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Diana Al-Hadid, “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things,” Kasmin Gallery NYC, Nov 2, 2023 to Dec 22, 2023

Who: Artist Diana Al-Hadid

What: Exhibition, titled, “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things.”

When: November 2, 2023 to December 22, 2023

Where: Kasmin Gallery’s Chelsea location, 509 West 27th Street, New York City

Bottom Line: Al-Hadid uses metaphors across categories (metonymies) for symbolic rewards

Website: https://www.kasmingallery.com/exhibitions/291-diana-al-hadid-women-bronze-and-dangerous-things/

Introduction

Diana Al-Hadid has an exhibition, closing this weekend on December 22, 2023.The exhibition is titled, “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things,” based on George Lakoff’s book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987). The former happens to be one of my favorites, and so, without getting too sucked into the philosophy vortex, this essay will summarize the Lakoff, and then work to apply its ideas to the Al-Hadid exhibition.

George Lakoff

Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), was a rebellion in linguistics by the writer Lakoff against professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s genius was to unite the biology of the human mind with the innovations in symbolic logic and discrete mathematics, from many different sciences, but in this article mentioning Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Because Symbolic Logic is the basis for computer programming languages, and therefore how a person might read an article on the Internet, Chomsky is at the very least usefully correct.

Lakoff’s attack on Chomsky is the revelation that words can come from other places besides ontological or biological precursors, somehow naturally built into the brain. To make these points, Lakoff uses metonymy and categories.

Lakoff and Metonymy

Lakoff’s thesis includes, but is not limited to, metonymy and categories. “Women, fire, and dangerous things” is thus a humorous joke about categories, and not sexism or misogyny. We will get back to this point shortly.

Lakoff thinks humans create categories, and then the categories mix up. Thus, the Japanese term for “throw in an arcing motion,” has metaphoric family resemblance to words in Japanese for line. Metonymy is when a turn of phrase uses a part for a whole. When I write, “President Biden re-started the economy,” I do not mean the one person flipped a switch and turned the global marketplace on like a car. Lakoff’s metonymy goes further than our traditional definition of metonymy, by calling metonymy a metaphor across categories. Lakoff’s metonymy is beyond metaphor, because I can run a race, or run a computer, or watch a river run.

Lakoff and Al-Hadid

I used Lakoff’s metonymy this year in both my reviews for Willa Cosinuke at the EUROPA Gallery and Ed Ruscha at the New York MoMA. Ruscha often uses single words, and Cosinuke is closer to what Al-Hadid is doing here. It is not a contest, and in fact the Ruscha and Cosinuke both shoot at what Al-Hadid is aiming to achieve. Lakoff’s metonymy is a metaphor across categories, and thus Al-Hadid simply wants her viewers to move beyond, and maybe above the ordinary in the ways an audience might sort the symbols, meanings, and real life references to this art. The works are not anti-connotative, but neither are they strict with their literal meanings, or interactions thereof. “Women, fire, and dangerous things” looks like a sexist joke about women being useful and dangerous, like fire. To the people who read the book, Lakoff’s title is a linguistics joke about categories and metonymies. In a turn of phrase, Al-Hadid is the one who brings the heat.

Mother Splits the Moon (2023)

The largest sculpture in this exhibit is a cube with hanging wooden dowels. The work is mostly trichromatic, using different shades of white, turquoise, and iridescent gold, that viewers might compare to the title of the exhibit as bronze. The cube has layers and striations of acrylic and plaster, among other media, with a neutral empty space in the shape of a cube as part of the inner space.

Wooden dowels are grouped into conical inversions, with the cones pointing up. Paint has been grouped and clumped at the bases of these implied cone structures. The dowels simultaneously appear to be falling; while at the same time clamor upward toward the ceiling. Architectural bronze structures scaffold inside of the wooden reed pieces. At the sculpture’s base on the floor, gray carpet mats clump toward the cube.

Yeah, dude, this is about oil in the Middle East…Right? Not entirely.

