JAVA Nov 19

ARTS
JENNIFER MCCABE CURATING COUNTER-LANDSCAPES AT SMOCA
By Grant Vetter
The exhibition Counter-Landscapes: Performative
Actions from the 1970s–Now at SMoCA is both a
curatorial and an artistic triumph. It celebrates the
work of three generations of the most important
performance artists, including the likes of Marina
Abramović, Francis Alÿs, VALIE EXPORT, and Adrian
Piper, to name a few. The breadth of the artists
selected by museum director and chief curator
Jennifer McCabe, which includes 24 in total, provides
a concise and thought-provoking survey of the kinds
of motivations that have been often overlooked in the
history of the genre.
Of course, the idea of counter-landscapes is a
reference to the work of the French philosopher
Michel Foucault, who defended the notion of
counter-memories as those that have been repressed
or marginalized: memories of happenings that the
status quo could not accommodate. Starting from this
premise, we could say that works like Abramović’s
“Looking at the Mountains” is a counter-landscape
in the sense of inverting the iconic image of Caspar
David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.”
Friedrich’s painting of a rather well-dressed man at
the summit of a high mountain peak is considered
by many to be the epitome of Romantic art because
it provides an image of mankind overcoming nature,
where the mind is set free by the sublime expanse
of pure metaphysical contemplation, and the gaze
places humanity in the position of being both the
pinnacle and surveyor of the natural world.
Abramović’s work is a counter-landscape inasmuch
as it inverts all three of these premises by situating
the artist between the heavens and earth, where
the image places her firmly in this world, and the
darkened clouds above provide a sense of existential
isolation rather than metaphysical mastery.
A different kind of counter-landscape, aiming
to challenge the ideals of the Enlightenment as
much as those of Romanticism, can be found in
the works of Agnes Denes. Her three images from
the Wheatfield series serve not just to question the
narratives of progress and civilization but to highlight
how skyscrapers provide corporate CEOs with a
Friedrichesque worldview from atop, in their offices
and boardrooms, albeit places decidedly removed
from nature.
But, of course, this is the point, and these three
photographs can also be read as a three-act
play of sorts, with the first image revealing the
detritus of modern civilization set off against one
of the greatest symbols of the Enlightenment – the
Statue of Liberty. The next shows us an expanse
of unharvested grain, demonstrating the power of
reclamation, but not just in a literal sense. Rather,
the juxtaposition of field and figure, the latter bearing
the words of the poet Emma Lazarus, serves to
underscore an expanded notion of “liberty, equality,
and fraternity.” Denes’ project points to the hope of
reclaiming a lost sense of congress between nature,
people, and the greater ecology of exchanges that
make up modern life.
This is highlighted by the third photograph from
Wheatfield, which struck a chord at the height of
the environmental art movement, but which reads
differently today with the World Trade Center
pictured in the background. The image now occupies
the place of a memory as much as it functions as
documentation. Denes’ work, and the space allotted
to the twin towers, becomes even more relevant
for having pictured the place where a conflict
over capitalism, the first and third worlds, and
secularism and fundamentalism would eventually
explode in an act of terror. In this way, we learn that
counter-landscapes always already contain countermemories,
and that the archeology of images from
our past can come to haunt our understanding of the
future.
It is this temporal element that is highlighted
throughout the exhibition as we encounter
Mendieta’s symbolically charged acts with her body
and the earth, or Piper’s critique of silenced minority
positions, as well as Pope L.’s profound performances
about the grueling struggle for artistic recognition
in an art world that continues to be permeated by
racism. These works and others in the show are part
of the profound archive that McCabe has assembled
in order to highlight how we think about various
genealogies of artistic disciplines that have not only
challenged the status quo but have forever changed
the art world as we know it.
Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s–Now
Through January 19, 2020
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA)
www.smoca.org
16 JAVA
MAGAZINE