Wins, Losses of Olympic Proportions

As we learned so well in Los Angeles in 1984, arts festivals associated with the Olympic Games can do smashingly well with the performing arts of theater, music and dance. When it comes to the visual arts, though, look out.

L.A.’s extensive visual arts program was a flop, with one exception. (“A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape” managed a refreshing new take on a wildly popular art.) Maybe because the Olympic Games are themselves performance-oriented, people who ought to know better suddenly seem to get flummoxed over how to deal with static art mediums like painting, sculpture and photography.

Now, as global visitors prepare to descend on Georgia July 19 for an Olympic-size helping of Southern hospitality, it remains to be seen how the centennial celebration of the Games will handle the performing arts. However, a recent two-day tour of visual arts venues brought decidedly mixed results. Far smaller and considerably less ambitious than L.A. in ‘84, the 1996 Cultural Olympiad can’t exactly be called an art enthusiast’s dream.

There are two big exceptions. One is a sculpture that may well be the single finest commission ever executed at the behest of an Olympic organizing committee. The other is a terrific show of an art rarely encountered outside the South.

The sculpture is the Centennial Olympic Cauldron, a monumental structure that will house the Olympic flame during the 17 days of the Games. The 111-foot steel-truss tower was designed by Iranian-born American artist Siah Armajani, who lives in Minneapolis and ranks among the finest public artists working today. (The tower will be reviewed in Calendar when the Olympic Games open.)

The engrossing exhibition is “Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South,” organized by the Carlos Museum at Emory University but handsomely installed in out-of-the-way galleries in City Hall East. The sprawling show expands upon a groundbreaking display of black American folk art that traveled the United States in the early 1980s.

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Some 500 works by 30 self-taught Southeastern artists have been selected, chiefly from the collection of Atlantan William Arnett. Among them are paintings and sculptures by such celebrated figures as James “Son” Thomas, Bessie Harvey, Mose Tolliver, Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe, together with those of compelling younger artists new to me, including Lonnie Holley and Mary Tillman Smith.

“Souls Grown Deep” demonstrates the potential power in a highly personal art commonly made from castoff materials, by artists who have themselves been castoffs from American society. It also suggests a largely unrecognized source for the work of more mainstream artists, such as the 1950s “combine paintings” of Southern-born Robert Rauschenberg and the evocative 1990s pictures of Radcliffe Bailey, whose found photographic portraits framed by elaborately collaged paintings are the standout in “Out of Bounds,” a survey of eight Southern-based contemporary artists at the alternative space Nexus.

Several other projects complete the Cultural Olympiad’s visual arts component, headed by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi. They include more than 20 temporary and permanent public sculptures by Tony Cragg, Betye Saar and others, currently being installed, and a solid if uninspired survey of Southern photography from the 19th century to the present (“Picturing the South” at the High Museum’s downtown annex).

These accomplishments are somewhat muted, though, by the blockbuster being touted as a high-flying centerpiece for the Cultural Olympiad. Opening today, “Rings: Five Passions in World Art” turns out to be an unintentionally hilarious compendium of mostly masterpieces from around the world, all held together by a kitschy thesis breathtaking in its wrongheadedness. Rarely has so much great art been put to such lame use.

Organized for the High Museum of Art by J. Carter Brown, former director of the National Gallery in Washington, “Rings” wants you to know that human emotions are universal. People everywhere experience love, anguish, awe, triumph and joy--the five arbitrarily chosen “passions in world art,” one per Olympic ring--regardless of their race, color, creed or national origin.

Yes, children, we are all one beneath the skin. With a grateful nod to “The Disuniting of America,” eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger’s least accomplished book, Brown writes in the luxurious catalog that, as ethnic politics drive us into sharper and sharper differentiations, we urgently need something to pull us all together.

Of course, Atlanta is world headquarters of the Coca-Cola Co., so you can practically hear an angel chorus swell with the strains of its old advertising jingle, “I’d like to teach the world to sing, in per-fect har-mo-ny.” That is, you might hear it if you weren’t plugged into the obligatory headphones provided as a soundtrack for this reactionary show, on which the curator explains how you should be experiencing the art you’re looking at, as snippets of great music rise in the background.

Led by the hand through boisterous passions supposedly embodied in global art history, it’s sort of “Masterpiece Theatre” meets Pirates of the Caribbean.

Brancusi’s charming, 1907-1908 stone carving “The Kiss” (representing love); Munch’s 1893 icon “The Scream” (anguish); Dai Jin’s mysterious 15th century scroll “Seeking Paradise” (awe); Ingres’ wondrously bombastic 1806 “Napoleon Enthroned” (triumph)--these and other great works from Japan, Mexico, Zaire, India, Kuwait and 34 other countries are airily laid out in a daisy chain of hallway-like galleries. They culminate in Matisse’s majestic 1909-1910 “Dance II” (joy), on loan from St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and here ignominiously wedged between a curtained window and the door to the big “Rings” gift shop (more joy?), with which the show concludes (relief).

Some fun comes from puzzling over why, say, a Tibetan painting of Kurukulla, goddess of love, is said to represent triumph, not the passion over which the deity usually presides. (Turns out it’s because she’s shown trampling a corpse that signifies human ego.) Or, whether the vast and tediously painted acreage of churning sea that swallows up a teeny, tiny ship in Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky’s huge, academic machine from 1889, “The Wave,” doesn’t more accurately represent stultifying boredom, not awe, as the curator insists.

Nor can you ever be sure if the art is supposed to be representing the five cited passions, or if it’s supposed to be generating them in the viewer. But when you read in the catalog that love has been subdivided into three parts--sex between men and women, the consequences of spousal ardor and the anguish of separation--you might wonder if all the phony-baloney posturing doesn’t just obscure the obvious: Aren’t those three heterosexual subheads translatable as dating, marriage and divorce?

So much for world peace and cosmic oneness. “Rings” is the sort of silly institutional pap that unwittingly declares just how ineffectual we now regard art to be.

Reducing the experience of a painting or sculpture to a singular emotion is finally counterproductive, because any art that can be so easily corralled is a failure. Confronted with the high level of quality of most of the 125 works, you can be pretty sure that it’s the five-passions motif that’s the dud, not the art. Absent any convincing thesis, the show’s subject becomes the curator’s remarkable international clout at securing loans.

Given the obvious dangers of packing fragile treasures and shipping them halfway around the world, though, you may marvel at this museum’s misplaced sense of priorities. Putting great art at risk for no compelling reason ought not to receive Olympian kudos.

* For information on the Cultural Olympiad, call (404) 224-1996, Ext. 5.