At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, about 150 Chinese ritual bronzes are on display, presented in a highly theatrical show that may be seen until May 21, 2023. The bronzes are selected from the museum's collection, apparently very extensive with respect to these kinds of things, and exhibited with no explanatory material in seven rooms (the so-called Target Galleries). I'm ambivalent about the show -- it's uncompromising and asks that viewers respond to the enigmatic, even somewhat menacing-looking, bronzes without the benefit of any intermediary explanation. Although the exhibition spaces are brilliantly configured and dramatically lit, I would have appreciated more art-historical information about the objects on display. However, it is also fair to observe that the MIA show doesn't hector you with politically correct wall-labels, doesn't encourage you to scrutinize the bronzes for signs of oppression or exploitation of the enslaved or impoverished, and declines to advise you how to think about the objects in the show. In many museums, extensive labeling is used to virtue-signal and persuade as to how you are supposed to react to the artifact on display. To its credit, the MIA show is precisely the opposite in its effect: the viewer is left with nothing but questions and the emotional valence associated with bronzes is left to the viewer's own idiosyncratic response.
As far as I can determine the Chinese bronzes are all about 3000 years old. They are mostly urns, with vaguely basket- or bucket-shaped vessels supported by tripodal (or four) legs. Some of the vessels have zoomorphic handles or extensions -- chimeric animals or dragons protruding from the urns. The surface of the urns is intricately incised with floral and abstract patterns and the bronzes have greenish-grey patina that makes them very handsome. (This is a show involving things that you yearn to touch -- the urns have a cold, jade-like quality and I imagine that they would present fascinating surfaces to the hand and fingers.) In addition to the urns, there are serving vessels for royal banquets, lance and sword blades, figurines such as horses, birds, and oxen carts. In one room, large trapezoid-shaped bells, also intricately figured, are on display. There are no labels explaining what the objects were used for; nothing tells us anything about the sometimes grotesque (in the original Italian sense of the word) etchings on the bronzes. We aren't told anything about their provenance or age or iconography.
The first room in the display cites Chinese classical poems -- normally, the introductory room at shows of this sort provides detailed information as to the content of the exhibit and its significance. (Sometimes, there is even a movie that provides information as the show's themes.) In this show, the poems are opaque and not easily interpreted -- they describe an ideal polity with an intricate relationship between the Mandates of Heaven and the Earth. Another introductory chamber displays translucent, bone-colored castings from some of the urns dangling overhead between two dark-colored mirrors -- looking up or down, you see an moonlit abyss, both bottomless and topless, in which the pale castings rotate like planets. (These objects in intact form will be presented in the show's final room) This first room opens into a space in which the collection's iconic owl vessel (it was used for wine) stands perched on a pedestal that is dramatically lit with a scrim behind sliced into man-sized panels roiling with an abstract (and animate) projection of calligraphy displaying the Yellow River. In other rooms, urns seem to have pale columns of incense rising from them, projecting on another scrim that leads up to an oculus above where blue skies with moving clouds are visible. Percussive sounds, mostly high bells, twitter in the darkness. The gallery space is disorienting with mirrors everywhere reflecting the bronzes so that they seem to multiply and appear on all sides, hovering in the air. It's very dramatic and invites the viewer to look carefully at each object -- usually in exhibitions of this sort, viewers tend to glance at the artifact, read the label and, then, move on; generally, you spend more time reading the wall label than looking at the object to which it refers. Here, there's no label to read and so your entire attention is focused on the bronzes. It's fascinating, but there's a sense that the objects themselves are so similar in character and so lacking in charisma that they have to be displayed against stormy moving backgrounds, scrim-projections, and lit like silent movie heroines. The viewer's reactions are foremost, however, I think that this must be respected.
You emerge from the show, more than a little disoriented, into a gallery with Native American artifacts. Of course, these objects are all politically fraught and the gallery-goer is admonished that many of the objects must be viewed in light of the genocide committed against native peoples, genocide in which the collectors and viewers, of course, are complicit. One label in particular denounces James J. Hill, who acquired some of the artifacts, as a mass-murderer, or, at least, as an enabler of mass-murder. Upstairs in a gallery leading to the Impressionist galleries, there are four or six Corots, all of them once owned by James J. Hill -- these are silvery grey paintings of enormous delicacy, (it's moonlight in the bright of day), with eerie white highlights like seeds or bleached leaves demonstrating the motion of the air. Are we supposed to regard these timeless works of art as significant in part due to being once owned by the Empire Builder as Hill was called? -- or are we to imagine some note of reproach in the labels in light of the denunciations in the texts in the Native American gallery? It's an interesting inconsistency which plays out against the interior screen of the viewer's imagination.
Also on display is a good collection of German woodcuts culminating in Duerer's works. There are some openly homo-erotic pictures in one of the photography galleries -- this isn't a good exhibit for couples on dates because the male nudes will make men feel insecure, and, probably, inadequate. In the gallery devoted to academic and classical European painting at the time of the early Impressionists, there's a huge new acquisition, probably 8 by 16 feet made by someone named Joaquin Sorollo y Bastida -- the big canvas seems uninteresting to me: it's mostly a life-size picador's horse, viewed from behind (what was the Academic obsession with horse's asses about?) with a several diva-like matadors getting attired before entering the ring. The subject matter, bull-fighting, is abhorrent and the picture's photo-realism is tiresome. I took another look at the Kunin paintings, a large gift to the Institute containing many interesting images. Kunin was socially conscious and collected aggressively erotic nudes as well as paintings with social significance (strikebreakers dressed lie Imperial troopers in Star Wars and a Madonna of the coal mines for instance), and many fine portraits -- the collection includes two Ivan Albright canvases, faces not as decomposed as in other painting by this artist, some fine Alice Neel pictures, a good Andrew Wyeth canvas, and an alarmingly severe and scary picture of an shaved John Brown glaring down at a black Bible overflowing with incomprehensible script (it's by Horace Pippin). The museum is large enough to always provide me with fresh surprises. This viewing I was surprised at the number of interesting painting by John Singer Sargent -- at least four or five including a fine image of a child's birthday party with a monumental matronly figure and her faceless husband, all black suit and trousers, standing by the birthday cake in a richly appointed room. (The picture always deludes me into thinking it is by Degas). A small but wonderful exhibition called "The Art of Literacy in Early Modern Japan" contains a number of fascinating and whimsical images, capriccios as it were, printed in books or impressed onto wall-hangings. Some of the screens are shockingly bare, just a calligraphic figure at bottom of a hanging that is otherwise a glowing void. There are some books printed with Hokusai images and a comical tableaux called "Frog Writing Context" which accurately describes the content of the image. A very strange and remarkable wall-hanging is entitled as "A Meeting of Japan, China, and the West". In this late 17th century work, a Chinese sage sits across a table from a Japanese man who has a white snake twisted in a bizarre way around his wrist. A Dutchman stares into an anatomy book, scrutinizing a skeleton printed there. Above these figures, a pagoda is enveloped in bright red flame. The Westerners have brought a hose-truck on wheels to the blaze and are spraying it with water. The Chinese look on in philosophical dismay. Japanese sumo wrestlers have lugged huge wooden tubs of water to the conflagration but don't seem to know what to do with them.
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