C International Contemporary Art
Fall 1996
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Negotiating Rapture
by Claire Wolf Krantz

The exhibit inaugurating the Museum of Contemporary Art's new building supports an inclusive vision that connects past art to the present and to sources within the broader culture. Radically subverting modernist claims for art's autonomy, "Negotiating Rapture:  The Power of Art to Transform Lives" relates to the museum's classical interior which expands outward to embrace its surroundings and differs from its austere modernist exterior which elevates art and separates it from the everyday life of the street.
For "Negotiating Rapture," curator Richard Francis organized eleven artists' works, executed between 1945 and 1995, around the somewhat unfashionable subject of rapture. Positing that some artists pass through intense emotional states as they work, arriving at a point of ecstasy akin to other  religious states, Francis claims that a parallel journey can be traversed by the viewer. His curatorial process seems similar in the way many artists create: initial intuitive choices are later embellished, connected and explained in a more discursive manner using various linking devices, such as drawings, artifacts and documents.
A small 16th-century Italian painting of St. John in the desert seeking enlightenment and a Tebetan tangka intended to provide a visual path toward meditation introduce the show. Following are several modernist approaches to the sublime: Ad Reinhardt's abstract paintings, displayed so that earlier blue and black works enhance understanding of his later black ones; and Agnes Martin's infitely subtle explorations of the grid. In Bill Viola's installation, video projections of mountain peaks appear in a darkened room that contains a small cell with a tiny tv (picturing mountains) from which emanates the sounds of poetry by St. John of the Cross. The videos represent the mind's ability to transcend the body's (the cell's) limitations in contemporary, pictorial terms rather than in abstract pathways to meditation.
         Other sublime themes include identiy, as passionately explored by Francis Bacon, as well as myth and history, evident in Anselm Kiefer's paintings. James Lee Byars's giant golden sphere, Monument to Language, implies both the comic and the sacred, its hollow cenre a performance space within which an invisible actor reads poetry selected by Byars. More violently, Lucio Fontana's pierced, torn spheres and paintings spatially thrust us into infinity. Joseph Beuys's objects in vitrines emphasize the elevation of the artist to shaman. In cotrast to Western individualism, the communal base of Shirazeh Houshiary's Sufi heritage -- where dervishes whirl to free themselves of the finite to achieve the infinite -- underpins the tall boxes, which she has divided with angled partitions of lead and gold, implying rotation and transformation. Less convincing is Francis's use of biographical data to associate the sublime in nature with certain works, including Barnett Newman's abstract, zip paintings or Bruce Nauman's installations dealing with language, meaning and communication
         The exhibiton finishes with Nauman's semi-ironic spiral fluourescent sign which states: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths," leaving the viewer ambivalent about any belief in the spirit or the power of art. "Negotiating Rapture" promotes an art that is open, both to belief and to connectedness; within the isolated temple of its new building it may portend an important direction for the MCA

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images..