You sometimes see it in the galleries of Blue Chip: shows that seem to reach something closer to a museum exhibition, in which conservation, contextualization of information and objects play an atypically important role for a commercial enterprise. It looks like David Zwirner and Hauser and Wirth have made some of the biggest gestures in this direction in recent years. In addition to exploring large workforce, it seems obvious that these efforts aim to add weight and legitimacy to the galleries and to the work they sell. By creating an intentional simulacrum of a museum, they finally say that we can also play this game.
This desire to get out of institutions while modeling their behavior was in mind when I entered Mother Nature in the Bardo. In view of High Line Nine, a place of event which is just below the High Line park in Chelsea, the exhibition was organized by Evanly Schindler, founder and former editor of Black book review. From Judd to Monet in Rauschenberg; From Kusama to Dali via works with a golden framework by members of the Hudson River school, including Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, the names we meet more often in the large artistic institutions cover the walls of this space. Next to them are contemporary artists such as Ebony Patterson, Nicholas Galanin and Serge Attukwei Clottey. But unlike a museum, everything is for sale.
Hyperalgic Readers know the fact that most museums are not, overall, benevolent institutions. A large class of work keeps them on the move, and many even manage to do an excellent job, but the dependence of museums with excess of wealth will simply lead to problems. In the end, the commercial and institutional art worlds are not all separated, with money, people and works of art that regularly move between the two.
However, it is still to be noted that a commercial enterprise as Mother Nature in the Bardo Works so hard to present itself with an institutional veneer, claiming that it “promotes a feeling of shared responsibility” while exploring “the impact between art, culture and the environment”. He also proclaims the wall texts and in the catalog his collaborative relationship with UNESCO (in fact, the agency Global education surveillance report is an “impact partner” and will receive 10% of the profits of any sale).
Perhaps the preface to the catalog of the conservative Klaus Biesenbach reveals a little too much of who this program thinks that it is aimed at when he tells the impact of Hurricane Sandy on his property in the Rockaways: “Saturday evening, there was an evacuation order, and even I had to go back to Manhattan.”
“… even me …”
Obviously, Biesenbach does not think that he is talking to the thousands of residents of the Rockaways who had no other place where to go, like one of my colleagues of the time, her husband, whose business was swept away in the storm, and her two children, who all stood in a building damaged by the storm for weeks after Sandy, without electricity, until they finally become refugees.
But even if this spectacle and its catalog (which, strangely, for a book by an old publisher, is filled with pixealized and blurred images) seem to be established as easy targets, they also hold a mirror with their excessive assertions the most impact of the climate to collapse. By taking the costume of a museum exhibition, this show reminds us that we must all be more critical of the affirmations on what any exhibition, anywhere, performs in the world and exactly how it has an impact.
Mother Nature in the Bardo Continue to High Line Nine (507 West 27th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) until April 30. The exhibition was organized by Evanly Schindler.
