Dislocations at the Modern

National Review, March 16, 1992 by James Gardner

ROLLER-COASTERS and funhouses do not fall within the ordinary jurisdiction of the art critic. but as regards "Dislocations," a show of seven installations at the Museum of Modern Art, either the critic talks about roller-coasters and funhouses, or he doesn't talk about "Dislocations."

Like roller-coasters, these installations were great fun. They had noise. They had movement. They had flashing lights and booming videos and simulated landscapes approaching virtual reality. Unlike roller-coasters, however, they were in deadly earnest. The cataloque, by Robert Storr, the new Curator of Painting and Sculpture, began somewhat inauspiciously with this sullenly existential query: "Where are we?" Even if Storr knows the answer to that one, you can be sure he has no intention of telling you. He wants you to question: it might do you some good, for a change. "There are plenty of reasons to wonder [where we are]," he continues. "And even more, perhaps, to ask why we don't wonder more often. . . . Most of the time we would just as soon pretend that we are sure of our surroundings, and, so, sure of ourselves and who we are. Rather that than pose the simple questions that might abruptly shatter the illusion of dependable normalcy."

Here, however, are three questions you weren't supposed to ask: "Why are we here at the exhibitin? What, if anything, does all this mean? Is it my imagination, or are these essentially the same questions the art world has been asking, without answering, for the past generation?"

"Dislocations" is the first exhibition organized at the Modern by Robert Storr. He was taken on with one idea in mind: to rescue the Modern from the worst of all curses, curatorial conservatism. Under the czardom of the recently retired William Rubin, the museum had been the bastion of High Modernist Greats, served up in a formalist mode that had not substantially changed in fifty years. If the charismatic Kirk Varnedoe was called in to spiff up the Museum's approach to classic modernism, Storr, coming from SoHo, was to turn the Modern into a showcase of contemporary art. "Dislocations" is the result. Virtually in one go, MOMA has lurched out of the late Sixties and into the mid Eighties. The seven artists featured appear to have been chosen in as studiously democratic a spirit as you could want. There were three women: Adrian Piper (American), Sophie Calle (French), and Louise Bourgeois (Franco-American). Of the four men, David Hammon's work, like Miss Piper's, reflects his experience as a black American; Ilya Kabakov is a Russian emigre; and finally Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden are just white.

There is an almost willful variety in these works. Yet similarities do emerge. Though Chris Burden may be best known for his performance pieces from the Seventies, in which, among other things, he was shot in the arm with real bullets, electrocuted, and nailed to the back of a Volkswagen, he has latterly become one of our more prominent political artists. He is represented in "Dislocations" by The Other Vietnam Memorial, which amounts to a massive book rising from floor to ceiling, whose nine huge leaves of steel and copper are etched with the names of three million Vietnamese who died in the war. As in so much of Burden's art, there is an almost obsessive, morbid pertinacity to the tens of millions of tiny letters swarming across the metallic surface.

A similar compulsiveness inspires Adrian Piper's What it's like/What it is. The artist has constructed a large cubic room out of timber; along its immaculately clinical white walls are levels where you can sit. In the center, on a raised television monitor, the talking head of a black man growls over and over: "I'm not smelly. I'm not dirty. I'm not pushy." You've got to admire Miss Piper for unerringly pulling all the right levers: white guild, black oppression, post-modern alienation (e.g., white walls), not to mention video-culture's totalitarian domination of thought, which of course is bad. In a similar vein, Bruce Nauman's Anthro/Socio occupies a darkened room illuminated only by a half-dozen monitors projecting the thick-set, shaved head of German performance artist Rinde Eckert. Because he is shouting with almost lunatic intensity, it takes time and close attention before you can make out what he is saying" "Feed me. Eat me. Help me. hurt me." If these three works, different as they are, amount to a new movement, and if they are in the market for a catchy name like Cubism or Dadaism, may I suggest Autism?

Just in case you had hoped that the newly liberated Russians were about to flood our markets with sober masterpieces of high art, it will be chastening to consider Ilya Kabakov, who proves that the Slavs can be every bit as imbecilic as our boys. Situated in the basement of the Modern. The Bridge was a tribute to entropy and internal corruption. One passed through a narrow hallway, dimly lit by a single bulb coated with glutinous muck, into a darkened chamber. The wooden bridge that had been thrown across it quivered and shook with each footfall. Chairs and tables were strewn everywhere, with all the apparent premeditation of a bar brawl. According to a note by the artist, this house of horrors reconstructed a room in which dissident Soviet artists had planned a secret exhibition of vanguardist art, before it was ransacked by the authorities. One could not help wondering whether there were not some better use to which Kabokov could put his new-found freedom.