Can an artist’s best work become a kind of prison? Dorothea Lange’s iconic 1936 image Migrant Mother has pidgeonholed her as a Depression era documentarian. An extensive exploration of her archive shows a far more diverse output. Lange sought ways to “convey intimacy … gestures … subjects resting or sleeping … her own world of small things. A surprisingly contemporary image-maker …”
Alexander studied architecture but wasn’t convinced. Art proved a better fit and, almost immediately, he began making coloured resin sculptures. These works were small and luminous, perfectly suited to “connecting light and space”. Pristine these works may have been, but Alexander saw little commonality with the austere minimalism then prevailing on the US East Coast. Minimalism, he said, is “a crock”.
Kent Monkman, a Cree Nation / Canadian citizen, has had two of his paintings hung in New York’s Met. Good, one might think – recognition of an artist and of the terrible treatment of indigenous peoples. Some think otherwise, worrying that mainstream artworld success compromises art advocacy of indigenous causes. Frets this writer, can indigenous art avoid being “overwhelmed by the historical context”?
For her first show in 1975 Rothenberg produced figurative works … of horses. It caused a sensation in abstraction–obsessed New York and launched her career. But why horses? They didn’t come from an art theory idea, just her intuition. A reviewer of Rothenberg’s just-finished show comments that her horses are like cave art, “fundamentally ambiguous”. Ascribing meaning is the viewer’s task and as Rothenberg noted, “they getcha or they don’t.”
Should museums sell (deaccession) artworks to fund operations? Some see this as a museum neglecting its duty of care toward its collection. Now an American museum body has dropped its long-standing opposition to the practice because many museums are in financial crisis. No-one seems ready to lay down arms on this debate; the writers pointedly suggesting that museum professionals “put down their cups of Kool-Aid”.