Carnegie Ramble

Art in America, March, 2000 by Edward Leffingwell

The visitor is again offered several choices of where to turn next. One choice leads to the decorative-arts galleries and another more directly to the museum's Hall of Sculpture balcony, where one finds an expansive site-specific cut-paper panorama by Kara Walker. The Emancipation Approximation (1999) overlooks an atrium filled with an installation by the late Martin Kippenberger, also part of the exhibition. Above is Lothar Baumgarten's The Tongue of the Cherokee (1985-88), acquired by the museum from a previous International, its linguistic symbols painted, laminated and sandblasted on the checkerboard glass coffers of the ceiling. Walker's procession of signature silhouettes offers a barbed storybook gloss on race relations in the rural 19th-century United States, identifying black and white figures through the caricature of their social and racial characteristics. There are cameo appearances by Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox of the Uncle Remus tales and, somehow, Leda and the Swan, and then a moment of oral sex performed on master. The mistress beheads girls with an ax at a tree stump, while a boy kisses a chicken's ass and drops eggs in a frying pan at his backside. There are vignettes placing the girls' heads where the swans' should be, and a swan expelling a load of guano that whitewashes a black figure below. Walker plays her characters off the dozen or so classic marble statues that surround the balcony, conscripting them as witness to her silent narrative.

Close at hand, Kerry James Marshall commandeered the museum's Treasure Room, a wood-paneled studio of display cases accessed from one side of the sculpture hall's balcony. RYTHM MASTR (1999) consists of two-sided newspaper comics, drawn and lettered by Marshall, taped to the glass of the cases as though they were makeshift privacy screens. Because of the light washing through the thin newsprint from within the cases, the serial cartoon, involving the streetwise and foolish, superheroes and villains, proves difficult to follow on-site, but was made available to readers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the city's morning newspaper, in eight weekly installments.

As one returns to what at first appears to be a traditional gallery of the decorative arts, it becomes clear that the inmates have well and truly taken over the asylum. Mark Dion, a magnet for archival abundance, dresses the first of these galleries in its own costume with a two-part installation. For Ornithological Selections from the Collections of Carnegie Museum of Art (1999), he decorated the gallery walls and populated vitrines with avian paintings, porcelains, books and prints. In the second part, he centers the ensemble with Alexander Wilson--Studio (1999), an imaginative reconstruction of the wilderness cabin of the largely forgotten wildlife artist named in the title. Preceding John James Audubon's more famous undertakings by 50 years or so, Wilson's works demonstrate his struggle to acquire a passable skill in drawing from specimens. Dion understands this as part and parcel of the construction of history: how events and discoveries are recorded, interpreted, disseminated and then cast aside. He focuses on Wilson's frustration with the portrayal of an owl, scattering rejected sketches on a table and floor of a room crowded with specimens, ground pigments, clay pipes, a mortar, weaver's tools (Wilson was also a weaver), tackle, boots, pelts, decoys, skulls, a stuffed white owl, a bluejay, a robin and cardinal also from the collections.