Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Ed Ruscha’s Noise, Pencil, Broken Pencil, Cheap Western (1963, at right) is a reality play in oils. On the far left of the painting, just above center, is a pencil. On the far right of the painting, on nearly the same horizontal axis, is a broken pencil. At the top of the painting Ruscha has painted the word “NOISE” in ‘three-dimensional’ projected script. The questions: Did you hear the pencil break? No. Is the word “noise” really in three dimensions? No. Can you hear noise? Yes. Can you hear “NOISE?” No.

At the bottom of the painting is a comic book titled “Popular Western.” It’s obviously not an actual comic, it’s just painted on to the blue ground of the canvas. It’s not real. It’s no more real than the noise of the pencil breaking you heard in your mind’s ear. Or of popular conceptions of the West, such as those in that comic book, or in Hollywood, which seems vaguely recalled by the Hollywood-style projected scrip of the word “NOISE” at the top of the painting. Or in the popular imagination, which has been influenced by Hollywood and comic books and the like. What is “real” anyway?

The painting, one of Ruscha’s absolute best, is in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. On the occasion of the museum’s expansion and re-opening, curator John Ravenal has installed it in a corner with Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis (below), which, like the Ruscha, was made in 1963.

Warhol’s painting features one image of Elvis dressed like a cowboy, repeated three times. The image is from a publicity shot for the 1960 film “Flaming Star,” which was, well, a ‘Popular Western.’ Warhol is also playing with reality: How much of the character – Elvis Presley, that is, not his film character – is constructed? And how much of it is constructed by the sheer repetition of the construct created for this character? What do we really know about Elvis Presley? When it comes to a celebrity in an emergent media age, what is “real” anyway?

It’s a super pairing, the kind of installation that not only brings challenging art into focus but that encourages the viewer to find something in the art that transcends the canvas or the museum. It’s a curator helping multiple works of art do what the artists want each work to do. (There are other little cross-gallery rhymes here too: To the left of the Ruscha is Roy Lichtenstein’s 1964 Gullscape. It features a fictional landscape composed of Ben-Day dots, a blown-up version of how Ruscha’s ‘Popular Western’ would have been printed. If, of course, it was real. Which it isn’t. No more than Lichtenstein’s landscape is. Capice?)

This is one of the things I like about museums that don’t have little-bit-of-everything collections. Big museums, such as MoMA or the National Gallery, often hang some version of The Timeline: Here’s abex, here’s the Johns/Rauschenberg/Twombly transition, here’s minimalism, here’s pop and so on. The institutional emphasis is on inclusion and grouping rather than on putting together pairings of works that do something together.

The VMFA doesn’t ‘have’ to do that. Instead the museum gives us a timely corner: One of the challenges of today’s media age is separating what’s real from what’s false from what’s partially real from what’s intended to distract us and so on. When I was in the gym earlier this week, I looked up at the televisions above the cardio machines. All were showing versions of somethings purporting to be real: The infamous reality-TV show “American Idol” was on one TV. (How real is reality TV? Not very.) The live web-stream of the BP oil spill was on CNN. (This was more real than “American Idol,” but the view that BP is giving us — a lava-lamp-on-steroids close-up of the Gulf floor — seems designed to titillate and to distract us from the awful reality of the spill’s impact throughout an ecosystem. The view of spewing oil is real, but it’s a presentation of a narrow reality that diverts us from the totality of the disaster.)

Meanwhile, on a third TV I saw that Fox News had noticed that President Barack Obama would be spending Memorial Day at a national cemetery in Illinois. Fox pushed a chyron with the headline “Offensive to Soldiers?” (Apparently Fox was ‘outraged’ that the President wouldn’t be spending Memorial Day at Arlington. Fox’s outrage was as real as the idea that the President is spending Memorial Day at the ‘wrong’ national cemetery, and was thus demonstrating ‘offensive’ behavior. Its chyron and discussion were also misleading: Over the last 20 years, presidents have spent 13 Memorial Days at Arlington and seven elsewhere.)

So what’s real and what’s just, well,

As I was walking through the galleries at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts I stopped in front of this Charles Sheeler. It was smartly hung in a corner, next to a 1958 Ralston Crawford and below a 1951 Alexander Calder. It’s a smart hang — precisionism kicked forward a bit on the walls, streamlined forms given the biomorphic treatment hovering up above . After I’d spent a few moments with the paintings, I found that I kept looking at the unusual frame around the Sheeler: What is that and where did it come from?

