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.