Rebecca Nemser

FRIDA KAHLO’s Self-Por­trait with Thorn Neck­lace and Hum­ming­bird shows her in a jun­gle with but­ter­flies in her hair and a hum­ming­bird dan­gling from a thorn neck­lace that pierces her neck, draw­ing small red drops of blood. “I nev­er paint­ed dreams,” she said. “I paint­ed my own reality.”

“All these images are oblit­er­at­ed, defaced, lost. It’s about those mar­gin­al, mun­dane expe­ri­ences that are for some rea­son sig­nif­i­cant to her. There are cer­tain things about her work that are mys­te­ri­ous. They remain mys­te­ri­ous. And she trea­sures that mysteriousness.”

ROBERT WILSON’S VISION is struc­tured like a jour­ney — a jour­ney that moves from morn­ing to night — from white to black — from the past to the future — from birth to death. A jour­ney that has no begin­ning and no end, but all takes place in a time­less, end­less present.

When you look up, all those frag­ments con­vey a ver­tig­i­nous sense of dis­in­te­gra­tion, and decay. But when you look down, every­thing is com­pressed onto a sin­gle shiny sur­face, and it’s beau­ti­ful. All that debris — all that waste and pain — is trans­formed into art.

The prayers were long, thin strips of paper or can­vas, newsprint, pho­tographs, or tin­sel, embell­ished with draw­ings, paint, cut‑outs, dried ros­es, gold leaf, but­tons, beads. Some were abstract; some had words; oth­ers had musi­cal nota­tions writ­ten on them. One prayer was made from a piece of old, paint‑splattered blue jeans, with a peace sym­bol and love beads. 

Being inside MATT MUL­LI­CAN’s instal­la­tion is like being inside Matt Mul­li­can’s mind — a dizzy­ing expe­ri­ence. He’s con­stant­ly clas­si­fy­ing and re-order­ing every­thing. “It’s the first time I’ve arranged my mean­ing as objects in space depict­ing my mean­ing,” he says. 

SOPHIE CALLE bor­rows ele­ments from detec­tive nov­els, philo­soph­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions, the film noir, the nou­veau roman, doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy, love let­ters, art movies, B‑movies, John Cage’s the­o­ries of ran­dom­ness, and Joseph Beuys’s actions. She com­bines them in star­tling ways, as med­i­ta­tions on the mys­te­ri­ous spaces between self and other.

The can­vas curled back like a white wave. The light turned red. Sil­hou­ettes of dancers moved through the white space like brush­strokes mov­ing across a pic­ture plane. The light turned white. The ceil­ing rip­pled and bil­lowed. Silence. White light. I was tak­ing notes, and the only sound I could hear was the sound of my own writ­ing. It was over.

Every view­er who choos­es to par­tic­i­pate will have a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. For me, it was a mov­ing med­i­ta­tion on loss, change, and get­ting a sec­ond chance. As one of the char­ac­ters in William Faulkn­er’s nov­el The Wild Palms says, “Between grief and noth­ing, I will take grief.”

Stand­ing at the cen­ter of the spi­ral, I see the backs of all the chairs fac­ing away from me, and feel a tremen­dous shock of lone­li­ness and loss. Look­ing down from the bal­cony, I see that the chairs are the begin­ning of a spi­ral that could go on forever.

The Sit­u­a­tion­ists called for an art of excess, delir­i­um, out­rage, and social change. They believed that cap­i­tal­ism had turned con­tem­po­rary life into a soci­ety of “spec­ta­cle” that its inhab­i­tants could only pas­sive­ly watch and con­sume. Sit­u­a­tion­ism would bring art out of the muse­ums and into the streets, and sab­o­tage the soci­ety of spec­ta­cle by cre­at­ing sit­u­a­tions in which peo­ple could turn their own lives into a cre­ative experience.

RITSUKO TAHO’s ever-chang­ing instal­la­tion is a spare but ele­gant invi­ta­tion to par­tic­i­pate in a work of art, both lit­er­al­ly and metaphor­i­cal­ly – by bring­ing more leaves, and by mak­ing a leap of imag­i­na­tion that trans­forms a heap of trash on a vacant lot into a poem in sil­ver and brown.

Sculp­tor JOHN UDVARDY sees the aes­thet­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties in an old whit­tled pad­dle or a forked birch branch, and he knows how to make a curve from a green sapling. But most of all, he brings to his mate­ri­als a feel­ing that every mark mat­ters: every stick, every thread, every shell, every bone.

As a very young man, OTTO PIENE saw the sky reflect­ed in a sea at long last calm: “The feel­ing of being reborn has nev­er left me.” Out of this rebirth came “a love for the sky, the desire to point at it, to show how beau­ti­ful it is, how it makes us live and feel alive.”

Artists and sci­en­tists. work­ing in neon, laser, steam, smoke, video, pyrotech­nics, film, inflat­ed and fly­ing sculp­ture, and oth­er celes­tial nav­i­ga­tions, cel­e­brate the sky as a medi­um of expres­sion, trans­mis­sion, and space.