Power and Beauty in China's Last Dynasty

The Minneapolis Insitute of Art hired Robert Wilson to stage ten rooms devoted to Qing dynasty objects.  Robert Wilson is best known for the seventies' minimalist theatrical events such as Deafman Glance and his collaboration with Phillip Glass Einstein on the Beach.  Wilson has designed sets for operas, made sculptural installations, and created other museum environments for exhibits of sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, garments created by Giorgio Armani, as well as the blockbuster touring exhibition of archaeological finds dredged from the sea in Egypt, Egypt's Sunken Treasures (that exhibit designed for a Turin Museum will travel to several venues in this country, including the St. Louis Museum of Art.)  Wilson's design skills have also been applied to staging for Lady Gaga as well as department store windows in New York and Europe. 

Wilson's work on the MIA installation is irritating and perversely opaque.  Viewed in eerie isolation, the artifacts seem abstract, forlorn, and abandoned -- the spectator doesn't know the significance of what he or she is seeing and I didn't think that there was anything particularly innovative about the way the objects were displayed (except that the viewer is left to form his or her own impressions about the meaning or lack of meaning of the artifacts in the context in which they are exhibited.)  The viewer enters the exhibit through a small dark room where the hapless viewer has to stand for, more or less, five minutes in almost complete dark.  Displayed high above the floor is one vase, illumined by pinpoint lights creating an outline of the object -- it looks vaguely supersonic, like a rocket with wings aimed toward the sky:  we see the object as a pattern of scintillation, tiny stellate reflections on the surface of a dark vase.  The idea of this initial room is to cleanse the mind as it were, and, true to Wilson's minimalist vision, reduce expectations.  Some piano arpeggios murmur in the background, rising to a sort of climax, before receding into the distance and silence -- perhaps, there is a faint odor of incense.  The next room shows elegant lacquer boxes and carved ivory objects displayed floor to ceiling in cage-like boxes.  It's not clear why Wilson has chosen to put the objects (they are writing sets, perfume cases, small sculptures) in chicken cages -- an irritating clicking sound fills the room and, now and then, there is a crash:  This led me to recall the mantra of the souvenir shop:  Pretty to Look At, Pretty to Hold -- But if you break it, it's sold.  It's a  display of chinoiserie and the viewer has a sense that these objects are delicate, fragile, and more than a little coyly formulaic.  The next room shows five imperial robes -- the soundtrack for the room is more ticks and tocks.  The lighting highlights one robe at a time, or several, but all robes are displayed in a soft yellow light -- it's just that a kind of roving spotlight aims at one or two or even three of them in  some obscure, possibly random, sequence.  More rooms ensue:  one of them shows an empty throne guarded by a huge red dragon painted on the walls -- the dragon is kitsch, a representation of the papier-mâché dragons that dancers lead prancing down the streets in parades in Chinatown.  There are Taoist immortals, a room full of small jade and ivory objects with kimonos that might be found in the chambers of 901 imperial wives  -- the wall of this room is like an ice cave, bright mylar crystals lit to be brilliantly white.  In the final room, the walls are completely white, glaring white panels and, in the corner of the room, there is a glass case containing another vaguely supersonic-shaped vase, this one dark black, the color a black beetle.  (It is obviously the camera-negative for the dark room through which we entered.)  A brochure advises the viewer that the rooms have thematic design, but the meaning of those designs is not clear to a person who is not following along in the brochure.  One example will suffice:  a dark room is lit by a single glowing cube -- the cube's base is violet and, suspended there on that color, is a small five-inch high bronze of a man.  The room is otherwise empty.  The little standing figure is not from the Qing dynasty and so seems to violate the principle of inclusion upon which the exhibit is based -- the bronze comes from the Warring States era, or about 550 BCE (that is, 2250 years before the Qing dynasty, an Imperial family that ruled from about 1700 to 1910).   Wilson intends the figure to represent the "common man" -- that is, the huge anonymous population of peasants on which the Imperial authority was based and, indeed, the little man seems to have some of the features of a Sumerian sculpture, a humble but solid effigy.   But this isn't something that you could ascertain from merely encountering the little figure in his saturated violet cube.  Puccini seems to be playing in a room devoted to women's adornments and accessories -- it's a reference to Madame Butterfly it seems; but Madame Butterfly was a Japanese courtesan, not a Chinese harem wife.  A fundamental problem is that the MIA's noteworthy collection of Asian art is already impeccably staged -- one enters the galleries devoted to Asian art though a kind of clay and terracotta temple portico and the rooms are very dimly lit, suffused as it were in the dull gloom of tea-colored darkness -- there are several rooms that are set up as replicas of the spaces where Chinese merchants or bureaucrats worked (or entertained).  It's all very palpably presented in dim rooms textured like ancient wood.  Wilson's installation is actually inferior to the way the MIA displays the art objects in its collection -- it is less meaningful, harder to navigate, and more intellectually inaccessible.  In this context, Wilson's minimalist rooms with their lighting tricks and sound effects (creaky floors, Buddhist chanting and so on) register as less impressive than the galleries at the other end of the Museum devoted to these Asian collections.  (I hasten to note one exception:  the great Jade Mountain that has always enthralled me and that represents my earliest encounter with art -- at least the earliest that I can recall -- is displayed in  Wilson's setting on a mirror-like pedestal:  the huge mountain (it weighs about two tons) seems to float weightlessly on the air, suspended like a thought in the minds of the Taoist immortals gathered in the jade bowers and jade belvederes carved into the side of the mountain -- the light was low and the mountain seemed somehow more mountainous and more wild, more cut from some kind of living boulder than it seems when shown in the entry corridor adjacent to the Asian galleries -- the spot it has occupied for the past 20 years.  Wilson's staging effectively defamiliarized  this art object for me.) 

Nearby, there's four rooms devoted to art by Minol Araki (1928 - 2010).  Araki was ethnically Japanese although raised in China.  His works are large landscapes, some of them wide scrolls sixty or seventy feet long -- they are typically representations of what we would call "the sublime" in the West:  mountains and deep cold-looking lakes are glimpsed through stormy, ashen clouds.  Sometime the clouds part to reveal tiny villages built on what seem to be tortoise-shell of pinkish rock and gravel -- the villages have little pagodas and small tiled-roof houses -- and, the distance, there are shadowy mountains like humped bison with curved laser-jets of white cascades pouring forth from them.  A image of a mynah bird, albino white, glares malignly at the spectator:  This is The Bird who ate so many rabbits he turned white.  Another fearsome-looking mynah eyes a persimmon.   (Minol -- "minoi" is "mynah" in Chinese, but also "persimmon" and so the birds are indirect portraits of the artist.)  We see a monk with a perfectly bald and shaved head, looking somewhat cross-eyed at a garment that he is mending.  The canvas that greets entrants to this superb exhibition is called "Splashed Color Landscape" (1974) -- it shows brilliant azurite and malachite forming clouds and little valleys with chaotic gorges and caves, stormy skies filled with smoky clouds, tufts and tangles of landscape in the foreground that look like battered vegetation in Hudson River School landscapes, with white fonts of waterfalls cascading from the cliffs in the background of the painting.   It's a wonderful show and free -- Wilson's fantasia costs 16 dollars to enter. 

A display of engravings by New Ulm's Wanda Gag as well as some socially-relevant manifesto woodcuts by Elizabeth Olds    is pleasant but forgettable.