Anyone who studied art history or other humanities in the 1990s or 2000s, say, the age of Australian cartoonist Hannah Gadsby (45), would have learned the word “problematic” in the distant seminary days. You may remember It was a popular noun at the time, Borrowing from French, which describes the unconscious structure of ideologies and texts. But soon, like many other efforts to think critically, the “problem stuff” was left behind by this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. These days we encounter the word “problematic” exclusively as an adjective. It is an outspoken judgment of moral disapproval by a speaker who doesn’t care about accuracy.
All professional art workers, such as restorers, designers, security guards and technicians, “It’s Pablomatic: Picasso by Hannah Gadsby, a small exhibition that opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (The title is so ridiculous I can’t even type it. It’s cut and pasted.) The show was one of many held around the world to mark the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973. , essentially a light pastime that follows “”. Nanette, 2018 Netflix Special. In that routine, which was a mixture of standup and TED talk, Gadsby tried to pull the Spaniard down by twisting the fact that he had “just graduated with an art history degree” at the bachelor’s level. Artist: “He’s rotten with a hollow face! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” If you think there is, it’s your fault that the joke was actually the only good joke of the day.
Like the noun-turned-adjective ‘problematic’, this new exhibition steers away from its close search for the positive comforts of social justice-themed pop culture. The Brooklyn Museum of Art showcases several Picasso paintings (very few), as well as two smaller sculptures of him and works on paper with understated sarcasm by Gadsby on adjacent labels. Surrounding and nearby are works of art made by women, most of them after Picasso’s death in 1973. Finally, in the vestibule, a clip of “Nanette” is played in loop. This is the whole exhibition, and those who were hoping that this was Netflix’s transformation of a perverted art show, with impoverished patriarchal Picasso as a ritualized scapegoat, can rest easy. . There is very little to see. No catalog to read. The ambition here is at his GIF level, but maybe that’s the point.
As long as there are arguments — problematic — It goes like this: Pablo Picasso was an important artist. He was also a bit of a jerk to women. And women are more than “goddesses and doormats,” as Picasso brutally put it. Women have stories to tell too. I wish I could have told you more, but that’s really it. All of the feminist scholarship of the last fifty years has pushed aside repressed desires, phallic instability, and even the lives of the women Picasso loved in favor of what really matters: your feelings. ing. The show’s opening message, “Admiration and anger can coexist,” reassures us.
Perhaps the most-written painter of all time, Picasso was both a great artist and a not-so-great figure, but far from news enough to be called trendy. the important thing is what you do With that friction, “pablomatic” doesn’t help much. First, there aren’t that many things to notice. The actual number of Picasso’s paintings here is only eight. Seven pieces were borrowed from the Picasso Museum in Paris, which supports exhibitions around the world for this anniversary. One is in the Brooklyn Museum. None are top notch. There is no institutional financing other than a few prints brought across the river from MoMA. Most of what Picasso has painted here are modest etchings, and even these show little of his stylistic breadth. Over 20 sheets are produced from his single portfolio. 1930s Neoclassical Vollard Suite.
An unsigned text in each gallery provides basic suggestions about sexism in museums and the colonial legacy of modern European art, while Gadsby provides a signed joke next to each individual piece. increase. These labels are a bit like toilet graffiti, or Instagram captions. Next to a classic engraving depicting Picasso and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter reads: “I’m so manly that my chest hair exploded.” Or was she just dropped from a great height?”
There is an obsession with genitals and bodily functions throughout. Each sphincter, each phallus is summoned with adolescent excitement. Vocabulary for adolescents. The jokes there (“Mehta? I barely know her!”) remain young enough to leave Picasso intact. The adults involved in the Brooklyn Museum (primarily senior curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, Gadsby’s collaborators here) could have really tempered this immaturity, but they should be honored. For the record, they at least fleshed out the exhibit with some context about the cult. A story of male genius, or the rise of feminist art history in the 1970s.
