Exhibitions 1
Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life (Moma, New York, till 26 Aug: Hayward Gallery, London, from 9 Oct to 4 Jan)
Very good and bad, bad, bad
Roger Kimball
The good news is that perhaps ten or 15 of the 130 objects on view in this exhibition really are artistic 'objects of desire'. That is to say, they repay visual attention with aes- thetic pleasure. The bad news is everything else: the other one-hundred-and-something undesirable objects, the overall conception of the exhibition, the pretentious porno art-speak catalogue. About the good news: this exhibition opens on a high note with Cezanne's exquisite 'Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants' (1890-94). It continues at or about that level of painterly achievement for about two and a half galleries. Anyone with the least taste for the innovations of early modernism will find a lot to like. There are excellent, if mostly familiar, paintings by Matisse, Braque, Leger, (early) Mondrian and others. True, even here the quality of the works is by no means uniform. The several Picassos, espe- cially, vary widely in accomplishment: one or two show him at the top of his form, the others are just off-the-rack items from the prodigious Picasso mill.
But the first part of the exhibition does provide abundant satisfactions. There is the intellectual satisfaction of seeing how the tradition of Western still-life painting is absorbed and recast by certain formal imperatives: a controlled tendency to abstraction, an emphasis on harmonising volumes and colours rather than represen- tational exactitude, a related movement away from meticulous modelling and the conventions of one-point perspective.
When it works, this art can be visually thrilling, which brings us to the distinctive aesthetic satisfactions to be had from mod- ernist still-life painting at its most accom- plished. They are not the same satisfactions one has from a minutely rendered 17th- century Dutch still life; nor are they the earthier satisfactions one has from, say, a still life by Caravaggio. They are the taut, slightly intoxicated pleasures of an art form at the threshold of a revolution. The con- ventions of the past are still strong enough to provide a chastening anchor; the innova- tions of the present are still new enough to be handled with a sense of excitement and discovery. The result is an art of seductive ferment: brash, pert, insouciant, full of fugitive beauties but quite without the con- solations of prettiness.
If only someone could steal into the Museum of Modern Art and segregate the first couple of rooms from the rest of the exhibition, taking care to dispose of all the catalogues along the way. Then a visitor could wander into the museum, take a turn or two around those galleries, and leave feeling exhilarated. As it is, the effect of Objects of Desire is distinctly anaphrodisiac.
The good news: 'Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, 1890-94, by Cezanne If one object can be said to epitomise what's wrong with this exhibition, it is Mar- cel Duchamp's 'Bicycle Wheel' — which is, in fact, just that: a bicycle wheel in its chas- sis, stuck impertinently in the seat of a wooden stool. This 'ready made' was one of Duchamp's impish jokes against the art world, designed to short-circuit the whole process of aesthetic delectation. The origi- nal 1913 version was lost, so Duchamp obligingly reconstructed the work in 1951. How he would have savoured the label that solemnly informs us of these curatorial facts. No wonder Duchamp gave up art for chess.
The curator of this exhibition, Margit Rowell, writes in her catalogue that Duchamp — along with later artistic pranksters such as Allan McCollum and Kiki Smith — 'expands the boundaries of the genre' of the still life. 'Travesties' is more like it. Margit Rowell tells us that `the attempt to tell the story of the modern still life is virtually equivalent to trying to tell the story of twentieth-century avant- garde art'. This isn't true, but it gives one a good indication of what went wrong with this exhibition. Miss Rowell, infatuated with the phrase 'avant-garde', has forsaken the history of the modern still life in order to provide us with a miscellany of 'advanced' art that may or may not have anything to do with the still life. Jasper John's Ameri- can flag, for example, has about as much to do with still-life painting as your kitchen sink, but because it is a pop art icon Miss Rowell duly includes it in the show.
And the closer to the present she gets, the more Miss Rowell's taste falters. The American artist William Bailey has pro- duced some of the most beautiful still-life paintings of our day. You won't find any of his pictures in this exhibition, however, but you will find a glass tank full of water with two basketballs floating in it, courtesy of Jeff Koons.
It's the same with the catalogue. Miss Rowell has invented a number of preten- tious pseudo-themes around which to organise the exhibition: 'The Mechanisms of Consumer Culture', 'Postmodern Simu- lacra', that sort of thing. And she has adopted wholesale today's barbarous aca- demic jargon: 'Objects of desire,' she writes, 'are not real but fictive . . . They furthermore enact a structure of desire that is a closed narrative system. Because the drive or pulsion of desire, in order to be sustained, must be unsatisfied, the objects desired (or the climax of the story) are ever distant or deferred. Thus the objects of a still life, although they appear accessible, are actually inaccessible, fictional, created: ideal as opposed to real.' In other words, works of art are not the same as the things they represent. That may seem pedestrian enough; but of course it sounds ever so much more sophisticated when you talk about the 'drive or pulsion of desire', a `narrative system', etc.
Walking through this exhibition, one is frequently reminded that the French term for 'still life' is nature morte. Despite its splendid beginning, it contains a lot more morte than nature.
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