Audio By Carbonatix
Behind frenzied and diligent art collecting one usually finds eccentric and extraordinary art collectors. Such idiosyncrasy and the museum go hand in hand as the labyrinthine spaces of yesterday’s collectors often become the public treasuries of today’s moneyed idlers and wandering intelligentsia. One need only look to the John Soane House in London or the house of Isabella Stewart Gardner turned museum in Boston for examples of private collecting mania made public sources of awe and splendor. Mausoleums to consumerism and acquisition past, these museum-ified homes make us feel comfortable about our own desire to own and amass. They create an instant sense of history for both collecting and the figure of the collector. Yet it’s to the machine and its hallowed ability to mass-produce that we owe our will to collect everything from whatnots to bona fide art. Collecting, while a monkey on the back of some, is a sign of refinement–focused desire that comes only with an unmeasured resource of leisure time.
Collecting is something Dallas does very well. The city collects rabidly and unabashedly. While indeed the unconscious spirit of the city, collecting is nevertheless a conscious decision for many. For figures such as Raymond Nasher and Howard Rachofsky, collecting is a civic duty, an outward display of municipal stewardship bringing to mind the tradition of giving “good works”–baths and temples–practiced by the wealthy during Roman antiquity. Equal parts essence and structure, collecting provides the grammar through which even the artists of Dallas speak, with local artists unmindful of how peculiar it is to discuss their work in a public forum according to how a “collector might want to collect it.” This doesn’t happen everywhere. This is singular to Dallas–and this, odd as it might sound, is one of the city’s strengths. It is from Dallas’ collecting unconscious that the city’s ethos wells forth. So, when graciously ignored, or repressed as in the case of Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas, a painting exhibition showing at the Dallas Museum of Art, its rebound is ever more resonant.
Dallas’ collecting unconscious is a force, an indelible characteristic, I might add, that goes willfully untouched in Ellsworth Kelly in Dallas. A showing of the work by the mid-20th-century artist Ellsworth Kelly owned by local collectors, this is an exhibition largely bereft of an overarching concept or, for that matter, intellectual titillation of even the mildest sort. Instead of ideas this is a show about further collecting–but you’d never know it, as the collecting unconscious of the city is muffled, kept down and quiet because of its seemingly uncouth, garish and over-the-top materialistic intent. An exhibition meant to ensure the future bequeathing of Kelly’s paintings owned by locals to the DMA, it is fueled by the circuitous logic of art conceived as a fetishistic object or commodity to collect. Once the fetishistic and sacred objects of private collectors, the paintings have emerged briefly into the public sphere as “art” only to return once again after the showing to the realm of private fetish–so many painterly talismans of Dallas collectors or, by turns of hope and genuflection combined, the DMA. There is nothing really wrong or immoral about this cycle. Rather it is the pretense set forth by the DMA–that this intellectually deficient show is somehow not about collecting–that is so questionable.
This is not to say that the paintings by the man himself are somehow weak. In fact, the work is good, sometimes astounding. It is just meager in presentation. While consisting of a small array of high-quality works by Kelly, this “survey” of the artist’s work feels more like 30-some-odd paintings and a few sculptures in search of an idea than a full-fledged overview. Perhaps this is just that: a gathering of local Kelly paintings. Located in the architectural expanse of the museum’s barrel vault, quadrant galleries and sculpture garden combined, there are too few pieces to constitute a “survey” of Kelly’s work. Yet, in an odd turn of events, it is the quality of those few that redeems this otherwise Swiss-cheese-like exhibition.
Born in 1923, Kelly is an artist whose coming of age occurred in the years after World War II. Living in France on the GI Bill after the war, Kelly discovered the wonders of architecture–in particular the Gothic and Romanesque–which would consistently inflect his work in years to come. At first blush, though, there seem to be few outward references to architecture and figural, three-dimensional objects within his work. His brightly colored, experimentally shaped large canvases appear to present an artist working through the permutations of sheer painting: painting and its purity as a medium. The electric colors of “Green Blue Red” (1963) and “Green Black” (1968) are testament to this purity. Their opaque and flat surfaces give rise to a sense not only of Kelly’s expertise as a painter but, beyond the artist’s hands, to the essential qualities of painting as a medium itself–that by definition painting should be nontransparent and planar.
The well-nigh fluorescent color palette of these paintings suggests another very present, indeed more populist influence in his work, namely that of signage. For Kelly working in New York in the 1950s, formalism and popular culture were not mutually exclusive. In fact, Kelly found the formalism of painting embedded in the streets and signs of the city. This combined processing of form and everyday life–that he found the former ever present in the latter–is delightfully palpable in four untitled postcards of New York City tucked away in the corner of one of the quadrant galleries. Uniting abstract painterly form and the rough-and-tumble life of city sidewalks, Kelly painted white abstract forms atop the small postcards of the city. Other evidence that Kelly was working through issues of popular communication appears as early as 1952 with the grid of bright colors in “Sanary.” We might see in this work Kelly’s mock representation of color as the shared essence of painting and advertising. Painting for Kelly was at once specific and other, simultaneously defined by its own qualities as a medium yet always spilling over into and borrowing from other artistic disciplines. The flatness of his canvases equally suggests a turn toward the architectural, bringing to mind the wall-ness of later sculpture by Richard Serra or the floor-ness of Carl André’s work. These architectural qualities, especially as they participate in the culture of Minimalism, are clearly present in Kelly’s enormous polished stainless steel sculpture, “Untitled” (1982-’83), located in the sculpture garden.
Ultimately, this small collection of paintings and sculpture would have been better serviced by a stronger sense of intellectual direction. The DMA could have either brought in more works and turned it into a real retrospective or, perhaps more interesting and in keeping with the budget of the museum, underscored Kelly’s work as the pivotal force that it has been. Kelly’s painting and sculpture could have been placed amid works by other, later artists he influenced–Pop artists such as Warhol and Oldenburg and Minimalists such as Serra and André–in order to draw attention to his role as the potent and necessary linchpin between midcentury abstraction and 1960s Pop Art and Minimalism. Or, better yet, why not represent this small collection of works as precisely what it is: the articulation of Dallas’ collecting unconscious? Why be ashamed of something the city does so well?
