Big Things at Hirshhorn

 

"Immersed in art" is not a figure of speech at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. It sums up the visitors' experience at the latest exhibition Big Things for Big Rooms. The straightforward title describes ten installations set in a succession of galleries on the third floor of the museum, a collection of diverse works spanning from the sixties until today, representing art movements from color field to land art and more. 

An explosion of colors at the entrance comes from a huge painting-sculpture, Light Depth (1969) from Sam Gilliam. A commission from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, it is a quintessential work of the artist's Drape paintings and a fitting start to the exhibition. Sam Gilliam born in Tupelo, Mississippi, spent his adult life in Washington where he became a prominent member of the District's arts community and was nicknamed the "Dean" in recognition of his influence. In contrast, Untitled (1969) from Robert Irwin is a sober piece made of shadows created by four white spotlights shining through a frosted clear disk, drawing organic shapes on the white wall. The flower-like pattern reaches a perfection found in nature with a dark band in the center like a pistil. The recently deceased artist (1928-2023) was part of the Light and Space movement prominent in California in the sixties and seventies. The following installation, Carrara Line (1985) from Richard Long could be a model for a land art piece set in the great outdoors: the narrow rocky white path running almost the whole length of the gallery invites the visitor for a walking meditation. The pure line of Carrara marble enhanced by the grey floor may lead to nowhere or to eternity. Minimalism and light art define the work from Dan Flavin (1933-1996) represented by "monument" for V. Tatlin (1967), one of the thirty-nine versions of the series started in 1964 ending in 1990, tribute to a beacon of the Constructivist movement Vladimir Tatlin. Set at floor level along the wall, the reductive neon sculpture splashes white light reflecting on the shiny ground. A blinding white, Théia 1, A (1979/2025) from Lygia Pape is a small piece representative of her Ttéia series. The ethereal corner piece made of tenuous gold threads seems to appear and disappear in a shifting interaction with the viewer walking by. A monumental spidery installation from the same series Ttéia 1, C (2003/2025) was recently on view at Bourse de Commerce/Pinault Collection for her first solo show in France, appropriately titled Weaving Space. Lygia Pape was a prominent member of the neo-concrete movement in Brazil. The natural light coming through a row of windows and the view of the neoclassical buildings across the Mall compete with Cloud (H2O) (2006), the installation from Spencer Finch suspended from the ceiling of the vast "Lerner Room". The ninety-five "water molecules" (white light bulbs arranged in a horizontal “Y” shape, with trios composed of two smaller bulbs and one large bulb connected by black metal rods as described in the brochure) are engineered to form a cloud-like construction easily mistaken for a decorative lightning. In contrast, Moon Dust (Apollo 17) (2009) brought dreams and poetry to the lobby of the Baltimore Museum of Art for several years. Installations can be overshadowed by their surroundings.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Following the intermission, part two of the exhibition starts with Round Rainbow (2005), a work from Olafur Eliasson set in a smaller dim gallery. Through a machinery (tripod, light, glass ring) easily disregarded, the magician of light creates fleeting shadows of orbs, spirals, volutes, resolving in rainbows, mirages on the walls, ways to reach a realm beyond time and space. The quiet visit is interrupted by loud sounds coming from a huge wooden shipping crate in the next gallery, its opening facing away. Inside, an absurdist video with a humorous twist features an endless loop of "chew, pass, wipe, pass back, receive, pack" between female protagonists in a satire about human physical labor and female exploitation in a capitalist economy. The commodity is human sweat and saliva, the final product, lemon-scented wipes. Boxes of "Tropical Breeze", their commercial name, are stacked high outside and inside the container, ready to be shipped. The installation Tropical Breeze (2004) from Mika Rottenberg is more than twenty years old and may not sustain the passage of time in a new age of robots. The refreshing site specific installation from Rashid Johnson is like a tropical island made of a metal skeleton filled with an exuberant greenery, homey props, and decorated with minimalist white light fixtures. The Changes (2025) offers a healing place, a refuge where the visitor can be vulnerable, a home. The conceptual piece can leave you indifferent or filled with empathy triggered by the live plants, the artist's goal. The last "big thing" is Third Light (2006) from a series The 7 Lights (2005-2007) about the seven-day creation narrated in the Bible. Paul Chan's installation combines sculptural elements, a rustic wooden table on sawhorses in the middle of the room, and animation with shadow silhouettes of objects and human figures floating on rectangular puddles of varied colored lights coming from a projector. The third day of the creation is about the apparition of life on earth. The fourteen-minute show leaves plenty of time to meditate on light or its absence, on enlightenment or lack of it. 

