The incongruity put forth by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in its recent overlapping of exhibitions devoted to Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), the pioneering Russian abstractionist, and Matthew Barney, a pioneer in the public misuse of vaseline, has been much remarked upon. The incongruity was so great that one would have to to have undergone a staggering feat of self-restraint not to comment upon it. Here, after all, are two figures who exemplify the disparity between Modernism and Post-Modernism, high art and popular culture, the Guggenheim as we have come to know it and what used to be called the Museum for Nonobjective Art. One is tempted to peg the museum’s current incarnation as the New! Improved! Guggenheim because such terminology underscores how thoroughly the institution has co-opted the methodologies of commerce.
Such an approach may be fitting when applied to Barney, whose theatrical sensationalism puts him more in the company of art-inflected pop stars like R.E.M. and Bjork (with whom, it should probably be mentioned, Barney is having a child). For Malevich, a painter who strove with the utmost seriousness to formulate the New Gospel in Art, it won’t do at all. The work of each man is radically unlike; their differences unbridgeable. Entering the Guggenheim, one expected to undergo a personality crisis in order to accommodate the fact that both men were being honored under the same roof.
Happily, I was spared any potential injury to my psyche. Due to divine guidance–in the guise of my
