“Radical Scavenger(s): The Conceptual Vernacular in Recent American Art” is a dry, pretentious, bumbling-and immensely important-exhibition.
It is the most ambitious exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in a long time and the first conceived and mounted by Richard Francis since he arrived from the Tate Gallery in London to become the museum’s chief curator.
It formally begins, then, a new phase in the 27-year history of the MCA and suggests what an audience might expect from the museum regarding the direction, approach and thoroughness of its future exhibitions.
This is significant because for nine years museum officials have talked of the future as if it were solely a matter of the building now under construction on East Chicago Avenue. What kinds of exhibitions might justify a new $55 million museum has-until now-seemed almost beside the point.
In the catalog for the present show, MCA director Kevin Consey at last makes the connection: “This exhibition is one of many that the MCA is planning which describe contemporary practice through the agency of ideas,” he writes, “and we think of our new home-the MCA’s new building, to be completed in 1996-as a repository of ideas expressed through the best new art.”
Consey implies that “Radical Scavenger(s)” presents some of “the best new art” and its presentation makes clear the ideas. However, part of this does not accurately apply to contemporary art museums.
Most such museums are less judges of the art they show than reporters who suspend judgment in the interest of showing work that is the most up to date. Opinions about “the best new art” are at these places purely academic because they mean so little, having none of the disinterestedness or perspective afforded by time.
It is the works selected for the permanent collection of a contemporary art museum that show more judgment, particularly if they are purchases. But in cases where a museum is, like the MCA, largely without purchase funds and dependent on donations, criteria will be more relaxed and “the best new art” will be thought of more as “the best new art that collectors offer.”
As a temporary exhibition, “Radical Scavenger(s)” reports on the concerns of contemporary artists Dan Graham, Mike Kelley, Louise Lawler, Cady Noland, Hirsch Perlman, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams. Whether anyone inside or outside the museum thinks the artists’ work is “the best” is irrelevant. Francis has fulfilled one part of the MCA’s role simply by showing art with up-to-date ideas. That four of the eight artists have never before exhibited in Chicago is a nice bonus.
The work will occupy nearly all the exhibition space of the museum for 10 weeks, which indicates a healthy commitment. In recent years, the MCA’s contemporary shows have been smaller than its historical surveys. “Radical Scavenger(s)” brings a change, one more happily in line with the original mission of the museum.
The premise and content of the exhibition are, however, less happy and expressed in ways that do not fulfill basic educational responsibilities of a museum.
Part of the problem is evident from the start, from the show’s title, which alters the name of a painting by Ruscha-“Radical Scavenger”-and appends a capsule description of what Francis perceives the artists to be about: “the conceptual vernacular.”
Now, the vernacular is a language native to a region or a country. It is natural speech as opposed to anything literary, cultured or foreign. Everybody in a particular place speaks it. So the vernacular is common because it is both familiar and shared.
Concepts are things of the mind: thoughts, ideas, notions. They are not tangible. They remain theoretical and abstract. So “conceptual” relates to mental operations rather than to objects or products out in the world.
The “conceptual vernacular” refers, then, to cerebral work dealing with anything in the common language of a place, period or group. The exhibition would be easier to comprehend if we could agree on the meaning of these terms from the beginning.
But in his foreword Consey writes of “our confusing titling.” And confusion results because Francis says he has posited “not a simple definition of `vernacular’ as the everyday thing you find on the street, but a definition more complicated and personal.”
We need not go into this further because to do so would be to realize the words under discussion have lost their accepted meaning. Which is what Francis and, presumably, his artists want to happen. They want us to think ordinary words have had their meanings eroded, and thoughts of postmodern artists are so far beyond those of forebears that, in any case, no ordinary words could help us understand them.
Some may recognize here the attitude of various linguistic and philosophical theorists of the 1980s. In his catalog essay, Francis names Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. They will do, though the chief provider of postmodern jargon to artists in the United States is another Frenchman, Jean Baudrillard, whose
cant had no influence on artists in his own country and is now old hat to them.
How much actual influence any of these writers had on the artists on view remains cloudy. If Francis and his two other essayists know, they do not tell us, for statements that bear a direct relationship to anything in the verifiable world are but a small part of their writing. To them, works of art scarcely have life as objects; they exist primarily as dematerializations that are so complex they cannot be expressed in written prose with lucidity.
The problem is, most works with a conceptual orientation being created today do not have their intent conveyed by the objects either. Williams’ photographs of a dam in the Alps do not clearly tell you they were taken in homage to Jean-Luc Godard, on the site of his first industrial film. And a manikin by Ray does not directly proclaim its relationships of scale, childhood, personality and self-portraiture.
Such pieces are deliberately vague, open-ended regarding meaning; somebody has to read it into them. However, these days, curators or essayists are not quite “with it” if they are more specific than the artists, who usually take clarification as an effort to narrow, restrict or confine works otherwise limitless in their possible meanings.
But a contemporary museum has to clarify the works it shows. There is no other reason for showing them. Leave the vagueness to artists and dealers. A contemporary museum reports ideas of the day not to please trustees who own the pieces or to send others out to buy them but to educate an audience that up until then had difficulty in arriving at understanding.
“Radical Scavenger(s)” does not educate. Even its basic premise remains unclear because the notion of a “personal vernacular” proposes shifts in emphasis from artist to artist that require more, rather than less, explication. And the catalog essays play with language in ways that will gratify about 2,000 people worldwide, saying to everybody else-as they do in type across the bottom of three pages-“I can tell you. . . Anything … I want.”
It does not help to be told that “the works here all (were) made in the last ten years” when the first pieces you see upon entering date from the 1960s. Nor is it reassuring to find a full two-page color reproduction of a work by Ray that never made it into the exhibition or to discover the sole “analysis” of his art has been based on several more pieces that aren’t there, either.
Was that by carelessness or intent? Could not the essayists have rewritten the passages and the photograph be removed? Or doesn’t it matter? Why should it matter when a catalog can tell you anything it wants and it wants to tell you accuracy is something small, didactic?
The exhibition does not serve the artists by presenting the most pieces by Ruscha, whose paintings and drawings with text long have been known in Chicago, and the least by Noland and Ray, whose installations and self-referential pieces here make their local debuts. Nor does the omission of such basic data as birthdates really strengthen the show by suggesting age is unimportant when artists have a similar, idea-based approach.
As the reproductions on these pages indicate, the artists end at very different places no matter how many ideas they hold in common. Kelley’s crafts have little to do with Graham’s architecture, Perlman’s interrogations or (of the artists not pictured) Lawler’s art about art. Francis is attracted to their intentions. We see their results. And the one is seldom embodied in the other.
That difference plus an emphasis on theory instead of clear, honest prose suggests the MCA’s exhibitions may be headed for trouble.