The issue is clear and a perfect sign of our back-to-front digital life. reaction came first, the object reacted in seconds.The show, which kicks off with a photo, might wonder in the footsteps of a pioneering feminist art historian Linda Nochlin — Why Picasso’s paintings of women are so different from Balthus, Picabia, and other cancellable perverted paintings of mid-century men, and generally devoid of lust. If the show is appropriately concerned with feminism and avant-garde art, notable female Soviet artists who have used Picasso’s collapse of form for political revolution, such as Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udartsova, or Olga Rozanova. may have been noticed. If reputation and male genius were taken more seriously, at least the following works might have been introduced. one Female Cubists: Perhaps Alice Baillie, Marie Vasiliev, Alice Harikka, Marie Laurencin, Jeanne Liege Rousseau, Maria Blanchard, or Anne Danger from Australia.
Instead, “It’s Pablo-matic” is about stirring up women’s work from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. These seem to have been chosen more or less at random, and include a lithograph by Kathe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, a collective work by Betty Searle, “Tech/Transformation: Wonder Woman” by Dara Birnbaum A video art classic from 1978/79, I don’t see any connection to Picasso. (At least two paintings here by Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalen Thomas Mimic, not Picasso. ) Here, in what might be the show’s only real insult, the artists who made them are reduced to mere narrators of women’s lives. “I want you to hear me,” Gadsby is quoted in the final gallery. The label praises the new generation for a “whole new story”.
This elevating of “narrative” over art (or at least comedy) is what made Nanette’s stand-up show in Sydney a huge hit in America during the former president shortly after Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds were finally exposed. was the main driving force behind . “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejected “trauma” by telling jokes, and favored three-act resolution by “narrative.” It directly compared Picasso to then-President Trump, saying, “The greatest artist of the 20th century. Let’s make art great again, folks.” He asserted that he was suffering from (Given Picasso’s pathology, it is very It is interesting that Gadsby described the Brooklyn Museum exhibition as a sexually violent act of their own hearts against a man from Malaga. talk about variety: “I really, really want to give him one.”)
Most bizarrely, that routine was based on the denunciation of art as an elite fraud, and modernism made it particularly harsh. “CUUU-bism,” Gadsby repeated mockingly, and the audience was sure to burst into laughter. (Actually, Picasso’s own Cubist art is on display at the Brooklyn Museum through a single 6-by-4.5-inch print.) The irony from the comedian of moderate art history had a purpose. It gave Gadsby’s audience permission to: I believe that avant-garde painting was actually a big fraud. “They’re all cut from the same cloth,” Gadsby told the audience in “Nanette”: “Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein” — and the art he didn’t like from the start , a cabal of villains that might be dismissed as flimsy of art.
Not so long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that avant-garde painting was too difficult for them to prefer the comfort of story time. What Gadsby did was give permission to the audience— moral It’s about turning our backs on the things that challenge us and allowing comfort and kitsch to be ennobled.
So who will be most excited about this show? It’s not a Picasso that comes out completely unscathed. But the female artists in the museum’s collection have been caught up in this little prank, and so have generations of women and feminist art historians… Rosalind Krause, Ann Wagner, Mary Ann Cowes, and hundreds more have dedicated their careers to thinking seriously about contemporary art and gender. Especially at the Brooklyn Museum, where engagement with feminist art is unique even in New York, I was sad and embarrassed that the exhibition didn’t even try to live up to its promise of putting women artists on an equal footing with big names.
“My story has value,” Gadsby said in “Nanette.” And “I will not allow my story to be destroyed.” And “stories provide our cure.” But the Hawardena Pindel on display here is more than just a storyteller. The Cindy Sherman on display here is more than just a storyteller. They, like Picassos before them, are artists who put ideas and images in productive tension without the reassurance of closure or comfort. The role of public museums (or at least it should be) is to present all of these women’s aesthetic achievements to all of us. There is also space for story time in the children’s wing.
It’s Pablomatic: Picasso by Hannah Gadsby
June 2nd to September 24th, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn. (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.
