How to Enjoy the Frye
by AMANDA MANITACH September 4, 2012
TO START WITH, HAVE A GLASS OF WINE IN THE MUSEUM CAFE.
Or have two glasses. The Frye’s star artwork is called Sin and you’re going to spend some time with it, so if you’re not indulging in something that smacks just a little bit of indiscretion, you’re missing part of the fun.
The Frye’s permanent collection is based on German Symbolist and Secessionist era paintings. This was the era of rampant absinthe consumption, opium eaters and ether drinkers. If you don’t want to be drunk on wine, at least be drunk on poetry. Indulge in some Symbolist folly from Maeterlinck to lubricate the experience:
Look about you in the moonlight!
(Nothing’s in its proper place!)
Like a madwoman dragged before judges,
A warship in full sail on a canal,
Night-birds amidst lilies,
Bells tolling at noon,
(Beneath these panes of glass!)
The sick halted in a prairie,
The smell of ether on a sunny day….
Ok, now that we have the scent of sunshine and ether fixed in the imagination of our nostrils, let’s take a stroll around the galleries.
THE REMODEL
The paint is fresh in here. It’s not so fresh it dampens the imaginary ether and sunshine in our nostrils, but it’s bright and more airy in the galleries than it used to be. For the exhibit Ties That Bind: American Artists in Europe, a few of the gallery walls have been painted a pale lemon cream yellow. I’m not sure this agrees with me. I’m reminded of the maddening yellowness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, as well as Goethe’s analysis of the color: “By a slight and scarcely perceptible change, the beautiful impression of fire and gold is transformed into one not undeserving the epithet foul; and the color of honor and joy reversed to that of ignominy and aversion.” I’m trying to figure out if it’s sunshine or sulfur and if it does any of the paintings justice.
The Perfection of Good-Nature and Ties That Bind are exhibits filled with Frye classics. Gabriel von Max’s erotic crucifix The Christian Martyr is always a guilty pleasure. Mihàly de Munkácsy’s The Condemned stews in the shadows like a tragic degenerate out of a Zola novel. There’s one really nice Bouguereau. There are plenty of sun-spattered landscapes with trembling jewel-tone treetops and rainbow-doused meadows.
THE CURRENT EXHIBIT THAT ISN’T PART OF THE PERMANENT COLLECTION.
The full title of the exhibit is Liu Ding’s Store: Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart. Liu Ding is a Chinese conceptual artist. The exhibit consists of a bunch of painted canvases that riff on Franz von Stuck’s Sin.
The Frye often tries to shed new light on old works in its permanent collection, particularly with Sin. Sometimes it works very nicely, sometimes it’s less inspiring. I recall, years ago (2007), seeing Victoria Haven’s “altar” addition to Sin. I was excited to see how a contemporary Seattle artist had worked directly with the painting, to create a literal altar for it. Haven pinned a shiny, gold, cut-out mylar sculpture to the wall around the painting. It radiated from the frame like a cobwebby halo. I was, frankly, disappointed. It seemed so frail and cheap looking.
Maybe Haven wanted something terribly airy as a counterpoint to the self-indulgent heft of the gilt frame. But Sin is a beacon of bad, Decadent taste. We are enthralled by Sin because the painting’s subject is unapologetically caressing that huge phallus snake and her breasts are so buoyant and green. At the time I was hoping its gross excess would have been met by even grosser excess. This was a chance to heap it on.
This is, in a way, what Liu Ding’s exhibit does: heaps of decadent excess. But of course in a cooler, conceptual way. There are two fragmented paintings that have been reproduced (identically, over and over, as though made in a factory): a painting of Sin’s hyper-ornate frame and a painting of just the snake’s body, with the rest of the image left blank. They’re ugly and funny. Some of the canvases are hung facing the wall so you can only see the artist’s signature painted on the back.
Our consideration is being directed to the commercial/market/gift shop aspect of the art industry. As such, the installation is a bit of a snooze fest. And visually it’s a one-liner. Certainly no one needs to be convinced of the decadence of the contemporary art market. But decadence is the resounding howl in Liu Ding’s mass-produced canvases, connecting the economic decadence of the contemporary art world (the factory-made art of Koons, for example) to 19th century Decadence, which fills the Frye.
DECADENCE AND LATTER-DAY DREAMING
It raises the question of whether we ever emerged from the haze of 19th century decadence. Arguably, from the 19th century onward, we still wander in its perpetual twilight. We build melancholy narratives on the broken backs of governments and the whispers of once-mighty empires. Like world-weary children, we entertain fantasies of solidarity and progress while constructing dioramas out of chintzy baubles. We dream of the Parthenon while building modular ghost cities in China. The distance between our collective dreams and reality comprises such a yawning gulf that it must be filled, insincerely and at breakneck speed, with endless excess.
And what better place to source this excess than a factory in China?
This is how the Frye shines: it makes you consider the present in terms of history, and vice versa. Liu Ding makes it clear how conceptual and Decadent art are both descended from the same philosophical crisis: jettisoning assumptions about the spiritual, embracing contingency, wittily delighting in the frothy insubstantiality of postmodernism (post-whatever). One art movement happens to be romantically Satanic, the other cool and calculated. Liu Ding’s exhibit isn’t going to change your mind, and it might not even entertain you. It doesn’t really try to do either. Rather, it indulges in redundancy, it indulges in the self-indulgence of the art industry. It’s punning and folding in on itself, an ouroboros. It’s an example of the chilling erotics of contemporary art: both material and message devouring its own tail. Art, as an object of contemplation, loves nothing more than to think about itself.
This can be infuriating or pleasurable depending on your mood. I suggest you indulge it, however, since indulgence is what we’re doing. Go get lost in another glass of wine. Bask in the perfection of John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Frederick William Roller. Her skin is luminous and alive with gold and ruby undertones, as only Sargent can paint skin. Charles Sprague Pearce’s Sainte Genevieve is haloed and euphoric. (Is she intoxicated with hunger? She was a vegetarian and purportedly only ate twice a week for more than thirty years as part of her mortifications.) Genevieve eventually saved Paris from Attila the Hun. In this painting she has rough hands and the sun-kissed skin of a farmer’s daughter.
After you leave the Frye, you walk a block down to Cherry and 9th and stop for a moment at Kafe Berlin, the facade of which is painted with wild blue and orange trim. You get a strudel. You wander over to St. James Cathedral and climb the front steps of the church and study the relief ornamentation on the doors, which are so solid and heavy they drag you out of the ether, back down to the earth.
Liu Ding’s Store: Take Home and Make Real the Priceless in Your Heart is on view at Frye Art Museum through September 9, 2012. Ties That Bind: American Artists in Europe and The Perfection of Good-Nature: Frye Founding Collection is up through September 23.