Museum and gallery texts (and Dana Schutz and Renaud Jerez)

Posted February 07, 2024

Already on my other blog, the one about opera, I've mentioned Poppy Bullshit and Araminta Bollocks, characters in the UK's VIZ comic magazine. Poppy and Araminta are 'artmakers', and in one 2018 strip we find them gazing over their tea at a broken biscuit: 'Hmm... yes... that is challenging my preconceptions about the intrinsic nature of biscuits. It's a telling juxtaposition of form and content... I've always regarded Hobnobs as being round... And yet this one isn't. It's an artistic tour de force dripping with dramatic éclat...!' I forwarded it to half a dozen gallery-owners I know, as they were getting ready for that autumn's Paris art fair, the FIAC - as it was then.

Here they are in a different edition, challenging our preconceptions of the office Christmas party:

Visiting museums and galleries, I think we've all seen texts like this, or worse:

(Artist's name) weaves concepts of subjective world building and collective narrative production, combining material histories to enrich faceted notions of her/their own cultural belonging. Their work speculates and fictions ethnographic her/stories drawing on their nomadic upbringing. The present work stems from an interest in armour and defence strategies. Thinking about embodiment, vulnerability and transnational ecologies allows the artist to restructure ideas of political resilience and resistance.

The Palais de Tokyo's website even has an application that randomly generates this kind of text for you (sadly in French only), proving that they are at least aware of the phenomenon and able to make fun of it - and by extension, of some of their own texts.

The artists and works in the two exhibitions I'm posting about here have little in common - superficially, at least, though now I've started writing this post, I'm beginning to find the idea of comparing them interesting. But that isn't the point, which is that what struck me at both shows was the style of writing on the flyers, or the texts posted beside the works. Neither fell into the jargon trap illustrated above. They had me wondering if a conscious effort is under way, in museums and galleries, to write more sensibly about art. It would be a relief to us all if it were.

The first of the two shows was Le Monde Visible, an extensive exhibition of big, bold works by Dana Schutz at MAM Paris, the city's (i.e. as opposed to the state's) modern art museum, located in the same art-déco ensemble - a relic of the 1937 Exposition Universelle - as the Palais de Tokyo. Here, the texts had quite a chatty, good-humoured feel to them, and were more descriptive than (pseudo-) philosophical. I'll give two examples, take from the museum's press kit online, before I post a few photos.

Sneeze, 2001

The depiction of a sneeze may appear as repulsive and grotesque. Art history isn’t exactly peppered with those, nor with scenes of yawning or fits of laughter. But why is that? Maybe this is due to the fleeting nature of these actions. In order to depict a sneeze, all the artist has to go on is her own intuition and her most private sensations – which are also the most widely shared. Two centuries before her, the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt came up with his stunningly lifelike Character Heads. Dana Schutz creates a mental picture, based on a physiological phenomenon.

The Arts, 2021

The arts – in the form of music, theatre, literature and painting – move from right to left as though parading uphill on their crooked legs, but at the same time there is an air of catastrophe. The composition takes after paintings from the Renaissance onwards. However these figures do not have any shared goal. One of the characters gazes up in hope while swinging a violin, another clutches a skeleton like a modern Hamlet, a third one is sniffing a flower, while the others look straight ahead brandishing a club, whip or spotlight. The scene gives the impression of a pointless death ride – or a medieval danse macabre. Beneath a green, primitive sun the landscape is strangely subdued; it could be underwater. Parallels can be drawn to the colour palette of Surrealism, not least that of the artist Max Ernst (1891–1976).

The post continues after these photos (all mine).

Even more plainly descriptive were the texts for Renaud Jerez's POISON at the CrèveCoeur gallery in Belleville, so much so that the young woman who welcomed me went actually mentioned the fact when guiding me to the flyers. I took that to mean a deliberate decision was behind it. Again, I'll paste a couple of examples here, followed by some pictures.

Poison, 2024, is a full-length portrait of a mature woman wearing Céline® glasses, in which is vaguely reflected a tempestuous red background of Chinese lacquer and Helios red. Her slightly scintillating, luminous green dress trails down to her Swiffer® slippers. An armoured witch from the video game Eldenring® causes a bottle containing a skull to levitate above her razor-gloved hand. The turquoise and pink inscription POISON runs across the scene.

Mood, 2024, is the largest painting in the show and it depicts three characters wearing green kimonos in what might be taken for an inn. We recognise them as Brad Pitt, the Joker from the film The Dark Knight, played by Heath Ledger, and a kind of Mickey Mouse, whose head seems to be detached from the rest of its body. The upper section contains a dubious pictorial representation of fake marble, and a candyfloss sky. The rather uncertain overall scene gives free play to the imagination to interpret freely the activities of these characters in a medieval-inspired setting with yellowish-brown hues.