Graciela Iturbide is a black-and-white photographer born in 1945 and primarily known for photographs made in her native Mexico (although she has worked in East LA and other places as well.) Iturbide's photographs, printed in uniform size (all proportioned like a magazine on its side) are arrayed around the walls of two galleries. The pictures are interesting,although with a few exceptions not particularly memorable -- Mexico and its indigenous people are so intrinsically fascinating and photogenic that its hard to not get good pictures of them. Iturbide is ethnographic in her emphasis -- she lives for a number of weeks with the people that she photographs and, so, her rapport with her subjects is obvious from the images. The Indians that appear in her pictures confront the camera proudly and seem happy to have their portraits taken. Some of the subject matter is hair-raising -- a group of pictures documenting La Matanza, a goat-slaughter ritual among one group of Indians are conspicuously gory and Iturbide treats some of the images a bit like Weegee: we seem to be seeing images of bloody crime-scenes. (There is one alarming picture of a little girl, scarcely more than a toddler, who seems gripped with blood-lust as she stares as the carcass of a recently slaughtered and bloody goat.) Iturbide's pictures raise question about the "ethnographic gaze" and, I wonder, if the pictures would be as well-received if they had been made by a male Caucasian researcher: in other words, there is something dispassionate, clinical and, even, "essentialist" about many of the picture. We are looking at what seem to be imagined as archetypes or representatives of the cultures that are portrayed -- these Zapotec, Mixtec, Seri of the Sonoran desert, and Juchitan (a subgroup of Mixtec people) Indians of coastal Oaxaca. The Juchitan in particular are proclaimed to be Indians that live in matriarchal societies that are strongly female-influenced and that ostracize men from the market (for instance) although certain types of flamboyant transvestites are, apparently, allowed participation. (It should be noted that the Juchitan women themselves reject this characterization of their society.) The pictures are well-worth seeing and all of them are interesting, although I note again my slight skepticism as to whether this is due to the art of the photographer or the intrinsically fascinating quality of the subject matter. Two of the pictures are justly famous: One of them, Mujer Angel, shows an eerie-looking black clad woman, arms outstretched like great dark wings, running down from a ridge into what seems to be completely barren desert -- the woman is carrying a big boombox, an element that adds to the surreal quality of the picture. The picture seems staged but is impressive nevertheless -- I think it was featured on the cover of a Rage Against the Machine album. Another picture is whimsical: it shows a statuesque and floridly handsome woman wearing a turban of living iguanas -- I think it's called "Our Lady of the Iguanas."
One pleasure of returning to the MIA is to see new hangings and new acquisitions. Some of the period rooms have been equipped with multi-media installations -- a New England seaside room now has windows with crude, but effective, animations of silhouette crabs, seagulls, and ships. (I think the animations, which look a little like Kara Walker but without the violence and sodomy, are supposed to comment on the slave trade.) Another room is set up with lighting to simulate the candles that once illumined the place, then, transitioning to the bright light of day. A surreal painting by Peter Blume (Winter, 1964) is new to me: it's a large work with a conspicuously jagged boulder sitting in the middle of snow decked with birds and some strange-looking vegetation. An inconspicuous painting by the Chicago-based Ivan Lorraine Albright shows nothing more than a potato, but its big, blemished, hefty potato and the damn thing seems to watch you with a sullen gaze -- it moves when you move. This room is full of lots of showy stuff but the potato painting, about eight inches by eight inches is the canvas that has the real presence and profundity in the room. (It's called "The Lonely Potato"). In a little show called "Growing the Collection", there is a large and impressive collage by an outsider artist named Felipe Jesus Consalves (1891-1960) -- the picture is fantastically complex and very beautiful. Two smaller and sinister-looking canvases by Henry Ray Clark, a prisoner doing hard-time in some southern penitentiary, are also very spooky, beautiful, and compelling: strange personages with beaks and rooster combs glare out of elaborate labyrinths of paint. In one of the rooms full of late Victorian furniture, a large canvas writhing with life-sized figures has been hung. This is a painting called "Cleopatra" made by the Swedish artist Julius Kronberg. It's over-the-top: a nude marmoreal Cleopatra seizing an emerald-green viper while her dark-skinned and similarly half nude maids are slaughtered around her -- its like a vulgarization of Delacroix's already insistently vulgar "The Death of Sardanapalus". The picture is twelve feet tall, swooning with sphinxes and all sorts of Egyptian kitsch and its quite the thing to see -- this loan from "Anonymous"is more spectacle than art, but well-worth examining. (When I was there, a curator was unctuously discussing the painting with a couple of obviously wealthy donors -- one of them confined to a wheelchair. The curator said that the picture's peculiar obelisk or monolithic shape was due to the fact that it had been commissioned to flank a similarly sized window in a Swedish castle.) In the prints gallery, there are a number of very pretty colored woodcuts by the French artist La Pierre -- the elegant images confirm the influence of Japanese engravings on French art during the Impressionist period. All in all, plenty of new things to see and admire at the old Minneapolis Institute of Art.
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