The past is present in the art of today

By Joe Pinchot
Herald Staff Writer

PITTSBURGH May 07, 2008 05:48 pm

— If you walk into a cave, write something on walls in spray paint, the end of a charred stick or whatever, and leave, it’s considered vandalism.
If your mark is still visible 100 years later, it becomes history. If your mark sticks around for 1,000 years, it becomes art.
Over time, human perception of things can change, sometimes to the opposite of what was originally thought.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Cavemanman” — on display in Pittsburgh in Carnegie International, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s world survey of art — asks the viewer to ponder changes in human perception, general and personal.
Hirschhorn’s work is dazzlingly complex in construction, and bombards you with visual images and ideas.
The Swiss-born artist, who lives in Paris, built the thing to look like a real cave, complete with four rooms and “breakdown” — chunks of rock that have fallen off the ceiling — out of cardboard, wood and packing tape.
Videos of the famous Lascaux, France, cave paintings help the viewer to compare the work with what the viewer knows of human history.
Rooms are occupied by mannequins and cutouts of human form, all wrapped in aluminum foil and connected by foil wire to books on philosophy and ethics, and sticks of dynamite. Ideas are as explosive as gunpowder.
Two of the rooms feature waste baskets full of aluminum soft drink cans, which spill out onto the floor, bringing to mind the saying, “Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time,” an adage that has been blindingly ignored over the years.
One room is adorned with posters of rock groups, movies and soft porn pinups. This room is mindful of the bedroom of your average teenager, comparing him or her to the early humans who lived in the Lascaux caves and drew pictures of the animals and activities of their days on the walls.
Hirschhorn’s rumination on vandalism vs. art is not foreign to San Francisco artist Barry McGee. He depicts five men stacked on each other’s shoulders so the one on top can spray paint on an unspecified structure, and compares that to ancient civilizations — represented by wooden idols, including that of an American Indian — committing the same sort of defacement.
Matthew Monahan’s sculptures follow this embracing of history and its relevance in the modern world. His mixed media sculptures show faces and body parts — reminiscent of Egyptian or Easter Island sculptures — but alters them in terms of placement and dimension, and makes them look as if they are unfinished or have been violently attacked.
“I travel through all these time zones in the history of art,” Monahan, of Los Angeles, once said.
An image by the late Paul Thek of New York of the earth as seen from space painted on newspaper seems to ask if the history of art — and the history of humanity — will one day no longer be relevant.
Thinking of things on terms of the news, it’s old the next day, forgotten a week later, the paper it is printed on worth no more than cow bedding.
Are the human endeavors chronicled on the news pages inconsequential when compared to universal time? If the earth is one day hit by a giant asteroid and knocked off orbit, or global warming leads to mass extinction, then human activity — from the mundane to the artful — will become yesterday’s news.
Douglas Fogle, who curated “Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International,” said he chose the 40 artists who present works because they consider the human condition — a generic definition in that it has been given as the definition of all art.
But, as artists also create works that speak of the time in which they live, “Life on Mars” shows that, in the Western world of 2008, the human condition is vexed by expanding moral and ethical dilemmas — as it always has been — because of rapidly expanding technology, evolving threats to safety and increasing demands that becoming a productive (employable) member of society requires continual education for jobs that might not be there tomorrow.
The shows works come in all shapes, sizes, forms and materials. There is the deceptive simplicity of Susan Philipsz singing three overlapping renditions of an old murder ballad and Thomas Schütte’s watercolor paintings. There’s Mark Bradford’s installation on the roof that can only be seen from overhead and Mike Kelley’s installation of futuristic cityscapes based on the fictional city of Kandor from the Superman comic books, displayed with everyday objects and video projections.
“These artists present more questions than they have answers to, and I think the best contemporary art does that,” Fogle said. “I think you should be walking away with questions.”

“Life on Mars” runs through Jan. 11 in, around and on the Carnegie Museums complex in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section. Make sure you get a gallery guide and a map to find all the works. Info: 412-622-3131 and www.cmoa.org

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