This is absolutely a place where Al-Hadid’s Lakoff thesis kicks in. First off, yes, the geological striations on her cube structure, the neutral space in the cubes center, and the shooting liquid acrylic, and wooden dowels, all reference the violent dredging of crude oil. Al-Hadid’s use of acrylic plastic paint is another idea in this metaphor (metonym), because plastic comes from crude oil. Nevertheless, the use of stairs in Islamic art is important here. One points to the ancient Ziggurats of Persia, but stairs as life appear in Jennifer Packer’s “Blessed are Those Who Mourn” (2020). This sculpture has more in common with gratitude for life than mere simple domination of the oil industry because Al-Hadid’s sculpture is really beautiful. The work is less like the movie, “There Will Be Blood,” and more like Georgia O’Keefe. The former is ugly drama, and the latter is defiant beauty.

The Bride in the Large Glass (2023) and Seed (2023)

Two bronze sculptures, about equal in size, anchor the exhibition. When one enters from the street, there is a medieval-looking chain structure, reminiscent of the torture devices from the Middle Ages. On the right, a cube wraps around effervescent bubbles. Both sculptures are approximately a human’s height, made of bronze, and capped with ovals referencing the faces of human beings. Whereas the Mother Splits the Moon sculpture uses both iridescent gold colors and green rusted bronze, these sculptures bask in the grays, blues, greens, and matted yellows of corroded bronze, and corroded silver. Al-Hadid makes points about the triumphs of Middle Eastern cultures by using bronze, and also by talking about the mathematical and the chemical in the cubist sculpture.

Here is the thing: I just cannot forgive Simone Leigh. I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Simone Leigh. She is everywhere in New York City. I saw her at one of the Whitney Biennial shows, and at the NYC Gugghenheim, and against all logic, without preparation from my perspective, at the Harriet Tubman park of Harlem in Manhattan. You have got to be kidding me. For the second time in this essay, I hereby say, it’s not a competition. What I will say is the reason why Simone Leigh’s works are receiving so many acknowledgements and accolades is the works are excellent. And, weirdly or not, Simone Leigh’s investigations of history indeed look different than Al-Hadid’s. The subject is the same, as women were historically repressed and represented in each artists’ formal design, and the media is the same, as in bronze, and yet the final products do diverge. Leigh’s works could never be mistaken for Al-Hadid’s and that is a wonder.

The Bronze Chamber of Danae (2023) 

In one of Al-Hadid’s larger works, the artist uses paint, plaster, and cloth, and their reliefs, to create a three-dimensional painting. The paint and plaster is shaped into a curtains scene. Art fans might recognize such a scene from the Degas [sic – title] show at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this year. Al-Hadid uses dripping gold in the piece’s middle to evoke a chandelier, or maybe a scene from a royal court.The distance between romanticism and realism – here – is just like the joking proverb that the silence is defeaning. Whereas the French Master Delacroix used the Middle East as wonderful food for the imagination in the 19th century, Al-Hadid has some major realistic authenticity beyond such fantasies. While I covered some of this in my review of Maria Magdelena Campos-Pons, suffice to say, this is a big deal. The pretentious Masters meet the authentic Originals.

Conclusion – Raymond Carver

Metonymy is tricky in art. Viewers are away from literal symbolism that denotes precise references at any given time. On the other hand, these works are not so easily taken for abstraction, that a person might project whatever ideas and morals they please. And finally, if the references of Islam, or crises in the Middle East are called upon — these works quite reasonably ask about these issues, without offering answers.

So, let’s close with a straightforward moral, just to tie things up.

I was perplexed by Raymond Carver’s short story, “What we talk about when we talk about love,” from the 1981 same-titled short story collection. In the eponymous story, four people, two men and two women, have drinks and talk about love. At the end of the story, one character cannot understand why his first wife left him, and as his current girlfriend is pestering him about bringing hors d’oeuvres, or turning on the lights, he keeps snapping at her. The character is unaware that he is doing the things that pushed away his first wife. The sick and fascinating thing is when the narrator –Carver’s proxy – says he could watch the other character’s confusion all day, for all time. Nietzsche wrote that without love, a person’s game is weak. Al-Hadid’s works provoke her viewers and tempt all sorts of responses. My advice? Respond with love.

