Members Only: Relics of the Age of Relics and Reliquaries

Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you can’t help but look back and wonder what we “members” were thinking. A similar phenomenon surrounds the modern perception of the medieval cult of relics and the precious reliquaries that once housed them. In the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, currently at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011, modern pilgrims can see that the cult venerated not just members (such as the arm bones once inside the arm-shaped reliquary shown), but any souvenir of the sacred from items related to the life of Christ to even stones or water taken from the Holy Land. Gaining an appreciation of the allure of such objects opens a window onto a medieval world at once very different than our own and yet somehow a precursor of our own cults and memberships. Please come over to at Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Members Only."

[Image: Arm Reliquary of the Apostles. German (Lower Saxony), ca. 1190. Silver gilt over wood (oak), enamel (champlevé). 51 x 14 x 9.2 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, 1930.739.]

[Many thanks to the Walters Art Museum for the image above and to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe, which runs at the Walters Art Museum through May 15, 2011.]

Copycat: Damien Hirst, Plagiarist?

When you compile a list of artists that other artists love to hate, a few names typically appear: Jeff Koons, Thomas Kinkade, and, perhaps most virulently, Damien Hirst. You can call it jealousy over their financial success, or you can call it disdain for the artwork that brings those riches home, but people in the art world just can’t stand those three. Koons offends with his kitschy pieces relentlessly marketed. Kinkaide draws ire with the cloying pseudo-religiosity of his calendar- and greeting card-ready landscapes. But Hirst twists artists’ knickers by rolling in the dollars with work that repeatedly echoes, to put it kindly, the art of lesser-known artists. A recent article in The Guardian outlined the most recent claims of plagiarism against Hirst. Hirst refuses to comment, but many believe his silence is the meek meow of a copycat. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Copycat."

The Persistence of Memory: Christian Boltanski and Memory

In an exhibition currently at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, a crane reaches into a mountain of clothes and pulls out at random a selection of shirts, pants, etc., only to release them to flutter back to their brethren. “No Man’s Land,” Christian Boltanski’s latest art installation, moves to the soundtrack of a thousand human heartbeats. The uninhabited clothing recalls the Holocaust, and Boltanski’s invites that connection. Memory, both personal and cultural, pervades all his work. A new monograph on the artist examines Boltanski’s career and the persistence of memory in both playful and humorous as well as dark and disturbing ways. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Persistence of Memory."

[Many thanks to Rizzoli USA for providing me with a review copy of Christian Boltanski.]

Oh, Behave

Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character spoofs the days of “Swinging London,” when outrageous behavior was the norm, but his outrageousness isn’t far from the real deal. In the middle of that swinging time was one of the most intriguing and fun artists of the twentieth century—Peter Blake. Born June 25, 1935, Blake was born just in time to soak up the teen-targeted popular culture of post-World War II Britain. Combining such “low brow” pop with “high brow” fine art technique and history, Blake created such works as Got a Girl (above, from 1960-1961). The faces of teen idols such as Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson appear in a band across the top above a series of red, white, and blue chevrons that recall the work of Blake’s American contemporary Kenneth Noland. Just as America imported to England young hunks through movies and music, it imported the latest trends in abstract art, such as Noland’s pieces. Blake binds the two imports together and creates a pastiche of cultures clashing. By putting Elvis et al. at the top and Noland on the bottom, Blake flips the idea of “high” versus “low” on its head. Blake would take this pastiche style to its greatest extreme in his design for for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which mixes history, literature, art, and music together in a dazzling, ground-breaking display.

