The Hirshorn could be a showroom for the latter half of a traditional modern art class: Rothko, Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, Freud, Moore, Warhol, as well as a host of lesser knowns and current artists--all speaking to each other.
In the establishing documents for the museum, Hirshorn made provision for the periodic de-accessioning of art (selling off) so that the museum can remain a contemporary art museum. The Hirshorn is a 3-story, doughnut-shaped museum which sort of reminds me of a building from the Jetsons.
Around the outside and across the street are sculpture gardens. Would have loved to really study these, but it is too cold to be out for long, and the snow has covered all of the signs! There is also a cafe outside for the summer--looks like a fun place for coffee.
The main floor feels a bit like a waste of space to me. It is approx 90 degrees of the circle, and it has one large sculpture, windows looking outside at the entrance to the museum, the lobby desk and escalators. That's it. Below is a gift show, coat check, bathroom, and one contemporary art installation. Second floor has 15 video installations, and the top floor is their permanent collection.
I started on the top floor. On stepping off the elevator I was swooped up by a gallery guide. That was cool as one of the internships I applied for was to be a gallery guide. Gallery guides aren't docents, but rather hang out by the art and get visitors thinking and talking about the art they are looking at. Here is a sampling of the art that drew my attention:
Jan Dibbets Conceptual Art, "Tide", 1969 was really interesting. It was a series of 10 photographs from left to right. The art work drew my attention from across the room. The first picture just looks like a line on a patterned background. With each successive photo the artwork is less abstract as the line on a sandy beach going out to the ocean is slowly erased as the tide comes in. I love the strong vertical line juxtaposed to the horizontal lines of the tide.
It was hard to walk by Yinka Shonibare's sculpture, "The age of enlightenment -- Antoine Lavoisier" 2008, because of the tools on the desk and the colorful clothes. Yinka Shonibare's art deals with race and class issues around colonialism and post-colonialism. This particular sculpture is based on a painting of Antoine Lavoisier. The original painting points to the great age of enlightenment--with reason, mankind can solve all problems. The picture emphasizes western and white, but the sculpture's skin color is ambiguous. An interesting fact about the fabric. I didn't know that traditional Western/Central African fabric designs originated with the Dutch. The Dutch were trying to mass-produce Indonesian batik cloth to flood the Indonesian market, but their initial attempts produced cloth with flaws--no two bolts alike. The Indonesian market rejected it so the Dutch took it to West Africa. West Africans loved it for the design flaws, and their tastes started to change the designs. Here's an article from Slate about it: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2012/03/african_fabric_where_do_tribal_prints_really_come_from_.html
The headlessness of the person, the wheelchair and the giant cage pattern on the front of the shirt seem to point to the fact that there are limits to our reason and consequences to our enlightenment.
Anselm Kiefer's "The Book", 1979-85 is a show stopper. The key to the painting is an unreadable book. Kiefer hasn't revealed what book "the Book" is based on, but Kiefer was born just after WWII in Germany. He noticed lots of devastation in the world around him--buildings, cities, land--and no one would talk about what had happened. Many think the book is "Mein Kampf". Before I knew anything about the painting I wondered if it could be the moment of creation. It looked like the separation of heaven and earth, when the earth is "formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters." It is rather a bleak, dark painting, but there are elements of hope in it.
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