I always hate year-end lists that talk about shows from October and November as being the best-of-the-year and end-of-the-decade lists that concentrate heavily on the 8s and 9s, but as sure as Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t deserve it, I must declare that the Guston show at Hauser and Wirth does deserve infinite praise – it was one of the better gallery exhibits I have ever seen.
To call it museum-worthy would be to accept that the pinheaded garbagebags who currently run most art museums are the natural progenitors of excellence in exhibitions. This is demonstrably not the case. When we go to museums these days, we see artists featured for excelling in carreerist whoring much more often than we witness amazing art. Every great show is almost so by accident in the institutions. Meanwhile, of course, the galleries play a different game, one often complicit with the institutions, and in no way is this positive review an exoneration of Hauser Wirth, a collaborator with the lucky monied obtuse. But again, this Guston show was a wow wow wow wowzah.
We have all seen too many shows of great artists that suck a cucumber so deepthroatedly that it functions as an organic stomach pump, so there is no way that good curation can be overlooked when considering that the curator had such great art to begin with.
This great curator was then, of course, decidedly not from the institutional, nor the commercial, art world (worlds? continents? sectors? hemispheres?). The curator was the late artist’s daughter. The premise of the show was not a sprawling encyclopedic pterodactyl bent on defining something so brutally that all not included would be stomped out of existence. The premise was also not some ambiguous puff of smoke rationalization that hid the inclusion of friends, favors, trendy fucks and latent investments in a fog of wordy fecal mist that means nothing more than hiding the rea$on it all happened.
No, the premise here was simple: A sojourn to Rome in 1971.
Why? Phillip Guston was trashed mightily by the cognoscenti for his breakthrough 1970 exhibit that abandoned abstraction for a raw figurative expressionism the likes of which had hardly ever been seen by the tastemakers who considered Guston a member of their club. He had to leave New York. Well, maybe he didn’t, but that is how the story goes. The reality of ostracization being what it is, and for anyone with even a smattering of knowledge about the cretins who run about the art world on ALL levels, the Hausers, the sophomore sculpture majors, the Withs, the New York Times art review headline writers, the pissant eBay art print flippers, it is believable, as it is also easy to understand to anyone with an imagination. In that, the premise of the show, Guston’s retreat from the New York Art World to Rome, functions as much as a possible screenplay as it does an exhibition.
Why is it so difficult to have the art fulfill a simple curatorial premise? Most bigtime curators cannot be bothered to lay it all on one show. They have to pile the basket full of favors and futures, tying up loose ends of the past and paving the way to move up in the networking frenzy of the months to come. The curator here, Musa Meyer, the artist’s daughter, has loyalty but to one. And with that she delivered. The exhibit’s premise done, the art starts with some classic small Guston paintings, mostly on paper, divided into themes. In one room, a cube theater has been constructed where outtakes of a film of a slurring Guston chatting with an interviewer offers a break from the magnificence. It is interesting if only to spot paintings on the wall in the film that are then hanging in the show. even with subtitles, it is a blur, but still a chance to see the man alive and pulsating with the energy of creation.
Then, just as the paintings are making life worth living, we enter two large rooms with Guston’s infamous Nixon drawings. Heretical to Modernism, this cartoon punditry is raw, almost punk rock five years before punk, brutal, satiric, merciless, brilliant, and in 2019, topically prescient. History repeats. Nixon’s jowls are a scrotum in these hundreds of drawings, his nose a penis. Born in the same year as Guston, 1913, and growing up in different parts of Southern California, but near enough (Whittier/Venice) for that geographical fact to haunt Guston during the apogee of Tricky Dick’s corruption, Nixon is afforded a biographical timeline on one wall of the exhibit. Guston incriminates the whole herd: Dick, Kissinger, Agnew, Billy Graham; the cartoonish drawings are immediate and inform one on viewing his paintings. At the exhibition’s climax, a gallery of paintings completed in 1972 deliver the same immediacy, maintained as if in amber. Elegaic in their material assertiveness, they were birthed because Guston’s abstraction, perhaps all abstraciotn became impossible in an era of murder and corruption. We are talking about an era so venal and threatening that the urgency of commentary had seeped into the studio of a master of modernism and he responded, dipping his brush into the muck.
The show is still up thru Sunday. If you are in Southern California you are a fool to miss it and still assert that the quality of your life is maintained by access to culture. Move to Kansas if you aren’t going to see the greatest of the great exhibitions when they come around like this one. It has been waiting for your ass since September.