In addition to celebrating stars who “got the girl” in Got the Girl, Blake “got” his own girl in Tuesday (above, from 1961). Two photos of the actress and early 1960s teen sex symbol Tuesday Weld appear above the simple banner of “TUESDAY.” Blake plays off of the instant, one-name name recognition of pop culture and modern media in broadcasting the actress’ first name. Tuesday in many ways is the companion piece to the male stars of Got a Girl. To Blake’s male perspective, the young male stars blend together in their similar hairstyles and chiseled features. In contrast, Tuesday Weld strikes the male viewer as unique and special. If Blake had been a woman, the two compositions might have been reversed. Blake again places a Noland-esque abstract arrangement of color beneath the pop culture reference, but I wonder if Blake also alludes here to the celebrity-celebrating boxes of Joseph Cornell. Cornell, also a omnivorous consumer of all strata of culture, created semi-shrines to Lauren Bacall and other starlets of the 1940s. The boxlike arrangement of Blake’s Tuesday leads me to believe that he’s having a little fun in “borrowing” Cornell’s style while modifying it to his own taste and time.

Blake has become a revered figure in British art, but that doesn’t mean that the old lion’s been tamed. In The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney (above, from 1981-1983), Blake plays off of Gustave Courbet’s 1854 The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Blake recasts artist David Hockney as Courbet and himself and Howard Hodgkin as the fawning patrons. Blake and Hodgkin seem out of place in their heavy clothes, but Hockney, the transplanted British artist in his new California habitat, wears informal, seasonal clothing. Behind the artists, Blake places all the stereotypical accessories of California living—palm trees, garish advertising, and beautiful blondes on roller skates. Blake is one of my favorite artists of the twentieth century for his incorrigible yen for mixing up the history of art with the pop culture of the time with equal respect for both worlds yet a sense of overall irreverence. You have to respect a man who grew up never growing up.

Utopia in a Box

How fitting that Joseph Cornell, maker of his magic boxes, was born on Christmas Eve 1903, the day before the opening of boxes around the world. Cornell lived with his mother and disabled brother for most of his life on a street in Flushing, New York called Utopia Parkway. As an artist, Cornell brought together the tiny fragments of ordinary life and assembled them into a tiny utopia he neatly packaged into a box. Many critics like to lump Cornell in with the Surrealists, but I’ve always seen him more as a hyper-realist who distills the world around him into its essential essence. Cornell was the ultimate pack rat, collecting not only little bits and pieces to place into his artwork but also mentally collecting new obsessions that ranged across the whole gamut of culture, both high and low. Cornell’s Untitled (Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall) (above, from 1945) came out of the artist’s obsession with the actress. I’m sure Cornell wished he could find the sultry starlet under his tree on Christmas morning, but his almost crippling shyness relegated him to living out his dreams through his box. In his Penny Arcade, Cornell could enshrine Bacall and make her his forever.

Cornell taught himself how to build his boxes. Art and art history were just two of the many subjects he taught himself from scratch, obsessing and possessing them before locking them away in his boxes. Untitled (Medici Princess) (above, from 1948) shows Cornell facing the art of the past and the ideal of beauty of the past. Cornell’s centuries-old Medici Princess serves as a neat contrast to Bacall’s contemporary femme fatale. I love Cornell’s boxes for just how transparently they show the workings of the artist’s mind. You can sit and look at them individually and follow how they “work” internally. Just when you think you understand one, you see another box, perhaps related to another subject entirely, and recognize how Cornell’s mind leapt from place to place. Cornell’s obsessiveness can become almost obsessively compelling by itself.

Cornell remains a confusing figure for the general art public, many of whom don’t see the big fuss of these little boxes of “junk.” Because of his withdrawn nature, Cornell never promoted his own work. At his death, even Cornell’s family had no clue as to his stature in the art world and almost destroyed his body of work if not for the intervention of a fan. When Cornell screened his 1936 collage film Rose Hobart, Salvador Dalí, king of self-promotion, railed against Cornell for “stealing” his idea, thus ending Cornell’s film experiments and driving the film itself underground for decades. To appreciate Cornell, you must follow him and be prepared to go anywhere, including the stars. Cornell’s late-career love of astronomy led him to create works such as Cassiopeia 1 (above, from 1960) in which he attempts to stuff the very universe into his tiny boxes. A great deal of art teaches us to reach for the stars, but Joseph Cornell’s art brings them down to earth and hands them to us like a present.