Jacob Goldbas is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010 he graduated from NC State University, studying under Neo-Kantian Michael Pendlebury. In 2013 he won the Washington DC Jewish Community Center Award for Excellence in Essay Writing for their Fall Literary Festival. His brother Sol Goldbas is a jazz pianist, living in Mississippi. His sister Paige Saez is an artist and technologist living in California.

Thinking about Kitsch from Liz Rundorff Smith at the Susan Eley Gallery; November 9th to January 6th, 2024

Who: artists Liz Rundorff Smith and Sasha Hallock (covering only Rundorff Smith in this post)

What: “But we’ve come so far,” exhibition

Where: Susan Eley Fine Art Gallery, Lower East Side, Manhattan

How: Delancey-Essex J train

Bottom Line: Rundorff Smith breaks out of kitsch and camp prison

The Susan Eley Gallery in the Lower East Side exhibits two artists concerned with spirituality, aesthetics, and spiritual aesthetics. I’m going to talk about Liz Rundorff Smith in this post and save Sasha Hallock for a separate review.

For Liz Rundorff Smith, the works are large two dimensional mixed media paintings. All of that goes into question as Rundorff Smith breaks the third dimension with string tassles, or uses so many different mixed media that the works function as multivalent two dimensional sculptures.

I was absolutely non plussed by the subject matter – outlines of Grecian urns, and outlines of trophies – and that is the conflict that makes these works above and beyond. These are intentionally pretty paintings with delicious violently explosive conceptual knives for insiders. This is the unassuming grandmother in a children’s movie who just so happens to know karate, and can kill everybody.

Rundorff Smith mentions on her website that she plays with kitsch. This is a loaded insider art game. The question of kitsch started with art critic Clement Greenberg. The critic was bored with art! And so he lamented that so much art was reconfigured and overcooked ideas that had already been done. His major beef was with the artist Norman Rockwell, who took 16th century Dutch paintings and just redid the scenes with Americans in the 20th century.

Talking about Kitsch in art and popular culture

Kitsch as a term is going on a century old at this point, and so might be confused with anybody’s complaint that something is bad.

Kitsch simply means bad art in this watered down sense. But Greenberg had some particular bitching going on, too. Ideas such as not acknowledging art history – those freaky Dutch – or taking for granted that the viewer will enjoy the current work by Norman Rockwell unbeknownst of Vermeer, Ter Borch, Jan Steen, Pieter Brueghal the Elder, Pieter Brueghal the Younger, and on and on.

My favorite kitsch takedown of all time is Richard Brody’s assault on Spielberg’s Ready Player One in the New Yorker Magazine website. Spielberg takes his ideas from 1980’s movies and puts them all in a movie together as if Brody had not seen all of those movies a million times, and as if seeing seeing those movies was both of ultimate consequence – Spielberg thinks he is so important – and paradoxically that one does not need to see those ultimate importance movies, because hey, they are right here.

The accusation of kitsch in popular culture absolutely flies with the backlash to the updated Space Jam with LeBron James in the past five years. This sequel demands importance while trivializing the whole movie and the flick knocks all of the beats of kitsch. The movie is a rehash of the original film and loads up mismatched cartoon characters from disparate corners of popular culture for something like a giant commercial for those characters, which also functions as a juvenile exercise in grabbing people’s money.

Kitsch in a joke is the old, “I liked this John Mayer song when James Taylor did it fifty years ago, only better.”

The Empire Strikes Back: Camp versus Kitsch

Public intellectual Susan Sontag coined the term camp in the 1970’s. The idea of camp is to reclaim kitsch and do kitsch on purpose. Camp is so dyed in the wool at this point that the strategy can be hard to spot – camp is the de facto point of view for popular culture.

Why? Camp as a conflict means the artist and the viewer damn the questions of kitsch and the critic. Gertrude Stein wrote that repetition is insistence, and that camp-as-repetition functions here as a preemptive defense against a vitriolic art critic.

The other side of this is laziness, because just like our second Space Jam movie, popular culture wants to reclaim existing properties and simultaneously pretend that the older brands are important. The audience is supposed to love the new and bash the old, and also hate the new and celebrate the old.

