Contemporary art: movements, contexts, and critical perspectives

¶ … Art

Myth and Revolt: Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, and Louise Bourgeois

This exhibition will feature the works of three of the most heroic names in contemporary art - Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, and Louise Bourgeois. Each of these artists has produced a vast body of work that makes extensive use of myth through idiosyncratic - and hence, revolutionary means. As such, Bourgeois, Kiefer, and Twombly are in many ways the last of the modernists. At the same time, their output serves as a sort of bridge, connecting the expressionistic tendencies of the 20th century to the neo-conceptual practices of the present. Through an extensive evaluation of surface and meaning, these three artists have each left an indelible mark in the art historical canon in their ongoing investigation of the foundational myths that continue to intrigue our civilization in the subtlest ways.

Each of the artists exhibited deals with myth in different ways. For Twombly, his concerns are mainly literary and historical. In Apollo and the Artist, a series of drawings that revolve around the word VIRGIL evokes the author of the Aeneid, who is credited with importing Greek civilization to Rome. Discourse on Commodus, a series from the 1960s, addresses the notorious mad son of Marcus Aurelius, who was eventually murdered by an athlete named Narcissus.

Of course, what is most discernible about Twombly's worth is not its entanglement with mythic themes, but the strong gesturality that comprise the artist's surfaces. Leda and the Swan, a painting that references Leonardo - himself a mythic figure in the history of art - is characteristic of Twombly's anarchic style. The large painting consists of a series of crazed scribblings and feathery shapes that manage to coalesce into a truly stunning formlessness. In other works, ancient graffiti's influence on Twombly makes itself felt in his scrawls across the canvas, which transport us to the ancient Roman world - a world Twombly lives at a remove from, as a resident of modern day Rome.

But it is not just painting that Twombly is known for. In sculptures like the bronze by the Ionian Sea, Twombly evokes classical works like the Odyssey and the Iliad, foundational myths that our civilization has been built on.

Whereas Twombly's conception of myth connects the artist to a larger historical tradition via literature, Louise Bourgeois's work concerns itself with psychic myth. Mainly, she approaches myth from a psychoanalytic vantage point, unearthing archetypal relationships between parents and child that form the center of Freud's Oedipal complex. Bourgeois turns to her own past to find the universal in the particular. As a child, Bourgeois's father had an affair with her governess, who resided in the family home. Bourgeois's mother was aware of this fact, yet she refused to acknowledge it. This complex sexual web is the fabric upon which Bourgeois has woven some of her most well-known sculptural works, including Maman, a giant spider that is both savage in its potential lethality as well as protective in its sheltering poise.

Bourgeois also concerns herself with another facet of Freudian myth - namely, that of the fetish. Femme Couteau (Knife Woman), a work from 1969, has been described by Lucy Lippard as "a wrapped and folded marble blade with delicate pudenda exposed." This smooth object evokes a clitoris, the ultimate sign of female sexuality, while simultaneously calling to mind an earlier work by Giacometti, Disagreeable Object. Such works bring to mind Freud's theory of genital anxiety, which is present in both men and women. At the same time - and this is where Bourgeois's revolt against myth occurs - what would otherwise be seen as a fetish object for men is deployed here as a weapon instead. Thus, by subverting the feminine into a weapon, Bourgeois is simultaneously responding to the psychic myths of Western civilization and transgressing them in an effort to posit a new model of the real.

Throughout the course of his career, Anselm Kiefer has attempted to unite myth and history through an immense terrain of entangled cultural references and pictorial techniques. In doing so, Kiefer has effectively attempted to bear the weight of our collective historical tragedies and redemptive hopes that many artists in the last forty years have attempted to convey. Few of them, however, do it so effectively as Kiefer.

This exhibition will feature an overview of Kiefer's primary thematic concerns, which include Egyptian myths, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, Exodus, the Napoleonic occupation of Germany, the National Socialist architecture of Albert Speer, as well as fascist uses of German Romantic images.

Like both Bourgeois and Twombly, Kiefer has worked extensively in sculpture. Jericho is typical of the artist's monumental approach to the medium. It comprises two large concrete towers, both of which seem to be on the verge of collapsing. The piece has been interpreted as a Modernist re-working of the Tower of Pisa. Viewers are able to step into the tower and look up through the holes that have been cut on top.

Kiefer continues his Biblical excavation in such works as the installation Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday), a work that consists of a giant palm tree surrounded by a series of eighteen paintings, each of which have been layered with leaves from the tree. In Kiefer's painting practice, the artist has continuously sought to integrate natural materials with traditional artistic mediums in an effort to shatter the artificial division between nature and culture, and thus unite his works with a mythical conception of the universe.