Born Again

When Max Ernst joined the German army to serve in World War I he felt like his life had ended, writing later that "Max Ernst died the 1st of August, 1914." Born April 2, 1891, Ernst’s rebirth as an artist took place in the wake of the Great War as the madness of a generation’s self-destruction called for the Dadaism and Surrealism that flourished where reason failed. In Pietà or Revolution by Night (above, from 1923), Ernst addresses his father issues by mimicking the familiar image of the pieta, replacing the Virgin Mary with his cold, distant father and Christ with himself as cold, hard marble. A figure resembling Sigmund Freud lurks in the background just to clear up any doubts that a psychodrama’s playing out here.


Ernst learned from every artist he encountered in his travels, from Paul Klee to Giorgio de Chirico. The Elephant Celebes (above, from 1921) pays homage to de Chirico in creating a monstrous machine-elephant set to rumble down the ominous streets of an unpopulated de Chirico town. The Elephant Celebes also confounds nature and technology in a way that anyone intimately familiar with the mechanized murder of World War I would still have nightmares about. Ernst’s Elephant could easily share a surrealist zoo habitat with the bizarre creations of Salvador Dali.

When fascism began to spread across Europe in the run-up to World War II, Ernst responded with Une Semaine de Bonté (one image from which appears above, from 1934), a series of collages made from cutting apart Victorian Era magazines and books and building bizarre images set in deceivingly tranquil, homey situations. Joseph Cornell saw these images and borrowed the technique and the spirit of Ernst for many of his own “boxes.” Ernst himself never found a truly stable home. He left his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington, behind when he fled France after the German occupation of World War II. Once in America, he wed art patron Peggy Guggenheim, only to divorce her and marry fellow surrealist Dorothea Tanning in a double ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browner—perhaps the only double wedding in art history. Ernst’s work puzzles me, but in a good way. The instability of his life and his artistic vision match the instability of the world crumbling around him. In his second life, the surreal had truly become the real.

Masqued Avenger

KAREN KILIMNIK, The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, 1989/2007; Mixed media installation, variable dimensions; Installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art; Photo by Aaron Igler

“I meant it so you would feel like you just had walked into one of the episodes,” Karen Kilimnik says of her mixed-media installation The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers (above), “so I do mean it to be like you’re in a movie or something.” Face to face with Patrick Macnee as the steely John Steed and Diana Rigg as the lively Emma Peel from the old espionage television series, The Avengers, you enter not only the make believe world of spying and disguising, but also the pop culture-strewn, identity-questioning world of the art of Karen Kilimnik, who brings together her passion for classic art and her passion for modern celebrity ala Andy Warhol, whose autograph Kilimnik owns as a telling sign of her own insatiable fandom. In the exhibition catalogue to the show previously at the Institute of Contemporary Art, The University of Pennsylvania and now at The Aspen Art Museum, Ingrid Schaffner and others examine the many masks and masquerades of this unique, post-Warholian artist.

KAREN KILIMNIK, Me—I Forgot the Wire Cutters Getting the Wire Cutters from the Car to Break into Stonehenge,1982, 1998; water soluble oil color on canvas, 16 x 20 inches; Courtesy Nina and Frank Moore

“Sidestepping all of the anticipated postmodern positions,” Schaffner writes in her introductory essay, “Lives Naturally in World of Theatre + Illusion,” “Kilimnik’s art is disarmingly subjective—immersive, imaginative, opinionated, possessive. It simultaneously mediates and expresses those desires and emotions, which appear like the imagery itself, to be left critically unresolved, full of mystery and aspiration.” Kilimnik open-heartedly allows herself the pleasure of being a fan, the standard affliction of modern consumers of pop culture, and refuses to place judgment on the subject matter’s value or on herself for loving it so. “Kilimnik is taking the stand that Warhol so famously offered: the possibility of taking no stand at all,” Schaffner concludes. Like Cindy Sherman in her photographic series mimicking the conventions of old movie stills, Kilimnik tries on different personas in her self-portraits, posing as Elizabeth Taylor at one moment and as a vandal breaking into Stonehenge in another (above). Using what Scott Rothkopf calls Kilimnik’s “pitch-perfect ear for the telling cultural signifier,” the artist continually plucks from the stream of commercial consciousness the prize of the one concise image or combination of images that resonates with the viewer.

