Broken Power Lines

This weekend I visited my favorite museum, The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas.  The permanent collection of the museum is remarkable: a wondrous assortment of surrealist art (especially the room devoted to “objects” surrealists collected called: Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision), contemporary art (such as Warhol’s “Lavender Disaster” and a few Rothko’s – the museum neighbors the Rothko chapel), as well as traditional art from places like Papua New Guinea and the Tlingit tribe of the Pacific Northwest.  Moreover, the architecture and space of the museum is worth visiting alone – sunlight delicately slants across hardwood floors offering a subtle feeling of ease and grace as you travel from one room to the next.

During this Saturday’s visit, I was confronted, and unsettled, by the work of conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan from Padua, Italy.   According to a friendly room attendant and the Menil brochure, Cattelan was authorized to re-arrange and selectively position paintings from the Menil’s permanent collection next to his own conceptual pieces.  As a result, Cattelan’s objects, such as the wax sculptures and taxidermied animals I will discuss in detail shortly, transform the space of the museum into a semiotic landscape.  ‘Transform’, however, is too innocuous a word because it effaces the palpable violence of Cattelan’s intervention; Cattelan does not simply engage other works of art in a dialogue but damages both the space of the museum and the works of art exhibited therein.

To explain what I mean, I will begin by describing the standard way of encountering a museum.   The museum displays art objects.  Simple enough definition, but in order to do so, it must rip the object from its lived space– simultaneously disconnecting the work of art from its social, historical and political contexts and elevating it into a space of aesthetic pleasure open to the public.  The museum allows us to view each work of art individually and like good Kantians we can engage in the free play of aesthetic judgment apart from the distressing and dirty world of politics.  We can be moved by the aesthetic power and even violence of Picasso’s Guernica without having to delve too intensely into the details and historical conditions that produced it.

Conversely, Cattelan’s exhibition disrupts this space of individuation and blocks our ability to enjoy the beauty of art for its own sake.  My friend Rodney who accompanied me pointed out how the other visitors to the museum actively avoided gazing directly at Cattelan’s installations, straining to will their non-existence.   I will first describe only a few of his installations, and then offer one or two speculative remarks on their significance…

Imagine entering a room displaying the Menil’s collection of beautiful medieval Russian orthodox icons and frescoes (one painted by a disciple of the famous Andrei Rublev).   The room is perfectly under-lit, and even for a non-believer like myself, there is something sublime when viewing a representation of Saint George slaying the dragon painted on an aging piece of lime wood.   When I turned the corner and saw the following installation (see below image), my body viscerally convulsed – it is a wax statue of a women crucified, who also appears to be a mental-patient restrained in a straight jacket – the crucifix is encased in large crates for shipping wine, which read “Fragile” on the side.

I am not claiming to offer an authoritative interpretation – I am simply trying to organize the thoughts that accompanied a lingering sensation of discomfort, which has not, in fact, entirely gone away.  However, I believe that the feminization of the Passion (not to mention pathologization) is not performed for the sake of cheap shock value or blasphemy, but is unsettling, precisely because it taps into a core dimension of the history, imaginary, and unconscious of Christianity.  The suffering body – that is both condemned to suffer and eroticized in its suffering – continues to wield a powerful grip on our contemporary imagination (see Princess Di; Anna Nicole Smith; anorexic bodies; bodies enhanced and disfigured through implants and steriods; and, of course, Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion).  This dimension is concealed in the sublimity of the religious icon, and its contemporary incarnation, the commodity fetish.  What Cattelan stages is the obscene underside of the air-brushed simulacra.

Next, I want to discuss two installations together – the taxidermied horse toppled on its side, impaled by a stake with the letters “INRI” etched into (see image below) and a different installation in a separate room: a series of marble sheets covering what are assumed to be anonymous corpses (see image at the beginning of this post).   The taxidermined horse is in a room with Magritte’s “A Glass Key” and the marble bodies titled “ALL” are placed alone at the center of an empty room.  What is so memorable and powerful about both of these installations is that they bring into the space of the museum the nameless dead of history. Whereas art, especially religious art and portraiture, serves to memorialize those who have been fortunate enough to be adorned by the beautiful, Cattelan invites unwanted guests: the maimed horse, the mass grave, those who exhausted their lives on the edges of history (reminding me of Bresson’s christ-like donkey who was beaten to death by his owners in the film Au Hasard Balthazar).   The massive physical presence of the petrified horse undermines an experience of the museum as a space of beauty apart from the world – and left me pondering the horrible fate of horses who break their legs – a scene which, for me, negates any belief in the benevolence of the universe.

The exhibit also calls into question the power of art to educate us on how to be better human beings, and redeem us from the suffering of our history in a sublimated moment of grace.   We know from the Holocaust how Nazis would retire to their houses and relax by listening to Beethoven and Wagner.  Centuries of profound feeling and artistic creation accompanied the darkest moment of human history, without challenging its fundamental destructive core.  As such, it is somewhat fitting that Cattelan’s exhibit closes with three wax arms extended from the wall in a Nazi salute titled …. “Ave Maria.”