Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Hernan Bas at the Brooklyn Museum

Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection, Brooklyn Museum, February 27 - May 24, 2009

I would very much like to take Hernan Bas's career review at the Brooklyn Museum on its own terms, but circumstances haven't made this especially easy. It looks for all the world like a museological equivalent of payola. Ken Johnson already noted as much:

It is partly because of Mr. Bas's relative immaturity that the question of the Rubells' part in the exhibition arises. As private collectors who have purchased his work in depth over the past 10 years, they have a significant stake in the elevation of his reputation. Having the show at a major museum in New York is a good deal for them.

The museum saves on some costs, as institutions often do when they present traveling exhibitions organized by others. And the Rubells have promised to donate a piece from the exhibition to the museum...

But the museum loses some of its intellectual and ethical credibility in letting the Rubells and their former in-house curator, Mark Coetzee, completely determine an exhibition devoted to an artist whose importance remains speculative.

But that's not all. The Rubell Family Collection published the exhibition catalogue, which features a bound ribbon bookmark, like any dutifully worshipful tome. Inside, Mark Coetzee interviews Bas for twenty-five pages, a little over a third of which is spent name-checking influential collectors and gallerists.

Mark Coetzee: In the beginning of an artists [sic] career the attention and support of collectors is very helpful, and many times essential. The Rubell family obviously has been engaged with your work as is evidenced by this exhibition. Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz and Charles Saatchi understood the importance of what you were doing early on. Other big supporters have been Debra and Dennis Scholl and George Lindemann. Would you like to elaborate on these and other collectors and what impact they had on your studio practice?

Hernan Bas: I don't know to what degree any collector has influenced my studio practice; regardless of friendships, that would seem potentially dangerous. Having said that, I have been rather fortunate to come about in a city that is very supportive and small-worldish when it comes to relationships with collectors. ...

It's a bit weird for me to talk about collectors in Miami because it's like talking about your friends and how cool they are.

For ten pages. Two other writers have been called in for intellectual heft. Dominic Molon does a rundown of the exhibition's themes and concludes:

Since Bas emerged on the scene in the late 1990s, his art has steadily maintained its development from earnestly demure celebrations of an alternative form of masculine identity—that is, one fraught with fragility and uncertainty—to more boldly resolute syntheses of historically dichotomous styles and sensibilities.

I've come to recognize this kind of infelicitous styling as the call that a certain species of art-world bird makes to signal the discovery of something important to the flock; the sound is more important than the content. Then Robert Hobbs pulls quotes from Henry Jenkins and Judith Butler and opens up a forty-page clunker of analysis with this:

Freed from old-fashioned ideas regarding the hegemony of the artist and the preeminence of the work of art, readers and viewers in recent decades have been open to choosing between meaning that they view as consistent with the artist's intentions and positing resistive readings that demarcate their own and others' points of view. Artists have also become increasingly sympathetic to these critical attitudes and the remarkable range of meanings viewers can inscribe in works of art. Consequently, they have partially relinquished the concept of aristocratic creator-based interpretations while embracing a new democratic openness regarding observers' roles in responding to the art, and even, figuratively speaking, remaking it. In doing so, they have helped to validate the idea that art is perpetually open to new perspectives, which have the ability to change substantially the ways it is regarded. Working with the paradigm shift, artists have reconstrued the process of creativity to make it far less dependent on inspired gems distilled from their mythologized colloquies with their muses, and more in line with critical readings of ongoing social practices.

Which is pretty much the opposite of what Bas is actually doing. One of the attractive features of Bas's work is the motif of fey boys set loose in the primordial woods, free to live out their romantic misadventures. The whole shebang is gems handed down from muses, notably the prime movers of late-19th Century decadent literature, especially Wilde and Huysmans. (I have a guess as to how Bas found out about Huysmans.) Bas has spent his working career constructing a mythological garden, part Eden and part Babylon, designed for the delectation of a cast of shirtless twinks. The only references to ongoing social practices appear in the form of imagery that has been pulled from contemporary fashion photography, and it is quite loving, not critical at all.

(And here I have to mention that the images supplied to me by the museum are contrasty and saturated, precisely the reverse of what the originals needed to translate to the screen. The dark areas in the paintings have nuances that have been cooked out of the jpegs.)

It's unfair to the work to review it against this backdrop of bald critical and professional maneuvering on Bas's behalf, but it's equally unfair to set it up to fail against expectations that it clearly doesn't meet. Bas is doing his job as a painter, and I mean that both as a sincere compliment and a limited one. Among the main players of what I've been calling Wan Figuration (and others have been calling Feeble Painting), Bas has shown the most improvement over time, making him the least wan and least feeble of a crowd that includes Kilimnik, Peyton, Owens, and Tuymans. Bas has much more feeling for paint than any of them, and can use color with far more verve. It's hard to tell how much the mawkish drawing style is deliberate homage to the illustrations for the Hardy Boys books and how much is plain inability to handle the figure, but it may not matter in the end, as the figures come off appropriately uncomfortable. One gets the sense that even in their languor, they remember that death and perdition lurk nearby.

Strongest evidence of that improvement is a twelve-foot triptych chock-full of cavorting figures. (This reproduction bears notice for its not looking like it was color-corrected in a discotheque.) An earlier attempt at large-scale painting, On the Jagged Shores from 2002, shows him struggling mightily to get the thing to coalesce. The Great Barrier Wreath, painted 2006, presents a strongly composed tribute to dandyism and homosocial creative effort. It recalls, if in ambition if not in size, Paul Cadmus's What I Believe.

I rank his recent video work at about the level of his earlier drawings: inchoate, anemic, maudlin, and too tentative to support color. Ocean's Symphony projects above an installation of objects that seems to have been pulled from a pirate's basement, and the whole thing is an ode to the Fiji Mermaid. There's something to it, and perhaps Bas eventually goes the way of Julian Schnabel, trading in lively, emotionally fraught paintings for film. But to find out we'll have to wait quite a bit more time, which not incidentally, might have better justified this exhibition. Caillebotte, himself a less than flawless painter, is on display upstairs with works made at about the same age as Bas. But in Caillebotte's case, we have a confirmed contribution to the history of Impressionism and a century of hindsight regarding his importance. Bas's generally increasing strengths indicate that his best work lies ahead of him, but by the time Caillebotte reached his mid-thirties (Bas isn't there yet), he gave up painting for floriculture and yachting. Who knows what the future will bring? The work in Bas's exhibition ends up getting upstaged by the question of who was in such a hurry to make this exhibition come to pass, and why.