de force (leaning on the edge of craft), probably to a degree where this show could become the next handy joke for old postmodern detractors.
In that sense Baier did take a strong risk for organizing this show, and made choices that some could attack as presomptuous, as Baier's take on "art with capital A" this time is definitely about seeking universalisms, more than it's being about exploring his intimate world (as it's been the case in his earlier shows).
My favorite piece of the show (I agree that the two pieces in the "canadian art" room look at best like an humorous take on Burtynsky, though I absolutely adored all the pieces featuring log cabins), is one that I had surprisingly heard bad comments about. People assume that "An Afternoon On De Gaspe" is downsizing impressionism (the painting movement) for showing an image from a street of Montreal through a snowy (and maybe dirty) windows. Well I thought it was ravishing! I actually had a hard time finding it: I was really fooling myself that it was a painting from some guy (whom I forgot the name for now) who used to paint beautiful streets of Quebec City in similar moody atmospheres. In fact, yes, I'm obliged to say that it is because the subject seemed so mundane, yet fluffy, "arranged" and dreamy, which is to say that it didn't look like (usual) contemporary art, that it was disappearing for me as a possible Baier piece. And the fact of discovering how I had been tricked sort of made photography sound more interesting than painting for a minute.
It was refreshing to see, after floors of Baier art that gleaned toward the abstraction, the deco-conceptual, and the ironic (the log cabins again and again), to be presented with an art that could be granted (though most seem to only read cynicism into it) some emotional qualities. Maybe it was because I felt just "so there". Many it is because every people in the art community of my generations all had short love affairs happening on De Gaspe, Casgrain, and surounding streets in the Mile End of the 1990's, Montreal. I really perceive this photograph as representing the zeitgeist of that. You know? Psychogeography? The emotional synthesis of an actual urban space within a certain time slot of local history?
Go figure... Maybe I'm getting old and genuinely fall for the cute decorative stuff. I was nevertheless glad I ended with this piece.
So again with a Nicolas Baier exhibit there would be interesting things to discuss about every (most) photographs, as the man only proved once more that he is truly...well, call it "meilleur espoir"(?): in Canada I think he is the best artist to explore the medium of photography. Period. I am actually curious why there isn't yet an "important" (ahem...or "self-important") New York gallery representing him, from which website I now could simply link images while I babble (or from Artnet), like it is actually the case with the bigger artists. Why are canadian galleries hiding his art? What interest does that serve? There is barely one small photo on the Jessica Bradley site and some very old photos on the Rene Blouin website. How am I supposed to talk to people in New York and say: "Hey...you really really got to see this art!". It's a chance that Mr. Baier developed his own website, but if gallerists want "his prices" to raise, well, they might as well pretend for a while that the art is already taken BUT....they need to show it too.
From what I heard about the MMFA opening, everyone in the Montreal artworld is hot about Baier, but I still think he is badly represented. At least now there is a new magnificent catalog (though missing the opportunity of presenting the recent work from the gallerists) that hopefully will circulate in the right hands.
They are probably like 5 artists in Quebec's younger generations that can make it internationally (let's be real, the game is tough), and Nicolas Baier I think should be among them.
Toodles,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Nicolas Baier: "Hunting Gallery"
March 22 - May 28 2006
Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal Canada
Sorry for letting down this blog if you've been following,
I've been absent but I did manage to see a lot of art in the
past couple months, visiting New York, Washington (just one day) and Philadelphia
(just one day). I cancelled other trips, it's not been easy.
I'll be back this week with words on what I saw from Late April to mid-May,
but for now I wanted to say a few words about Nicolas Baier's work, which I saw at the Museum Of Fine Arts today (and another exhibit earlier but this is another topic).
I can't believe I waited the last day to visit this exhibit, "Hunting Gallery" at MMFA, but while being there (after having waited 20 minutes to enter on a heavy-packed free-opening museum day), I thought that the situation was judicious: it was much fun to watch the general public stop by every piece that were dispersed throughout the museum and observe their surprise and curiosity. I think I had the greatest time on a "Museum Day" yet (an event I usually try to avoid).
They have been talk on some other blogs (Zekes' Gallery blog) about the question wrether the interventional aspect of this exhibit was a first within such a large institution. I'm hesitating about my opinion: there have been many shows where an artist or a group of artists were asked to do art that reflected upon objects or pieces from a museum collection, but usually all these objects and artworks are brought together in the context of one singular exhibit, in specially designed temporary rooms (just look at the past years activities calendars from Mass Moca, Peabody Museum, Quebec Civilization Museum, and countless others, or for a solo I'll simply mention Kara Walker going on right now at the Metropolitan). Or there have been a few rare cases of some interventions throughout an entire museum, but as far as I remember, those were either group shows or unique piece commissioned from one artist (say, Maurizio Cattelan's head sneaking through the floor of a museum's permanent collection, or the Montreal CCA Shaughnessy house series, or for group shows I'll mention a recent sound art exhibit among the collection of the Victoria And Albert Museum (London)).
