The Contemporary Museum, sprawled across the spine of Makiki Heights, is all grown up now, and it’s celebrating up there, on the mountain, with an exhibition of its recent acquisitions. Right now, while the galleries boast contemporary American art and art from elsewhere, is perhaps the best time to visit. This exhibition, dubbed “At 21: Gifts and Promised Gifts in Honor of The Contemporary Museum’s 20th Anniversary,” offers everyone—young, old, with or without advanced degrees in Art History—something to stare at.
The gifts, on view until January 24, 2010, are tiny and monolithic, shiny and dull, confusing and exhilarating, beautiful and, well, not so beautiful (but in the best possible way). Some pieces come from collectors and galleries, others from artists and friends of the Contemporary. Some names are recognizable, others new. Some ideas are tried and true, others experimental and fresh. Some materials, like oil and acrylic paint, predictably appear; others—like powder-coated steel and magnets, or blue tape and tar—breathe new life into the collection. The Contemporary, still reeling off Yoshihiro Suda’s minimalistic Zen art garden exhibition, demonstrates that, at 21, it’s got a curatorial exuberance and unpredictability befitting its bright-eyed age.
Unlike the Suda exhibition, which showcased the Japanese artist’s ability to transform the Contemporary Museum with so little art, “At 21” gives viewers the exact opposite: hundreds of pieces, hundreds of points of view.
The first gallery, studded with the unexpectedly playful and colorful, sets the tone for this freewheeling fete. “Walking Through Diamonds” (1990), by James Surls, a spiky, anthropomorphic sculpture composed of carved and scorched wood and metal pins, seems apt to climb off its pedestal and onto a science fiction movie set. Paul Wonner’s “To Flora (Second Version)” (1985), a surreal still life of flowers stuffed into whiskey bottles, pots, vases, all of which cast surreal shadows within the painting, is eye candy par excellence. William Wegman’s puckish photographs, like “Improved Photographs (Man Ray as a Cat)” (1979), converts canine into feline, to hilarious effect.
The next gallery, comprised of photos and collages, augments, in an unexpected fashion, the Contemporary’s photography collection. Candida Hofer’s “Schindler House Los Angeles IV” (2000), offers viewers a scaled down version of her large-format, Gursky-esque photos of social spaces. Sandy Skoglund’s “Fresh Hybrid (Spring)” (2008), transports viewers, via pigmented inkjet print, to an imaginary world where the sky and the ground are constructed of furry carpet, where trees, equally furry, have legs, and baby chicks, in lieu of leaves, dot the branches (think of David Lynch and Tim Burton tossed into a joint and sprinkled with Sesame Street). Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Colors of Shadow C1026” (2006), perhaps the greatest photographic addition to the Contemporary’s collection, manages to create a photo out of nothing. It is, quite literally, pure form, a picture of light hitting a stark white architectural space, and the various shadows generated as a result.
?The stand out piece in the adjacent gallery is Alexandre Arrechea’s “Untitled” (2003), an ostensible two-colored painting of book-like forms with a formal structure that seems closer to design than art. But, on closer inspection, it’s revealed to be a yellow powder-coated steel plate on which a large black magnet cutout sits, delineating the negative space. The other mind-bending piece is William Wood’s “Untitled” (1998), a Magic Eye-like piece with repetitive, globular forms, infinitely layered. It’s a pictorial curiosity, one which viewers won’t believe is actually oil on paper.
Downstairs, monolithic paintings and mixed media pieces by Donald Sultan and Jane Hammond occupy the walls, next to diminutive sculptures like Dean McNeil’s carved and engraved granite piece “In Memory of the Significant Other,” placed precariously on the floor. The most exciting painting in this gallery is Enrique Martinez Celaya’s “The Habit of Hummingbirds” (1996), an oil, wax and fabric piece that looks incredibly rudimentary at first, but, once a closer look is afforded, a complex microcosm of brushstrokes, textures and shapes seeps through the surface of this process piece.
There are, to be certain, canonical art world giants in the new collection (Ed Ruscha and Sol LeWitt), but these pieces tend to be lesser works, except, that is, in the case of Duane Hanson. His jaw-dropping, hyper realistic sculpture, “Secretary” (1972), is, in this writer’s opinion, alone worth the trip to the Contemporary. Adorned with real eyeglasses, steno pad and pen, not to mention real garments, this ersatz secretary is so true-to-life in both size and detail, viewers will be forgiven for eyeballing this woman, and all her flaws and imperfections (including wrinkles), for hours.
Given its newest additions, the Contemporary Museum, at 21, is looking pretty swell. Whether you fancy intricate, figurative paintings, abstract swathes of color, photographs or sculptures, “At 21” delivers great works of art in spades.
