#deliriousmet

A STRANGE CHARISMA

The Met Breuer’s survey Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason 1950-1980 offers works that don’t conform to canonical modernism.  Taking in the selection of painting, sculpture and videos installed in the building’s grand fourth floor gallery, against kookily skewed partitions, is like walking through a playground; it gives great pleasure.  The artworks are, for the most part, eccentric, personal, whimsical, political, confusing, ugly, and viscerally powerful.  A wall of Hanne Darboven’s tablet-sized paintings, each crowded with X’s and O’s on a quarter inch grid, evokes both the sterility and infinite possibility of Cartesian space. Eva Hesse’s ottoman-sized cube of metal grate, threaded with hundreds of lengths of dark rubber tubing, is oddly, warmly organic.  Paul Thek’s painted wax models resembling raw chunks of flex, sealed inside cool acrylic vitrines, are both revolting and fascinating; one can’t turn away from them.  These artworks posses a strange charisma; they give a middle finger to modernist cool.

Delirious impresses as a group show of outsiders -- of stubborn, brilliant postwar artists who followed the visions in their heads rather than intellectual and commercial trends.  In most cases the artist involves himself or herself actually, physically, personally.  Bruce Nauman videotapes himself performing an abstract choreography, raising his leg and turning at fixed angles like a jewelry-box ballerina.  Lee Lozano keeps a personal calendar of upcoming performances with felt-tipped marker, in text, in a spiral notebook.   Ana Mendieta takes self-portraits with her face smashed against a square of glass, distorting her fine features into the mask of a hysteric, producing images as gruesome as Charcot’s nineteenth-century portraits of the insane.  (In addition to everything else, this show is a love song to obsolete technologies, including videotape, xerox, analog photography, CRT television, and handheld calculators.)  

One senses that these artist aren’t constructing a parallel modernism, but working in causal disregard to modernism, turning instead towards more intimate narratives of gender, race and brute power that at the time remained unexpressed.  In that sense they were decades ahead of their more convention-bound contemporaries.