Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

Life on Mars: 2008 Carnegie International Exhibition

Since I was right years old, I have gone to the Pittsburgh International Exbibition (which a few years ago was renamed to the Carnegie International). Traditionally, it filled the two upper galleries in the old museum and the new galleries on the top floor in the new contemporary museum. Today, when I visited, it took almost all the new museum and several traditional galleries of the old wing. It was a surprise to see contemporary works in the Greek and Roman section. The whole exhibition, for someone who sees “a lot of new works of art,” was a genuine head fake. Even the title, which was conceived before the forty artists were chosen, was a head fake. The exhibition had everything and nothing to do with “life on Mars” because it became clear was you walked from floor to floor, gallery to gallery, this was about how Mars was here, now, everywhere. “Remember, when in a foreign land, you are the foreigner!” If it is hard to see where we are since it is changing all the time, we all live in a foreign land, an alien world. We might as well call it MARS.  As the curator, Douglas Fogle, stated in the foreword to the exhibition brochure:

“Conceived around the title Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International explores the increasingly relevant yet perplexing proposition of what it means to be human today. The question, “Is there life on Mars?” is a rhetorical one posed in the face of an increasingly accelerating world in which global events challenge and threaten to overtake our everyday existence.

The forty artists from all over the globe in this exhibition, each in his or her own way, metaphorically ask, “Is there life on Mars?” Their myriad perspectives and responses investigate the nature of humanness in this radically unmoored world and the alien inside us. Moving from micro to macro levels of experience and along paths that are both introspective and worldly; their explorations traverse the dramatic spectrum from tragedy to comedy.

Questioning the absurdity of our lives yet demonstrating hope for humankind, these artists are inheritors of an artistic legacy that seeks to produce not the monumental but the momentary, the ephemeral, and the modest. Working in all media, from painting and sculpture to film, video, photography, and drawing, they foreground the poetic over the absolute and the intimate over the heroic. In so doing, they transport us aesthetically to other worlds with the hope that each of us will learn to start loving the alien. In the end, Life on Mars poses a series of questions each of us must answer: Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds? We are not alone.”

You arrive on a level from the parking lot on the shiny, stainless steel elevator and emerge into a long hall that has been conceived and installed by Barry McGee, a San Francisco artist who loves to reflect punk, outside, and folk art in his creations. The walls and ceiling had the uncontrolled atmosphere of street art and the mediated contemporary art gallery. Found, discarded and recycled objects, motorized figures spray painting the walls, audio components, and video monitors exist alongside portraits, text, assemblages of framed photographs and drawings, and sections of optical color-field “wallpaper” explode within your eyes. It is a Best Buy store on steroids. The motorized figures include his trademark images of morose, droopy, caricatured faces inspired by the transient and homeless population of San Francisco. Walking by this art, it is like all the mega-cities of the world.  As the brochure says, “The temporality of his visual language and the immediacy of its communication convey a history that is continually written, erased, and written again.”

From that experience you walk up the long steps, with broad steps, color exploding quietly from the primary-colored walls, and into the first gallery, filled with cartoons that act as important art. When the International first opened this time, a guard who could not take the lowering of traditional standards on what he thought was the art that should be shown, took a knife and cut arpart a painting, valued at several thousands of dollars. Arrested, he no longer guards the works on the walls. He was from Pittsburgh; these works of art were from Mars.

