The world of visual arts keeps track of itself more assiduously than almost any other field you can think of, through regular international exhibitions. Some, like the Venice Biennale, which celebrated its centennial this year, are venerable. And the field keeps growing: The most recent entry was last winter’s Africus ’95, the first biennial staged in Johannesburg and part of South Africa’s bid to take its place on the world stage.
The Carnegie International in Pittsburgh is among the oldest of the surveys. It dates from 1896, and since the newly opened International extends until February, it is being billed as a centennial show. It has been variously an annual, biennial and triennial event; the last one was in 1991. Its format, style and commitment to forward-thinking art have also varied. The show once had a decidedly conservative bias. Recently, though, it has become more adventurous.
The Carnegie International is the only regular international overview of contemporary art staged by a museum in North America, which accounts for the huge number of New Yorkers currently making the pilgrimage to Pittsburgh. The closest thing Manhattan has to the Carnegie show is the Whitney Biennial, which looks only at American art. The Whitney was a warm-up act of sorts for the organizer of this year’s Carnegie show, Richard Armstrong, an erstwhile Whitney curator who organized that museum’s biennials from 1985 to 1991.
Armstrong, who came to the Carnegie in 1992, has created an exhibition that is exquisitely installed in an ocean of space–46,000 square feet, as compared, say, with the 10,800 square feet of space in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Gund Gallery. Although the space is huge, the show delights rather than exhausts the viewer. In part that’s because Armstrong has wisely kept the number of participants relatively small: 36 artists, from 16 countries.
Fourteen are from the United States and most of the rest are Europeans. There’s a sprinkling of South Americans, one Israeli and one Japanese. A single curator couldn’t cover the earth in search of artists, of course. But in light of the new attention being paid to contemporary African art–London is full of exciting examples of it at the moment, thanks to a mega-festival called “Africa ’95”–it seems a shame that there’s nothing at all from that continent in the Pittsburgh show.
The Carnegie artists work in painting, sculpture, photography, film and video. The success of individual media varies wildly. The painting in the show is a keen disappointment, mostly more of the same by regulars on the international scene, figures like Georg Baselitz and Agnes Martin. Baselitz’s large-scale expressionism doesn’t come off nearly as well here as in his Guggenheim Museum retrospective earlier this year; Martin’s ethereal horizontal stripe paintings are eternally strong, but at this point they’re hardly the kind of revelation you hope for in a big international survey.
Where the Carnegie show excels is in the 3-D work, partly because of Armstrong’s superb installation. Sculptures don’t cower near the walls; they’re center stage, all over the place, causing you to take a serpentine path around them. It’s physically gratifying, for instance, to negotiate a field of 100 Rachel Whiteread works.
There are multiple entrances to the show; the most interesting is through the gallery completely taken up by Robert Therrien’s “Under the Table,” an 11-foot-tall wooden table with suitably proportioned chairs. The scale is disorienting, a la “Alice in Wonderland,” and viewers are also participants, lured underneath the huge table. On the other hand, you can’t see what, if anything, is on top of the table. The work is witty, but also ominous.
Meditations on furniture form a subplot of the show. Whiteread’s “Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)” continues the young British artist’s fascination with making the absent present. Here she gives tangible form to the spaces under chairs, casting them in resin of various colors.
Richard Artschwager offers a huge room full of faux furnishings–heavy plywood boxes that look like shipping crates or coffins, cabinets whose lack of hardware renders them nonfunctional. They’re sturdy in the extreme, as if meant to be jostled, held together with weighty metal screws. They look sealed for eternity.
So do Doris Salcedo’s works, pieces of battered furniture that are metaphors for battered people and a reflection of the violence in her native Colombia. Salcedo, who hasn’t yet shown a great deal in North America, starts with pieces of real furniture–armoires, beds, chairs–and then mutes them. Chairs are swamped in cement, which is slathered both on top of and under the seats. A bed is useless because an aggressive armoire has intersected with it. A chair frame is cemented into an armoire that is turned on its side and rammed against a chest whose drawers couldn’t open anyway because they’ve been cemented shut: Layers of futility pile up in this room of furniture arranged with seeming carelessness, as it would be in a warehouse, not a living room.
Robert Gober deals with spaces just outside walls or floors, places that are dangerous or mysterious. In “Untitled (Man in Drain)” Gober has installed a large, sidewalk type of drain in an otherwise empty room. You have to kneel down to see what’s down inside the confined space–a pale, nude torso of a naked man with hairy nipples and a small bathtub drain planted in his chest. It’s a horrifying image, a human who has become part of a sewer. But the starkness of the bare room is also strangely beautiful.
For the most part, Armstrong has installed the show so that each artist gets one suitably large room, and this simple strategy allows each to make the strongest possible case. One of the exceptions is Tony Oursler, whose video sculptures pop up in odd corners of the museum. They’d cancel one another out if they were all together; this way, their chill sneaks up on you repeatedly, unexpectedly. Oursler’s limp clothing or puppet-like bits of cloth are topped with pillowy heads on which faces are projected. The faces speak, delivering bleak monologues.
As surveys of contemporary art go, the Carnegie’s is excellent, even though the scene it reflects is not particularly exciting. There’s no new movement to unveil, nothing comparable to the birth of Abstract Expressionism or Pop to make this show startling. But the exhibition is large and lavish. More evidence of the Carnegie’s enviable affluence comes in the show’s substantial catalog, and in the $10,000 prizes the museum awards to artists judged the best in show. It’s fun to compare your own choices with those of the jury, who this year picked Artschwager and German painter Sigmar Polke.
THE FACTS
1995 Carnegie International
What: Survey of contemporary art worldwide
When: Through Feb. 18
Where: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Tickets: $5 adults, $3 students and children
Call: 412-622-3131