Which is to say that I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about a full
solo show of one artist (the pleonasm is intentional) with works dispersed throughout all the collection rooms in a museum, on every floors (erratum: except for Louise Bourgeois which is happening right now at the Walker Art Centre...but I heard of Baier's first). Jonathan Horowitz's faces of the September 11 terrorists spread throughout the Whitney this past season doesn't count: it was one work, and once you had seen a couple of the faces, you easily got the point. Moreover, those were usually placed in leftover spaces surrounding the usual art, like parasites. In Baier's exhibit, the works take holistically the places of other works, that they replace temporarely, what made them all seem so "seemless". Even with the map handout they were a couple pieces that I had a hard time finding out so much that they blended with every other (usually non-contemporary) art surrounding them. This is (no playing around the pot, and even though some claims that the photographs were better at the recent solo at Rene Blouin) truly one of the most interesting art experiences I've had this year yet.
And it's not exactly the photographs themselves that "make" this show: as individual pieces they're not all of equal qualities. The "abstract pieces" especially (Steamé, Miroir, etc..), are playing on a trick that has been a little too prevalent in recent Baier's art (the idea that mundane traces look as neat as AbEx masterpieces), and are starting to pale in comparison with no-concept, "pure" abstract photography, like with the recent work of Wolfgang Stillman. With Baier, it becomes a case by case affair: the best one was the large piece in the large contemporary room, "City",
but yet that wasn't even exactly an abstract piece. It just looked so much like one that I was certain in fact that it was a large 70's painting (by..whoever...Pierre Soulages, or Richard Mills...) and because I didn't expect such a large piece by Baier I was really trying to find the piece until I came close to...IT (!....eyes
at 5 mm from the canvas). A while after, when you finally discover the group of people walking towards the edge in the corner of this work (and after reading the title), you are sort of forced to follow Baier's now familiar ambivalences between the abstract and figurative, the monstrative and the represented. This art is as bipolar as you'll get.
The fascinating aspect of the show though, is how it demonstrated that Baier succeeded at bypassing the cul-de-sac of dialoguing with the artists of recent generations (the vaulted theories of contemporary art to which his art is most usually confined), and permitted his photographs to evoke archetypes of a large variety of other artforms, through a similar method of abstracting mundane motifs, sort of exploring how what we perceive is being conceptualized and accepted as cultural form. Pointing exactly toward that moment of transgression between form and culture. But more to the point: the most peculiar (and unique) aspect of this exhibit was that it functioned purposefully just like an hide-and-seek child play, where the audience was obliged to open all eyes and see if they could distinguish Baier's photographs among various art masterpieces from different art historical eras.
Obviously Baier loves to trick his audience.
"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" and "Harpy" both play on banal effects of wood branches meeting light to evoke essences of Baroque or Renaissance painting. You can easily imagine the form of a bird-demon in "Harpy" even though it will never formulate itself precisely. Before you even read the title of "Harpy", you would actually "sense" a process of imagination taking play, grasping with vague impressions of a dark romanticism, or earlier "flashlight" spiritualism, as you attempt to decipher what this obscure image is actually showing. The mundane has turned into a Rembrandt! And the question as to know wrether such aesthetic comparisons were enhanced by the position of the piece between older european paintings, or not, only helped mystify the experience, making it seem worthwhile. It was as such, an opportunity. Here you could really start pondering wrether anyone ever really "saw an harpy" in the first place, or if every images of harpies we think we're getting were only ever imprinted from uncertain motifs, from impressions. The question is interesting: if no one ever really saw an harpy, than does its image come from the shapes of branches at night?
"Hunt, Hunter, Hunted" recalled a large roccoco cameo, playing on the ambivalence between the representation of wood and the close-up of logs, oversightly spousing the form of a decorative design imitative of an era that often relayed on excessive vegetal details. In the end, it borrowed from similar baroque strategies to make the whole look like a large piece of jewelry. Just like with "Monolith", a photographic collage of used marble flagstones that was placed in the islamic art room, which evoked either ancient hyeroglyphic tablatures (the photograph is posed on the floor and leaning against the wall like a large stone) or simply motif-regulated religious design, these two works served to remind us that throughout history there have been other quests to form than the merely abstract and representational, like the decorative, the pragmatic, or the symbolic. And through his photography Baier is trying to stir it all up, provoking conceptual tours de force (leaning on the edge of craft), probably to a degree where this show could become the next handy joke for old postmodern detractors.
In that sense Baier did take a strong risk for organizing this show, and made choices that some could attack as presomptuous, as Baier's take on "art with capital A" this time is definitely about seeking universalisms, more than it's being about exploring his intimate world (as it's been the case in his earlier shows).
My favorite piece of the show (I agree that the two pieces in the "canadian art" room look at best like an humorous take on Burtynsky, though I absolutely adored all the pieces featuring log cabins), is one that I had surprisingly heard bad comments about. People assume that "An Afternoon On De Gaspe" is downsizing impressionism (the painting movement) for showing an image from a street of Montreal through a snowy (and maybe dirty) windows. Well I thought it was ravishing! I actually had a hard time finding it: I was really fooling myself that it was a painting from some guy (whom I forgot the name for now) who used to paint beautiful streets of Quebec City in similar moody atmospheres. In fact, yes, I'm obliged to say that it is because the subject seemed so mundane, yet fluffy, "arranged" and dreamy, which is to say that it didn't look like (usual) contemporary art, that it was disappearing for me as a possible Baier piece. And the fact of discovering how I had been tricked sort of made photography sound more interesting than painting for a minute.
