Only a year to go for the exhibition I wish was already here: Ana Mendieta's retrospective at the Hirshhorn. Here's something I wrote about Mendieta and "Latino art" a while back.

Mendieta (in my view) often had an interesting relationship with death - not meaning her unfortunate end.  I met her once at an airport in Chicago.

On the flight to Seattle from Chicago, I wrote this poem on the barf bag (I still have it)... not really because of her, or influenced by her meeting (she was NOT famous when we met by accident)... but it is somewhat ironic how life turned out.  Here it is:

Sleep is the cousin of Death

I'm falling...

It's a dream,

but I'm falling and it's raining.

I'm falling faster than the rain

and when I hit a water drop

it wounds my skin like a bullet

I'm falling...

Why am I falling in this dream?

I've heard that if you don't wake up before you hit the ground...

You die.

You die because sleep is the cousin of Death.
 

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The Corcoran's "Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited, the Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr." has been brutalized in the critical press practically everywhere, and yet as bad as the show is, there's a conceptual connection between Johnson's work (take a famous Impressionist painting and make it into a lifesized 3-D tableaux of statues) and the Turner Prize-nominated Chapman Brothers in Britain.

Jake and Dinos Chapman's early work was based on Goya's series of etchings, Disasters of War. Initially they used plastic figures to re-create Goya in a miniature three-dimensional form, and like Johnson (later on), one of these 83 scenes became a life-sized version using mannequins (Johnson is a multimillionaire and thus he creates bronze statues).

This sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead of two mutilated and castrated bodies, was shown at the famous "Sensation" show in London in 1997.

I suspect that no museum in America would dare to show Great Deeds Against the Dead, but it is remarkable that the connection between Johnson and the Chapman Brothers is so obvious and yet the critical reaction to their work so vastly different.

I also suspect that the sickly sweet overexposure of Impressionism as the subject of Johnson's works has something to do with the negative critical reaction to his work, while the macabre nature of Goya's etchings brought to a life size display, appeals to the gimmick of "shock" that has become the standard and Achilles heel of contemporary British art.

By the way, the Chapman Brothers have moved on, but continue to use mannequins in their artwork, which they say is about "producing things with zero culture value, to produce aesthetic inertia - a series of works of art to be consumed and then forgotten." To me that brings them even closer to J. Seward Johnson.

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On Fridays, Weekend section art critic Michael O'Sullivan reviews area galleries and/or museums for the Post. Today he reviews "Civic Endurance" at Conner Contemporary Art (in my opinion one of area's best art galleries) in Dupont Circle area as well as "African American Quilts From the Robert and Helen Cargo Collection" at the Textile Museum also in Dupont Circle area.

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Busy night in the DC artscene last night with the Colby Caldwell opening at Hemphill Fine Arts, the BLANC opening at the Mexican Cultural Institute and the Whitman-Walker Clinic "Art for Life" charity auction held at the very beautiful OAS building on 17th Street. I was very pleased to see that most pieces of artwork donated auctioned off very nicely, raising much needed funds for the Clinic's Latino services.

Whitman-Walker Clinic is a non-profit community-based health organization serving the Washington, D.C. metropolitan region. Established by and for the gay and lesbian community, the Clinic is comprised of volunteers and staff who provide or facilitate the delivery of high quality, comprehensive, accessible health care and community services, especially committed to ending the suffering of all those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

You can donate to the clinic online here.

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