KAREN KILIMNIK, Should I, Like the Heroine of the Ballet, Defy the Command and Make a Dangerous--and Possibly Fatal--Bid for Freedom?, 1998; crayon and pastel on paper, 34” x 26”; Collection of Gregory R. Miller, New York ; Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York

Like Joseph Cornell, Kilimnik’s acquisitive, inquisitive imagination lands upon the world of ballet in images such as Should I, Like the Heroine of the Ballet, Defy the Command and Make a Dangerous—and Possibly Fatal—Bid for Freedom? (above), which drops the visage of actor Leonardo DiCaprio into a tableu of an unnamed ballet. Kilimnik surrounds the images with a narrative of the ballet, showing the verbal facility that leads Rothkopf to call her “wordly wise.” The unwieldliness of many of Kilimnik’s titles weights down her often bare-bones drawings and paintings with added narrative heft, such as the Stonehenge self-portrait above and this ballet scene. The ballet in Kilimnik’s hands becomes a masque in the sixteenth-century sense, with individual dancers’ identities superfluous to the work at hand. “Borrowing” DiCaprio for the role of a prince or even interchanging the actual dancer’s identity for the role they play, Kilimnik stirs up a fluid sense of individual identity that gives full reign to the play of the theatrical in her works. In addition to watching balletic performances, Kilimnik herself has been taking ballet classes since 1999 to learn the steps and positions firsthand, something that you could never imagine Cornell or that ultimate devotee of the dance, Edgar Degas, ever doing. Kilimnik continually places herself within the action her art examines.

In the midst of Kilimnik’s love affair with such pop culture effluvia as the tragic events behind The Boomtown Rats’ song “I Don’t Like Mondays,” her 6-hour film obsessively rerunning the crueler exchanges of the movie Heathers, and the humorous appearance of The Pink Panther in so many works, it’s easy to forget the serious student of art behind the fangirl/woman. Kilimnik’s Master Hare, 6:45 p.m. belongs to a series of retellings of Sir Joshua Reynolds' famous portrait. By revisiting that image and placing the specificity of “6:45 p.m.”, Kilimnik, in Schaffner’s view, “turn[s] a romantic sense of the past into an operative present.” Or, as Dominic Molon in his essay, “Karen Kilimnik’s History Lesson,” puts it, Kilimnik’s homages to the art of the past, as well as her pop culture studies, “demonstrate how our obsession with history as mediated by movies, television, and, of course, works of art, gives the past its unshakable presentness.” Just as when she makes over Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette in one painting, Kilimnik continually makes over the art of the past, even the recent past, into something startlingly, continually present and relevant.

Schaffner sees this constant presentness as the “intrigue of Karen Kilimnik’s romantic imagination,” in which “the world we live in is also shown to be the one we desire.” Rather than flee from the visual stimulation all around her, Kilimnik embraces it, bringing her imaginative power to bear in transforming it into something transcendent. Kilimnik’s art is “not so much an escape from reality but a way of knowing it,” Schaffner believes. Whereas artists of the far distant past turned to mythology, the Bible, and literature to speak the shared language of the time, Kilimnik turns to pop culture to speak the modern idiom of the most visual generation ever to walk the Earth. Neil Postman once warned in the title of his study of popular entertainment that we were Amusing Ourselves to Death. Karen Kilimnik, instead, shows us how to amuse ourselves to life.


[Many thanks to the Institute of Contemporary Art, The University of Pennsylvania for the review copy of the exhibition catalogue Karen Kilimnik and for the images from the exhibition.]