black mirrors

Fred Wilson, Venice Suite: Sala Longhi and Related Works 

at Pace Gallery 510 West 25^th Street

March 17 – April 14, 2012

A quote by Patrick Mimran comes to mind: “Art doesn’t have to be ugly to look clever.” Fred Wilson’s series of glass works in Venice Suite: Sala Longhi and Related Works, at Pace Gallery consist of elaborate chandeliers, mirrors, and droplets, and are undeniably beautiful. He worked with local craftsmen to utilize an old glass tradition, from an emblem of Western European art history: Venice, the place known for its “unique visual feast.” Venetian art in the 18^th century is especially indicative of a preoccupation with aesthetic indulgence, a mindset not so far off from the modernist “art for art’s sake” that would come centuries later. However, the beauty of Wilson’s work derives from beyond the plastic surface of visual appeal: his social critique.

Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx in 1954. Over the decades, he has focused a large portion of his works on challenging the way by which institutions participate in and promote discriminatory ideological programs. His goal has been to offer the perspectives of those that had been thereby marginalized and excluded from the dominant socio-cultural narrative. His latest work addresses similar themes specifically through the Venetian lens—especially apparent in the direct link Wilson creates through his installation work, Sala Longhi, 2011 to paintings by Pietro Longhi at a museum in Venice. The artist utilizes the materials and techniques of a dominant culture to reveal what they have erased in history.

His version of the Sala Longhi—a room of paintings specifically devoted to Longhi—recreates the arrangement with framed reflective black glass surfaces that are punctured with scattered oval cut-outs. Placement of the cut-outs is meant to correspond with faces in the original paintings. As the frames do not have any back panels, the holes show what lies directly behind the glass: the painted white wall of the gallery. And are not all traditional exhibition spaces painted white? Here, the whiteness of the walls are made analogous to the whiteness of the faces in Longhi’s revered paintings: institutions still operate by an elitist mechanism.

As we peer through each frame, we also can’t help but notice our own hair disheveled by Chelsea’s riverside wind, dark circles from lack of sleep, a button undone, partially obscured by the scattered holes. The elaborate details etched onto his layered mirrors—Mark, 2009 and Bat, 2009—serve a similar function of disrupting what might otherwise be a clearer image of the already dim visage of the spectator. In this way, Wilson places the spectator—you, me, any art lover—into his work, but still as ghosts. At the same time, we realize that the original Longhis did not even allow room for ghosts to hover in the vicinities of their closed-off worlds, discrete samples of what he deemed the everyday Venetian life, and of his acceptance into the canon. As I watched Pace’s lone security guard adjust his tie in front of one frame, I marveled at how far we have come, and how much longer it will take for us to even start to resemble a utopian world.