Fortunately, VMFA does something unusual with its wall-text labels: It doesn’t just list the artist, the title of the work and the acquisition date/info, it includes data on the frame. In the case of this Sheeler the label reads:

CHARLES SHEELER

American, 1883-1965

Steel-Croton, 1953

Oil on canvas

John Barton Payne Fund, 54.3.3

Original frame

American, ca. 1953

Wood, carved and painted

Frame information! Sure, the label doesn’t say if “original” means its Sheeler’s frame or if it was just the frame a dealer put around the painting way back when, but that’s still about 98 percent more information than most (any?) other museums provide.

I’ve only seen this at VMFA and only in the museum’s American galleries. VMFA American curator Sylvia Yount told me that the museum has done this for a while, dating back to the tenure of her predecessor, David Park Curry (who is now the American curator in Baltimore). “We consider them important transitional objects between the paintings and decorative art holdings,” she told me in email.

It’s a practice that I wish would spread to other museums and to other curatorial departments. How many times have you seen atrocious frames on impressionist paintings and thought, ‘That frame has to be about the collector and his sense of self-importance, right?’ and so on. (And maybe, just maybe, being a little more up-front about frames would motivate curators to use more sensible frames, too…)

Related from VMFA: Genre paintings tell two Civil War-era stories. An unfortunate atrium. VMFA reopens — and why it deserves more attention.

As economic troubles have hit Michigan and southeast Michigan in particular, the Detroit Institute has struggled. It has slashed its operating budget from the tens of millions into the teens, laid off staff and taken other austerity measures. No major American art museum has been more affected by the nation’s economic downturn than Detroit.

In recent years some of the museum’s biggest sources of revenue have all but dried up. (Example: the state of Michigan has cut its funding to the museum by more than 85 percent). So the DIA is fighting back on multiple fronts. A couple weeks ago Mark Stryker at the Detroit Free Press reported that the museum plans to seek a local property tax millage — not dissimilar from the one St. Louis city and county has to support St. Louis cultural attractions — to support the DIA. The Freep reported that the museum’s polling shows that 70 percent of voters would approve such a measure.

Today the museum tries something a little more direct: A telethon on Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV-TV. Throughout the day WDIV will feature stories on the museum and its collections. The telethon will encourage Detroiters to give to the DIA and to become members of the museum — and at special rates. WDIV is also running some web specials on the occasion of the telethon, including this slideshow which features Cary Grant visiting the museum. If you’d like to support one of America’s great collections, click here or call 1-888-YEAR125.

(And if a telethon increases awareness of the museum and its needs ahead of a process that ends up with a property tax-for-the-DIA being on the ballot…)

Related: I talked with DIA director Graham Beal in January, 2009. Part two.

When I walked into the newly expanded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond recently, I found myself in a giant white lobby-atrium, the kind of mega-void that has become practically required in new art museum buildings. Think MoMA, think the Indianapolis Museum of Art (times two!), think the East Building of the National Gallery of Art or the High Museum. (I understand the Modern Wing at the Art Institute features same, but I haven’t been.)

I looked around VMFA for the art. Hmm, where could it be… I found the bookstore, which has an opening from the path into the atrium and another opening into the atrium itself. I found the cafe, which has a lovely outdoor patio that looks out over a pool of water and, soon, a contemporary sculpture garden. I found the museum’s library, which was smartly, invitingly located where anyone could easily access it. (In the photograph above, it’s roughly where that golden light comes in on the left.) But still: Where were the galleries? Everywhere I looked: drywall, drywall, drywall. Well, OK, drywall plus one giant plexi window, which seemed like a peek-a-boo prophylactic that protects atrium visitors from the galleries, or vice-versa.

I saw staircases that led up to somewheres. At the top of each flight of stairs were small words on the wall. That seemed to indicate that there may be galleries up there. However, the doors near the words looked like small fire doors on a seawall of drywall — little about them invitingly suggested that the reason to visit the museum was beyond. (See the picture below. And imagine looking up two or three floors to these doors/signs.) Museum officials point out that the tiny words on the wall say “art deco” or something that indicates there is art beyond. Against three stories of drywall and an atrium the size of Delaware, that light-colored text, next to doors about the size of the bathroom doors at my neighborhood Starbucks, is not helpful. Also, a sign in front of me indicated that there were special exhibitions on a “lower level,” but I couldn’t figure out how to get there. (The only staircase going downstairs that I saw seemed to go to an auditorium.)

Eventually I found a little dead-end shoebox gallery with a few paintings in it. It was the only gallery on the main floor. I slowly realized that the VMFA had built a giant fish-tank atrium that made it not only difficult to find the art, but that the museum had put almost no galleries on the level at which people enter the museum. I do not understand this. [Image: Flickr user Mimmyg, who has a nice pool of VMFA pictures.]

