“The Medieval Body”
Luhring Augustine in conjunction with Sam Fogg London
January 21 - March 12
Contemporary art is really struggling to reproduce itself. In art, as in politics, octogenarians shuffle on while a new generation struggles to arrive. But even in this dire situation, a retreat all the way back to the middle ages is a bit jarring at a Chelsea gallery of contemporary art. I wish I could tell you that it is not the single best thing in the neighborhood, but I would probably be lying, with the possible exception of the Turrell at Pace. And we should be glad that these relics could be dusted off for display without requiring Hirst to remake them covered in coral.
Though there is a list of works available at the entrance, the show is presented without any of the labeling, detailed context or sumptuously colored galleries we expect from museum exhibitions. There’s no history lesson. Just form.
There’s drapery carved with soft ripples and sharp, almost expressionist, angles into wood and gold worked into the most refined chalices and refined spires. A Giovanni Della Robia Judith seems just a little too happy dancing with the head of Holofernes — more like kitschy garden decor than a vaunted saint. The unknown sculptor of a 16th century German crucifix rendered Christ’s wound with cartoonish enthusiasm.
The present discloses itself in the fragments of the past it selects. In the polished and morally certain twenty-teens Michelangelo drew crowds. Now the kooks, distortions and uninhibited opulence of the gawky medievals charm this battered decade. (In a similar vein the Met staged a fluffy show of the rococo’s influence on Disney cartoons — no sober sophistication there.)
Embroidery threads dance in a lilting herringbone pattern behind shimmering saints, in whose bodies they become closely woven enough to appear as paint. There’s no preening fanfare for the finely crafted manuscripts, refined panels and ornate metalwork. No apologia for the uncannily-shy-of-naturalistic examples. They are nearer than any museum display has ever been; time travelers from a world of magic and mystery.
A wooden Virgin breaks the illusion somewhat. From the front she is perfect, but from the side the is too narrow, a sculptural trick used on figures meant to be seen only frontally. She’s not where she is supposed to be. She was holy once, but not any more.
It’s bourgeois modernity that yanked her from her chapel and put her in a white cube, that liberated her from her cult and put her in an exhibition. We can delight in the beautiful for its own sake, but we do so at a price. Poor Mary, smushed too thin, surveils this gleaming and frigid future.