At the Met putting up a sign for the name-brand "El Greco" show.
THIS time of year, the titles of oncoming art exhibitions blare from magazine covers and museum posters, amplified by megawatt names, weighty epochal allusions, clever colloquialisms or restrained, status-reeking factuality. (Can you say "2006 Whitney Biennial"?)
An exhibition title is a harbinger, the first whiff of a brand whose apotheosis will be not only the show, but also assorted gift shop merchandise: the ties, scarves, umbrellas and totes on which it will be emblazoned. Or, looked at another way, the title is a flare fired from an ocean liner that has yet to crest the horizon; it lights up the night sky regardless of whether the vessel is sinking or there's a party onboard. Once the exhibition opens, the title becomes a mere handle, an appendage whose fate is forever tied to the impact of the show.
Some titles are almost drabbly self-evident. "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" the plain-spoken title of one of Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s groundbreaking surveys at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, may not roll off the tongue, but it is hallowed - if a bit dry, like Barr himself. But other titles seem calculated to enhance a show's mystique. The afterlife of the first museum show of Conceptual Art (Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969) undoubtedly benefited from its poetic mantra of a title: "Live in Your Head: When Attitude Becomes Form." The risk, of course, is that at a certain point originality can simply seem weird. The Whitney Museum's current "Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing," for example, practically tells you not to look too closely at the art.
Occasionally titles fuse so vividly with their shows that they become a kind of code of their own. It's hard to believe the furor over the Brooklyn Museum exhibition of works belonging to the British adman Charles Saatchi would have reached quite the pitch that it did without the title "Sensation." On a far more sinister note, there is the pitch-perfect poison of Hitler's "Degenerate Art" exhibition of 1937. "Modernist Trends of Which the Führer Disapproves" would not have had the same effect.
And then there are the titles so lengthy they require internal punctuation: invariably, a colon. The protocol of the colon is complicated, if not unfathomable, involving rhythm (number of beats per side) and balance (the less, apparently, the better). The Modern's forthcoming "Safe: Design Takes on Risk" gets leverage up front from the Todd Haynes movie of the same one-word name, but can't quite go it alone. Anyway, the two dots lend a Hollywood cadence: "Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings" meet "Superman: The Movie."
On the other extreme are brazen one-word titles. "Dada" at the National Gallery in Washington, for example, assumes - probably correctly - that the word is a part of the vernacular, even perhaps a brand. The Modern's "Pixar," opening in December, makes that bet somewhat more literally. "Frequency," which is being planned by Thelma Golden and Christine Y. Kim at the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a little unclear but has a certain buzz about it. It may also be a sign of an institutional tradition. Ms. Golden, who a decade ago organized "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art," remarked at the time of her last survey, organized with Ms. Kim and simply entitled "Post-Black," "I have no colon."
But punctuation doesn't always slow a title down. "Russia!," the immense survey of Russian culture opening on Sept. 16 at the Guggenheim, would certainly be dull without the Vreelandesque exclamation point.
No one messes much with solo shows of the quick or the world-famous (witness MoMA's "Elizabeth Murray" and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Fra Angelico"). But an added word or two provides focus. This year we have "Memling's Portraits" (did he paint anything else?), "Frank Stella 1958" (i.e., very early), "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" (i.e., seminal) and "Gottlieb 1956" (huh?).
Over all, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there seems to be an inverse ratio between the prominence of the museum and the nerviness of its titles' forays into wordplay, popular culture references or general touchy-feely appeal. Prominent big-city museums favor straight-laced titles; the most playful one at the Met this season is "The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult," which doesn't exactly pander.
Smaller, out-of-the way museums in need of attention take more risks and liberties. This summer the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo appropriated one of marketing's most overused adjectives for "Extreme Abstraction," while the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston opted for sitcomese with "Getting Emotional." "Girls Night Out," a show organized last fall by the Orange County Museum of Art, sounds as though it might involve two-for-one daiquiri specials. And there's always the option of reshaping or simply inventing words. Look at "Populence," an exhibition about popular culture's influence on current art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.
The league leader of contemporary-art titledom may be the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which segued from deconstructionist chic to rocker sinister to Sunset Boulevard suave in the late 1980's and the 90's with "A Forest of Signs," "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990's" and "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945." This year the museum is back on the charts with "Ecstasy: In and About Altered Space," a contemporary art survey that explores heightened consciousness and perception. Other indications of a trend toward the intergalactic include "Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology and the Paranormal" at the University of Maryland, and my fave, "Star Star: Toward the Center of Attention" at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.
Yet even at their most adventurous, museum exhibition titles rarely breach book-club acceptability. This is left to commercial galleries, which in New York alone offered, this summer, "Bridge Freezes Before Road," "Ribbed for Her Pleasure" and "Drunk vs. Stoned 2" - the bare-bones original of the "Ecstasy" exhibition in Los Angeles. These gallery shows may be the tiniest of boats, full of holes and taking on water, but their titles will stay afloat, tantalizing us from the pages of artists' bibliographies for years to come.
沒有留言:
張貼留言