In gallery upon gallery, you find eclectic ranges of media; Maria Lassnig’s paintings from Vienna, Austria, which shows the anguish of her life (“I want to be as independent as possible of machines and complicated tools. Painting is a primeval art.”); Daniel Guzman’s drawings from Mexico City which seems anguished and intimate, yet also bitterly ironic (“Here, pre-Hispanic symbols, such as the moon, the pyramid, and the rabbit, join with caricatures of politicians, cosmic imagery, and rock music icons in a vomiting-up of hope and greed, good and evil, pleasure and violence.”); sculptures wrapped for sending (to God know where) by Matthew Monahan of Los Angeles, California, seem to be composed and decomposed from a wide range of materials (“…translucent structures integrate and encase these grotesque bodies, incomplete and (filled with)…museological piety and violent iconoclasm-both set loose.”); Mario Merz’s art encapsulates a confrontation with the technological, the rational, and the mass-produced (“His work shares many of the preoccupations of Arte Povera- literally “poor art”- a term coined to describe the work of a loosely associated group of artists working in the vibrant milieu of the Italian art scene beginning in the 1960s onward.”); and then, at the end of gallery, off to the far left is an entrance created with cardboard and shiney, plastic, brown package tape, we were transformed into modern cavemen. It was a work by Thomas Hirschhorm, who was born in Bern, Switzerland, but lives and works in Paris. As the brochure tells us, “Cavemanman (2002) is a sprawling, shambolic network of cardboard caves, a spectacular information-crammed labyrinth of slogans and tableaux concerning Iraq-war militarism and martyrdom, sadomasochism, and materialistic greed. This unforgiving environment excavates and examines the brutality and consumerism of our time.”

As you walked through this last statement of where we all live in our “abundance of abundance” and “abundance of less”, the televisions on the walls walked us through the Lascaux Caves and the cave drawings of the first humans who walked upright on this globe.

Just when you think that you have left this International Exhibition in the galleries, it opens up again in the traditional museum, the Science Wing, the traditional Roman and Greek statue wing held two almost-last exhibits: One by Bruce Conner, who recently died in San Francisco (a classmate of mine at the University of Colorado in their master’s program) and Mike Kelley of Los Angeles. 

Bruce was an artist who, whether responding to atom bombs, or surfing, the Kennedy assassination, Western movies, Christian iconography, outer space, Marilyn Monroe, or television advertising, refused a characteristic style. He almost did not graduate because of this aspect of his personality. “His work often expresses his strong aversion to commercialism, celebrity, and assimilation, and it can also reflect narratives such as the explosion of mass-media culture following World War II and the paranoia of the cold war.” Among the Greek statues of gods, the curator placed Conner’s work “in memoriam.”  The images, called the Angel series, are captured without a camera. The apparitions result from standing in front of light-sensitive paper that was then exposed to the beam of a slide projector.  “As the visual memory of an elusive artist who has continually disrupted attempts by art history to pin him down- and who for many years refused to be photographed- the Angels are an affirmation of the ineffable, the ungraspable, and the extraordinary.”

On seeing these images, Bruce Conner is still an alien in our midst, an artist who stands outside the establishment, and, in a strange turn of our curious workings, is now glamorized by a selected spot in the traditional wing of the Carnegie Museum of Science and Fine Arts. Another artist, Mike Kelley, was similar in his approach over his three decades of work.

When you walked into the bottom level of the traditional Greek and Roman gallery, you knew that this was a strange, new world, a world of constant global weather change and domed cites with piped in clean air.  “The Kandors series (2007) takes its inspiration from the fictional city of Kandor in Superman comics. Kelley re-envisions Superman’s lost homeland as miniaturized Atlantis-like cityscapes covered by glass domes. Sound, light, and motion envelop a surrealistic topography through an all-encompassing sensory experience.”

To bring us all back to the real of our world and things that we understood, we walked through the newly-redone wing of  Carnegie’s science section, the museum’s dinosaur room. Outside, at the bus stop with a bronze dinosaur’s neck overhanging the walkway, a derelict asked for donations for dinner. A discarded soft drink can was wedged amongst the bushes. While we passed that way, the bus came with advertisement for Hellboy II, The Mummy and The Dark Knight. On arriving home, we caught the final moments of gymnastics, Michael Phelps swimming for another goal metal, some saber fighting, beach volleyball, laced with commercials for Coca Cola and GMC. We were citizens again from Mars and as good citizens we were reticent to question our multi-colored, multi-dimensional, and many layers commercial existence. It was a great head fake of a day. We even had video-tapes of the (Greek) Olympic opening which a friend had recorded for our later viewing so that Beijing, which was really Mars (but we never questioned that also), could be seen in all its five hours of magnificent commercialism, selling the New China (a new landing on a planet, like Mars, that most of the world had never seen.)