An Exhibition in Search of the ‘Real’ Reality

“R eal is a tricky term,” says the Museum of Contemporary Art’s chief curator, Mary Jane Jacob, contemplating the work represented in “A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation.”

The exhibition, at the Temporary Contemporary, focuses on the multiplicity of signs that represent the modern world and the contemporary artist’s attempt to reveal how they function.

Thirty artists, whose work is variously examined over the past 12 years, investigate such issues as the impact of mass culture on individual identity, the role of originality in producing meaning in a work of art and the artist as a self-conscious producer of commodities.

“The question in all of this is where is the real reality,” says Jacob, who organized the show with assistant curator Ann Goldstein.

In a society enveloped by media images, meaning is an unstable commodity. “Context defines meaning,” says Jacob.

Placing a pre-existing image in a new context creates new meaning. The technique, “the appropriation of images”--is one of the art world’s most fashionable terminologies, and one invited by the show.

What is appropriated can be anything already in existence that an artist makes his or her own. A stuffed teddy bear becomes a large-scale porcelain sculpture, a photograph is rephotographed and presented as a separate artwork.

In Dara Birnbaum’s “PM Magazine,” which examines TV’s representation of women by reprocessing film footage of the show, “appropriation was crucial,” Goldstein points out. “Before VCRs, the only way to gain access to TV shows was to actually get someone at the studio to lend you a tape.”

In physically acquiring the film, says Jacob, “Birnbaum was playing out a recapturing of power from the corporate media system to bring that power back into the hands of a woman.”

When Birnbaum takes the film images out of the context in which they were constructed, dissolving, then reconstructing them as an artwork, she courts another popular art-world term, “deconstruction.” Applied to literature, deconstruction questions the ability of language to represent reality.

But both curators shy away from it in art.

“The term gets thrown at the work, but I don’t think it describes it,” says Jacob.

“It’s a vague term,” adds Goldstein, who is willing to define it only loosely as “art that’s been manipulated,” and “the aftermath of appropriation.”

“You get lost in rhetoric,” warns Jacob. “Our point of view is the artist’s, not the critic’s.”

Labels aside, artists have portrayed meaning through images for centuries, only now the images have proliferated and changed. “The Renaissance man never knew the Madonna from seeing her,” says Jacob. “But when he saw the image of the Madonna, it meant something about his or her life with the church.

“What are the images that have meaning in our lives today? Cigarette ads, television programs, movie personalities, products. We don’t live up to being the Madonna anymore; we live up to looking like the woman in the makeup ad.”

For a TV-bred generation, media images are powerful and real. Says Jacob: “Do we really know Michael Jackson or do we know images of Michael Jackson? The artists are saying, I think, that the media images are the real Michael Jackson, not Michael Jackson himself.”

Neither curator will attempt to speak for the artists, however, nor to define a theme for the show.

“The expectation is that museums present something that is definitive, where we’ve worked out all the answers. These artists are telling us that life is no longer simple and linear. It might seem hard to grasp or unfamiliar at the moment, but we aimed to deal with ideas that are still in formation.”

Though most of the artists have achieved considerable fame within recent years, few, if any, were known in the late ‘70s, the period with which the exhibit begins. “They weren’t the ones receiving the headlines at the time Julian Schnabel or David Salle were stealing the show,” says Jacob.

“We were concerned about work that might have been excluded because it wasn’t fashionable. It’s a revisionist attitude of looking at art that had a conceptual art base but had been pushed under the rug while painting and Neo-Expressionism were being discussed.”

Not everybody agrees with the method of art-making that can easily blur the boundaries between the commercial and the aesthetic. In a catalogue essay, Jacob quotes New York magazine critic Kay Larsen, who questions, “How valid is any critique of capitalism that aims at total success within the system?”

Which raises the question: How will the man on the street respond to the art?

“Anyone is going to find things they can relate to, because they’re images that are very close to our day-to-day existence,” says Jacob.

And that includes the man and woman who may never have heard of deconstruction, not to mention understanding it.