It’s the second week of a new year, and if you’ve managed to stay the course thus far vis-a-vis your resolution to eat more vegetables and get more exercise, then strong work, America!
Alas, most of us have more rueful, or at least more complicated, feelings about our mortal vessels.
“Strange Bodies,” a new presentation of figurative works from the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (though a few are borrowed), exploits our shared mélange of shame, pride, anxiety, vanity, frustration and pure, animalistic joy to powerful effect.
Though many of the creators and pieces here are familiar — including pieces by Rene Magritte, Francis Bacon, Julian Schnabel and Willem de Kooning — the thoughtful juxtaposition of their works here creates points of resonance that surprise even Kristen Hileman, the Hirshhorn associate curator who organized the show. Take, for example, her deft positioning of Ron Mueck’s giant sculpture “Untitled (Big Man)” next to John Currin’s “The Pink Tree,” a 1999 painting of two naked women with sharp, modern faces, but the kind of round bodies celebrated throughout antiquity.
“Traditionally there’s a longer history of portraying female nudes and having them represent an ideal of beauty,” Hileman says, “versus representing a heavy, bulky male nude, and having that figure represent an un-idealized version of the human body.” She mentions Lucian Freud’s “Nude With Leg Up (Leigh Bowery),” just around the corner, as still another example of how “contemporary artists are interested in un-idealized forms of the figure, in addition to figures that might be considered typically beautiful.”
Another inspired pairing is that of Jim Dine’s 1961 oil-and-collage “Flesh Striped Tie” with Magritte’s sculpture “The Healer,” from 1967, the year the Belgian surrealist master died. In the bronze sculpture, a suit of clothes is arranged anthropomorphically around an empty birdcage — the cage where the chest should be.
“That’s a little bit of a visual joke,” Hileman says. “That juxtaposition was intentional, but I was especially pleased by how they looked together aesthetically.”
The distortion of the physical body to heighten its emotionality is a technique that gets a lot of play here, particularly in the pieces from the first half of the 20th century by the likes of Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and de Kooning. The German artist George Grosz, a onetime member of the Dadaist movement before he fled to the U.S. in 1932, takes this device still further. In his works on paper, we see him using a brutal style of caricature to indict Berlin society post-World War I. He produced portfolios of these in various sizes and formats, to get his jeremiad of upper-class complicity in the Fatherland’s resurgent 1920s and ’30s militarism into as many German homes as possible. (For all the good it did.)
Of course, not everything in the show is so sinister. Mueck’s very popular “Untitled (Big Man)” is creepy or funny according to the viewer’s inference. Mueck “hasn’t given us any other information,” Hileman says. “He just sits the figure down in a gallery, and we have to make sense of him. That’s a powerful tool: Artists can select out parts of the body, or depict the body in a scenario that doesn’t give us the information we need to read a photographic image. It leaves a lot of room for our imaginations to kick in and for us to fill in the details of the story.”
While “Strange Bodies” is scheduled to remain on view through this time next year, the Hirshhorn plans to reshuffle the selection in June. So we’re recommending a visit in the winter and another in the summer unless, of course, you expect you’ll have gotten over all your body issues by then.
If you go
“Strange Bodies: Figurative Works from the Hirshhorn Collection”
Where: Hirshorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Seventh St. and Independence Ave. SW
When: Through early 2010
Info: Free; 202-633-4674; www.hmsg.si.edu