The ten works require more than the average thirty seconds usually allotted by visitors to view a piece of art. The selected diverse installations require a total physical and mental immersion to be fully taken in. Slow Art Day is April 11 this year. Here the only way to interiorize the art is a slow visit. At the end of the show, a small comfy room with deep armchairs is an invitation to browse through books and read quotes from each artist posted on the walls like Robert Irwin's "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees" or Dan Flavin's: "I am not interested in creating objects, but rather in creating experiences."   

                                                        

photographs by the author:

-Rashid Johnson "The Changes" (2025

-Mika Rottenberg "Tropical Breeze" (2004)

-Sam Gilliam "Light Depth" (1969)

Adam Pendleton at Hirshhorn

 

A visit at Hirshhorn for one more look at Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860-1960, a landmark exhibition closing in November, is the occasion to see Adam Pendleton's solo show in the circular gallery on the second floor. Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen assembles about forty of his most recent mixed media paintings and a nine-minute video. 

With little previous exposure to the artist's work, I welcomed the informative wall text introducing the show, followed by an alignment of large canvasses grouped by two or three, interrupted by signs with titles and dates for each one, in a conventional display. All the canvasses have a black background with variations brought by shapes of monochrome colors on top. The white, red, green, blue... compositions evoke abstract expressionism, geometric abstract and street art. They result from an elaborate process starting with drawings and paintings on paper photographed to create screen-prints applied on a black-gessoed canvas. The layering of shapes creates depth and story. The succession of  works along the slightly curved walls of the gallery becomes monotonous and ends with thirteen pieces of smaller size from the series Composition, courtesy of the artist. Using the same visual language of drips, sprays, splashes, peppered with Arial Bold letters or graffiti-like text, they are confined in thin black frames, cheapening their content. All the works are part of  five series: Black Dada, Untitled (Days), WE ARE NOT, Composition and Movement. At first confused by the name Black Dada, an ongoing series started in 2008, I acquired the voluminous book published at the occasion of the exhibition Blackness, White and Light at the MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) in Vienna, Austria in 2023 to shed some light about the work from the conceptual artist. In her essay, the curator Marianne Dobner describes the birth and maturation of the series: "When Pendleton began making Black Dada paintings, in 2008, they were based on excerpts from Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes (1974), a work that explored all 122 ways the framework of a cube can be incomplete. For each painting, Pendleton selected a single line from LeWitt's photographs to use as the composition's foundation. He then positioned the words "BLACK" and "DADA" over them in Arial Bold type before printing some of the letters onto the canvass in black, leaving viewers to extrapolate the missing ones. In the new Black Dada paintings, Pendleton's own painterly gestures have taken the place of LeWitt's geometric forms. Drips, sprays, and splatters from his studio, documented in photographs, provide the new visual index on which the paintings are composed. With inks including green, blue, yellow, gold, and silver, they also introduce a chromatic element not found in his other paintings." The description of the elaborate process left me with questions about the conceptual significance of the works. The journalist Hanno Hauenstein who interviewed Pendleton writes: "he explained the working hypothesis behind his art, Black Dada. In his view, this term encapsulates the relationship between blackness, abstraction and avant-garde art... It also encompasses theoretical outlooks that have shaped his practice, including those of philosopher Fred Moten, queer theorist Judith Butler, and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard." In Pendleton's own words: "It was initially a kind of conceptual position that I function from as an artist... As a concept, Black Dada is generative, even generous. It opens up the same freedom and flexibility for the viewer as it does for me as an artist." The name Black Dada comes from the 1964 poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" by Amiri Baraka. Pendleton states that the two words merge into two ideas: "Dada meaning 'yes, yes' and Black as an open-ended signifier."  

Overwhelmed by a  rapid succession of images and voices drowned out by loud sounds, subjected to epileptogenic strobe lights and flashes, I missed the video's message blurred by the artistic effects of superimposed geometric shapes. Even its title Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?) (2024-2025) left me wondering about its content. Again, the wall text provided some light. The images come from archival documentation about Resurrection City erected in 1968 on the National Mall shortly after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. The short lived tent city, part of the Poor People's Campaign, was built to underline social and economic inequities. The voice is a recording of Amiri Baraka reading his poem: "I Love Music: For John Coltrane." 

It is clear that the conceptual artist is also an activist deeply involved through his multidisciplinary practice. The exhibition is only a sample of his artistic activities which include performances, videos, installations, photography, paintings, movies, poetry... His eclectic sources from French philosophers like Deleuze or Guattari to poets, filmmakers, diverse visual artists, muffle his own voice and his multiple references transform conceptual art into an elitist cryptic discourse. 

Has conceptual art run amok?... confused at Hirshhorn. 

                                                

photographs by the author:

"Untitled (Composition)" 2024-2026

"Black Dada (L)" 2024-2026

View of the series "Composition"