Dear Artvehicle,
On 7 May in Knoxville it has already reached 90 degrees by noon and the
intense midday sun photographs a shadow city under street lamps and
sign posts. Looking down wide streets that shimmer in the heat and that
seem to elongate as I attempt to walk them I have the typical
European's induction into American space. I only manage to reach a
couple of galleries whose addresses I have jotted down but I end up in
Knoxville Museum of Art, an impressive modern museum that is bathed in
a diffused form of the light that is blinding on the street outside.
KMA is currently showing works by Tim Davis from his Permanent
Collection series, an exhibition that brings the effects of light to
the surface.
In this recent work the New York artist photographs paintings from the
permanent collections of major art museums. Into these 'reproductions'
of canonical works Davis introduces light as a mediating device which
refocuses our perspective: the intervention of glare and shadow on a
painting or the reflected image of museum surroundings upon glass. The
trick of light is Davis' motif in this series. In Self portrait 2003
which captures a haunting late Van Gogh self-portrait, reflections of
museum spotlights cruelly blank out the shaven-headed Van Gogh's eyes
and mouth. However in Basket of Fruit 2003, a dispersed spattering of
light reveals the weave of canvas and the textures of paint in a way
that conventional photographic reproductions avoid.
The idea that light is a paradoxical force that both illuminates and
blinds is introduced in the exhibition's texts as an analogy for the
museum: at once the home of knowledge and a machine of ideology that
obstructs access to the truth. This is a neat concept and this
exhibition of Davis' work seems slick at first glance (and perhaps flat
like the world in which a sleeping museum guard is grafted onto the
canvas of Joan Miró's Danseuse Espangoles). However once our eyes
become accustomed to the installation that appears like a replica
museum in the dimmed gallery, depths are revealed. Where the mouth of a
saint is erased by a white smear or a Christ is veiled by the
reflection of a curtain, light suddenly seems weighty and the work much
more ambiguous than anything we can reel off about critiquing art
institutions. Davis who describes himself as a 'New Luminist' seems to
aim at something more elusive as he reveals the contradictory
properties of light.
A conservative curatorial decision adds to the ambiguity of
Davis' work and suggests confusion on behalf of KMA. I almost missed it
but hung on the back of a temporary wall at the far end of the gallery
is his L'Origine du Monde 2004. This photograph is introduced by
warnings of 'adult content' and it shows Courbet's famous painting of a
woman's body that centres on the vagina rendered in realist technique.
Courbet's painting has had a controversial life, its previous and most
famous owner was psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan but it now hangs in the
Musée D'Orsay. It seems incredible that its image should invoke
censorship and parental advisory notices in a contemporary art
exhibition but I remember that this is the American South (I have spent
most of my time in a Knoxville where bumper stickers oppose the war in
Iraq and support Obama from president). I start to wonder whether
Courbet's painting is also hidden away in its permanent position in
Paris. Then I remember that we are not anyway talking about Courbet's
painting but Davis' photograph where a patch of light lands just above
the famous vagina. The catalogue essay describes Davis's photographs as
'simulacra' but KMA's decision blurs this distinction and conservative
values trump Baudrillard. I perversely enjoyed this unexpected anomaly,
it seemed to distort the intentions of the exhibition and the sense
that Davis' images have something clear to reveal.
SH