Two successful camp perspectives are the Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool movies and LCD Soundsystem. In the Deadpool movies, the ninja talks directly to the audience. His comments complain about tired superhero themes, usually around the joke that everything has been done before.

LCD Soundsystem’s song, “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” repeats that line over and over using an analogue rock band with guitars and live drums, with A D C chord progression. The chord progression itself is the oldest trick in the book, and is heard in Foghat’s “Slow Ride.” However the writer James Murphy wins by pointing out Daft Punk themselves stole all of their beats, put shitty repetitive lyrics on top, and then repackaged their kitsch adventure as brand new. If Daft Punk can do it, so can LCD Soundsystem.

Beyond Camp with Rundorff Smith

Rundorff Smith uses kitsch intentionally. Although, the artist is head and shoulders above a typical camp rejoinder. Rundorff Smith says she is using kitsch on her website. One giveaway in these works is the color choice. The fleshy pink contrasts with a turquoise green. Where was this? I think the Art Deco movement of the 1920’s is relevant, where minimalist architects used absurd colors, but really the green and pink speaks to strange juxtapositions of color of the Memphis school in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

But these works are not camp! Why? This is the subject matter of the paintings. Rundorff Smith uses Grecian urns outlines, or outlines of trophies. Here is the knives out, nuclear bomb attack. The artist calls back to Ancient Hellens, because Greek pottery was before anything that could possibly be part of a culture war, between camp and kitsch, between popular fashions, and the taste makers who choose the objects of kitsch, camp, and fashion.

All of the examples are limited in this scope. Failed camp movies Ready Player One and the Space Jam sequel recursively talk about themselves like an idiot teenager. Nevertheless, even the successful camp strategies are sophomoric. Deadpool complains about the past twenty years of superhero movies, and James Murphy complains about the past thirty years of popular music. Greenberg compares 20th century art to 17th century art. Rundorff Smith outruns any opposition by going back to original art, and the start of Western Canon. Camp is fundamentally reactive. In the rock, paper, scissors game of kitsch versus camp, Rundorff Smith brings napalm.

Conclusions

I think Rundorff Smith’s works in this exhibition are a sleeper cell of all of this art talk. The paintings are pretty and thus might function as a cool, relaxing thing to rest one’s eyes on in a home office, or a living room. Hey, those are some nice trophies. This is the damning criticism that a work is merely decorative. Even the most cynical art critic will concede that beauty has a special place in a person’s living room.

But that’s why the conceptual war is so much fun. These works break out of the moment, and free themselves of questions about fashion. Rundorff Smith gambits triviality in exchange for the longevity associated with Grecian urns. This longterm thinking is so alien to American consumerism that people are going to buy these paintings without knowing any of the conceptual baggage. Again, that’s quite all right. By acknowledging the problems of kitsch, camp, and fashion, and using ancient symbols, Rundorff Smith secretly comments on these problems. The solution is the paintings’ beauty and their conceptuality — in synthesis.

One imagines two friends talking, maybe in front of one of these paintings.

The first friend complains about feeling old and out of fashion. I feel kitsch.

Maybe she makes a self-criticizing mea culpa that she is indeed old and out of fashion, so as to preempt hurtful attacks she received in the past. I’m trying to be camp.

The second friend tells the first, hey man, it’s all right. You gotta take the long view. That would be neither camp nor kitsch, like these paintings.

What a beautiful, reassuring, and intelligent thing to say. These sentiments are not shallow or ill-conceived. The conversation is hard won.

A splendid exhibition from Liz Rundorff Smith and the Susan Eley Gallery.

Jacob Goldbas is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In 2010 he graduated from NC State University, studying under Neo-Kantian philosopher Michael Pendlebury. In 2013 he won the Washington, DC Jewish Community Center Award for Excellence in Essay Writing for their Fall Literary Festival Contest. He writes about art, philosophy, and popular culture for Facadeaside. With love and pride, his brother Bol Goldbas is an acclaimed jazz musician in Mississippi and his sister Paige Saez is an acclaimed artist and technologist in California.