ART REVIEW : Carnegie International Strikes a One-Note Theme

Why is there a near total absence of significant painting in the 1991 Carnegie International?

Answer that question and you’ll have some idea of the curatorial slant on this 51st installment of the oldest international survey of contemporary art in the world, which opened this week at the Carnegie Museum of Art and, in special installations, at five other locations around the city.

Answer the question and you’ll also have a hint of the one-note weakness that, despite more than a dozen strong entries, undermines a sustained level of interest for the show.

It isn’t that the International, which continues through Feb. 16, includes no painters. There’s the estimable Philip Taaffe, whose odd fusions of contradictory stylistic and structural motifs I admire. And there are the limpid, melting geometries of the Parisian Bernard Frize and the painterly, Wayne Thiebaud-like cataloguing of light bulbs, blank books and squares of color by Canada’s Lisa Mulroy, which I do not.

Clearly, though, when only three of the 43 participants chosen by curators Lynne Cooke and Mark Francis do it, painting was not high on the curatorial agenda.

Nor is it that no painting of merit has been made since the International’s last outing three years ago. (If you doubt it, stop in to see Lari Pittman’s extraordinary new paintings currently at Rosamund Felsen Gallery in L.A.) Instead, the dearth of painting carries a decidedly polemical edge.

Consider the prestigious Carnegie Prize, a “best of show” award that this year went to the Japanese-born, New York-based Conceptual artist On Kawara. Displayed are 35 of his so-called “date paintings”--a kind of calendar of small monochrome canvases, each printed with a month, day and year, and each accompanied by the front page of a newspaper from whatever town the artist happened to be in on that day. (The newspapers don’t get displayed with the paintings.)

Kawara, 59, has painted these by hand since 1966. As a body of work it’s pretty thin, of interest principally for the rigorousness of its single-minded duration. But painting is here used only as a sign--invoked because of its hierarchical value on Western culture’s scale of art’s possible mediums. In the context of this show the prize is notable because Kawara is, in effect, an “anti-painter.”

(Sentimentality, by the way, which would seem wholly antithetical to Kawara’s project, inevitably intrudes on the award. The Carnegie Prize, presented here to an interesting if decidedly minor artist, is like a gold watch given for 25 years of faithful service to Conceptual art.)

The exhibition also features odes to absent paintings (Stephen Prina, Sophie Calle), games played with other people’s paintings (John Cage), paintings digitalized into electronic images (Richard Hamilton), painted sculptures hung on the wall like landscape horizons (John McCracken) and books painted over with abstractions (Tim Rollins + K.O.S.).

The German artist Katharina Fritsch, in the strongest work of hers I’ve seen, has made a gorgeous sequence of eight, foil framed, light-reflective panels that look like idealized, space-age models of paintings.

Because these artists principally make reference to the idea of a painting, rather than actually making paintings, their labor can be seen to be analogous to that of the art museum itself. And it is principally the museum, as physical, conceptual, economic, social and psychological space, that is the cloistered subject of the 1991 Carnegie International.

Even those artists who chose to make installations elsewhere in Pittsburgh, rather than in the museum’s own building, are inevitably framed by it. That they’ve “fled” the museum-precinct inflects the experience of their work.

Only one of the eight outside installations is worth searching out. Lothar Baumgarten’s exquisite “Grammar of Creation,” inscribed on the glass walls of the Richard King Mellon Hall of Science at Duquesne University, uses light-reflective silver vinyl letters to make a frieze of descriptive words on two sides of the transparent podium of the beautiful Modernist building, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1966.

Clarity , discipline , detail , space , rationality , harmony , essence --two dozen silvery words describe the luminous ideals of Mies, in particular, and Modernism, in general, while recalling the device of inscribing the names of philosophers, scientists, artists and such on the entablature of a Neoclassical building. Its site seamlessly pulls together science, art, industry, civic virtue and the tradition of the Carnegie International within these modern ideals.

Meanwhile, back at the museum, the show is heavy on art that engages institutional imperatives. There are the groaningly obvious, painted-plaster castings of dinosaur bones by Allan McCollum, and the awful mawkishness of yet another Christian Boltanski archive of the dead (this time a corridor filled with rows of blurry photos of Swiss citizens, ostensibly chosen because Switzerland is a neutral country and our erroneous perception of the modern museum is that it, too, is a neutral space).

Michael Asher, Judith Barry, Dan Graham, Mike Kelley, Louise Lawler, Ken Lum, Guilio Paolini, Huang Yong Ping, Richard Serra, Christopher Williams, Christopher Wool--all have contributed work that, in some way or another, reflects on its container. The most potent of them include the culmination of one body of work, an early manifestation of another and a masterful example from a third.

Kelley’s “Craft Morphology Flow Chart,” which the artist expects to be the last of his celebrated works with stuffed animals, creates a loopy taxonomy of homemade toys. Used rag dolls and strange, crotcheted animals have been laid out for examination on 32 institutional folding tables; measured and photographed for the archive in pictures that ring the room; and rendered for study by an archeological illustrator in a large drawing that leans against a wall. The neighborhood church basement as paradigmatic site for cultural anthropology is wittily--and creepily--evoked.

Huang’s installation is a remarkable assembly of books, pulverized in a cement mixer and returned, soggy and moldering, to shelves in the museum’s library of music and art. Site of the first Carnegie International in 1896, this historic repository is subtly transformed into a place where brutal assault meets determined regeneration. For Huang, who cannot return to China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square conflict, neither irony nor cynicism is appropriate to the seriousness of the situation.

Through formal means, Serra has created an environment called “Judith and Holofernes” that accomplishes more than any didactic assault on context could muster. Interestingly, he’s done it by conflating painting and sculpture into environmental proportions.

In a big, nearly square room, Serra has installed on opposite white walls, flush to the surface, two dense, black panels made from thick, oil paintstick on canvas. One rises from the floor part way up the wall, the other descends from the ceiling part way down the wall.

Together, these carefully calibrated intrusions forcefully reconfigure your perception of the otherwise commanding architectural space, making it dynamic. The “Judith” of art brutally slays the powerful “Holofernes” of the museum building.

Given the emphasis of the show, in which contemporary art is almost always seen as valuable principally as a vehicle for a rigorous critique of its context, painting is the “odd art out.” Sculpture, which is also in rather short supply (most notable are some terrific bronzes by Tony Cragg), shares a similar fate, but its relative absence is somehow less significant.

Perhaps it’s because this particular context--the art museum--typically has privileged painting above all else, thus making it persona non grata for a show with the rather narrow parameters of this one.

The International includes a variety of compelling installations, including a wild, jiving basketball court by David Hammons and the chambers of a hauntingly abandoned orphanage by Ukranian Ilya Kabakov, which eloquently evokes the ruin of the Soviet Union today. At the other end of the spectrum, there is even a flatly appalling installation: Richard Avedon’s photographs of New Year’s Eve at the newly demolished Berlin Wall, shockingly transformed into a theatrical fashion spectacle of numbing triviality.

Finally, though, the preponderence of self-referential museum art makes for a narrow and navel-gazing show. The irony is that the exhibition has forthrightly embraced precisely those bureaucratic, categorical and exclusionary structures of the modern institution that this sort of work typically means to critique.

As a friend remarked, the 1991 International is rather like a very good chicken restaurant that cooks its bird in a variety of ways, some satisfyingly tasty, some not. You’d be inclined to say that, overall, it’s really quite good--even though, underneath, it’s all still chicken.