As frustrating as it was to excitedly enter a new museum building and to be unable to find art, I was only just beginning to understand the extent of VMFA’s design error. Over the next seven hours I wandered through VMFA’s three joined buildings. The new atrium effectively separates VMFA’s new galleries of American art, contemporary art and South Asian art from the museum’s previous galleries of everything else (modern art, European art, art deco, art nouveau, British silver, Faberge and so on). The VMFA atrium isn’t a common space that helps the museum’s three buildings cohere, it separates them.

It seemed obvious to me that when you separate one building from two others with an an acre of three or four stories of drywall that you cut off two parts of the museum from the third. When I visited, the new building and its galleries were full of people. The two older buildings were almost empty. I wasn’t the only one who either couldn’t figure out how to find the art or who found that the connections between buildings and galleries were badly lacking.

At first I couldn’t understand why the museum would want to break itself up like this. Finally I read a Richmond Times-Dispatch story in which VMFA officials told the paper that they expect rental income, from cocktail parties and the like, to triple to $900,000 a year. That would be fourth-best among American art museums. No wonder the new building seems to have been designed for ‘event space’ first, art second. [Image: Hallway from the parking deck into the VMFA void, featuring Ryan McGinness' Art History is Not Linear (VMFA).]

If any one art museum building serve as the tombstone for these kind of corporate-entertaining-enabling, vanity-voids, it should be this new Rick Mather-designed atrium in Richmond. It is a soulless, sterile, mostly empty vault. Museum directors: Bring your trustees here to show them what not to do. If you need space that generates revenue, fine. Use this void space to motivate you to come up with new ideas.

Tomorrow: Finding my way out of the atrium and into the galleries. Previously: One of America’s quietest museums quietly expands.

Related: Washington Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott loved the VMFA’s new Mather.

It is symptomatic of the art world’s current infatuation with the market and were-you-there cocktail parties that earlier this month an art museum bigger than MoMA or the Getty opened and almost no one out of its home region noticed.

After a four-and-a-half-year, $150 million expansion, Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has turned itself into North America’s 14th-largest museum, an impressive feat considering that Richmond is the United States’ 43rd-largest metropolitan area.

So how did a museum in a small city become so substantial? VMFA has benefited from its association with state government, which funded $50 million of its expansion, and from its relationship with the late Paul Mellon, who gave significant chunks of his collection to the National Gallery of Art, Yale University and to the VMFA — and who helped fund VMFA’s previous expansion (which helped place the deep 20thC collections of Sydney and Frances Lewis on view.)  The commonwealth of Virginia is also a major contributor to the museum’s operating budget, kicking in just under $11 million in 2010 — about seven times as much as the No. 2 state-funded art museum. (VMFA’s state appropriation is likely growing: The Virginia state legislature recently approved $12.5 million for the museum in the state’s most recent budget. The bill has yet to be signed by Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.)

VMFA suffers an attention deficit, mostly because it isn’t in anything remotely approximating a media capital and because it doesn’t do anything flashy. It shows strong collections, it shows them well, and it builds its collections carefully and smartly. Its expansion, the first American project for British architect Rick Mather, fits the museum’s low-key character. (More on Mather’s building tomorrow.)

No question: VMFA deserves more national attention than it receives: Its collections of Faberge, British sporting art, English silver, art nouveau and art deco design objects, and South Asian and African art are among America’s best. The museum also has a fine collection of late 19th-century French art and improving collections of American art and German expressionism. Among comprehensive museums, only a handful have better collections of mid-20thC art. I recently spent seven hours in the new VMFA and didn’t have near enough time to see everything — and VMFA’s African and antiquities galleries have yet to re-open. VMFA is now a ‘two-day museum.’

Tomorrow I’ll share some thoughts on VMFA’s new building and over the course of the week I’ll spotlight some of the best of the new VMFA.

Related: North America’s largest art museums ranked by total exhibition space (in square feet) from 2009 AAMD survey:

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 736,095

2. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 228,334

3. National Gallery of Art, 224,417

4. Brooklyn Museum of Art, 193,057

5. Art Institute of Chicago**, 185,187

6. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 183,404

7. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 165,128

8. Detroit Institute of Arts, 157,314

9. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 144,168

10. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston*, 143,000

11. National Gallery of Canada, 142,979

12. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 142,091

13. Indianapolis Museum of Art, 141,037

14. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 135,000

15. Museum of Modern Art, 130,000

* In November the MFA Boston opens an expansion. At that point they’ll have 221, 267 square feet.

** The AIC’s Modern Wing brings its total to 249,282 square feet.

It is time for the weekend. Thanks for joining us for Week One of ‘new MAN.’ If I lived in Utah, I’d be headed for recently opened Epic Brewing, which is offering Spiral Jetty IPA. (The beer may not make it out to Washington, but if those guys made t-shirts…) Also: There must be other American microbrews named after artists/artworks, right? (Does Victory’s Storm King Stout count?)