It was refreshing to see, after floors of Baier art that gleaned toward the abstraction, the deco-conceptual, and the ironic (the log cabins again and again), to be presented with an art that could be granted (though most seem to only read cynicism into it) some emotional qualities. Maybe it was because I felt just "so there". Many it is because every people in the art community of my generations all had short love affairs happening on De Gaspe, Casgrain, and surounding streets in the Mile End of the 1990's, Montreal. I really perceive this photograph as representing the zeitgeist of that. You know? Psychogeography? The emotional synthesis of an actual urban space within a certain time slot of local history?
Go figure... Maybe I'm getting old and genuinely fall for the cute decorative stuff. I was nevertheless glad I ended with this piece.
So again with a Nicolas Baier exhibit there would be interesting things to discuss about every (most) photographs, as the man only proved once more that he is truly...well, call it "meilleur espoir"(?): in Canada I think he is the best artist to explore the medium of photography. Period. I am actually curious why there isn't yet an "important" (ahem...or "self-important") New York gallery representing him, from which website I now could simply link images while I babble (or from Artnet), like it is actually the case with the bigger artists. Why are canadian galleries hiding his art? What interest does that serve? There is barely one small photo on the Jessica Bradley site and some very old photos on the Rene Blouin website. How am I supposed to talk to people in New York and say: "Hey...you really really got to see this art!". It's a chance that Mr. Baier developed his own website, but if gallerists want "his prices" to raise, well, they might as well pretend for a while that the art is already taken BUT....they need to show it too.
From what I heard about the MMFA opening, everyone in the Montreal artworld is hot about Baier, but I still think he is badly represented. At least now there is a new magnificent catalog (though missing the opportunity of presenting the recent work from the gallerists) that hopefully will circulate in the right hands.
They are probably like 5 artists in Quebec's younger generations that can make it internationally (let's be real, the game is tough), and Nicolas Baier I think should be among them.
Toodles,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Nicolas Baier: "Hunting Gallery"
March 22 - May 28 2006
Montreal Museum Of Fine Arts
1380 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal Canada
posted by Cedric at 2:48 PM
7 Comments:
hm.. maybe it's b/c all canada cares about in photography is van schools? I think most of reps, hearing upon the word "photography", are still hung up on jeff walls. most of ppl i talk to, students now, seem to have a bleake out look in canada art scene. other than quebec(province) i think there are lack of support in some ways?
props on all the writings you are doing, how are you associated to art "scene"?
I'm not associated to any.
Pseudo-journalist, pseudo-artist, pseudo-future-curator(?), pseudo-future-gallery-owner(?). It's all pseudo.
Truth is I travel to see art for my own pure fun.
But some people recognize me on my routes and we talk about art and ideas.
Cheers,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
You should check out this gallery named DIA in ny state.
i heard it's two hr train ride from new york city? me and my friend is planning to do a little gallery hopping in ny for a week, so that's one of the stops. It's suppose have good collection of minimalist works. Cheers!
OP from above
Hello,
You mean the DIA Beacon. ;-)
Yes, I've been there 4 times already since it opened in 2003
(they have some sparsed temporary exhibits).
It's more of a temple to minimalist and conceptual art
than anything. Some refer to it as a tomb, a crypt, of Dia's past commissions and holdings.
Frankly I think only half the works are worth the trip, and I
wish some of the space (at least the basement) was offered to temporary artist projects.
The museum itself is a work of art.
DIA also holds (among other things)
a 3 storey space in Chelsea, NY, which is supposed to open again at some point (after renovation).
They're late. They seem to have had problems. If they close the New York DIA hopefully they'll transfer the temporary exhibits to the Beacon basement.
Happy travel,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Well, all galleries and museums are refered as a "tomb". Either way, i'm hoping it will be worth a trip. Going back to actually see these works will help understand Fried's adamant point of view against minimalists or theatricality for that matter(which is very ironical to me). Plus, with new contemporary artists being somewhat minimalistic, a historical tomb raiding would do me some good. :)
Well, all galleries and museums are referred as a “tomb”. Either way, I’m hoping it will be worth a trip. Actually seeing these works will help understand Fried’s adamant point of a view against minimalists or theatricality for that matter (which is very ironically funny). Plus, with new contemporary artists being somewhat minimalistic, a historical tomb raiding would do me some good. :)
Well if you pass by Montreal
there is a piece at Oboro right now by Judy Radul that deals (I find) with issues of minimalism ("we walk around the cube") and theatricality.
Youll be able to compare it with the Bruce Nauman landmark pieces at DIA (whom I find is a strong influence to canadian conceptual artists).
Cheers,
Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com
Post a Comment
<< Home